Thursday the 20th was not a public holiday – deemed inappropriate, in the economic context – but there was still enormous interest in the wedding (flower arrangements by Constance Spry). ‘How we love the Crown and a wedding!’ wrote James Lansdale Hodson next day:
Our work in the office was put quite out of gear by all the staff listening-in. A newspaper records that Trafalgar Square was so crowded that not a pigeon could find foothold, and I’m told you could shop comfortably in the remoter streets, rows of tempting iced cakes lying untouched. Overnight Londoners brought out their blitz mattresses and blankets and lay on the kerbstone route; hard lying for pleasure now instead of for Jerry, and in the morning women washed in warm water from vacuum flasks before putting on their new make-up.
Not everyone was quite bowled over. Finding himself close-up to the happy couple on their way to Waterloo and their honeymoon (at Broad-lands), the journalist John Clarke privately thought that ‘she looked to have a great deal too much make-up on’, while ‘he’ (that morning created the Duke of Edinburgh) was ‘rather grey-faced and already long-suffering’. The following Monday, dining at the Beefsteak, Sir Cuthbert Headlam was told by the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, ‘that Philip Mountbatten is a “nice boy”, but not much educated – should do all right he thinks for his job’. Later that week, the commercial artist Grace Golden went to a news cinema to see the film of the wedding and observed that ‘Princess Elizabeth’s charm must lie in her expressions.’ But by the New Year there was still undimmed, mainly female enthusiasm to see the wedding dress and presents that had been on display since November. ‘Mrs C. and I dragged ourselves out of bed at 7 a.m.,’ Vere Hodgson, a staunch royalist, recorded in mid-January, ‘and on a cold, wet and windy morning found ourselves in a long queue outside St James’ Palace at 9.15 a.m. It was none too soon. At 10 o’clock we were let in with the first thousand.’2.
There is the odd quasi-intimate diary glimpse of Elizabeth herself. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally,’ reckoned Hugh Gaitskell in April 1948 after a quarter of an hour’s conversation with her. Soon afterwards, Violet Bonham Carter went to a ball at Buckingham Palace for the King and Queen’s silver wedding. ‘I have never seen Pss E. look better,’ she told her son Mark. ‘She looked really pretty . . . She strikes me as being rather “delié” by marriage – with fewer “stops”.’ The report went on: ‘Pss Margaret on the other hand has none – as you have always said. Talking to her is not like talking to a “royalty”.’
Not long afterwards, on 2 June, the princesses’ mother paid a visit to the Lancashire cotton industry. It turned out to be ‘a wet day, thoroughly wet, with a raw cold wind’, in the words of Raymond Streat, one of the party that met the Queen at Blackburn station and then followed her in the second car of the procession. Early on she visited a mill and talked to the weavers, with Streat struck by ‘the positive rapture indicated on the faces of those to whom she spoke’. Lunch at Rochdale Town Hall followed, and afterwards she appeared on the balcony ‘and the vast crowd in the Town Hall Square cheered her mightily’. The procession then made its way to Oldham and from there, with the rain still pelting down, to Manchester. During those 7 miles there were ‘people all the way on both sides of the road’, and ‘they surged off the pavement to get a close view of the Queen’. For Streat, it was the culmination of a rich anthropological experience:
Through the windows of our car we heard the voices of the crowd as they looked with fond affection on the receding car of the Queen and expressed their reaction to their immediate neighbours. Many hundreds of times that day I heard the phrase ‘Ain’t she lovely?’ . . . That was the comment of more than three-quarters of the onlookers – just that and nothing more. They had come in curiosity to see a Queen, some no doubt for the first time and wondering what majesty did to a woman: they had seen a sweet and kindly face and shining friendly eyes, a wave of the hand and a little bow in their direction: that was all and their outstanding thought was that ‘she’ was lovely.
The Firm did not rely on just waves and smiles. Less than a week later, Harold Nicolson went to Buckingham Palace to be sounded out by Lascelles about writing an official life of George V. ‘He said that I should not be expected to write one word that was not true,’ Nicolson recorded. ‘I should not be expected to praise or exaggerate. But I must omit things and incidents which were discreditable.’ Nicolson agonised but in the end agreed. And privately he conceded, shortly before getting down to work on the commission, ‘I quite see that the Royal Family feel their myth is a piece of gossamer and must not be blown upon.’3.
