Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Not knowing much about the facts of life before marriage, it came as rather a shock to my nervous system. (Working-class married woman, 42, Bradford)

  A girl should not, because I did – with my husband and I’ve often wished we’d waited. Neither of us ever refers to it and we are very happy in our marriage even so. (Working-class married woman, Yorkshire)

  I would rather have my husband know what he is doing, but for a girl I do not consider this necessary as she takes more risks. (Unmarried working-class woman, 25, Southampton)

  Anyone who tackles a big job should be trained for it. Marriage and sex life is a big job, and for women my answer obviously has to be the same, but I suggest the woman does not obtain her training from too many teachers. (Married working-class man, 33, Lincoln)

  In all, 52 per cent were opposed to pre-marital sexual experience for young men and 63 per cent for young women. Gorer made three main accompanying points: that ‘whether pre-marital experience is advocated or reprobated, the effect on the future marriage is the preponderating consideration’; that ‘the high valuation put on virginity for both sexes is remarkable and, I should suspect, specifically English’; and that the view, common in some other societies, connecting ‘sexual activity with physical and mental health’ had in England ‘apparently achieved very little currency’.17It was still, a year after the publication of Nancy Mitford’s novel, a case of love in a cold climate.

  One type of sexual activity – little studied in either survey – dared not speak its name: homosexual intercourse. Unsurprisingly, the moral panic of the late 1940s and early 1950s generated a sustained campaign to stamp out such wicked congress, with indictable offences (mainly for sodomy and bestiality, indecent assault and ‘gross indecency’) rising sharply. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, was a zealous homophobe; successive Home Secretaries were disinclined to restrain either him or the police; and the men in blue now started using agents provocateurs to catch homosexuals, as often as not ‘cottaging’ in public lavatories. Predictably, there is no evidence that this campaign was out of step with public opinion.

  To take people’s minds off such upsetting matters, there was the emergence by 1950 of a blessedly heterosexual film star. In the weeks and months after The Blue Lamp’s release, Dirk Bogarde (‘all Brylcreem and liquid eyes’) was assiduously groomed and publicised by Rank to become the great British male heart-throb of the new decade – a process typified by his open letter to Woman’s Own about the qualities he demanded in ‘The girl that I marry’. From a formidable list, they included:

  Do not smoke in public.

  Do not wear high heels with slacks.

  Wear a little skilful make-up.

  Never draw attention to yourself in public places by loud laughter, conversation, or clothing.

  NEVER try to order a meal from a menu when I am with you.

  Never laugh at me in front of my friends.

  Never welcome me back in the evening with a smutty face, the smell of cooking in your hair, broken nails, and a whine about the day’s trials and difficulties.

  From one reader, Evelyn S. Kerr of Gidea Park, Essex, there came a memorable riposte: ‘After reading Dirk Bogarde’s article, I find that I am his ideal woman. The only snag is, I breathe. Do you think it matters?’18

  The electorate’s hour was at hand – an electorate that, Mark Abrams found in a July 1949 survey, was a distinctly polarised one. ‘Among all electors, except Conservative supporters, substantial minorities were convinced that a Conservative victory in the next general election would mean mass unemployment, the dismantlement of the Welfare State, more industrial disputes, and an abrupt extension of private enterprise’; at the same time, ‘all but Labour supporters feared that another Labour victory would lead to a much wider application of nationalisation, the neglect of national material prosperity, and excessive class-oriented legislation’, with a third of all Conservatives asserting that ‘in its four years of power the Labour government had done nothing that was worthy of approval’. Much would depend on whether Labour could hold on to the significant degree of non-working-class support that it had attracted in 1945. One of Mass-Observation’s panel, a clearly well-off 37-year-old housewife, explained in August 1949 why she felt she could no longer vote Labour:

  Like many ‘upper class’ socialists, I thought with security of employment and adequate pay, as well as a Government of their own, workers would act as we should act in similar circumstances, i.e. work with a will, and enjoy doing so. In the event, it seems that we have been wrong and that removing the threats of unemployment, starvation, etc has only made the workers more discontented, which also seems to apply to nationalisation which certainly is a failure up till now. I think it will be possible to make it work in the case of railways, etc (it had better be) but I do not think that this is the time for more similar experiments . . .

  The other reason is more intangible, it is a matter of atmosphere. Somehow, a Labour Government has managed to take a lot of the joy and the interest out of the atmosphere. I feel that it is not so much ‘austerity’ – I can eat like a king if I have the money, and now also dress well, so it wouldn’t be that – but the general discontent, the lack of eagerness to serve among the people accompanied by a lack of eagerness to play, to have any social life, to do anything at all.

