Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  In the cinema that summer, there were no fewer than three superb comedies from Ealing Studios to enjoy. Whisky Galore! was a tale of Scottish islanders determined to keep a shipwrecked cargo of whisky out of the hands of killjoy Customs and Excise officers; Kind Hearts and Coronets (‘I enjoyed it very much and thought the script very amusing,’ noted Gladys Langford) concerned an aristocratic outcast killing off his unlovable relatives; but the most resonant, and for most people closest to home, was Passport to Pimlico, starring Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford. It was, on the surface, anti-state in its message (like Whisky Galore!) and indeed anti-Labour government. The plot hinges on Pimlico, very much a working-class district, declaring itself independent from the rest of Britain – an independence immediately resulting in freedom from restrictions, rationing, purchase tax, ID cards and so on, with a scene in a pub of ration books and ID cards being torn up that apparently provoked roars of applause from the cinema audiences. Or, in the words of a placard, ‘Forget that Cripps Feeling’. Civil servants from Whitehall try to bring the natives back into the fold, but their leader brutally tells them, ‘We’re sick and tired of your voice in this country.’ Soon things go wrong. Pimlico becomes a ‘spivs’ paradise’ (as the Holloway character calls it), ‘crowds of cup-tie proportions’ (in the phrase of the mock radio report) flood in from outside, and law and order breaks down. In fact, complete freedom from rationing and controls is shown to be frightening, not something to be desired, and in the end, after the fracture is repaired between Pimlico and Whitehall, we see the warmly greeted return of the ID card and ration book. ‘I never thought people’d welcome the sight of these things again,’ remarks Pimlico’s policeman. To which Holloway’s wife replies, ‘You never know when you’re well off till you aren’t.’ The film ends in nostalgic wartime mood, with the state once again benign, community spirit strong, and an unnatural heat wave giving way to reassuring rain and cold. The left-of-centre ‘1945’ verities had been reasserted.9.

  They were not verities to which by 1949 much of the middle class was any longer inclined to subscribe. An autumn 1948 survey of British standards of living – the work of Mark Abrams, starting to carve out a notable career as one of the closest observers of social and economic trends – revealed that whereas the standard of living of the average working-class family had increased by 10 per cent since 1938, that of the average salary earner had slumped by 20 per cent. Even though the fact remained (as Abrams also showed) that the average middle-class family was still 50 per cent better off than the average working-class family, the middle-class reaction to such a stark contrast in recent fortunes was understandably unenthusiastic.

  Nevertheless, pending an opportunity at the ballot box, stoicism – and an almost iron will not to let hard-won personal standards and social position slip – tended to rule the day. ‘The interesting thing is that they are contriving to send their children to the same sort of schools, are as determined as ever to take the same sort of holidays, and are in some way managing to fit their lives into a reduced but roughly recognizable pattern,’ observed Panter-Downes in February 1949, after describing how the middle class were ‘beginning to feel with fright the effects of prices that have crept up so quietly and steadily that they are now perched, like ghostly black dogs, on everyone’s back’. Three months later, Mrs Lola Archer’s new column (‘Over the Tea Cups’) for the local paper in Weston-super-Mare exuded similar values:

  Once upon a time, way back in the halcyon days of the nineteen-thirties, a woman’s column meant clothes, holidays, and recipes that started: ‘Take six eggs . . .’ Today, though holidays may be nothing more than making the best of your free time at home, and recipes are expected to combine equal proportions of ingenuity and frugality, the latest fashion still holds place of honour. Owing to this fact it has been decided to run a pattern service for ‘Mercury’ readers. In future, every week an ‘easy to make’ pattern, featuring the style of the moment, will be reproduced in this column. So, put your work baskets in order . . .

  Elsewhere in the column, she told the story of her nine-year-old son Jeffrey being refused a new pair of white flannels for the cricket season and saying scathingly, ‘But mummy, you only need money now’, as she wondered aloud to her readers how to teach children the value of money.

  For Picture Post, running a major investigative feature in June, the question was simple: ‘Is the Middle Class Doomed?’ The writer, Ruth Bowley, itemised their plight:

  Those with less than £1,000 are really up against it. They are facing that hardest thing to face – a move down the scale through inescapable necessity. The average budget here gives no scope for substantial adjustments, like doing without the family car and the maid. When the coalman calls, the family cuts down on housekeeping extras. When the dry-cleaning bill turns up on Thursday, there is no cinema on Friday night. Salaries cannot catch up with prices, and there are few savings to fall back on. Now the wife knows that she must do all the housework and look after the children.

  Yet middle-class standards are still somehow kept up. Meals are eaten in the dining-room, though it would be less work to eat in the kitchen. The children still go out for a walk in the afternoon, but mother is now the nursemaid, and often has to finish the housework when the children are in bed.

