Austerity Britain
Page 63
In domestic kitchens, of course, there were all through the 1940s severely limited ingredients available. ‘All winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and oatmeal with just a little meat’ was how the leading cookery writer Marguerite Patten retrospectively encapsulated that decade’s diet. The pages of the Reading-based Berkshire Chronicle suggest, however, that by the early 1950s things were starting to change – and not just in a derationing sense. Advertisements became rife in 1950 for new types of convenience food, including the range of Birds Eye ‘frosted’ foods. ‘Don’t moan when summer fruits are over,’ declared one, aimed directly at the housewife: ‘Birds Eye Quick-Frozen Foods give you garden fresh fruits and vegetables all the year round – without a refrigerator! And husbands love them, particularly Birds Eye strawberries, which are sweetened – and sliced so they’re sweet right through!’ The following year, the paper’s Ladies’ Page began to explore Continental cuisine, albeit with some diffidence and necessary ingenuity: in its Lasagne Casserole, macaroni took the place of lasagne sheets, while cottage cheese made do for mozzarella.10
The person usually credited with hauling British cooking out of the dark ages is the writer Elizabeth David. A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in June 1950, three and a bit years after her initial scribblings in the bleak midwinter of Ross-on-Wye. Complete with an alluring John Minton dust jacket, David’s recipes conjured up an exotic Mediterranean abundance far removed from the realities or even the possibilities of mid-century Britain. The book was enthusiastically received – ‘deserves to become the familiar companion of all who seek uninhibited excitement in the kitchen’, declared the Observer – and David quickly followed it up with the equally evocative and attractive French Country Cooking, published in September 1951.
It is impossible, though, to gauge confidently the true extent of David’s influence. Certainly she wrote extensively, including in the 1950s for Harper’s and Vogue; certainly, as Arabella Boxer has pointed out, there sprung up in the early 1950s a whole clutch of small London bistros, such as Le Matelot and La Bicyclette in Pimlico and the Chanterelle near South Kensington, where ‘not only the menu but also the décor owed much to the David books’; and certainly she had her proselytising disciples, most notably George Perry-Smith, whose The Hole in the Wall restaurant opened in Bath in 1952. Yet for all David’s elegant prose and, in Boxer’s phrase, ‘uncompromising intelligence’, it is arguable that her influence has been exaggerated. Not only was she far from the most widely read cookery writer – significantly, she seems to have had little or nothing to do with the mass-market women’s magazines – but there would be many other factors at work in the gradual post-war emancipation of British cooking and eating, including the spread of foreign travel (not least through National Service), increasing prosperity, and the arrival of Indian and Chinese immigrants. 11 But among those at the very vanguard of the culinary broadening out, David was the totemic figure.
There was one other key mover. Raymond Postgate, son-in-law of the former Labour leader George Lansbury and brother-in-law of the leading socialist intellectual G.D.H. Cole, was a well-known journalist and author in his own right. He was also, in his biographer’s words, ‘a connoisseur of wine and cookery’. In the late 1940s he decided that the best way to do something about Britain’s dreadful reputation for eating out was to recruit a team of volunteers who would offer candid and impartial assessments of the fare being proffered. The first edition of the Good Food Guide, under his editorship, duly appeared in the spring of 1951 and sold some 5,000 copies. Perhaps inevitably, the several hundred entries on individual restaurants (barely a handful of which outside London served ‘foreign food’) comprised recommendations – recommendations that Postgate hoped would stimulate the unrecommended into action. However, while conceding that the shortage of butcher’s meat was a genuine problem, he did let fly in his introduction: ‘For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted. Indeed, it is quite arguable that worse meals are served today in hotels and restaurants than were in Edwardian days.’ From the start, the Guide had a pleasingly quirky, readable quality to it (‘Preston is a desperate place for anyone who dares to want food after 7.30 p.m.,’ observed one volunteer), and that, together with the integrity of the venture, soon won it a considerable reputation. It was also a pioneering case of consumer power – and all the more telling given that its initiator came from the left of the political spectrum.12
One aspect of the food revolution is often overlooked: nutrition. Diet records of 4,600 children (across the country) who were four in 1950 revealed the following as a typical day’s intake:
Breakfast: Cereals with milk, egg with bread and butter.