For royalty and subjects alike, at least in theory, there was no getting away from continuing austerity. When Gallup in 1947 asked people what would be their ideal, no-expense-spared meal for a special occasion, their lovingly detailed answer – sherry; tomato soup; sole; roast chicken with roast potatoes, peas and sprouts; trifle and cream; cheese and biscuits; coffee – belonged in large part to the realms of fantasy, certainly in terms of assembling it all on any one domestic table at any one time. By the autumn of that year, following the convertibility crisis, not only had the butter and meat rations been cut again, including the bacon ration halved, but potatoes were on the ration for the first time. In early December, from the vantage point of a Wembley housewife, Rose Uttin summed up a year that had been ‘depressing in all ways except the weather’:
Our rations now are 1 oz bacon per week – 3 lbs potatoes – 2 ozs butter – 3 ozs marge – 1 oz cooking fat – 2 ozs cheese & 1/- meat – 1 lb jam or marmalade per month – ½ lb bread per day. We could be worse – but we should be a lot better considering we won the war. Cigarettes are 1/8 for 10 our only luxury except for 1 drink on Bridge evenings. Dora [her daughter] became engaged to Mac in October – we did manage a party, but I am wondering how long it will be before they can afford to marry with prices high as they are. One bag coal last week cost 4/10. America & the Labour government say we are producing more – what a joke. They forget to count the lumps of slate & stone in it. Used all the points up by last Wed on oats & mashed potato powder. Hard frost last two nights. Fog yesterday. My dinner today 2 sausages which tasted like wet bread with sage added – mashed potato – ½ tomato – 1 cube cheese & 1 slice bread & butter. The only consolation no air raids to worry us.
Nor was eating out, assuming one could afford it, necessarily a panacea. ‘It used to be a treat to have a meal there,’ commented Florence Speed in September after a dismal experience at Peter Jones. ‘Our lunch costing 3/- was a waste of money,’ with the lowlight being ‘half-cold at least just tepid fish au gratin’. Or as Lees-Milne, speaking for everyman, put it two months later, ‘The food in England is worse than during the war, dry and tasteless, even at Brooks’s.’
One food above all became a byword for these straitened, unappetising times. ‘A new South African fish on the market – snoek!’ noted Speed in October 1947. ‘Fred expressed a desire to taste it, so I got a tin when I saw it in Collins. Not cheap – 2/9 a tin.’ Fred’s reaction went unrecorded, but from the first there seems to have been little enthusiasm for this vaguely mackerel-type fish, seen by the government as the ideal replacement (largely because it came from within the sterling area) for Portuguese sardines. Ten million tins were due to reach Britain, and when in May 1948 there arrived the first large consignment the Ministry of Food celebrated by putting up snoek posters and publicising eight snoek recipes, including a concoction to go with salad immortally called snoek piquante. By this time a tin cost only 1s 4½d and took only one point (five less than household salmon) – necessary inducements with so many half-pound tins to get rid of. ‘If you have not yet tried the new allocation of snoek, you may be wondering what it is like,’ Marjorie Huxley wrote encouragingly soon afterwards in her ‘Recipes for the Housewife’ in the Listener. ‘It is rather like tunny fish in texture, but with snoek, it is best not to try servin
g it as it is, but to break it into flakes and moisten it with some kind of sauce, dressing or mayonnaise.’4.
