Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  One broadcast did make a difference. ‘It isn’t as the Radio Doctor that I’m speaking tonight,’ began Charles Hill on Tuesday the 14th. ‘And it isn’t about aches and pains or babies and backaches. It’s politics. I shall say what I honestly think – speaking not for others, not for the doctors, but for myself – one of the many candidates.’ Over the next 20 minutes he argued forcibly but not fanatically that the miseries of the past had been grossly exaggerated by Labour politicians (whom he like most Tories invariably referred to as ‘the socialists’); that the welfare state had essentially bipartisan foundations; that the recent devaluation of the pound (announced by Cripps ‘with that touch of unction all his own’) had signalled an economy in serious trouble; and that the fundamental choice facing the electorate was whether ‘we really want a world in which the state’s the universal boss’. A particular passage entered electoral folklore:

  Why are the socialists trying to fill us up with ghost stories about the inter-war years? Well, not all of us, because many of us can remember what they were like. But there are many voters who can’t. I am not surprised that the socialists gave up that ‘Ask your Dad’ campaign. I suppose Dad was beginning to give the answers! And did you hear that great writer of fiction, J.B. Priestley [who had given a party political broadcast for Labour a month earlier], super-tax payer and good luck to him – did you hear him tell us that last Christmas was the best ever? Oh, chuck it, Priestley. Anybody would think that we had no memories . . .

  It was a formidable target – as Hill himself would recall, Priestley ‘in his rich, Yorkshire homespun voice had given the impression of an honest-to-God chap who was having a fireside chat with blokes as puzzled and eager for the truth as he was’ – but that one, seemingly spontaneous phrase, ‘chuck it, Priestley’, brilliantly did the job and would long be remembered.

  Among the 42 per cent listening were Kenneth Preston in Keighley and Vere Hodgson in west London, both admittedly Tory supporters. ‘He was very effective and must have done a great deal of damage to the Socialist cause’ was Preston’s instant verdict, while Hodgson reckoned that he ‘wiped the floor with Mr Priestley’ and added: ‘The broadcast is to be on gramophone records by Monday . . . It would touch every home, as he has a homely manner.’ Nicholas in his election study agreed about Hill’s effectiveness. ‘Here was expressed, in popular phraseology, in an occasional pungent phrase and in a continuously “folksy” delivery, the politics of the unpolitical, the plain man’s grouse’ – or, put another way, a ‘narrative of the adventures of l’homme moyen sensuel in Queue-topia’ (the term recently coined by Churchill) that was ‘winged straight at the discontents and prejudices of the lower middle class, full of the changeless wisdom of common-sense and constructed according to the most sophisticated formulas of applied psychology’.25

  Even so, the 1930s ‘myth’ remained a potent weapon in Labour’s hands. One of its national posters featured marchers with a ‘Jarrow Crusade’ poster and the accompanying caption ‘Unemployment – don’t give the Tories another chance’. And although for the Tories there was, as Hill showed, some mileage in challenging the myth, the leadership and candidates broadly preferred to follow the Spectator’s advice to ‘make it abundantly clear that as a party they have learned much from the years of travail, and that the Tories of 1950 are not the Tories of 1935’. Churchill in particular stayed more or less on-message, though naturally he could not resist the temptation to play the world statesman. In a speech in Edinburgh on the 14th – a speech reported by all the world’s radio services except those of the UK and the USSR – he spoke of how, if restored to power, he would seek to convene ‘a parley at the summit’ with the Soviet leaders, so that ‘the two worlds’ could ‘live their life, if not in friendship at least without the hatreds of the cold war’. Churchill’s proposal coined the diplomatic term ‘summit’, but Ernest Bevin immediately labelled it a stunt, while Harold Nicolson agreed that it was ‘unworthy of him’: ‘To suggest talks with Stalin on the highest level inevitably makes people think, “Winston could talk to Stalin on more or less the same level. But if Attlee goes, it would be like a mouse addressing a tiger. Therefore vote for Winston.”’ There was also soon after this speech a whispering campaign to the effect that Churchill was dead; a robust denial quickly put an end to it.