Lunch: Lamb chop with potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots; followed by rice pudding and tea.
Tea: Bread and butter; jam, cake and tea.
Supper: Glass of milk.
In a 1990s study funded by the Medical Research Council, these records were compared with the results of a similar national study in 1992, again focusing on four-year-olds. The scientists’ conclusions were unambiguous: ‘The higher amounts of bread, milk and vegetables consumed in 1950 are closer to the healthy eating guidelines of the Nineties. The children’s higher calcium intake could have potential benefits for their bone health in later life, while their vegetable consumption may protect them against heart and respiratory disease and some forms of cancer.’ There were other plus points for the 1950 diet: fresh vegetables (not fruit juices) as the main source of vitamin C provided the additional nutrients of plant-derived foods; red meat as opposed to poultry (in other words before the rise of chicken as a mass food) was good for iron; and starch rather than sugar as the main source of carbohydrates was more beneficial to gastro-intestinal health. As for the higher calorie intake in 1950 as a result of eating more animal fat, this was almost certainly counteracted by a much more physically energetic lifestyle.13It was, overall, a message to gladden any puritan’s heart: a shortage of money and of choice was positively beneficial for the children of austerity.
There had been three previous tournaments, but the 1950 World Cup, held in Brazil, was the first in which England consented to take part. Scotland also received an invitation but declined it. Advance preparations were negligible, while the party that left London in early June did not even include a doctor. ‘It was typical,’ recalled one of the players, Tottenham’s Eddie Baily. ‘There we were going off to a strange country about which we knew very little and there wasn’t anyone we could turn to if we were sick or injured. Backward wasn’t the word for it.’ Missing from the party was England’s dominant defender, Neil Franklin. Fed up with his paltry financial rewards under the maximum-wage system then prevailing in English football, he had left his club, Stoke City, at the end of the season and gone to join Santa Fe of Bogotá. The reaction to his move was generally hostile, with much talk of greed and treachery, and he was automatically ineligible for the national team.
It proved a disastrous tournament. Not only did England lose two out of three matches, but one of them was to a footballing minnow, the USA – a 1–0 defeat instantly tagged the shock of the century. In that match, played on 28 June on a rutted and stony pitch at Belo Horizonte, all the luck went against England; it did not help that the team had been picked not by England’s manager, the insufficiently combative Walter Winterbottom, but by the Football Association’s senior committee member, Arthur Drewry. Tellingly, such was the deep parochialism of the British football world (supporters included) that the whole ill-fated foray received surprisingly muted media attention: the BBC did not cover the matches, while the press was relatively restrained in its treatment of England’s humiliation. As for Franklin, his Bogotá venture was a fiasco, but when he returned home later that summer he faced four months’ suspension and ostracism by the top clubs. ‘Arguably the finest centre-half the England football team ever had’, as his obituarist put it, never played for England ag
ain.14
Even as the shock news came over from Belo Horizonte, England’s cricketers were facing an almost equally ignominious defeat. Playing against the West Indies at Lord’s, they went into the last day, Thursday the 29th, still needing a mountain of runs. By soon after lunch they had been bowled out, with the West Indies winning by a comprehensive 326 runs – a first victory on English soil. John Arlott, one of the radio commentators on the match, subsequently described what happened next:
A crowd of West Indians rushed on to the field in a final skirmish of the delight which they had called out from the balcony at the Nursery End since the beginning of the game. Their happiness was such that no one in the ground could fail to notice them: it was of such quality that every spectator on the ground must have felt himself their friend. Their ‘In, out, in, out, in, out,’ their calypsos, their delight in every turn of the game, their applause for players on both sides, were a higher brand of spirits than Lord’s has known in modern times. It is one of my major credit marks for the MCC that, faced with all the possible forms which a celebration of victory might take, their only step was to ensure that no portions of the wicket were seized as trophies. Otherwise, these vocal and instrumental supporters were allowed their dance and gallop of triumph.
