Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  In an election in which the two main parties virtually squeezed out all other parties, why had Labour, landslide victors in 1945, lost so many MPs? Almost immediately afterwards, the political analyst Philip Williams persuasively attributed the collapse to two main causes. Firstly, there was the redistribution of seats that had been agreed during the previous parliament, with Attlee in this respect behaving with self-sacrificing integrity, in the knowledge that large numbers of Labour votes would be transferred from marginal to safe seats. So it transpired. In terms of the popular vote, Labour at 46.1 per cent were still well ahead of the Conservatives on 43.5 per cent. But it was seats that mattered. Secondly, there was what Williams termed ‘the revolt of the suburbs’. As he explained, whereas the national swing from Labour to Conservative was 2.6 per cent, in London and the Home Counties it was 6, in Essex nearly 8 and in Middlesex 8.5 per cent. Put another way, Labour’s working-class vote had stayed pretty solid (though there remained a significant obstinate minority of working-class Conservatives), but its unprecedentedly high middle-class vote in 1945 had shown itself flaky when put to the test after four and a half years of actual Labour government – years above all of rationing and high taxation, accompanied by a sustained press campaign against what was depicted as the doctrinaire and hypocritical socialism of ministers like Bevan, especially after his ‘vermin’ outburst in July 1948. The predominantly class-based character of the voting in 1950 was further borne out by Benney’s Greenwich survey. There he found that ‘for most voters, and in particular for working-class voters, party policy plays a smaller part in attracting or repelling support than the class character of the party’s public image.’32

  In all, it was an election that, from a Labour point of view, threw up three troubling questions as it prepared to govern again, albeit with a threadbare majority. Could the party win back its fickle middle-class supporters? Would its impressively loyal working-class base continue to be grateful for the full employment, welfare reforms and shift of wealth brought about in the immediate post-war years? And, with the working class in long-term secular decline (comprising 78 per cent of British society in 1931, 72 per cent by 1951), would that base be sufficient in elections to come?

  PART TWO

  5

  A Negative of Snowflakes

  Take a journey in 1948 from what one traveller soon afterwards reckoned ‘the grimmest station in England’:

  Starting from Birmingham’s New Street Station, the train runs between the old central factory quarter and streets of huddled dwellings, past a vista of Middle Ring industrial buildings, by Monument Lane and on to the edge of Birmingham. Here, without a break, begins the Smethwick industrial zone, with its jumble of roads, railways and canals. Running alongside the canal bank, the train enters the Black Country leaving the congested industry of Smethwick for the waste lands left derelict by earlier industries. Canal junction and old spoilbanks lie north of the line and to the south lies Oldbury, the first Black Country town. A steel plant shows the persistence of heavy industry in the middle of the Conurbation. The River Tame winds through a landscape of slagheaps and pitmounds. Open land stretches towards Rowley Regis. Houses advance across land evacuated by industry. Across the canal the carriage window still looks on to tracks of derelict land, with a brickworks marking the midway point. Close by, this desolation forms the setting of a new housing estate. The train halts at Dudley Port Station, a Black Country railway centre. Industrial buildings stand among heaps of ash, spoil and scrap. Roads, railway and canals overlap at Tipton and straighten to cut through terrace streets and new municipal housing as far as Tipton Station. Just beyond, new industry is using old derelict land across the line opposite the township of Tipton Green, and tips are filling the open space between three embankments. Through Coseley the train passes the backyards of houses and factories, and a stretch of loosely knit development, before reaching the extensive steel plant and rolling mills at Spring Vale, Bilston. Across the line is Rough Hills, a slum built on and among slag heaps. As the chimneys of Bilston recede, the train enters the fringe of Wolverhampton, from which the zone of increasingly older and denser industrial building reaches into the heart of the town, 14 miles from New Street.

  This enticing travelogue was the work of the West Midland Group, authors of a resolutely optimistic planning study grappling with the legacy of two centuries in which ‘the needs of man’ had taken ‘second place to the demands of manufacture’, above all anything to do with metalworking (tubes and bolts, nuts and rivets, screws and nails) and engineering. Birmingham and the Black Country – together they were, this report did not exaggerate, ‘the very hub of industrial England’.1.

  Hub, indeed, not only of a nation but of a universe, given that Britain remained – as it had been since beyond living memory – the most industrialised country in the world. The headline facts at the midpoint of the twentieth century spoke for themselves: responsible for a quarter of the world’s trade in manufactured goods; the world’s leading producer of ships; Europe’s leading producer of coal, steel, cars and textiles. Yet the reality was more complex. Not only had the inter-war period strongly suggested that the two great staples – coal and cotton – of the nineteenth-century British economy were in long-term, perhaps irreversible decline, but it was also becoming clear that newer, science-based industries like electronics, chemicals and aviation were on an equally long-term rise. So strong, though, was the British self-image as pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, together with the accompanying dark satanic mills, that it would be a long time before ‘manufacturing’ stopped being almost exclusively equated with ‘smokestacks’. It would take even longer for the economy as a whole not to be seen in almost purely manufacturing terms – even though the service sector in 1950 provided as much as half of Britain’s gross domestic product and employed roughly as many people as the manufacturing sector. It is not fanciful to suggest that the overwhelming post-war emphasis on the virtues, importance and general superiority of manufacturing owed at least something to a male, virility-driven view of the world. Heavy industry was real men working in real jobs making real, tangible things; jobs in the ‘parasitic’ service sector, such as in offices and shops, were as often as not held by women. For planners and film-makers, economists and social-realist novelists, the cloth cap had the authenticity that the skirt, let alone the white collar, palpably lacked.2.

