Austerity Britain
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She also in her letters stopped extolling the abundance of food.
But whatever the objective truth about that, or indeed about the malnutrition question, the crucial, all-pervasive subjective reality for most people was that morale generally, and food morale in particular, was low. In the same month that Palmer arrived in England, an official survey asked a representative sample of the population whether they felt they were getting sufficient food to stay in good health. Fifty-five per cent answered ‘no’, with another 7 per cent doubtful; when a similar survey was conducted two months later, the respective figures were 53 and 9 per cent. ‘“Something tasty” is the key-phrase in feeding,’ Richard Hoggart would memorably write about the working-class Hunslet of the 1950s – but in reality of the 1930s when he was growing up there. ‘Something solid, preferably meaty, and with a well-defined flavour.’7. Given the shortages of anything tasty, especially with the low ration of fats, it was little wonder that almost half of a weary, put-upon population wanted to try pastures new.
Meanwhile, the sense of social malaise if anything deepened. Thirteen million pounds’ worth of property was stolen during 1947, more than five times as much as in 1938. ‘Newspapers are sprinkled with stories of rascals at work,’ noted Hodson in December 1947 – stories that included the Barnsley Chronicle’s report of how the town’s market had been invaded by ‘strapping young men dressed in gaily ribboned slouch hats; the loudest and latest Yankee ties (nude figures painted with luminous paint); fancy overcoats with padded shoulders; highly-polished pointed shoes’. And all rounded off with ‘David Niven ’tashes, cultivated with the aid of a black pencil’. These spivs, ‘driven from their holes and corners in London by the manpower hunt, the closer attentions of the police, and income tax officials’, attempted to sell toy balloons at 2s 6d, paper flowers at 5s a bunch, and ‘worthless glass trinkets at 10s’ – ‘“All very speshull” they whined in their best Cockney accent.’ But they got little joy from the Barnsley housewives. ‘Why should such fit young men be allowed to carry on like that,’ demanded one, ‘while my husband is at the coal face risking his life to get coal to keep the likes of those comfortable?’
Soon afterwards, in early 1948, the black market was the subject given by Mass-Observation to its regular panel. ‘Do you know of any such dealings in your area? If so, please describe them. (No identification, please.)’ More answers than not emphasised their prevalence:
Yes, I do know of such dealings locally. Eggs are sold at from 6d to 1/-each; dead birds at much above the controlled price; milk at 1/- per pint and moreover if one leaves a little extra each week in the empty bottles more milk is forthcoming. Conversely if one stops the tribute the milk stops immediately. No words are used in this little comedy . . . Black market dealings pervade every sphere of life and every commodity. (Grocer)
If the Black Market exists as it seems to in the minds of Fleet St then I’ve not come into contact with it. There’s a hell of a lot of a sort of barter going on. Which is very different. (Commercial traveller) My aunt (otherwise a scrupulously honest woman) gets extra supplies of eggs, butter, cheese and fruit from her regular grocer – at fabulously high prices. (Designer)
From my experience the focal points in my neighbourhood centre in the local Conservative Clubs. The people who, day in and day out, pour rancorous abuse upon the Government’s restrictions are, I find, the very folk who dabble dirtily in this sort of anti-social business. (Local government officer)
In common with everyone else in this country I know of such dealings and I would require strong proof to convince myself that we do not, all of us, take part in them. (Advertising)
The other day I was in a baker’s shop. A woman whispered to the assistant who glanced at me, hesitated, then brought a bag from under the counter (literally) and handed it over. No money passed. I knew at once that about half a dozen eggs had changed hands. (Pianist and housewife)
My experience is I don’t know anyone who is not in the B.M. (Steel worker)
My friends tell me that any number of clothing coupons can be bought at 2/- each; that bus conductors offer nylons to passengers on their buses; I know people who can get all they want in the way of ‘points’ goods without surrending a point – these they sell. Nearer home, I know a Methodist parson who collects eggs from one of his former ‘cures’ and who retails them at 6/7 per doz – quite cheap, when one considers that the regular B.M. rate is 10/- per doz. He also can produce silk stockings or marmalade – whichever you want! (Housewife)
About the same time, Kenneth Preston was told that the Bishop of Bradford and an ecclesiastical colleague had been overheard ‘discussing a 40 pound ham they had secured and which they were going to share between them’. To Preston, a middle-aged English teacher at Keighley Grammar School and the most conscientious of diarists, it was yet one more sign that there was something fundamentally amiss with the post-war world: ‘They were paying 10/- per pound for the ham. It is rather shocking to think of one’s bishop engaged in black market transactions.’