By one estimate there were only some 30 West Indians – almost all of them soberly dressed – taking part in this outburst of joy, but among them were two celebrated calypsonians who had both come over on the Empire Windrush almost exactly two years earlier. One, Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), recalled the afternoon long afterwards:
After we won the match, I took my guitar and I call a few West Indians, and I went around the cricket field, singing. And I had an answering chorus behind me, and we went around the field singing and dancing. That was a song that I made up. So, while we’re dancing, up come a policeman and arrested me. And while he was taking me out of the field, the English people boo him, they said, ‘Leave him alone! Let him enjoy himself! They won the match, let him enjoy himself.’ And he had to let me loose, because he was embarrassed. So I took the crowd with me, singing and dancing, from Lord’s, into Piccadilly in the heart of London . . .
The other, Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore), soon afterwards recorded the calypso ‘Victory Test Match’ – with its infectious chorus about ‘those little pals of mine / Ramadhin and Valentine’, the two young, hitherto unknown West Indian spinners who between them had destroyed the cream of English batting. ‘Hats went in the air,’ Beginner sang in the last verse, as he came to the celebrations; he added touchingly, ‘People shout and jump without fear.’15
There was a heartfelt quality to Arlott’s description of the harmonious atmosphere that afternoon at Lord’s. Three months earlier, appearing on Any Questions? (of which he had been a founder-panellist in October 1948), he had got into serious hot water by describing the pro-apartheid South African government as ‘predominantly a Nazi one’. As a result of the ensuing diplomatic reverberations (South Africa was still a member of the Commonwealth), the BBC pulled him from the programme for more than three years.
The panel was thus Arlott-free (but as usual all male) when, later in 1950 in a broadcast from the Guildhall, Gloucester – the programme for many years stuck to a West Country base – its members were asked whether they would ‘approve of a coloured person becoming their step-father, brother-in-law or sister-in-law’. First to reply was the recently elected Labour MP Anthony Crosland:
Certainly the scientists give virtually no evidence of supposing that coloured people are in any way physically, intellectually or in any other way whatsoever, inferior to white people. The fact that they may seem, at any given moment, less well-educated or less quick-witted, or what you will, according to scientists, so far as I can read them, is entirely a matter of education and environment and upbringing and everything else.
Accordingly, his answer was impeccably liberal, as was that of the other politician present, the Tory MP Ted Leather. By contrast, the historian Lord Elton said that he would be ‘rather sorry’ to see a relation of his making such a marriage, on the grounds that ‘you’re going to run up against so many difficulties and prejudices in the modern world’. The final panellist was the Dorset countryman Ralph Wightman, recently characterised by Malcolm Muggeridge as ‘a standing BBC farmer who appears in many broadcasts to indicate that broadcasting is not the preserve of intellectuals’. As usual, Wightman did not disappoint. ‘I would take it further than colour,’ he declared. ‘If you go to a white foreign race even, you are taking a risk of some sort, in that you’re wanting to fit in something which is harder to fit in. I would not like to see a relative of mine marrying a Frenchman or a German.’ According to the transcript, ‘applause’ greeted each of the first three contributions, but for Wightman there was ‘laughter’. It only remained for the chairman, the charming, unflappable Freddie Grisewood, to sum up the discussion: ‘I think really, in the main, we are agreed.’16
