Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Even so, there seems little doubt that it was the middle class that felt a relatively greater sense of deprivation during these austerity years. In Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s words, ‘the staples of the middle-class lifestyle – domestic service, ample food and clothes, consumer durables, motor cars, and luxuries such as travel, entertainment and subscriptions – were squeezed by labour shortage and rationing as well as high taxation and rising prices.’ Papers like the Evening Standard were full of malcontent correspondents. ‘Before the war,’ complained one in April 1947, ‘we could afford to go abroad for holidays. Last year we imposed ourselves upon relatives. We used to play golf, tennis and badminton. How can we afford them now?’ Another, a grammar-school master, was only marginally less downbeat: ‘We could give up the car; but we cling to it as a last link with comfort and luxury, having surrendered so many other things, including annual holidays, library subscriptions and golf.’ By 1948 at the latest, it had become almost axiomatic that it was the middle class that had taken the biggest hit since the war. In a radio talk given in May, four months after the Economist’s finding that ‘at least ten per cent of the national consuming power has been forcefully transferred from the middle classes and the rich to the wage earners’, the economic journalist (and prolific broadcaster) Graham Hutton similarly argued that ‘the well-to-do and better-off, the middle classes, have taken the biggest material cuts and sacrifices, as persons or households’, whereas ‘the less well-to-do have had their material standards raised’.12

  The obvious temptation – to emigrate – was manfully resisted in Evelyn Waugh’s case. At around the time of the cuts following the convertibility crisis, he explained in his diary why he had decided not to decamp to Ireland: ‘The Socialists are piling up repressive measures now. It would seem I was flying from them.’ But for the veteran travel writer H. V. Morton, the lure of South Africa was irresistible. Not only, he told a friend during the winter of 1947/8, had the Attlee government ‘put over more unpleasant measures than any other in history’, but England had become a society where ‘things moved steadily towards Communism’ and ‘everything that can be done is being done to pamper the masses and to plunder anyone with capital or initiative’. Soon afterwards, a City banker, Ernest Muriel, was similarly contemplating his sunset years in South Africa: ‘A country,’ he informed a no-doubt sympathetic correspondent in Cape Town, ‘which has many attractions as against Britain, where we are hedged around with so many restrictions and frustrations and where the retired rentier has to pay penal taxation, and, in the Socialist mentality, is looked upon as a cross between a drone and criminal.’

  Most stuck it out, including the indomitable ‘ladies’ for whom Derry & Toms was almost a second home. ‘Quite a number of the original upper middle class Kensingtonians survive,’ noted the writer John Brophy (father of Brigid) in April 1948:

  All over sixty, now, some over eighty. Most of the men are bewildered and defeated. The old ladies are invincible. Neither rationing, queues, the disappearance of servants, nor heavy taxation and the lowered purchasing power of money gets them down: the unforeseen bad times give them something to talk clichés about. They wear long, rustling skirts, flowered hats, and carry reticules and, in summer, silk sun-shades with long handles. The ‘New Look’ has for the first time in forty years brought them almost within range of contemporary fashion.

  These old dears mainly ate their meals in restaurants, where ‘they talk[ed] to each other across the small tables as though from mountain top to mountain top. And all banality . . .’ They were also, Brophy observed with grudging admiration, ‘quite unscrupulous’: ‘They were born to privilege, and in the days of their decline they fight for it. Given half a chance, any one of them will sail in ahead of the longest bus queue.’13

  In general it is clear which political party stood to benefit from an increasingly aggrieved middle class. ‘Two villages in the Home Counties have each subscribed about £500 for Lord Woolton’s Tory fund to fight the next General Election,’ Hodson had already noted in January 1948, adding that ‘the middle class are rising up.’ And that summer, a memo from the Conservative Party’s research department set out what it hoped would be the next election’s battleground: ‘The floating vote is mainly middle class (incomes £700–£1,200 per annum). These people are now finding it impossible to live. The chief fear of the middle-class voter is being submerged by a more prosperous working class. Our whole appeal must be in this direction.’ How would Labour respond? Manny Shinwell may have infamously declared in May 1947 that his party did not care ‘a tinker’s cuss’ for any class other than ‘the organised workers of the country’; Cripps in his April 1948 Budget may have indulged in a one-off capital levy; but for one of Labour’s more thoughtful MPs, Maurice Edelman (sitting, like Richard Crossman, for a Coventry seat), there was a key distinction to make. ‘Morrison has spoken of Labour’s concern for the “useful” people,’ he wrote in the New Statesman in June 1948:

  Among the middle class the description ‘useful’ applies from the white-collar clerk to the working director; it includes Civil Servants, teachers, working shopkeepers, technicians, managers, doctors, journalists and farmers . . .The useful middle classes are an integral part of the Movement.