  As for Attlee, driven around the country by his wife in a Humber (having traded up from a Hillman), he was happy enough to exude reassurance and for the most part stick to the largely domestic agenda that concerned the electorate. According to Mass-Observation’s London survey, asking its sample to name the election issues they thought most important, housing came easily top, followed by shortages, wages and taxation, nationalisation and cost of living. To Attlee fell the final broadcast, on Saturday the 18th and listened to by 44 per cent:

  The choice before you is clear. During these difficult years Britain by its example has done a great service to democracy and freedom. We have shown that orderly planning and freedom are not incompatible. We have confirmed faith in democracy by the example of a Government that has carried out its promises. It is utterly untrue to say that our prestige has been diminished. On the contrary, it stands higher than ever, for we have added to the triumphs of war the victories of peace.

  ‘I do not suggest that all our problems have been solved,’ he conceded, ‘but I do say that great progress has been made, that if we continue with the same steadiness, cheerfulness and hard work that have been displayed during these years I am convinced that we can solve them.’ Though as he added with an honesty that may only arguably have been advisable, ‘I am not going to make promises of quick solutions. I am not going to offer you any easement unless I am certain that it can be done.’26

  As during any election, there was plenty else going on. On Friday the 3rd, the day of the old parliament’s dissolution, probably the most popular British comedian, Sid Field, collapsed and died at the age of 45, after a short life of heavy drinking. Evocatively described by one historian of comedy, Graham McCann, as ‘ranging freely from coarse, back-throated cockney, through the nasal, drooping rhythms of his native Brummie, to the tight-necked, tongue-tip precision of a metropolitan toff’, Field was the special hero of another son of Birmingham, the aspiring comedian Tony Hancock, and on hearing the news, Hancock wept – the only time his agent saw him in tears. On the same day as Field’s death, the German-born nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had fled Germany in the 1930s and had been working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire, was charged with passing information to Russian agents about how to construct a plutonium bomb. Apparently disenchanted with Communism, the previous week he had made a full confessional statement at the War Office that included a remarkable passage:

  Before I joined the [Harwell] project most of the English people with whom I made personal contacts were left-wing, and affected in some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy. Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep-rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from and I don’t think they do, but it is there.

  Fuchs in due course received a 14-year sentence; but on 8 February a Liverpudlian gangster called George Kelly was sentenced to death for murdering the manager of the Cameo cinema in the suburb of Wavertree during a bungled burglary. The Crown’s case against Kelly was entirely circumstantial, lacking any scientific support – but his conviction was not quashed as unsafe until 53 years after he had been hanged.

  Meanwhile, for one Surbiton housewife, as for millions, the quotidian dominated:

  10 February. The greengrocer came very late, so we had to wait a long time for our second course of a fresh salad before the rice pudding.

  13 February. I like to see boys [including her son Robin] carrying attaché cases instead of satchels as they did in the war, not being able to get the cases then.

  14 February. Lay down to rest at about 2
.30 exhausted, went to sleep in middle of Woman’s Hour.

  16 February. Ray [her daughter] went out this morning to get some stuff for a skirt. Was I glad to see the Pudeena she brought me, the first since 1939. Of course, I make steam pudding with ordinary flour, but these make such light ones, lighter than with our heavy flour.

  19 February. Robin’s cold is better & went quickly. Wonder if it was the Ribena, the pure blackcurrant juice the Health Act provided for mothers & children, & which anyone can now get. It is lovely, &2/10 [for] a quite big bottle.

  For all her keenness as a radio listener and generally serious attitude to life, Marian Raynham did not mention listening that month to Fred Hoyle’s series of talks The Nature of the Universe, in which the term ‘Big Bang’ was coined. The astronomer’s robust, down-to-earth approach was for some an acquired taste – the BBC’s Listening Panel reported how his ‘way of speaking was not particularly well liked’, undoubtedly referring to the incongruity of a northern accent on the Third Programme – but the series established his reputation as the first popular scientist in the age of mass media (even though the listening figures, being for the Third, were unremarkable). ‘It has been the most satisfying & enjoyable series I think I have ever heard,’ declared one panel member, a gas inspector, after it was over, ‘& I am very sorry we shan’t have this Saturday evening speaker to look forward to any more.’27