Not everything fell victim to the government’s – above all Sir Stafford Cripps’s – determination to achieve a relentless drive for exports and reductions in unnecessary personal consumption. Cigarettes, for example, stayed off the ration: although their price had gone up sharply (from 2s 4d to 3s 4d for a packet of 20) in Hugh Dalton’s penultimate Budget, no minister dared tamper with the working man’s inalienable right to smoke, a right barely yet connected with lung cancer. ‘All we need to do,’ Dalton had reassuringly boomed, ‘is to smoke a little slower, make our cigarettes last a little longer, throw away our stubs a little shorter, knock out our pipes a little later; and all this might be good for our health.’ Nevertheless, in a thousand and one ways, everyday life remained difficult, perhaps typified by the qualitative as well as quantitative problems involved in that indispensable necessity for almost every household – coal supplies. ‘There seems to be more coal dust in the delivery nowadays,’ one housewife, Mrs Mary Whittaker, complained in October 1947 on Woman’s Hour. ‘I know we’re asked to make briquettes of it, but can you tell me why we get so much of it?’
Housing remained a continuing, high-profile worry, though at least the much-disparaged prefabs (described by Mary King in her diary as ‘a blot on the lovely English scenery’) were for the time being still going up. Neil Kinnock’s family moved in November 1947 to a new two-bedroom prefab on a council estate at Nant-y Bwch. ‘It was like moving to Beverly Hills,’ he recalled. ‘It had a fridge, a bath, central heating and a smokeless grate . . . and people used to come just to look at it.’ As for clothing restrictions, Anthony Heap’s experience a few weeks earlier was probably typical:
Hopefully hied up to Burton’s branch at The Angel, to order one of the fifteen ‘made to measure’ suits that comprise their present weekly ‘quota’. Wanted a grey tweed, but as luck would have it, they hadn’t any in this week’s ‘allocation’ of patterns – only blue worsteds. They would, however, try and get me a length next week. In which case, the suit would be ready in about nine months’ time! And with that dubious prospect I had to be content.
It was probably even more frustrating for women. ‘Proceed early to Marshall & Snelgrove,’ Grace Golden noted in January 1948, ‘only to learn that they do not change utility garments – I almost burst into tears.’5.
Gallup revealed that spring that as many as 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 per cent immediately after the end of the war. But soon afterwards there were merciful signs that Cripps’s strong medicine was starting to work, with a modest petrol ration for pleasure purposes being reinstated from 1 June, together with 12 extra clothing coupons. And in her The New Yorker letter a week later, Mollie Panter-Downes optimistically reckoned that such concessions would be ‘uplifting in their effect on the public, who are apt to accept controls as a sort of evil forest that has grown up around them and become a tedious but quite natural part of their lives’. Still, Tennessee Williams probably had the right of it. ‘I guess England is about the most unpleasant, uncomfortable and expensive place in the world you could be right now,’ he wrote not long afterwards to his agent in New York. It was a Sunday, he was staying at the Cumberland Hotel, and on going hopefully to the bar at 2.10 in the afternoon he had discovered that ‘there wasn’t a drink to be had in all of London until seven’.
Whatever the problems, whatever the sense of monotony and restricted choice, most people coped. Take Marian Raynham in Surbiton on a Wednesday in July 1947: ‘Had a good & very varied day. Went to grocers after breakfast, then on way home in next door, then made macaroni cheese & did peas & had & cleared lunch, then rest, then made 5 lbs raspberry jam, got tea & did some housework, listened to radio & darned, wrote to Jessie Gould. In bed about midnight.’ A key coping mechanism for many women, especially working-class women, was the bush telegraph. ‘Round about us we have got a good shopping centre, so we are very fortunate,’ explained a miner’s widow when asked that year about the effect of rationing on her family budget, ‘and I find in getting about you pick up windfalls and swop ideas and hints (for I am not too old to learn).’ There was also the indispensable safety valve of humorous grumbling. Punch as usual had its finger on the pulse of Middle England, typified by these more or less amusing snippets between October and December 1947:
‘Excellent meals can be obtained if you know where to go,’ says a correspondent. He claims to have found a restaurant where food is fully up to war-time standard.
The Government policy of encouraging large families is emphasized by a recent statement that only in households of six or over is it worth while collecting the new bacon ration weekly.
‘What could be better than a comfortable old arm-chair, a cosy little fire, and a good book?’ enthuses a reader. We don’t know; but no doubt some Ministry or other will soon be telling us.
Since caterers’ supplies were cut we hear many people have taken to rations to eke out their eating out.
