Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  On Michael Young, head of research at the Labour Party and principal author of the 1945 manifesto, it was starting to dawn that it was the very task of public-minded intellectuals to understand the lives and aspirations of ‘the common people’. Small Man, Big World was the haunting title of his pamphlet published in the winter of 1948/9. After a homely opening paragraph describing a family working together as they put up and decorate their Christmas tree, he set out his guiding preoccupations:

  There is no doubt that democracy can most easily flourish in the family and in other small groups built to the scale of the individual. All the members there meet face to face; if a decision has to be made, all can have a direct and personal part in making it, and all can perceive the results of their decisions.

  Democracy therefore seems to require smallness. But efficiency, promoted by the growth of science, often requires bigness. This is the great dilemma of modern society . . .

  There is no salvation in going back to some misty past in which the small man lived in a small world, no salvation in putting multi-coloured maypoles in every city square or even substituting William Morris for the Morris car. Destroying bigness would not only reduce the standard of living; it would also destroy democracy . . .

  But higher efficiency has not been gained without social cost . . . In the small group – in the family, amongst friends at work or in the pub, in the little ships of the Navy – the person has a feeling of comradeship and a sense of belonging: the individual matters and his self-respect is supported by the respect of his fellows. But in the large group the individual is only too likely to be and to feel powerless and insignificant.

  How can the individual be made to matter more?

  The bulk of the pamphlet then offered some rather mechanistic ways – befitting a party publication, albeit for discussion purposes – in which the right kind of democratic leadership could be secured, closer two-way communication between those at the bottom and those at the top could be established, and the size of organisations could be reduced without harming efficiency.

  Towards the end, after duly lauding industrial democracy, ‘the small New Towns which the Labour Government has bravely launched’, community associations, and parish and neighbourhood councils, Young extolled the way in which ‘some of the social scientists, with the psychologists in the lead, are analysing from a new standpoint the complex motives of man’ – and in the process revealing man’s deep need, whatever his aggressive impulses, ‘to love, or contribute to the good of others, and to be loved, or receive the affection and respect of others’. Fortunately, he reflected, ‘the strength of democracy is that it can so fully satisfy these human needs’. Much more research was needed (‘research based on field work in the social sciences is every bit as – in my personal view much more – important than research in the natural sciences’), but the incentive was that ‘this new knowledge will enrich socialism as it will enrich the new society which socialists are making’:

  British socialists have been broadly of two kinds – the Fabians with their emphasis on efficiency and social justice, and their devotion to facts; and the idealistic socialists, inspired by such men as Robert Owen and William Morris, with their emphasis on the dignity of man and of labour. The time is coming when the two strands can blend. If the Fabians are ready to follow the facts – the new knowledge about human relations which the social scientists are producing – they may find they are led to conclusions which differ little from those of the socialist idealists. If the latter are ready to restrain their more impractical ideas and compromise with efficiency, idealism need not lead to economic collapse and democratic disaster but to a society, built on the model of the family, which is not only more comradely but more efficient. In this new society human nature itself will increase its stature and the small man at last come into his own.

  Fieldwork, the family, the small man: a life-change was beckoning.

  ‘A pamphlet very much off the beaten track’ was Tribune’s verdict, though the magazine conceded that ‘the questions he raises and seeks to answer respond perhaps more directly to the worries of the rank-and-file of the Labour movement than the apparently more practical issues of day-to-day policy’. How had Young reached this point in his thinking? No doubt he had been much struck by the large gap that had seemingly opened up between rulers and ruled since the 1945 election, a gap symbolised in many eyes by the perceived failure of nationalisation to usher in a new set of social relations. But he was also perhaps influenced by his mentor, Leonard Elmhirst, cofounder (with his rich American wife Dorothy) of Dartington Hall, the progressive school near Totnes which Young himself had attended. ‘Remember,’ Elmhirst wrote to him in July 1948, ‘that the social sciences is only another term for political dynamite, because psychology and economics must drive right at the heart of human affairs and will inevitably upset any realisation of the immediate needs of party politicians.’ Young himself later that year described economics to Elmhirst as being ‘to social psychology like hacksaw surgery to chemotherapy’.

  He was also about to forge a new, fruitful alliance. ‘Did you see a note about Michael Young in yesterday’s Observer?’ Peter Willmott, a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford, wrote in early 1949 to his wife Phyllis in London. ‘He seems a good chap, right on the line, and I have thought that I might write to him.’ Willmott, whose personal background was far less easy than Young’s, got hold of the pamphlet, liked it, and over a pub lunch in early summer the two men clicked so well that Willmott joined Young in Labour’s research department that autumn. ‘Tall and hollow-chested, bony-limbed and flaxen-haired, with clean-cut jaw, pale-blue eyes and a pale, damp face, he seemed as he stood there to be oblivious to his surroundings’ is how Phyllis Willmott (née Noble) has vividly described her first encounter with Young, at a party where uncharacteristically he was ‘roaring drunk’. It was not long before she came to realise that he was almost invariably ‘diffident and reserved to the point of inhibition when talking about himself’ – but, crucially, ‘showed a keen interest in everything around him (including people) that was at once striking and flattering’.

  If Young was on a journey moving inexorably away from party politics, one Oxford economist was poised to go the other way. Born in 1918, educated at Highgate School and Oxford, and a protégé of one of Attlee’s senior ministers, Hugh Dalton, the notably handsome, intelligent and (when he wanted to be) charming Anthony Crosland was by 1949 actively looking for a parliamentary seat. That September, about the time he was adopted as Labour candidate for South Gloucestershire (which fortunately included Bristol’s northern suburbs), he reflected in his diary on how for all the good that Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their fellow Fabians had once done, especially in terms of stimulating state action to counteract economic inequality, it was high time that the labour movement outgrew the puritanism and priggishness of their latter-day followers:

  I want more, not less, ‘spooning in the Parks of Recreation & Rest’, more abortion, more freedom & hilarity in every way: abstinence is not a good foundation for Socialism, & the almost unnatural normality of the Webbs, & their indifference to emotional & physical pleasures, really would, if universally influential, make the Socialist State into the dull functional nightmare wh. many fear.

  Crosland’s liberalism contrasted sharply with the social conservatism of most Labour politicians, especially those from a trade-union background. Indeed, it was at about this time that Young (with whom Crosland was becoming friendly) commissioned a group of Labour-supporting lawyers to produce a report on law reform, with a view to including some of its proposals in the manifesto he was working on for the election due in 1950. ‘The report when it arrived contained a large number of well-reasoned proposals for reform, such as abolishing the “crime” of homosexuality, modernising the divorce laws, removing censorship of plays and films, and abolishing capital punishment,’ Young recalled a decade later. ‘The members of the [Policy] Committee were acutely embarrassed. Far from
considering the proposals on their merits, they showed concern only that no word should ever get out that such a dangerous report had been received.’18

  Of the two intellectuals, Young at least would come in time to appreciate through first-hand experience the deeply entrenched world view of the party’s core supporters. But perhaps not even he ever quite took on board the full force and significance of the findings, applicable to both sexes, of a gifted (and now almost completely forgotten) sociologist, Pearl Jephcott. After working incognito for several months in a light engineering factory on a London bypass, she reported in September 1948 on the virtually non-existent interest of her fellow-employees in current affairs:

  The girls’ talk hardly ranges beyond two themes, personal appearance and personal relations. The latter means fellows – mine, yours, hers. Even among the older women the only public event in the last three months which has fished folk out of the sea of personal and domestic affairs has been the Derby.

  ‘What we need,’ she concluded, ‘is some mental stimulant connected with our working life.’19

  3

  Jolly Good as a Whole

  Two of 1949’s innovations were Longleat and launderettes. On 1 April the sixth Marquess of Bath, wearing a pair of baggy old corduroys, stood with his wife on the front steps of one of the great Elizabethan houses and welcomed the first coach of visitors, each paying half a crown. A guidebook written by the marchioness, picture postcards and tubs of ice cream were all on sale, while her young children acted as tour guides or car-park attendants. The visitors poured in, up to 135,000 in the first year. ‘Of course,’ Lord Bath explained some months after his pioneering move, ‘the only way now is to run one’s house as a business, then it’s subject to the same taxation as other businesses. Like this it’s possible to keep things going.’ But for the landowning aristocracy as a whole, faced by unprecedentedly stiff peacetime taxation (including death duties of 75 per cent on estates of more than £1 million), the outlook seemed terminally grim. ‘A house such as Rowcester Abbey in these days is not an asset, sir, it is a liability,’ P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves authoritatively explained a few years later to an American visitor. ‘Socialistic legislation has sadly depleted the resources of England’s hereditary aristocracy.’ Ironically, it was the system of agricultural subsidies introduced by the Labour government that would, at least as much as charabancs, save many of the stately homes of England and their ungrateful inhabitants.

  Britain’s first self-service, coin-operated launderette opened, for a six-month trial, at 184 Queensway in Bayswater on 10 May. ‘All that housewives have to do is bring the washing, put it in the machine and come back 30 minutes later (charge 2s 6d for 9lbs),’ explained the local paper. After the film star Jean Kent had done the ceremonial honours, first through the doors was 14-year-old Ryan Hyde of Woodfield Road, Paddington, carrying a large white linen bag. ‘Mum’s doing the cooking,’ he told the reporter. ‘This is going to save my big sister a lot of work.’ The experiment proved a success, and gradually other Bendix branches spread across London and elsewhere. When one opened in Fulham Broadway, the working-class mother of Janet Bull (later Street-Porter) ‘decided to forgo the cheap bagwash (only a shilling a week, and our clothes went in a sack with those of our upstairs tenants) at the Sunlight Laundry around the corner’. For the four-year-old Janet it was a thrilling experience – ‘as we didn’t have a television, I found the hour or so spent watching our sheets and towels being washed in a machine every week totally mesmeric’.