  But there are others among the middle classes whose prosperity and advancement is tied up with a laissez-faire economy. Every measure of a planned economy is to them a poisoned draught. Often they owe their careers, started in the working class or the lower middle class, to the competitive nature of business, which has given their commercial aptitude opportunity, and their aggressiveness scope. They include company secretaries, commercial travellers, sales managers and small business men. These, then, are the irreconcilables among the middle classes. Labour’s victory is, by definition, their defeat.

  In the latter category, Edelman did not even bother to mention the rentiers of Kensington and Cheltenham, of Bournemouth and Budleigh Salterton, the ultimate irreconcilables.

  The increasing middle-class sense of being somehow muscled out of the picture by the working class was nicely caught by Gladys Langford. ‘It is very noticeable that nowadays the well-fed, well-clad, sweetly smiling bourgeoisie male & female have disappeared from poster and advertisement,’ she reflected in May 1947. ‘It is the broadly grinning and obviously unwashed “worker” who appears in more than life size on our hoardings and Tube stations.’ The chances are that hostility flowed mainly in one direction, at least to judge by the experience of a friend of Hodson who spent that summer in a hospital ward. ‘I hadn’t been so close to the working class before,’ he told the diarist. ‘I didn’t find a trace of class antagonism. The chap in the next bed was a Cockney who had three tricks, imitating pheasants, imitating the nurse when she asked “Have a cup of tea?” and creating a rude noise.’14

  That cheerful chappie was lucky not to be waiting to catch a train from Hungerford station on Tuesday, 6 January 1948. ‘A number of prosperous, well-dressed families were collected, who talked loudly about their personal affairs, ignoring the rest of the world and making me ponder the phenomenon of Class, and ask myself how the war had affected it.’ Frances Partridge (translator, diarist and member of the Bloomsbury Group) went on:

  When the pressure was on us all, it had seemed as though the relation between master and man, for instance, was suffering a sea-change, and it was a common sight to see a Colonel in a good but worn suit almost cringing to a waitress as he pleadingly enquired ‘Do you think I might have a little water?’ Today I felt we were in the presence of ‘conspicuous padding’ – that is to say I was aware that the gentry had reassumed their right to the privileges and support that money gives. Two elderly ladies got into our carriage in the train and drew back their lips from their yellowing teeth with identical snarls of concentration as they pecked about in their handbags. ‘Thought for a moment I’d forgotten my handkerchief,’ said one. ‘Very nosy day, isn’t it?’

  The previous day had featured the start, at 4.00 on
the Light Programme, of Mrs Dale’s Diary. Directly replacing the more down-market The Robinson Family, each day it told the story of the Dales, a family living in a comfortable house in an outer suburb, Kenton in Middlesex, though soon moving to a fictitious London locality (Virginia Lodge, Parkwood Hill). Dr Jim Dale had been a GP for 25 years; their son Bob had recently been demobilised from the army; their 19-year-old daughter Gwen worked in an office in town; and there was a cat, called Captain. As for Mrs Mary Dale herself, she enjoyed the services of a domestic help (Mrs Morgan, who seldom stopped talking) and before long came up with a catchphrase – ‘I’m a little worried about Jim’ – that over the years seeped into the middle-class collective consciousness.