  For politicians, the only focus that mattered in early 1950 was the electoral one. Before the campaign, seeking to relieve the tedium of a Cripps dinner party (‘the meal was pretty foul and conversation, not surprisingly, drab and common place,’ noted Hugh Gaitskell), a group of ministers and their wives had forecast the outcome. Everyone bar Douglas Jay assumed an overall Labour majority, with Gaitskell’s the lowest estimate at 30. The Stock Exchange already agreed, by the end of 1949 having informally given odds of 11/8 against a Tory win, while the Tories themselves were split. ‘Harold was somewhat cocksure I thought – I mean as to the result of the GE – the idea being that our manifesto is “a winner”,’ recorded Headlam after listening to Macmillan address northern candidates at the end of January. ‘I wonder – my fear is that the working man won’t change his attitude until he is in want – and that is not yet.’ The only poll with any sort of credibility was Gallup’s, which on 20 January revealed (in the News Chronicle) Labour having dramatically reduced a long-established Tory lead and then from the 30th moving narrowly ahead. Its final poll was published on Wednesday, 22 February, the day before voting, and showed Labour on 45 per cent, the Conservatives on 43.5 and the Liberals on 10.5. In truth it was too close to call, but the great thing for everyone involved was to stay as confident and motivated as possible. ‘We’ve all worked like blacks – but I’m not worried – I tell you, I’m not worried,’ the Tory agent for Islington North told a Mass-Observation investigator on the 18th. ‘But I’d far sooner see a Liberal get in – if they [ie Labour] got back, this’ll be the last election we shall see. There’ll be no more voting and no more parties – it’ll be straight totalitarianism.’28

  Polling day was mainly fine, but by the evening there was plenty of rain about, making the eventual turnout all the more notable. From about eleven o’clock there was a large crowd in Trafalgar Square, where a big Daily Mail screen on the Canadian Pacific Railway building was showing the early results. ‘There was no evidence of very deep personal feeling or concern except in a minority of cases,’ reported Mass-Observation, while Panter-Downes that night was struck by the many young people, including students who ‘swung along arm in arm, dressed, indistinguishably as to sex, in a uniform of old duffle coats or burberries, corduroy slacks, and huge party rosettes’. There were even thicker crowds in Piccadilly Circus, where the Daily Telegraph sponsored the scoreboards over the Criterion Theatre. There Panter-Downes overheard the exchange of views between ‘a pretty little blonde’ and a fat man next to her, after she had ‘enthusiastically shrilled “Up Labour!”’ after each government win:

  He: Now, sweetheart, you don’t bloody know what you’re talking about. You was only a kid when there was a Conservative Government last, so what the hell do you know about it, sweetheart?

  She: I know enough to know that they were rotten bad days for the workers. (Applauded by several people standing nearby. )

  He (patiently): Look at me, dear. Don’t I look like a worker? My dad was a foreman bricklayer, and we were seven boys, and always plenty to eat and us kids kept decent. No, sweetheart, this country won’t be right till it gets some private bloody enterprise again, and don’t you talk no more about bad old days to me, see, ducks?

  For London’s elite, there were election parties at the top hotels. At Claridge’s part of the accompanying cabaret was provided by Tony Hancock – who became increasingly vexed as his Hunchback of Notre Dame impression was continually interrupted by the toastmaster raising his white glove to announce the latest result – but the bigger draw, attracting up to 2,000 guests (and almost as many gate-crashers), was the thrash at the Savoy hosted by Lord Camrose, the Telegraph’s proprietor. ‘Practically everyone I’ve ever heard of there,’ reported Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘champagne flowing, ran into numbers of people, whole thing slightly macabre and eve of the Battle of Waterloo flavour about it – the bourgeoisie shivering before the deluge to come.’ And indeed, once the results started coming in, ‘it became clear very soon that there was no real swing against the Government’. Another diarist-guest, Cynthia Gladwyn, observed how ‘faces became downcast and, in spite of the champagne, spirits low’, so that ‘finally, at about one o’clock the party was a feast at which there were only skeletons’.

