Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Langford had retired at the end of the summer term after 30 years of teaching, but, with much fortitude amid waves of despair and loneliness, she continued to live at the Woodstock Hotel in Highbury.

  Later that month, there appeared in the British Medical Journal a report intended to help more people reach retirement age. The coauthors were Richard Doll of the Medical Research Council and the distinguished epidemiologist A. Bradford Hill, together commissioned by the MRC in 1947 to investigate the rising rate of lung cancer. The conventional wisdom was that air pollution was the principal cause, while Doll attributed the rise to the increasing practice of tarring roads. But after extensive interviewing in London hospitals of patients suffering from the disease, he and Hill found that in only two out of 649 cases were they non-smokers. The ensuing report (‘Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung’) broke new ground, in Britain anyway, by establishing, albeit with due caution, the link between smoking and lung cancer – at a time when 80 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women smoked. Further research followed almost immediately, including an inquiry into the smoking habits of Britain’s 60,000 doctors, but on the part of central government, reliant on tobacco tax for some 16 per cent of its revenue, there was as yet little will to tackle the issue. Smoking, moreover, remained deeply embedded in most people’s (or rather, most men’s) daily way of life, not least the busy, stressful lives of politicians, civil servants and medical advisers. Doll himself, a 20-a-day man, gave up as soon as the implications of his research became apparent; his reward was to see smoking bans begin to be implemented in the early twenty-first century.2.

  Those who lived and worked amid the nation’s collieries certainly knew the scourge of lung disease. ‘Oh John, this is a desolate place – like the other side of the moon,’ declared Sid Chaplin in July 1950, writing to a friend from Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire. ‘These people have lost their souls in trying to escape. Great muck-heaps – great soul-less pits, little scurrying men. They’ve lost heart . . .’ A month later, the ex-Ferryhill miner-novelist, as he was billed by the local paper, was at Coundon in County Durham opening a new sub-branch of Bishop Auckland Library. ‘It was a revelation,’ he explained about the moment when, growing up in a mining village not far away, he had borrowed from its library D. H. Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer. ‘I discovered then that my life in that little village was worth writing about.’ He presented a copy of his new novel, The Thin Seam, due to be published in October and, noted the press report, ‘set in the familiar surroundings of a Durham mine’.

  But before then, Chaplin was back at his day job, working for the National Coal Board’s magazine – in which capacity he was soon travelling to the small mining town of New Cumnock in Ayrshire, where on the night of 7 September a sea of mud swept into Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery, sealing off every exit from the mine. Thirteen men died, but 116 were saved in a heroic rescue operation. To the men stuck underground for 48 hours or more, Chaplin paid tribute for ‘their discipline in face of many disappointments, their unswerving obedience to their leader, and to the way they faced tribulation with a joke, a quip or a song’; the ‘tired and sleepless’ officials won praise, too, with ‘their minds geared to the job in hand and the timing of every new move almost miraculous’; and he had a special word for the patient, silent crowds of waiting relatives, who ‘obeyed the same canon of discipline’ as the trapped men. But when in due course a public inquiry was held, the first under nationalisation, Coal would have nothing to say about how the NCB successfully managed, like the old owners before them, to evade responsibility.

  Chaplin’s novel won generally positive reviews from the provincial press but got a stinker from the far more influential Times Literary Supplement. It was ‘an uneasy marriage between the theological preoccupations now in vogue and a description of eight hours’ work in a coal-mine’; and the anonymous reviewer (in fact the Soho literary dandy Julian Maclaren-Ross) was scornful of the way in which ‘the self-educated narrator, who occasionally visualizes himself as a latter-day Saint Francis of Assisi, comes at length to identify the rock-face and the underground darkness with the heart of God’s mystery’. Altogether the novel was ‘pretentious’, lacking even ‘some idea of the novelist’s true function’. But at least the TLS reviewed it, unlike the Spectator, New Statesman and most of the other weeklies. ‘This kind of thing stings,’ a bruised Chaplin wrote to his friend John Bate in November: ‘Quite honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion that the literary world is a closed shop, and that I’m an upstart, non-union, and a menace to be frozen out. Duff Cooper brings out a similar novel (form and shape, I mean) and everybody goes daft about it. Why? The novel, by all accounts, is not only weak but positively infantile. But Duff Cooper is part of that rotten world.’ Lodging during the working week in the basement of 29 Redcliffe Square in Earl’s Court (‘every night I settle down in front of a real coal fire to read and write’), Chaplin soon afterwards found out that Coal was intending to keep him on after the end of his year’s probation. His salary would rise to a handsome £850, and a baby was on the way (his wife and child were still living in County Durham) – altogether it was ‘providential’.3.