  Certainly the two cultures – middle-class and working-class – seldom mixed happily. In the autumn of 1947 the Bristol Empire, situated in the city’s east, decided as an experiment to put on eight plays. Those chosen were hardly highbrow, including Arsenic and Old Lace and Ivor Novello’s I Lived with You, but the experiment proved a resounding flop. ‘Simply,’ explains that theatre’s chronicler, ‘the Empire audiences did not expect or want to see this type of production, while keen playgoers from other areas of Bristol were not willing to visit the Empire, seen as a working-class home for variety and revue.’ Going legit was not a mistake that the London Palladium ever made, though as everywhere the quality could be mixed. ‘It was a rotten variety bill, with far too many acrobatic affairs – some of which were positively obscene,’ a just-demobbed Kenneth Williams noted in January 1948. ‘Sid Field was marvellous, and received terrific and well-merited applause – what camping! I simply roared!’

  Field, particularly celebrated for his ‘Slasher Green’ spiv sketch, was probably the variety performer of the late 1940s, but younger ones still had it all to do. A glance at the line-up at the Aldershot Hippodrome a month later reveals Dave and Joe O’Gorman (‘celebrated comedians’) as top of the bill, with other attractions including Arthur Dowler (‘The Wizard of Cod’), Peter Sellers (‘Bang On’), Wimpey (‘Acrobatic Novelty’), and Cynthia and Gladys (‘A Juggling Delight’). Sellers, at this stage an impressionist, was paid £12 10s for his week of twice-nightly appearances, which his friend Graham Stark remembered as a disaster. But on 5 April a star was born. ‘Wisdom’s the name,’ the Daily Express proclaimed. ‘He Woke to Find he had Joined the Star Comics.’ Such was the enthusiastic reception for Norman Wisdom’s first-night performance at the London Casino. The paper described his act: ‘His face is mobile, can be twisted into any shape. He tumbles on the stage, shadow-boxes, tries to play the piano, pulls out a clarinet, tires of it and turns his attention to . . . a vast sandwich. Then he pleads with his audience to follow him in an Eastern song – in gibberish. His props? A stringy tie, an old shirt, and a baggy evening suit, several sizes too large.’15Wisdom was 33 (though billed at the time as 27), a former shop assistant, and, like so many of his contemporaries, had begun entertaining while in the army.

  At the big football grounds, huge, almost entirely male working-class crowds continued to pour through the turnstiles – in January 1948 the highest League attendance ever, 83,360, saw Manchester United play Arsenal at Maine Road (Old Trafford being still out of commission following bomb damage). Sadly, few Lancastrians ever thought of going to watch Accrington Stanley in the Third Division North and thereby boost the seldom large crowd at Peel Park. Even so, the club by this time had just managed to pay off the mortgage on the ground, and on 10 February a ceremony took place at the Mechanics’ Institution. ‘The gathering was a happy one to celebrate a happy event,’ reported the Accrington Observer, ‘and the red and white motif was in evidence, from an iced cake bearing the words “On, Stanley, On” to the red and white table flowers.’ The main speech was given by Councillor S. T. Pilkington, JP, associated with the club as player, official, director and chairman (for the past 12 years) since 1906. ‘He referred to football finance at the present time as being “daft”. To pay £20,000 for one player [as Notts County, of all clubs, had recently done for Chelsea’s Tommy Lawton], he said was “absolutely silly, crazy finance”.’ The first match after the ceremony was at home to Wrexham, with a predictable outcome: ‘Bad Luck and Bad Shooting beat Stanley.’

  Two months later it was the Cup Final, Manchester United versus Blackpool, billed as probably the last chance for the 33-year-old Stanley Matthews to get a winner’s medal. But United won 4–2, and years later their winger, Charlie Mitten, recalled a conversation with his opponent that did not exactly focus on the glory aspect (or lack of it): ‘I walked off the field with Stan Matthews. He said, “Look at that, Charlie? A silver medal and we get no money.” But we never gave much thought to the money side. I said, “Yes, I believe the band get more than us, Stan.” “Yeah,” he said. “Bloody disgrace, isn’t it?” I said, “They must have played better than us, that’s why.”’ ‘Anyway,’ concluded Mitten with the mellowness of time, ‘it was all a bit of a joke and a laugh.’16