  ‘The atmosphere is one of lassitude,’ she concluded. ‘Perhaps by taking so much of the fight out of life, it gets less interesting, less worth while.’19

  Let Us Win Through Together was the unexceptionable title of Labour’s deliberately low-key election manifesto. Apart from a rather shapeless-looking ‘shopping list’ of industries (including water supply, cement, meat distribution and sugar refining) for which some form of public ownership was proposed, the main thrust was on the horrors of the past – above all dole queues, means tests and inadequate social services – and how these had been banished by the post-war Labour government, often against Tory opposition. ‘Clearly Herbert [Morrison] & Co are trusting to do nothing except to frighten the electors about what the wicked Tories will do if they are given a chance’ was the realistic appraisal of the Conservative backbencher Cuthbert Headlam, ‘and a reminder of the terrible times between the wars.’ A rare exception to the almost palpable intellectual exhaustion was the inclusion of a commitment to introduce a consumer-advisory service – on the face of it, an important shift by the producers’ party. The reality was rather different. ‘Since I was writing the election programme,’ Michael Young recalled years later, ‘I slipped it in and no one on the National Executive Committee made anything of it.’

  As for the main opposition’s response, one supporter, Florence Speed in Brixton, summed it up on 25 January:

  The Conservative manifesto published this morning. A fighting one, with freedom the keynote.

  Freedom of labour to choose its own job; freedom to build houses, freedom for private enterprise. No more state buying. Food off ration as quickly as possible. Freedom for doctors to practise where they like. Good strong stuff – and yet? The young of the world have had Socialism drilled into them from the cradle.

  In reality, This Is The Road was a pretty skilful document. It gave plenty of reassuring emphasis as to how a Tory government would build on rather than undermine the foundations of the newly constructed welfare state, declaring outright that ‘suggestions that we wish to cut the social services are a lie’, but it also included three strongly worded sections (‘Reduce Taxation’, ‘Limit Controls’, ‘Stop Nationalisation’) that together made it unambiguously clear that the party stood for ‘the encouragement of enterprise and initiative’. The manifesto got a generally good press. ‘Even The Times appears to approve of it,’ noted Headlam, ‘and admits that it is a far better thing than the Socialist manifesto.’ Typically, he added, ‘Of course 20 years ago one would have taken it for a Socialist pamphlet – but times have changed.’20

  A general election in the early 1950s was still a predomina
ntly local affair, with more than half the electors personally canvassed by one or more of the parties – testimony to the armies of unpaid activists the two main ones could rely on (Reginald Maudling, standing for the Tories in Barnet, had no fewer than 12,000 members at his disposal). As for the playing out of the 1950 election at a national level, there was of course the press (overwhelmingly anti-Labour), but apart from allowing the main politicians to make party political broadcasts – which they decided to do only on radio, not yet trusting television – the BBC ‘kept as aloof from the election as if it had been occurring on another planet’, as a somewhat exasperated Herbert Nicholas put it in his authoritative Nuffield study of the election. ‘Every programme was scrutinised in search of any item, jocular or serious, which might give aid or comfort to any of the contestants, and after February the 3rd virtually all mention of election politics disappeared from the British air.’ Indeed it did, with R.J.F. Howgill (Controller, Entertainment) having explicitly warned ‘all producers, announcers, commentators and other users of the microphone’ against ‘making political allusions, cracking political jokes, and using the microphone in any way that might influence the electors’, with ‘special care’ needing to be taken ‘over O.B.s [outside broadcasts] from music halls’. Even so, Nicholas’s overall verdict was telling: ‘Undoubtedly in view of the enormous power wielded by such a monopolistic instrument the decision to carry neutrality to the lengths of castration was the only right one.’

  Perhaps for this reason among others, it was not an election that ever really caught fire. ‘All along,’ Mollie Panter-Downes reckoned just over a week before polling day, it ‘has had a curious, fuzzy aura of unreality about it’, with the ‘subnormal’ election temperature not helped by ‘torrents of icy rain and gales of wind rampaging over the country’; while after it was all over, she called the campaign ‘as thrilling as a church bazaar’.21Still, a quickfire tour of the constituencies suggests it had a bit more life to it.

  One of the closest, most spirited contests was in Plymouth Devon-port between Michael Foot and Winston Churchill’s talented but bombastic son Randolph. ‘The reason I haven’t talked about Plymouth housing is that I don’t know much about it,’ the latter foolishly admitted with ten days to go; thereafter it was easy for Foot convincingly to depict his opponent as having ‘as much knowledge of the real political and economic issues facing the British nation as the man in the moon’. The two men were already well-established public figures, but it was different for a clutch of young – and ambitious – Tory hopefuls, among whom there were four men fighting eminently winnable seats and one woman who was not. ‘It’s the future that matters’ was the simple but effective (and also revealing) slogan of Maudling in Barnet; another moderniser, Iain Macleod in Enfield West, did not harm his cause by declaring that it was in the field of social services that ‘my deepest political interests lie’; in Wolverhampton South-West Enoch Powell conducted a short, intensive, military-style campaign that made much of how ‘we have watched our country’s strength and reputation in the world going to pieces in these years immediately after victory’; there was a similar briskness and efficiency about Edward Heath’s campaign in Bexley, despite an embarrassing moment when his claim that the housing situation would have improved if Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee had had to live with their in-laws was met by a heckler’s decisive intervention, ‘They do!’; and in Dartford, a neighbouring seat, Margaret Roberts (the future Margaret Thatcher) insisted, in more or less blatant disregard of her party’s accommodation with the post-war settlement, that Labour’s policies for universal welfare were ‘pernicious and nibble into our national character far further than one would be aware at first glance’. For Labour hopefuls, the high tide of opportunity had obviously been 1945, but Anthony Crosland was optimistic enough in South Gloucestershire. ‘A really crowded meeting at Staple Hill – very enthusiastic – I’m really becoming quite a popular figure!’ he noted in his campaign diary on 3 February, before adding: ‘A letter from a woman with a dropped stomach, demanding that I should get her a truss. This is too much.’ The following week he was in a village called Dyrham: ‘Member of squirearchy asked interminable questions about dental fees, & why he had to wait 3 months for an appointment: they do ask silly questions.’22