‘Fry your whalemeat with an onion to absorb the oil,’ advises a chef, ‘and throw away the onion.’ As well?
Anyway, there was remarkably little hard, objective evidence to back up the Tory claim that the unappetising austerity diet was actually leading to malnutrition. When the Hunterian Society debated the question in November 1947 at the Apothecaries Hall, nutritionists demonstrated that it was extremely difficult to detect even limited malnutrition. ‘The biological system of man was infinitely adaptable to circumstances,’ insisted one of them, Magnus Pyke. They did not perhaps go quite as far as Michael Foot had in a recent parliamentary debate – claiming that the children of 1947 were ‘healthier, tougher, stronger than any breed of children we have ever bred in this country before’ – but their central point was not disproved.6.
Things looked pretty good to one outsider. Enid Palmer was in her late 20s when in April 1948 – after military nursing service in India and Burma followed by a lengthy stay with her parents in Kenya – she disembarked at Liverpool and caught the train to London. ‘The sun shone most of the way – & England looked very pleasant,’ she wrote home soon afterwards. ‘Little green fields full of apple trees in blossom – sheep and white lambs gambolling about. Children everywhere – dogs all over the place – particularly wire haired terriers like Whiskey. We passed farms – with great English Carthorses pulling loads – and of course the rows and rows of tiny houses with their front and back gardens, washing hanging out.’ That Friday evening she reached Addlestone in Surrey, where she was staying with her uncle George, aunt Beattie, cousin Joan and her baby Graham, and ‘The Granny’. Uncle George took her on Saturday afternoon to the shops in Woking. ‘They are full of nice things,’ she reported. ‘I eventually bought a pair of blue leather shoes at Dolcis – they cost only 51/- and are beautifully made with a crepe sole. I had to give 7 coupons for them. We walked round Woolworths, it was packed with people.’ That evening a trip to the Weybridge Odeon (‘comfortable plush seats’) was followed by supper back home of ‘sardines, tomato & lettuce, bread & margarine & coffee’. All in all, she told her parents, she was impressed:
I have decided that England is not such a bad place after all. As for the stories one hears about it – they are quite untrue! Everybody looks very well – the children with beautiful rosy cheeks – and what numbers of children – there are crowds of them everywhere. The People are cheerful & happy – everybody is kind & polite & they smile – all the bus drivers & conductors, the railways officials, taxi drivers, porters etc, are polite & pleasant & helpful.
The shops are full of flowers & fruit, sweets, cigarettes, clothes, shoes, everything one could possibly want. The only snag about clothes &shoes is the lack of coupons – one cannot buy them without. Fruit one can buy. There are fine apples, Jaffa oranges, South African grapes. The apples & oranges are 9d a lb. Daffodils are 24 for a shilling. Sweets are rationed – each person is allowed ¾ lb per month. Cigarett
es are expensive, and not always easy to get. Other things are plentiful &everything is so much cheaper than in Kenya.
Nor was that all. ‘Everybody is well dressed – far better than you or I even are – they may be old clothes but they are smart and well cut . . . Few people wear hats or stockings. The commonest working man looks smart in his utility clothing.’
Over the next few weeks, while Palmer waited to go to a maternity home in Colchester to continue her training as a nurse, the honeymoon did not quite last. ‘England’s countryside is beautiful,’ she wrote, ‘but there are too many restrictions – everything is crowded & there are queues everywhere.’ And: ‘Life is narrow and bound by documents.’ And again: ‘There is one standard topic of conversation in England – “coupons”, “food”, “clothes”.’ She was also rather dismayed by the lack of hygiene, and one day in London, finding herself near Victoria station, she did the enterprising thing:
I found a public Baths building – after queuing for an hour got a good hot bath for 6d. It was most enjoyable as it was 6 days since I had had one. They are short of coalite here. Today Uncle George said, ‘You may have a bath today’. I am afraid he runs this house. I was rather amused at being told when I may have a bath. Nobody else seems to have a bath except Uncle George who has one on Sunday night. Other nights I have a kettle of hot water, heated on the gas.
Austerity Britain Page 31