  Perhaps it could not have been otherwise, given the sheer physical impress of industrialisation. ‘At Blaydon the murk sets in,’ noted Picture Post’s A. L. (‘Bert’) Lloyd (the renowned folk singer) as he made his way ‘Down the Tyne’ in 1950. ‘At Newcastle the smoke blows over the cliffs of brickwork that tower above the black river, and the soot falls like a negative of snowflakes on the washing strung across the ravines.’ From there to the river mouth, ‘the traveller walks along a Plutonian shore, among the rubbish heaps and the row-town rows whose little houses are overcast by the towering machinery of the shipyards’, their cranes ‘marked with such names as Swan Hunter and Vickers Armstrong’. Or take Sheffield – ‘a mucky picture in a golden frame’, as the local saying went. ‘Our skyline was dominated by hundreds of smoking chimneys and the city lived to the constant accompaniment of steam hammers and the ring of metal meeting metal,’ recalls Stewart Dalton about growing up on a council estate there. The steelworks’ smell and smoke was everywhere pervasive. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ doctors would try to reassure anxious mothers, ‘he’s just got a Sheffield cough.’

  Not very far away, the Pennines provided an even more striking industrial landscape than the Don Valley. Travelling by train in 1951 from Manchester to Leeds, via Oldham and Huddersfield, Laurence Thompson was not surprised to encounter ribbons of ‘barrack-like’ textile mills and ‘drilled rows’ of workers’ cottages. But for the young Australian actor Michael Blakemore, who in two years in England had barely ventured north of Watford, the experience in 1952 of travelling to Huddersfield had the force of revelation:

>   Most of the journey had been grim, rattling through the bleak, monochromatic Midlands, or sitting stranded in a railway intersection so huge it was like a harbour clogged with a seaweed of dirty steel tracks. The last section, however, was spectacular in its awfulness. As the train wound through the devastated beauty of the hills, each valley was revealed as a sink of smoke from which, like neglected washing-up, bits of township projected – a chimney stack, a church spire, the long spines of terraced housing sloping upwards . . .

  Down there entire lifetimes were ticking away as remorselessly as a chronic cough. I was appalled. Why had nobody spoken to me of this – not my godmother living in the orderly pastures of Sussex, not my teachers at RADA nor my fellow students?

  The natives, of course, largely took for granted the industrial environment in which they, their parents, their grandparents and most likely their great-grandparents had lived, worked and died. An environment now almost gone, and visible only through the new industry of odour-free nostalgia, the sheer pervasive heaviness of its presence in much of mid-century Britain is one of the hardest things to recreate. For every Salford (‘the ugly, scrawled, illiterate signature of the industrial revolution’, as the novelist Walter Greenwood called it in 1951, with its River Irwell ‘throwing up thick and oily chemical belches’) or Oldham (with its forest of 220 tall mill chimneys pointing ‘their cannon-like muzzles at the sky which they bombard day in and day out with a barrage of never-ending filth’), there were many lesser-known workshops of the world. Hunter Davies grew up in Carlisle after the war:

  An ordinary, smallish northern city, nothing as satanic as those in deepest Lancashire, but my whole memory is of dust and dirt, industrial noise and smoke. You couldn’t see the castle, built in 1092, for the decaying slums. I was unaware that our little town hall was a 17th-century gem. It had become almost a bus terminus, surrounded by traffic. Walking down Botchergate was frightening, huge cranes and monster machinery lumbering towards you. Dixon’s chimney and textile factory loomed over the whole town. Caldewgate was dominated by Carr’s biscuit works. Going Up Street, as we called it, you listened for the factory horns and hooters, careful not to be swept over by the human tide vomited into the streets when a shift finished.

  ‘That’s my un-rose-tinted memory,’ he adds defiantly. ‘Hence my only ambition in life, when I lived in Carlisle, was not to live in Carlisle.’3.

  The pollution was endemic. ‘Before Wigan at the approach of the dreadful industrial country, the sky darkened,’ noted an apprehensive James Lees-Milne during a motoring tour in 1947. ‘I thought storm clouds portended much-needed rain, but not a bit of it, only the filthy smoke which gathers in the sky here every day of the year, fair or foul.’ Five years later, Blakemore’s Pennine experience was made all the more striking by the fact that it was a Sunday, in other words the ‘stale haze was the residue of the previous working week’. London – itself with a still notably strong manufacturing base – could suffer, too. ‘The streets were like those of Dickens’ murky London by day and like Dante’s Inferno by night’ was how the writer Mollie Panter-Downes described the 114 continuous hours of late-November fog endured by poor Ronald Reagan in 1948.

  Britain’s rising consumption of coal, the cause of all this smoke pollution, had been inexorable for two centuries: some five million tons of it being burned in 1750; 50 million tons by 1850; and 184 million tons by 1946, with more than a quarter of that last total being consumed on the open domestic grate. ‘In peace and war alike, King Coal is the paramount Lord of Industry,’ declared the Minister of Fuel and Power in a 1951 radio talk, repeating the ringing words of Lloyd George some 30 years earlier. ‘It is still more true today,’ Philip Noel-Baker went on:

  When I go down a mine and watch the coal going out on the conveyor belt, I often wonder where it will at last be used: in some power station to drive our factories; in a gas works, to supply our cookers; [in] a blast furnace, smelting steel; in a grate at home; in a merchant vessel crossing the Atlantic to carry our exports overseas. On the output of these dark, mysterious galleries where our miners work, the greatness of Britain has been built and still depends.

  Such seemed the abiding, bipartisan truth, barely challenged by an as yet ineffectual environmental movement (the Coal Smoke Abatement Society jostling with the British Ecological Society) that seldom penetrated the most industrialised parts of the country. But for one man, E. F. (Fritz) Schumacher, the 1950s would be years of intense agonising. An economist who had left Germany in 1937, Schumacher became in 1950 economic adviser to the National Coal Board – from which vantage point he was increasingly convinced that an ever-rising GNP and supply of material goods was no longer the route to a spiritually healthy society. Accordingly, he began to argue publicly not just that oil and nuclear power were unreliable alternatives to coal, but that coal itself, as a non-renewable fossil fuel, needed to be conserved. A prophet without honour, long before the seismic publication in 1973 of Small is Beautiful and an almost simultaneous energy crisis, Schumacher struggled to make an impact with either part of his message.4.

  The foot soldiers of the British economy, meanwhile, concentrated on getting to and from work each day. The average journey to work in the 1940s was some five miles – more than double what it had been in the 1890s, barely half of what it would be in the 1990s. The main mode of transport for that journey between the 1930s and the 1950s broke down (by percentage) as follows:

  By the end of the 1940s, there were barely two million cars on the road, and for another decade it remained the prevailing assumption that the car was a middle-class luxury rather than a commuting necessity. Indeed, well into the 1950s a horse and cart (delivering milk or coal, or perhaps in the hands of a rag-and-bone man) was as likely to be seen as a car on a northern working-class street.5.

  By contrast, the pre-Beeching railway network lay thick across the country, creating sights, sounds and smells intimately known to every adult and child. The eventual, less vivid future was slowly dawning: ‘The principal advantages are economy of coal; 90 per cent availability (the engine being ready for service at a moment’s notice); no fuel consumption when at a standstill; simple fuel handling; greater cleanliness; smoother running; better conditions for driver and assistant,’ bullishly declared the Illustrated London News in January 1948, in the context of Britain’s ‘first diesel-electric main line locomotive’ having just done a trial run on the Derby–London line. But for the time being there were still plenty of steam locomotives for trainspotters and others to relish. Steam’s relationship with coal was mutually profitable – coal in the tender, coal as freight – and in 1950 few eyebrows were raised when the newly nationalised British Railways formulated a plan for large-scale production of 12 standard designs of steam locomotives through the rest of the decade.

  Even so, for most working-class people a railway journey was a fairly unusual occurrence, more often than not associated with going on holiday, and in general, railway commuting was a middle-class preserve. ‘The train had its regulars, usually in the same place every day,’ the broadcaster Paul Vaughan recalled about the start of his working life in 1950, when each morning he caught the 8.32 from Wimbledon to Holburn Viaduct. ‘In one carriage there would be four men, always in exactly the same seats in their sober business suits, and they would spread a cloth over their knees for a daily game of whist, which I suppose they played all the way to the City.’ Vaughan himself, working at a pharmaceutical firm near Loughborough Junction, sometimes had to get out on their side, when ‘they would frown and sigh and raise their eyes to heaven as they lifted their improvised card-table to let you pass . . .’6.

  It was for two other modes of transport that the first ten or so years after the war were the truly golden age. ‘This was certainly a town of car-makers,’ Peter Bailey wrote about growing up in Coventry, ‘but bikes and buses provide the memorable images of town traffic in the early 1950s: dense surging columns of pedalling workers released from the factories at the end of the
day; long snailing queues of workers, shoppers and schoolchildren waiting to board the bus home.’ Men were twice as likely to use bicycles, with a 1948 survey finding that ‘as the social scale is descended the proportion of men using bicycles increases and the proportion of women decreases’. As for the bus, it was by now decisively vanquishing the tram (killed off in London in 1952 but lingering in Glasgow for another decade), while the relatively newfangled trolley-bus, vulnerable to sudden power cuts, was never a truly serious competitor.