  Naturally all candidates had their awkward encounters with voters. Headlam, fighting his last election in Newcastle North, spoke in a school off Elswick Road and recorded with satisfaction the failure of a bunch of ‘men hecklers’ to break up his meeting. Another Tory, Dr Charles Hill (famous during the war as the ‘Radio Doctor’), held three lunchtime meetings in the large canteen at Vauxhall Motors – on one occasion being disconcerted by ‘four men ostentatiously seated in the front’ who ‘ignored me completely’ and stayed ‘deep in concentration in their game of solo’; on another, being photographed for the local press, revealing that, ‘while I was in full flood, a serious-looking young man seated at the back was engrossed in Forever Amber’. And over in South Bucks, the freelance broadcaster Bruce Belfrage, standing for the Liberals, had a bad time of it among the atavistic ‘hard core of the Tory supporters’ living in Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross. ‘Grim and determined characters whose political knowledge was in most cases non-existent,’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘they were inspired by an implacable loathing of the Socialist Government and all its works . . . They were not open to argument or persuasion, and my wife and I, together with all Liberals, were, in their eyes, traitors, renegades, fellow-travellers and foul splitters of the anti-Socialist vote.’ Judy Haines in Chingford would have sympathised. ‘As we have Conservative notices either side and all round us, got a trilly delight out of putting “Labour” notice in our window,’ she noted just over a week before polling day. ‘Will I be sent to Coventry tomorrow?’23

  Was the overall rather tame campaign a sign of democratic progress? Harold Macmillan thought so, claiming subsequently that ‘the high poll (at 84 per cent) showed that the lack of rowdyism and excitement was due not to the apathy of the electors but rather to a serious approach to their responsibilities.’ Evidence on the ground suggested a less sanguine conclusion. In his Greenwich survey, involving interviews with 914 people in that constituency, Mark Benney found that ahead of the election barely half could name even the party of their local MP and only a quarter the MP’s name; that during the campaign only 7 per cent went to an election meeting; that ‘those who had not made up their minds how they were going to vote bothered least of all about reading the campaign hand-outs’; and that although the parties were ‘reasonably successful’ in their efforts ‘to hammer home the names of their candidates’, the overwhelming indications were that ‘neither the candidates nor their electioneering activities aroused much enthusiasm.’

  It was pretty much the same with Mass-Observations’s survey shortly before polling day of 600 voters in six London constituencies. Not only had 86 per cent not been to any meeting, but 44 per cent had not even read an election leaflet (in an election where probably well over 30 million were distributed). Nor, among the 56 per cent who had picked one up, were there many signs of serious scrutiny. ‘Looked at the man’s face on it’ was how an accountant’s wife put it, while another woman replied, ‘I have glanced through them but I think they are a waste of paper.’ Touring East Ham on the Saturday before polling day, a Panel member noted: ‘In the afternoon I could not discover a single remark with any bearing on the election – on the streets, outside shops, in cafés – the people were shopping and that’s all.’ Or take the vox pop culled three days later from potential voters in Islington East. One 40-year-old working-class woman, a baker’s shophanger in Canonbury, based her voting intentions on the twin premises that ‘you’ve got to have money before you can do anything’ and that ‘there isn’t a single gentleman in the Labour Party – with the exception of Mr Attlee, and he’s too much of a gentleman to manage that crowd’. Another working-class woman, the 27-year-old wife of an asphalter in Aberdeen Park, had not
got quite that far in her analysis: ‘To tell the truth I haven’t thought about this voting business. I want a house. I live with a relative, and I think she wants it for her daughter so my main concern is to find a place.’24

  Where the electorate were most engaged was through listening to election broadcasts. During the fortnight from 4 February, the proportion of the adult population tuning in ranged from 31 per cent to 51 per cent (for Churchill) and averaged 38.1 per cent – a bit of a drop on 1945 but still pretty impressive, albeit that in Greenwich (and presumably elsewhere) ‘many of those who listened did so with half an ear, for no more than an average of 26 per cent claimed to have heard the whole broadcast’. Research immediately after the election found that the broadcasts by Attlee and Churchill had changed the minds of less than 1 per cent of the electorate – Churchill, after his 1945 radio fiasco, was perhaps grateful for that – and of course there were many households that did not tune in at all. These seem to have included Nella Last’s in Barrow. ‘We listened to Music Hall,’ she reluctantly noted on the 4th. ‘I wanted badly to listen to the political broadcast [by Morrison] but “controversy” of any kind upsets my husband.’