How prevalent was racial prejudice – and discrimination – in the early 1950s? Certainly Dan Jacobson, walking along Finchley Road looking for somewhere to live, was struck by how many of the little notices advertising rooms to let included the rubric ‘“No Coloureds” or even, testifying to some obscure convulsion of the English conscience, “Regret No Coloureds”’. In inner-city Liverpool, John Mays accepted that ‘there can be no doubt that a colour bar does exist at employment level, especially for girls and women’ but took heart from the fact that there was ‘no indication of a colour bar between local children of school age’; while in Cardiff’s Bute Town, where there was a not dissimilar concentration of 5,000 or 6,000 black people around the docks, Picture Post’s ‘Bert’ Lloyd found ‘the nearest thing to a ghetto we have in this free land’, with its inhabitants ‘marked off from the rest of the city’ not only by ‘social barriers’ and ‘the old Great Western Railway bridge’ but also by ‘race prejudice’. After quoting a Somali seaman – ‘If I go up into town, say to the pictures, why, man, everybody looks at me as if I left some buttons undone’ – Lloyd explained how the prejudice all too often operated in practice. For instance, ‘Locals applying for jobs outside the dockland area are familiar with the routine treatment: the employer fears his hands will refuse to work alongside a coloured man.’ A more academic observer was Michael Banton, who for two years from October 1950 carried out research in Stepney. There he found a fairly high degree of tolerance, but – as he freely admitted – it was an area that over the years had been well used to immigrants of one sort or another.17
In any particular situation, it all depended. For example, the management of a Coventry engineering firm, Sterling Metals, came under such union pressure that in 1951 it unequivocally declared at a works conference that ‘it was their main desire to recruit white labour’; agreed to segregate white and black gangs; and guaranteed to its white labourers that the Indians in the workforce would not be upgraded. Yet at one suburban golf club (Stanmore in north London), in image the very acme of 19th-hole bigotry, the authorities had stipulated the previous year that, when it came to membership, ‘a candidate shall not be refused election merely because of his Race’ – though the very fact of the rule suggests that race, in this case probably Jewishness at least as much as blackness, was an issue. Sometimes, of course, it is impossible to tell whether prejudice was at work. When the British middleweight champion Dick Turpin, son of the first black man to settle in Leamington Spa, fought Croydon’s Albert Finch at Nottingham ice stadium in April 1950, he knew that a successful defence of his title would give him the Lonsdale Belt to keep and, at least as importantly, a weekly pension of £1 from the British Boxing Board of Control – for life. Turpin knocked his man down twice, but still lost on points.18
Fortunately, we have a more systematic assessment of attitudes, carried out by The Social Survey in 1951 with a sample of more than 1,800. ‘Providing, of course, that there is plenty of work about,’ ran one question, ‘do you think that coloured colonials should be allowed to
go on coming to this country?’ By a smallish margin (46 per cent to 38 per cent) the response was positive. Asked ‘Why a coloured person should not find it easy to settle down in this country’, 49 per cent identified the colour bar or racial prejudice. As to whether landladies and hoteliers were justified in sometimes shutting the door on non-whites, 46 per cent said they were wrong, 18 per cent said they were right, and 19 per cent said it was a question of circumstances. When it came to personal contact, there was a telling difference between the workplace and the hearth: whereas 69 per cent said that they personally would not mind working with ‘a coloured person’, only 46 per cent were willing to invite such a person home, and still fewer (30 per cent) could equably contemplate having that person to stay. Those replying in the negative to the prospect of greater intimacy were asked to give their reasons. One extended category was popular – ‘they have different habits, customs, different religions, feel they don’t belong here; would feel embarrassed in their company, wouldn’t get on with them’ – as was ‘would be afraid of what the neighbours would think, etc’. But the most frequently cited explanation was almost eloquent in its muttered quality: ‘Don’t know; can’t say; just dislike them, etc.’
Overall, the 1951 survey concluded that ‘antipathy to coloured people in this country is probably considerable amongst at least one-third of the population’, an attitude especially common among the elderly, the poor and those working in low-status occupations; that ‘the reactions of another third might be uncertain or unfavourable’; and that, ‘even amongst the least antipathetic, who would certainly disapprove of discrimination in theory, there would be some who might not like to go as far as meeting a coloured person socially or letting a room to one if they had one to let’.19Every commentator stressed – and would continue to stress – that such prejudice was the result far more of ignorance than of knowledge, but it was still a pretty dismal picture.