Most people – respectable and law-abiding – probably shared Preston’s dislike of the very fact of the black market, instinctively seeing it as unfair. A Gallup poll in April 1947 found that only 14 per cent thought the authorities were doing enough to stop it. Did that, though, translate into widespread reluctance and/or shame about using it? The Mass-Observation replies in early 1948 suggested, perhaps inevitably, a range of attitudes:
My husband insists that anything one gets over and above the ration is morally a black market transaction. I prefer to call it grey – though I admit he is really right. (Housewife)
Generally speaking I feel that the ordinary Englishman leaves such dealings to the selfish who will have this or that no matter who else goes without, and to the shady character who makes his living in the business and has no qualms at all. (Civil servant)
A number of my neighbours buy sacks of potatoes [‘controlled’ rather than rationed between November 1947 and April 1948], onions, oranges when no one else can get them – ‘well my dear we pay a bit over the odds but one must have the stuff’. (Housewife and voluntary social worker)
I would say that the Black Market is treated as a semi-joke, although a serious one. People feel they are very clever if they can say they have obtained something or other outside the rations or without coupons. (Sales manager)
Unfortunately almost everybody I know does these things to a greater or lesser degree . . . I myself must admit that I am not quite without blame myself, where getting things for my family is concerned, although I honestly hope I do less wrong than most. (Export and production manager)
I guess we are all human, who wouldn’t like some ham, petrol, nylons, all those things that make life worth living (or do they?). No, I think my only dislike in this line is the slimy types who seem to deal in the ‘market’. I’ve no scruples about where the thing comes from really, but some of the slick boys who seem to live by this business get me down. Put it this way. If a Service man came to me and said, ‘this rum or whatever it was “knocked off” what’s it worth to you?’ I’d deal. But when it comes to some flash looking ‘won’t work’ type of Spiv, a guy living on his wits, no fixed abode, no guts, no papers etc, cut me out. If he is a fat cigar-smoking Jew – well I’d rather starve. (Electrician)
In fact there is some evidence that by this time – almost three years after VE Day, virtually everyone fed up with continuing rationing – the spiv was becoming a less demonised figure. March 1948 saw the first issue of the Spivs’ Gazette, a humorous magazine which among other things gave details of the Spivs’ Union (‘Only genuine spivs, drones, wide boys, eels, butterflies and black marketeers to be eligible for membership . . . All members must wear the official spiv uniform – shoulders to be not less than 46 inches wide . . . Members are not expected to “do” each other – only the public’).8. Put another way, the morality of shared sacrifice no longer seemed quite so compelling as – perhaps – it once had been.
/> Two developments in 1947/8 pointed the way to a more expansive, acquisitive future. The first took its cue directly from the United States, where self-service shopping had been pioneered in the early 1930s, to the extent that by 1946 almost a third of retail food stores were entirely or partially self-service. The first British experiment along these lines probably took place in a section of the Romford Co-op in 1942, in the context of a staff shortage. The Romford example was soon followed by other London Co-operative Society shops, but it was not until some time after the war that the requisite fixtures and fittings became available for authentic, full-scale self-service conversion. One enthusiast, after a revelatory eye-opening visit to the States, was Tesco’s Jack Cohen, the self-made founder of a chain of grocery shops (by this time about a hundred strong) that faithfully obeyed his dictum ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’. In 1947 he put his St Albans store on a self-service basis, an experiment that began well but ended after 12 months – partly because the equipment was not yet quite right. Elsewhere, in January 1948 Marks & Spencer introduced at its store in Wood Green, north London, what Kathryn Morrison, the historian of English shopping, has called ‘the first full-fledged version of self-service in the UK’. It was only the food department, but in style and layout it was unmistakably on the American model. ‘It would appear so far, at least, that shoppers are well pleased with the innovation, several writing to express their satisfaction to the store manager,’ reported Store magazine in February, though early users were sufficiently cautious that in the first few weeks their number of purchases per visit rarely rose above two or three. About the same time as the M&S initiative, several London Co-ops (including at Upton Park, Barkingside and West Hounslow) were putting entire grocery counters on a systematic self-service footing, while in March one of the more dynamic figures in the cooperative movement, the Portsmouth-based John Jacques, opted for self-service across his domain. Was it the start of an inexorable trans atlantic revolution? ‘This England of ours is not America,’ R. Hardstaff (‘Royal Arsenal Grocery Shop Assistant’) warned in the Co-operative News. ‘We live as English, not in the cosmopolitan manner of Americans. The English housewife wants personal service, she likes to shop with salesmen who know and understand her wants and likes.’9.
The other development was heralded by Vogue in the autumn of 1947:
Fashion has moved decisively in Paris. One has seen changes coming for many months but now they are here, inescapably. Our Fashion Editor sums it up: ‘Take last season’s round hipline, small shoulder, pulled-in waist, longer skirt, and emphasize each; stress the bosom, stress the derrière; add a side-moving hat; and you will have a composite view of the Paris form for the new season.’ The skirt may be full – petal-shaped or spreading with unpressed pleats. It may be straight. But either way it descends to anything from fourteen to eight inches from the floor.
From the first, there were opponents of this new, feminine style (largely the work of Christian Dior). ‘The ridiculous whim of idle people’ was the trenchant view of the Labour MP Bessie Braddock. ‘The problem today as it affects British women is to get hold of clothes. They have not agitated for the longer skirt. Their strong feeling is that things should be left as they are. Most women today are glad to get any clothes they can get hold of.’ The British Guild of Creative Designers agreed: ‘We just have not got the materials. We cannot give way to Paris’s irresponsible introduction of the longer skirt.’