  There was little inclination yet to abandon cultural hierarchies. ‘A certain Professor Zweig has been doing a little mass-observation in England all by himself, has had 400 conversations with men earning between £4 10s 0d and £6 a week,’ noted Hodson in April 1948, before summarising some of Zweig’s findings. Up to half of a wage could go on tobacco; 3s a week was the usual outlay on football pools; one in five betted on the dogs; ‘real recreational spending’ was ‘small’; and ‘time after time men said, “I have no interests.”’ Hodson went on:

  As a picture of Britain I find this decidedly inglorious. Every evening I see folk queued up for the cinema. Whatever picture is on, whatever drivel it is, the queues are there. Dogs, pictures, tobacco, drink, football pools, crooners – what an indifferent lot of pastimes for our people. To do a monotonous repetition job you loathe, and to use these anodynes to help you forget tomorrow’s work! If this is Western civilisation, there is a R.A.F. phrase that can be used – we’ve had it!

  A few days earlier Kenneth Preston, on holiday from school, cycled with his wife and son from Keighley to Nelson. There, after inspecting the open market (‘We always think there is far more food in the Lancashire shops than here’), they went to a second-hand bookshop:

  Whilst we were having a look round we heard the voices of two women in a really incredible conversation. One yelled out to another, who was evidently looking at some books, ‘Nah! then, don’t buy all e’ booiks’. The other said ‘Nay, we don’t read much at our ’ouse’. The other replied ‘No! we don’t. I’ve nivver read a book i’my life’. The other said ‘No! I often wish I’d read a bit more. You learn stuff from books, don’t you?’ It seems incredible that there could be anyone who had never read a book. The woman who said she hadn’t, Kath said, would be over fifty. These are the folk who vote!!

  Attitudes were perhaps not so different in the people’s party. Some weeks later, the Labour conference at Scarborough included an eye-opening diversion. ‘Paid our first visit to a Butlin Camp [ie at Filey] where the N.U.M. were entertaining us on our last night,’ noted Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford). ‘Very efficient, organised, pleasure holiday making. Everybody agreed they would not go there!’17

  Over the years, the profound cultural mismatch between progressive activators and the millions acted upon would inevitably be played out in some of the most emotive policy areas. In retrospect, two stand out from the late 1940s: crime and race. The first was already becoming the cause of major fractures – not only within elite opinion but also between elite liberal opinion and non-elite illiberal opinion – while the other, even more resonant, was poised to be similarly destructive of any forward-looking, modern-minded consensus.

  ‘More brutal crimes,’ recorded an unhappy, almost bewildered Gladys Langford in June 1947. ‘Have I been all wrong? Is it that these vicious criminals need flogging and harsh treatment or are they cases for a psychologist?’ There were many causes of the increased crime, brutal and otherwise, in immediate post-war Britain – most obviously t
he pressures and inducements deriving from the rationing of the majority of key everyday requirements – but what was undeniable was that it was happening. During the summer of 1947, the most headline-grabbing case was that of poor Alec de Antiquis, a respectable motor mechanic in his 30s who, as he rode his motorcycle down a London street, was shot dead by fleeing jewellery thieves. The culprits were quickly found (a vital clue being the clothing coupons for a discarded RAF raincoat), and two men were hanged at Pentonville, with the lugubrious Albert Pierrepoint doing the honours. When Cyril Connolly later that year weighed into the government in another disenchanted Horizon editorial, one of his main charges was that a regime that did not ‘even dare to propose the abolition of the death penalty’ bore ‘no relation to the kind of Socialism which many of us envisaged’. Yet the fact was that twice already in 1947 the question ‘Do you think the death penalty should be abolished?’ had been put by Gallup; and each time only 25 per cent had answered ‘yes’. Developments in 1948 were unlikely to sway this hardline majority. ‘A vast crime-wave is sweeping Britain,’ W. J. Brown noted in February. ‘And last week a policeman was killed in London.’ Indeed, over the year as a whole the number of indictable offences recorded in Britain turned out to be 522,684, almost double the total in 1937.18

  Unpromising mood music, then, for the abolitionist amendment by Sydney Silverman (Labour MP for Nelson and Colne) to the Criminal Justice Bill being brought forward by Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary. On the day of the debate and vote, 14 April, Cuthbert Headlam on the Opposition backbenches was a sardonic, unsentimental observer of a deep split in the ruling party: