Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The ad featured pictures of ‘Dan Dare Pilot of the Future’, ‘Skippy the Kangaroo’ and ‘P.C. 49 of Radio Fame’, as well as an irresistible come-on for the first issue: ‘Pin-up for Boys: an Accurate Colour Drawing of the new British Railways Gas Turbine-Electric Locomotive’. Eagle came from the same stable (Hulton Press) as Picture Post; the latter, in an article consisting mainly of enthusiastic comments from children shown advance copies of the first issue, did include some grumbles. ‘Some things I didn’t care for much such as “Dan Dare” – I can’t get interested in a hero who does things no one has really done yet,’ said 13-year-old Giles Davison. ‘I don’t see why Bible stories should be there,’ he added. ‘They haven’t anything to do with comics, really.’ Another probably equally middle-class north London boy was similarly wary of the moral message. ‘I shall enjoy being a member of the Eagle Club,’ declared Stephen Aris, also 13. ‘The Editor’s article about its objects is all right but he ought to be careful not to make them sound too priggish.’2.

  Aris had a point. ‘There are really only two kinds of people in the world,’ declared the editor’s letter in this first issue:

  One kind are the MUGS. The opposite of the MUGS are the Spivs – also called wide boys, smart guys, hooligans, louts or racketeers.

  The MUGS are the people who are some use in the world; the people who do something worth-while for others instead of just grabbing for themselves all the time.

  Of course the spivs snigger at that. They use the word Mug as an insult. ‘Aren’t they mugs?’ they say about people who believe in living for something bigger than themselves.

  That is why someone who gets called a MUG is likely to be a pretty good chap. For one thing, he’s got to have guts because he doesn’t mind being called a MUG. He likes it. He’s the sort who will volunteer for a difficult or risky job and say cheerfully, ‘Alright, I’ll be the Mug’.

  Notwithstanding which, Eagle’s first issue was a sell-out (more than 900,000 copies), and for the rest of the year it achieved weekly sales of more than 800,000. Hulton soon launched three companion comics: Girl in 1951, Robin (for under-sevens) in 1953 and Swift (for preteens) in 1954. The main man behind this remarkable success story was an Anglican clergyman, Marcus Morris, helped by his assistant Chad Varah (the future founder of the Samaritans) and a brilliant strip cartoonist, Frank Hampson. Morris, the comic’s first editor as well as initiator, consciously saw Eagle as a riposte to the extraordinarily popular American comics – ‘most skilfully and vividly drawn’, he conceded, but all too frequently offering content that was ‘deplorable, nastily over-violent and obscene, often with undue emphasis on the supernatural and magical as a way of solving problems’. Instead, Morris wanted to use the medium of the strip cartoon ‘to convey to the child the right kind of standards, values and attitudes, combined with the necessary amount of excitement and adventure’.3.

  Morris must have been aware of the contrast between what he was trying to do and the extremely popular comics that had been coming out of the austere but far from moralising D. C. Thomson stable in Dundee since before the war.4. By the early 1950s its comics included Beano, Dandy, Hotspur and Wizard (starring the phenomenal athlete Wilson, a more purist figure than Rover’s Alf Tupper, ‘the Tough of the Track’), with Topper following in 1953 and Beezer in 1956. The jewel in the Thomson crown was undoubtedly Beano, featuring from March 1951 a stand-out star in Dennis the Menace. The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx breezed in soon afterwards. No doubt a child’s choice in the end usually came down to a mixture of social class and parental input. Eagle provided wholesome adventure, digestible chunks of knowledge and moderately well-disguised moral uplift; Beano offered a recognisably urban setting for insatiable naughtiness and an attitude to learning encapsulated by the depiction of ‘Softy’ Walter (bow tie, private school, ghastly earnest parents) as the invariable anti-hero. Such was Eagle’s soaring ascent, in the somewhat anxious moral climate of the early 1950s, that it seemed possible its high-minded formula would better stand the test of time.

  Elsewhere in the magazine market, Woman’s Own was serialising all through the spring of 1950 the reminiscences of Marion Crawford (generally known as ‘Crawfie’) – a gambit that put half a million on its circulation. Crawfie was the former governess of Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and her account was also published as a best-selling book. ‘I have been reading the Story of the Princesses [in fact called The Little Princesses] by Crawfie,’ noted Vere Hodgson in May. ‘I think the early part about their education is very good, but I think she says too much about the Prince Philip business and Princess Margaret doesn’t figure too well.’ Indeed she didn’t, for Crawfie not only portrayed Margaret Rose in childhood as (in a biographer’s apt words) ‘spoilt, petulant and mischievous’ but implicitly drew the 19-year-old version as ‘an exacting, ill-organised and inconsiderate young woman’. Crawfie was never forgiven by the Royal Family, losing her grace-and-favour home and generally being cast into the outer darkness. But after all, what could she have expected? ‘She sneaked’ was how Margaret in later years reputedly justified the total ostracism.

  For the Princess, however, there was a more pressing concern. Peter Townsend – decorated Battle of Britain pilot, married, 16 years older – was equerry to her father; on the basis of a Rolls-Royce Phantom number plate (PM6450), it has been claimed, with some if not total plausibility, that 6 April 1950 was the date on which she and the Group Captain became lovers. Irrespective of that, there were no signs during the rest of 1950 that Crawfie’s revelations had diminished Margaret’s popularity, especially with the young. ‘Is it her sparkle, her youthfulness, her small stature, or the sense of fun she conveys, that makes Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret the most sought-after girl in England?’ asked Picture Post’s Mima Kerr that summer after several weeks of watching her fulfil engagements. ‘And this not only amongst her own set of young people, but amongst all the teenagers who rush to see her in Norfolk and Cornwall, or wherever she goes.’ Kerr added, ‘In spite of all the elaborate precautions, the general public always has the feeling that Princess Margaret’s about to do something unpredictable.’ 5 Or, put another way, she had the potential – though the plot had yet to thicken, at least in public – to turn the Royal Family into a soap opera. More than just a precedent, the Crawfie episode revealed the extent of the public’s appetite for that type of drama.

  The Little Princesses was the book of the season in one sense, but literary historians will always accord that honour to William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life, published in March. A wonderfully fresh and funny novel, imbued with liberal humanism and as unabashed in its treatment of homosexuality as of pre-marital sex, it was the work of someone who, under his real name of Harry Hoff, made his living as an assistant commissioner with the Civil Service Commission. His background was lower-middle-class – the son of elementary-school teachers in Crewe – and so was that of his hero, Joe Lunn, a young science teacher at a boys’ grammar school somewhere in the Midlands, in fact in Leicester. Irreverent and anti-elitist, perceptive about human foibles, profoundly modern in feeling but without any modernist baggage – Scenes ought to have won Cooper fame and fortune but only partially did so.

  Almost certainly he was ahead of his time, if only by a few years. His book had, the Times Literary Supplement thought, ‘an original, if not altogether agreeable, flavour’, leaving the reader ‘with an uncomfortable sensation that reality has been grossly distorted’. The Spectator’s reviewer was less critical but similarly uneasy: ‘Jaunty in mood and all but dadaistically casual in style, peppered with disarmingly shrewd and truthful observations about life, literature and other matters, Scenes from Provincial Life compelled a fair degree of reluctant admiration from me.’ An unequivocal admirer was Philip Larkin, who that summer got Kingsley Amis (by now teaching English literature at University College, Swansea) to read it, tactlessly suggesting that it achieved what his friend was striving for in his as yet unfinished novel ‘Dixon
and Christine’. Amis took umbrage. ‘I got hold of Scenes life a couple of weeks ago and read it with great attention,’ he reported in October. ‘I found it, on the whole, very good, but not particularly funny . . . I liked it rather [for] the exact transcription of an environment.’6. Still, something may have stuck; Cooper himself would come to think so.

  The provincial novel with attitude was quickly followed by the provincial politician with ambition. ‘I did not come from a much-travelled family,’ Dan Smith (invariably known in his later years as T. Dan Smith) recalled somewhat sardonically about growing up in a ground-floor flat of a Wallsend terrace, near Newcastle. ‘A hundred yards for shopping, a couple of hundred yards to the church, made up much of my world. It was a place where the majority of the families who survived the 1914–1918 war were born, reared, worked, married, grew old and died.’ Wallsend’s main occupation was shipbuilding, but Smith’s father was a coal miner. Smith himself, born in 1915, became a painter and decorator when he left school, soon working in Newcastle, but before and during the war, this autodidact devoted most of his energies to the cause of revolutionary socialism (but not the Communist Party), becoming a fluent, locally well-known speaker in such forums as the Market Place at Blyth or the Newcastle Bigg Market.

  His politics changed after 1945. Not only did the revolution become an ever more distant prospect each year, but he himself started a painting-and-decorating business that was soon employing up to 200 people. It was probably not long after the local Labour Party had lost control of Newcastle City Council in May 1949, following four years in power, that Smith complained bitterly to a local Labour MP, Arthur Blenkinsop, that pathetically little had been achieved in that time. Blenkinsop challenged him to do better, and, with the MP’s help, Smith was accepted, amid considerable misgivings, into the local party and found a winnable ward (Walker, a rundown shipbuilding district of Newcastle). ‘I am deeply conscious of the appalling housing conditions which exist in the city and am far from satisfied that anything of note is being done to alleviate these conditions,’ he declared in his election manifesto, adding that ‘my purpose is to SERVE’. He was duly elected on 11 May 1950, his 35th birthday.

  Thirteen days later, he was formally introduced to his fellow-members of the City Council. ‘Councillor Smith has shown his ability in public affairs, having been prominent in the youth movement for a considerable period’ were the reassuring words of Councillor Renwick. ‘He brings with him a spirit of integrity, which is a great thing in this Council Chamber. I am sure he will be a welcome addition to the Council and will carry out his functions as a councillor in an able and fitting manner.’ In his reply, the new man went beyond the customary bromides: ‘I hope I will be able to do the job well and that my work will meet with the approval of my fellow-citizens and that in time I will be feared by my opponents.’ Smith’s first substantive contribution followed in early June. ‘I believe so much in equality that if the workers get all they asked for, this issue would not arise,’ he asserted in a debate on the proposed abolition of workmen’s bus fares:

  If there is one section of the community that is absolutely indispensable it is the working men. I represent the working-class ward of Walker . . . The workers have to travel before eight o’clock in the morning. If you go along Scotswood Road at five o’clock at night you will see them standing in hundreds waiting for buses. The buses are packed, and if they are not run at a profit no buses will ever be run at a profit. It may be only coppers a week, but every sum is made up of coppers.7.

  The end of the 1940s – decade of war and austerity – signalled no immediate passage into the sunlit uplands. ‘The blackened, gutted hulks of houses one saw everywhere were the condition towards which the whole city was slowly, inevitably sinking’ was how a young South African writer, Dan Jacobson, recalled the London that he got to know after arriving in February 1950:

  The public buildings were filthy, pitted with shrapnel-scars, running with pigeon dung from every coign and eave; eminent statesmen and dead kings of stone looked out upon the world with soot-blackened faces, like coons in a grotesque carnival; bus tickets and torn newspapers blew down the streets or lay in white heaps in the parks; cats bred in the bomb-sites, where people flung old shoes, tin cans, and cardboard boxes; whole suburbs of private houses were peeling, cracking, crazing, their windows unwashed, their steps unswept, their gardens untended; innumerable little cafés reeked of chips frying in stale fat; in the streets that descended the slope to King’s Cross old men with beards and old women in canvas shoes wandered about, talking to themselves and warding off imaginary enemies with ragged arms. As for the rest of the people – how pale they were, what dark clothes they wore, what black homes they came from, how many of them there were swarming in the streets, queuing on the pavements, standing packed on underground escalators.

  Altogether, it was a ‘decaying, decrepit, sagging, rotten city’.

  For those used to the old place, there was the odd sign of things getting better, however. One event in mid-March really got Vere Hodgson going:

  Now we could hardly believe it but last week we had eggs OFF THE RATION. Absolutely remarkable and unheard-of . . . What this means to us only an English housewife can understand. We have been fobbed off with dried eggs and egg powder and lately not even that . . . and at last actually we could beat up two eggs and put them in a cake . . . THE FIRST TIME FOR TEN YEARS.

  ‘It’s strange to say “buy an egg” or “buy three eggs” & be able to,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton not long afterwards. ‘They can be got anywhere just now.’ Soap also came off the ration in 1950, but a wide range of foods remained on it, including meat, cheese, fats, sugar and sweets (after the false dawn of 1949), as well as tea. For Grace Golden – 46 years old, utterly lonely, frustrated by her commissions as a commercial artist (‘Working on Enid Blyton drawings – feel discouraged as soon as begin,’ she noted in July) – it was all part of the general misery, as exemplified on the last Friday in April:

  Woke feeling grim – decide must get new ration book – climb up hill to Ronalds Road to food office to find it was to be had at Central Hall – that appeared to be a Methodist chapel with doors firmly shut – a woman across rd begins to wave arms at me – at last gather I am to go down a passageway – get wretched thing – have lunch in Express [Dairies] at Highbury Corner.

  Even so, there was a striking Gallup poll in May. Asked to compare their present family circumstances with what life had been like as a child, only 25 per cent reckoned they were worse off than their fathers had been, whereas 56 per cent thought they were better off – hardly the march of material progress in irresistible Victorian style but still something.8.

  There was also good news for the country’s two or three million motorists. Mollie Panter-Downes may have informed her American readers in late April that ‘the doubling of tax on gasoline, which brings the price up to three shillings a gallon, has proved to be the most unpopular item in a generally unpopular budget’, but the end of petrol rationing just before the Whitsun weekend a month later graphically revealed the pent-up appetite for unfettered use of the family car. The Times urged motorists ‘to resist the temptation to say once more, after an interval of ten years, the magic words: Fill her right up!’, but the scenes on Whit Monday were chaotic. There were long queues on the main roads out of London, including one 2½ miles long on the road to Worthing; petrol-pump attendants were worked ragged; the car park at Whipsnade Zoo was soon full; and in the evening there was a huge jam on the road from Weston-super-Mare to Bristol. The same month, moreover, saw an equally telling portent. Vladimir Raitz, a Russian émigré who had recently started a company called Horizon Holidays, chartered a Dakota to take 20 holiday-makers to a camp near Calvi in north-west Corsica – reputedly the first British package holiday. For £32 10s they got their airfare, a fortnight under canvas, meals and as much wine as they could drink. ‘That was quite a lot of money for the time,’ recalled Raitz, ‘but compared with a scheduled
airfare then of about £70 to Nice, it was definitely a bargain. Our first customers were people like teachers, the middle classes.’ So it remained for the next few years, as he ran tours to different Mediterranean resorts unhindered by competition. ‘We went to Majorca, Sardinia, Minorca and Benidorm. There was only one hotel at Benidorm then.’9.

  British cooking was also due for some Continental influence. ‘When I first came,’ the Hungarian-born gastronome Egon Ronay recalled about settling in Britain soon after the war, ‘you could eat well in top-class restaurants and hotels, where there were French chefs, but there was nothing in the medium range, apart from Lyons Corner Houses, where you could get a good breakfast. Some of the food was unbelievable, those strange tennis-ball things, Scotch eggs, very badly done.’ It was a mediocrity, he believed, driven by class: ‘The people who influenced food at this time had been to public school, where the food had been not just without interest, but horrifying. So you didn’t discuss food.’