For British women, there was a six-month wait before clothes in the new style started to come through to the shops, though in January 1948 there was an early sighting of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous portmanteau term when Panter-Downes noted that ‘women’s winter coats are being offered at knock-down prices to tempt customers who are gambling on a mild winter and saving their coupons for a spring New Look – Cripps or no Cripps.’ The Chancellor was another of the New Look’s non-admirers, soon abetted by another Labour MP, Mabel Ridealgh, who in February denounced it as an ‘utterly ridiculous, stupidly exaggerated waste of material and manpower, foisted on the average woman to the detriment of other, more normal clothing’. For her as for some other Labour critics, it was not just that the New Look was a needless extravagance at a time of dire shortage of materials, but that it was also a seriously retrogressive step. ‘Women today are taking a larger part in the happenings of the world,’ she wrote in Reynolds News, ‘and the New Look is too reminiscent of a caged bird’s attitude. I hope our fashion dictators will realise the new outlook of women and will give the death blow to any attempt at curtailing women’s freedom.’
Alas for Ridealgh and others, the New Look began in March and April to sweep almost all before it. ‘We are selling nothing but New Look clothes, with nipped-in waists and rounded shoulder lines,’ reported Marshall & Snelgrove. ‘The longer skirt is here, let’s face it,’ Norah Alexander wrote in her fashion column in the Daily Mail. ‘You’d think that after all these austere years no one would grudge us this small token of pleasanter things to come . . . Don’t let anyone persuade you that it’s wanton to covet the sort of clothes they’re wearing in the other cities of the world.’ A spokesman for the London Model House group, which had tried to persuade the Board of Trade to regulate hemlines, conceded defeat: ‘It’s impossible to stop the New Look. It’s like a tidal wave.’ By late April it was popping up in diaries. ‘Saw several examples of the New Look, none of which was interesting to me,’ sniffed Gladys Langford after a trip to Richmond, where the ‘long queues outside all tea-shops’ had reduced her to ‘orangeade and jam sponge roll at Woolworth’s’. But for Grace Golden, standing in a bus queue in Piccadilly was an opportunity to view ‘a number of charming “new look” women – the full long skirts quite delightful’. The final, clinching breakthrough came on the 26th, with the outfit worn by Princess Margaret (who a few months earlier had been given a private showing by Dior) to the celebration in St Paul’s of her parents’ silver wedding anniversary. ‘She had fully adopted the tightly waisted, bouffant-skirted, ankle-length New Look,’ in the words of a biographer, ‘with which she wore – and would always thereafter wear – very high heels and platform soles.’ By the end of the year, soon after Mass-Observation had found that ‘opposition comes mainly from men over thirty-five’, it was estimated that as many as ten million women either had or desired the New Look.10
Was the widespread adoption of this new style really such a defeat for female emancipation? ‘There was nothing intrinsically submissive about the New Look,’ one cultural historian, Angela Partington, has forcefully contended, ‘even though it restricted movement and emphasised the curves of the body.’
Its strong colours, severe shapes, and theatrical styling could equally well be read as ‘stroppy’ and defiant compared to the twee floral prints and sensible cuts of utility styles. The way it was adapted and worn by working-class women transformed it into a hybrid style, ‘unfaithful’ to the designer’s vision, and they appropriated it for working and for relaxing in, as well as for ‘dressing up’ occasions . . . By refusing to keep the functional and the decorative separate, consumers were not only breaking the rules of good design and taste, but using goods to satisfy desires other than those assumed by the marketing industries.
Such assertions may demand fuller empirical testing than is possible, but any argument that gets away from the consumer as a passive, undifferentiated dummy deserves respect.
For at least two women – and their children – the New Look was not unmomentous. In 2002 an interviewer asked David Bailey (brought up ‘in a little terraced job in East Ham’ with an outside toilet) about his first strong visual memory: ‘“Going to Selfridges in 1948, where my mother tried on a New Look dress. She couldn’t afford it, but tried it on anyway. I remember her twirling around and thinking how beautiful she was, and that was my first fashion picture, I suppose.” Taken in your head? “Yeah.”’ For Carolyn Steedman, born in March 1947 and living in Hammersmith until she was four, an even more graphic early memory was dreaming abou
t her mother. ‘She wore the New Look, a coat of beige gaberdine which fell in two swaying, graceful pleats from her waist at the back’ – and for Steedman much of the retrospective point of the dream was the fierceness of her mother’s desire for the New Look, which in real, impoverished life was too expensive to be attainable. In her memoir, Landscape for a Good Woman, she draws a picture of her mother (the daughter of a Burnley weaver) who in two particular respects contradicted the conventional, salt-of-the-earth wisdom about the working class: not only was she politically a Tory, but she had almost overwhelming – and guiltless – material urges, together with powerful resentments if they were not fulfilled. Steedman’s remarkable book is, among other things, a plea against the overdeterministic reduction of working-class individuals to flattened figures in a Lowry-type setting, ‘washed over with a patina of stolid emotional sameness’. The New Look was, not only for Steedman’s mother, a very real as well as symbolic goal.11