  ‘Today the middle class, as our parents know it, is indeed disappearing’ was the bleak conclusion. ‘A new standard of living is taking shape.’ Among the many letters which the piece provoked, that from Mrs N. E. Walkey of resolutely lower-middle-class South Lane, New Malden, read in toto: ‘Re your article “Is the Middle Class Doomed”. Heaven forbid! They are the only people left who have good manners, brains and honesty. Lack of money will not destroy them. P.S. My first correspondence with a newspaper.’ Although further up the middle-class pecking order, the residents of the Grand Hotel at Frinton-on-Sea would no doubt have agreed. ‘Pre-war British customs may be dying (as they say abroad) but they are dying hard,’ noted the veteran journalist Sydney Moseley after staying there in August. ‘Almost everybody at this hotel “dressed” for dinner.’10

  The Picture Post issue with Bowley’s investigation was still on sale when, on 8 June, Secker & Warburg published George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a justifiably confident initial British print run of 25,500 copies. Six months earlier, reading the typescript, Fred Warburg himself had had no doubts about the novel’s central message: ‘Here is the Soviet Union to the nth degree, a Stalin who never dies, a secret police with every device of modern technology . . . A deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally’ – and to Orwell’s chagrin that tended to be the immediate, reductive reaction of the critical world at large. Some even interpreted the book as an attack on the Labour government. ‘My recent novel,’ he publicly insisted barely a week after publication, ‘is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.’ In practice, the perceived anti-socialist thrust, accurate or otherwise, proved impossible to dispel.

  Given the intensifying Cold War – especially once NATO had been formed, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Labour back benches, in April 1949 as an explicitly anti-Soviet alliance – this was surely inevitable. ‘It is an open season for communists,’ the young left-wing but not quite Communist literary critic and Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) tutor Raymond Williams had already noted in 1948, and during 1949 this was abundantly true in small as well as large ways. ‘It’s a fine state of ecclesiastic affairs when the Dean of Canterbury [the infamous Dr Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’] believes everything he reads in Pravda,’ declared one outraged elderly clergyman to another in March in an Osbert Lancaster cartoon in the Daily Express; soon afterwards, the news that the relatively radical schoolmaster Robert Birley, predictably dubbed ‘Red Robert’, was to be given the headmastershi
p of Eton caused much needless parental apprehension. Rather more importantly, that summer saw a major industrial dispute in London and elsewhere. ‘There has been a disgraceful Dock Strike all the week,’ noted Vere Hodgson on 10 July. ‘No one knows why . . .’ The same day, in its main front-page story that faithfully echoed the government line, the Sunday Pictorial had no doubts about the cause:

  This is the time to speak bluntly. Thousands of honest, decent workers in Britain are being hoodwinked and perverted by a contemptible little gang of unscrupulous rogues. They are menacing the nation at the time of its acute economic crisis. That, indeed, is their evil plan.

  Who are these rogues? They are the Communists, who seek to impair our country’s recovery by such wrecking tactics as the senseless, purposeless strike at the docks. To them honour is worthless and the welfare of their fellows is of no account if it obstructs their ruthless progress.

  ‘These are the Men of Shame,’ thundered the paper. ‘Let Britain be warned now . . .’11

  Certainly, in 1949, to be a Communist, or even merely a ‘fellow-traveller’, was not (in the short term at least) an astute career move. Civil servants continued, as they had been since the spring of 1948, to be vetted; scare tactics resulted in the removal of most Communists from the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Executive; the historian George Rudé was dismissed from his teaching post at St Paul’s public school and found it impossible to secure either an academic or a BBC position; the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s implacably right-wing leader, Arthur Deakin, banned Communists from holding office in his union; the educationalist Brian Simon thought he had got a job at Bristol University, but it proved a mirage after his CP membership was discovered; it was on pain of dismissal that any John Lewis employee did not sign an anti-Communist declaration; and so on.

  Yet for all that, the witch-hunt could have been much more extreme. ‘The Cold War mentality which developed in Britain did not reach the state of paranoia which sometimes afflicted the United States,’ the cultural historian Robert Hewison persuasively writes. ‘No House of Commons committee solemnly examined the works of art chosen for exhibition abroad by the British Council, in search of Communist tendencies . . . Britain had no Senator McCarthy.’ And by way of explanation, he quotes from A Summer to Decide (1948) by the young novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, in which the hero explains to an American why there is much less fearful preoccupation in Britain with the prospect of a war with Russia:

  One, the ordinary person is too busy. I mean he’s too busy coping with the daily problems of his rationed life, and trying to see a clear road for his own future. Two, he sees the ruins of war all round him – along the railway lines as he goes to work, along the bus routes. He sees the place where the pub was, and the children’s playground on the cleared site. He’s still wondering how long it’ll take to tidy them all up. He hasn’t got round to contemplating new ruins. And despite sporadic hullaballoo in the newspapers, he simply doesn’t see Russia as a threat to himself.