  Most people stayed at home that night. Some, like Judy Haines, were able to watch – ‘we were continually reminded by Television Commentators (Conservatives, I’m sure) that the results so far were nothing to go by’ – but far more listened into the small hours on the radio, including the 23-year-old John Fowles in his parents’ house at Leigh-on-Sea. ‘The constant interruption of the music and the numbers counted floating out of the loudspeaker,’ he recorded somewhat loftily in his diary. ‘Interest grows like a child’s interest in a match boat-race in a gutter.’ During the half-hour after midnight, some 36 per cent of the adult population were still listening to the results, and the only criticism of its coverage reported back to the BBC was that as the night wore on ‘the fill-up gramophone records were much too loud’.29By dawn Labour were 61 seats ahead of the Tories, with ministers still confident of a comfortable overall majority, but only 266 constituencies had declared, and those that had not included many rural and suburban seats.

  Friday the 24th proved a thriller. There was a steady flow of results from late morning to mid-evening, with many fluctuations in the relative state of the parties, but with the Tories having in general a far happier time than the previous night. At the Dorchester there was food and champagne provided by another newspaper dynasty, the Rother-meres. ‘From time to time the loudspeaker calls, “Attention! Attention!”, and then gives the state of the parties,’ noted a guest, Harold Nicolson. ‘At about 1 pm the gap between Labour and Conservative begins suddenly to narrow. Excitement rises. People do not behave well. They boo a Labour victory and hoot with joy at a Conservative victory. They roar with laughter when a Liberal forfeits his deposit.’

  By afternoon there was the unmistakable feel of a national nail-biter. ‘Shopkeepers, bus-passengers, fellow-residents all full of election news and very excited about the neck-and-neck election results,’ observed Gladys Langford in north London, while according to Panter-Downes it was as if the city generally had been ‘hit in the face by a blizzard of newspapers’: ‘On every street, people walked along thumbing through the latest edition, or stood on corners intently reading, or dropped one paper and queued to buy two others.’ Moreover, ‘shops that had a radio turned on or had put some kind of arrangement for showing election returns in the front window were surrounded by absorbed crowds.’ For a tired Judy Haines, who on Thursday
night had stayed up watching the coverage until 3.00 a.m., the political and the personal understandably merged: ‘7 o’c came round so terribly soon. Had a dreadful day with babes & their colds. Kept grizzling. I tried putting Pamela to sleep but had to bring her down again when she was so weepy. To make matters worse I was straining hard to get Election Results. Made a game of it by booing Conservatives & cheering Labour, but it wore very thin long before nightfall.’ Soon afterwards, no less than 43 per cent of the adult population listened to the six o’clock news to hear the latest position.30

  By mid-evening, with 13 results still outstanding, it was pretty certain that Labour would still have an overall majority, but one that was far from comfortable. The eventual figures – Labour 315, Conservative 298, Liberal 9, Irish Nationalist 2, Communist 0 – set it at six. By then the Cabinet had decided, late on the Friday, to carry on in government, notwithstanding some excitable talk of a coalition. Among the victors were Foot, Maudling, Macleod, Powell, Heath, Hill and Crosland; losers included Margaret Roberts and Bruce Belfrage; and in Islington North the Tories went down by more than 9,000. Almost everyone expected another general election before very long.

  ‘WHAT A SHAKING THEY HAVE HAD’ was Vere Hodgson’s immediate reaction to what had happened to the Labour government, while another diarist, the Liberal-voting Marian Raynham, agreed that ‘they won’t be able to have it all their own way’. Such was also the view of much of the press about the implications of Labour having, in the Economist’s words, ‘suffered a Pyrrhic victory’, or, as Nicolson privately put it, ‘Labour cannot carry on with a Socialist policy when it is now clear that the country dislikes it.’ But for one Tory supporter in Barrow (a rock-solid Labour seat), the defining moment was hearing her leader concede defeat. ‘I listened to Mr Churchill’s brave but broken voice with a pity so deep I began to cry bitterly,’ Nella Last wrote on the Friday evening. ‘I don’t cry easily, or often, my husband said “now fancy you upsetting yourself over so small a thing”, but somehow that brave gallant old voice got tangled up with my own worries & fears.’ In Chelsea, meanwhile, Mass-Observation’s investigators caught a couple of overheards more or less encompassing the socio-economic spectrum. ‘If it’s a stalemate it means they can’t do just as they like any longer,’ shouted a pleased-sounding coalman to someone on the pavement in Manor Street as he leaned down from his cart. A member of the Stock Exchange did not manage quite such a large view of the situation: ‘My God it was funny all the time there was just the one Liberal member – the word went round that they were waiting for a second so that they could breed from them.’31