  About the same time as Bayswater’s launderette opened, a national survey of housewives found that less than half used laundries, with most either doing their own washing or (for the better off) having a washerwoman come in to do it for them. To possess a washing machine was still rare; almost everyone had a scrubbing board or hand-turned mangle. But there had already been a significant moment in October 1948 when Hoover, hitherto best known for its vacuum cleaner, officially opened a factory for the manufacture of its new electric washing machine near Merthyr Tydfil. Initially almost all the machines were for export only, though that did not stop Hoover’s chairman and managing director, Charles Colston, from indulging in some pardonable rhetoric (probably written for him by a young Muriel Spark):

  The introduction of this machine, I believe, is going to be welcomed by countless housewives throughout the country. During the War they carried a tremendous responsibility, and since the end of the War conditions have been none too easy for them and to relieve the housewives of much of the laborious work which they have to do is, I believe, one of the most effective ways in which we can raise their general well-being. Our Electric Washing Machine should be most valuable to mothers of babies and young children.

  ‘It is not an expensive model intended for the few,’ he emphasised. ‘It has been built with the intention that it shall be for the million.’1.

  The National Health Service, by this time turning into a robust if greedy infant, was undeniably for the million. Right from the Appointed Day there was huge demand for its services, far from confined to elderly ladies wanting their varicose veins done. ‘I certainly found when the Health Service started on the 5th July ’48,’ Dr Alistair Clark, an ordinary GP, recalled half a century later, ‘that for the next six months I had as many as twenty or thirty ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions – I mean, of that twenty or thirty, there would be at least ten who had complete prolapse of their womb, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.’

  Overall, though, the three great, almost feverish rushes were for drugs, spectacles and false teeth. As the drugs bill spiralled in two years from £13 million to £41 million, even Aneurin Bevan, the NHS’s architect and still Minister of Health, was heard to complain about the ‘cascades of medicine pouring down British throats – and they’re not even bringing the bottles back’. As for the lure of free spectacles, some eight million pairs were provided in the first year, double the anticipated total. ‘Officials in the Service,’ reported Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘say that this is partly because of the hundreds of thousands of citizens – mostly among the poor – who have been fumbling around all their lives in glasses bought at the five-and-ten [traditionally a lucky (or unlucky) dip counter at Woolworths], the only kind they could afford.’ There were two NHS frames to choose from: the 422 Panto Round Oval (anticipating the glasses immortalised by John Lennon in the 1960s, though in the NHS case with unsightly, pinkish plastic) and, far more popular, the 524 Contour (as worn years later by Elvis Costello). In the case of teeth, it could be a question of finding a dentist. ‘Colonel Whiter explained that dentists are under no legal obligation to treat anybody as a Health Service patient,’ officials of the John Hilton Bureau (in effect a citizens’ advisory organisation subsidised by the News of the World) found in December 1948 when they went to see the Ministry of Health’s Deputy Senior Dental Officer. ‘They can, if they wish, in urgent cases say “I will treat you as a private patient but not as a Health Service patient.” He is aware that dentists are doing this all over the country. He agrees that it is against the whole spirit of the Health Service Scheme.’ The same issue of the bureau’s Journal that related this encounter also included a pithy anecdote in a reader’s letter: ‘The dentist froze my jaw and said “I will not take your tooth out under the Health Service. It will cost you 5/-.” What could I do?’ Altogether, there were many stories of abuse circulating during the NHS’s first year, not a few involving dentists succumbing to the obvious financial temptation posed of being paid by the filling.

  Nevertheless, Panter-Downes was surely right when in January 1949 she noted the existence of ‘a feeling that the Service is not working out as chaotically as was expected by its critics’ and that ‘the bitter blood between the Minister of Health and the medical men has diminished’. If there were storm clouds, they had to do with costs, almost from day one revealing that Sir William Beveridge’s confident expectation earlier in the decade
– that a national health service would make the nation healthier and thus reduce health costs – was diametrically wrong. As early as December 1948, Bevan was warning his colleagues that the original estimate of £176 million for the NHS’s first nine months was going to be overshot by almost £50 million, and when two months later he came to the Commons for that extra money, or what Sir Cuthbert Headlam privately termed ‘Mr Bevan’s monstrous Supplementary Estimates for the national health business’, he had to see off attacks on his profligate stewardship. ‘Pale and miserable lot,’ Bevan called the Tories, ‘instead of welcoming every increase in the health of the nation . . . they groan at it. They hate it because they think it spells electoral defeat.’2.

  One articulate doctor was disinclined to call a truce with the minister. ‘I am firmly convinced that at the present rate of expenditure it will involve us in national ruin,’ Ffrangcon Roberts (from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge) declared in the British Medical Journal about the cost of the NHS, before going on:

  Our duty as a profession is clear. We must teach our students and the lay public that the fight against disease is part of the struggle for existence; that medicine is not above economic law but strictly subject to it; that the claims of health, so far from being absolute, are relative to national well-being; that the country will get not the finest Health Service in the world but the Health Service which it deserves.