  That did not mean there was any great popular love for the Communists in Britain, Russia or elsewhere. In April the shelling by Communist forces of British ships on the Yangtse, together with the heroic if bloody escape of HMS Amethyst into the open sea, seems to have struck a deeply patriotic chord in the working-class breast. But as so often, Labour’s intellectuals did not get it. ‘British warships,’ Richard Crossman (Winchester¨Oxford undergraduate¨Oxford don¨ people’s tribune) declared in the Sunday Pictorial, ‘are as out of place on the Yangtse as Chinese warships would be on the Thames.’12

  Broadly speaking, it was from the intelligentsia and the trade unions that the bulk of the British Communist Party’s fewer than 50,000 members came. Mervyn Jones, a young writer in the late 1940s, recalls how, despite spreading doubts about Soviet Russia, it was the very ‘ferocity’ of the Cold War that held the party together, with the ‘incessant onslaughts’ from the press and two main parties including ‘some home truths’ but also ‘a torrent of distortions and slanders’. As for himself, he stayed a member because he could not yet find in the Labour Party an alternative ‘focus of dissent’. For Lawrence Daly, a young Fife miner who was also a part-time National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) lodge official and, from 1949, chairman of the Scottish TUC Youth Advisory Council, there was not a sliver of inner doubt as he stood that spring as a Communist candidate in the Fife County Council elections. ‘“Vox” and “Anti-Humbug” may talk as much as they like about “Police States” and “Ruthless Dictatorships”,’ he wrote defiantly to The Times for Lochgelly, Bowhill, Dundonald, Glencraig and Lochore, ‘but I prefer to accept the opinions of the founders of the Labour Party, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who, in their monumental work, “Soviet Communism”, described it as a new civilisation and as the greatest democracy on earth.’ Gratifyingly, two days later, the Daily Herald called him Fife’s ‘chief Communist orator and theorist’, but Daly still went down heavily to Labour.

  Generally, what sort of culture prevailed in the British CP? The evidence, cumulatively, is not flattering. For all the seriousness and noble intentions of many of the members, there was an almost unwavering allegiance to the Stalin line (at times descending into Stalin worship), and from the leadership an aggressive unwillingness to allow any dissent or deviation. ‘That time produced one of the sharpest mental frosts I can remember on the Left,’ the historian E. P. Thompson would recall from personal knowledge of the CP in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ‘Vitalities shrivelled up and books lost their leaves.’ The stultifying, repressive flavour comes out well in a 1948 internal statement by the party’s cultural commissar, Sam Aaronovitch. ‘There are still too many of you,’ he told the writers’ group, ‘who are not making a serious study of Marxism as a science. Because of that there are tendencies to compromise on basic principles, tendencies which lightheartedly reconcile, for instance, materialism and idealism . . . To engage more actively in the ideological struggle, our ideological workers must become Communists.’ It was an atmosphere that could not but encourage intellectual dishonesty, notoriously so when in 1948/9 the CP’s most famous scientist, J. D. Bernal, endorsed the wretchedly fraudulent ‘proletarian science’ of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s pet scientist and proponent of the Marxist theory that genes have no independent existence or influence.

  In February 1949 Penguin published The Case for Communism by one of the CP’s two MPs, the veteran Scottish activist Willie Gallacher. Naturally it came with a heavy health warning: ‘As publishers we have no politics . . . Whether we like it or not Communism is one of the major political forces in the modern world . . . Readers must judge for themselves how far his case is based upon objective analysis, and how far coloured by partisanship.’ At one point, in his chapter ‘Advancing Socialism – Declining Capitalism’, Gallacher considered Russia’s satellite states – countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary – and discussed whether they were democratic:

  The parties in the countries of east Europe, where the Communist parties are exerting a decisive influence, are all working together in the Governments to reconstruct their countries. But what about the opposition? What opposition? The parties in the Government bloc represent the people, and carry forward a policy in the interests of, and for the welfare of, the people. Those who want to put the clock back are enemies of the people. There can be no toleration for such.

  ‘In the democratic countries of east Europe they give no scope to the enemies of the people, and their nationalised industries have workers’ participation at every stage, from top to bottom,’ he added. ‘That’s the Communist idea of democracy, a new and far better type of democracy than the slow, dragging, Parliamentary sham of fighting that goes on in this country.’13

  In the early summer of 1949, there arrived from Salisbury, Rhodesia, a Communist sympathiser (though not yet a party member). ‘High on the side of the tall ship,’ Doris Lessing recalled, ‘I held up my little boy and said, “Look, there’s London.” Dockland: muddy c
reeks and channels, greyish rotting wooden walls and beams, cranes, tugs, big and little ships.’ She came with her two-year-old son, little money and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing. The London she found ‘was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs . . .’ It got worse:

  No cafés. No good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’ from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty. The Dining Rooms, subsidised during the war, were often the only places to eat in a whole area of streets. They served good meat, terrible vegetables, nursery puddings. Lyons restaurants were the high point of eating for ordinary people – I remember fish and chips and poached eggs on toast . . . The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people’s minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place.

  For Lessing, a redeeming feature (in addition to London’s overwhelming lack of provincialism in comparison with her hometown) was the general lack of affluence. ‘Nobody had any money, that’s what people don’t understand now,’ she told Sue MacGregor in 2002. ‘Nobody had anything. We didn’t bother about it . . . It wasn’t a question of suffering in any way. Nobody went hungry or anything like that, or went without clothes – it’s just that we weren’t suffering from this itch to possess more and more and more.’