  One family continued that autumn to semi-obsess the diarists. Vere Hodgson, more critical than most, reflected towards the end of October on the latest royal doings: ‘Princess Anne was christened yesterday. There was a picture of Princess Elizabeth in the Telegraph. I like her expression very much. When Princess Margaret settles down and has a family she may improve. I think her speeches are really silly. I know they are written for her, but the patronage in them is nauseating.’ Three weeks later, the First Family assembled at the London Palladium for the annual Royal Variety Performance. As ever, there were many leading British acts, including Gracie Fields, Max Wall, Tommy Trinder, Max Bygraves, Frankie Howerd, Billy Cotton and his Band, Flanagan and Allen, Binnie Hale, Nat Jackley and – controversially – Max Miller. The ‘Cheekie Chappie’ was told by the co-producer, Val Parnell, that he could not do his usual routine, as it might upset the royal party; in the event he not only dipped into his notorious ‘blue book’ but overran by eight minutes and thereby delayed the appearance of the big American stars Dinah Shore and Jack Benny. ‘I’m British!’ hissed Miller to an upset Parnell in the wings. The royals apparently loved his performance, while the neurotic, ultra-perfectionist Howerd, in unnecessary despair about how his own turn had gone, was comforted by Parnell passing on the King’s verdict that he had ‘a very nice personality’.4.

  ‘Testing Intelligence’ was the third of eight talks by Sir Cyril Burt on the Home Service that autumn on ‘The Study of the Mind’. In it he demonstrated how ‘by carefully planned experiments, the psychologists have discovered what kind of problems an average child of such-and-such an age is just able to answer’, and how ‘this provides them with a kind of measuring-rod for assessing mental abilities. After then declaring that ‘our test-results’ clearly revealed that ‘intelligence is inherited much as stature is inherited’, he concluded portentously: ‘Obviously, in an ideal community, our aim should be to discover what ration of intelligence Nature has given to each individual child at birth, then to provide him with the appropriate education, and finally to guide him into the career for which he seems to have been marked out’.

  Such sentiments carried weight, given that for over three decades Burt had been the country’s foremost educational psychologist, first on behalf of the London county Council (LCC) and then (until his recent retirement) at University College London. By 1950 his twin doctrines – of the scientific validity of intelligence testing and of intelligence as derived primarily from hereditary as opposed to environmental factors – had been influential in two key ways: entrenching the orthodoxy that only about 20 per cent of children had the innate intelligence to make them worthy of an academically demanding education; and, in terms of the testing that would determine who those 20 per cent should be, making it largely an IQ test, which he believed was not as susceptible to teaching
or coaching as a more traditional exam in the three Rs. In these immediate post-war years, the Burt approach dominated education – not just in the sense of selection for secondary schools but through the ubiquity of streaming for almost all age groups in almost every type of school. After his death in 1971, it would emerge that, from the mid-1950s anyway, he had fabricated at least some of his data on inherited intelligence and the educational implications. ‘It seems probable,’ concluded Peter Willmott in his judicious 1977 overview of the revelations, ‘that British educational policy and practice were influenced by work which was formerly thought to be scientifically authoritative and has now been discredited.’5.

  At the post-war centre of the Burt legacy was, of course, the 11-plus. The Butler Act of 1944 had made secondary education free and universal, but it was the 11-plus that now, for a whole generation, decided who went to grammar schools and who (much more numerous) went to secondary moderns – or, put another way, who were likely to have a prosperous, middle-class future ahead of them and who were not.

  Results day could have a cruelty all of its own. ‘The school was gathered together and those who had passed were called up to the podium one at a time with their own round of applause,’ recalled the newsreader Peter Sissons about Dovedale Primary School in Liverpool, which he attended from 1947 to 1953 with John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck. ‘The poor sods who had failed were left sitting in the hall – they only realised they had failed because they were not called up.’ The authorities were more sensitive at West Dock Avenue Junior School in a working-class district of Hull near the Fish Dock, where one morning Tom Courtenay was called into the staff room by the headmaster:

  He was looking very pleased. ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ ‘What, sir?’ My heart was beating fast. ‘You’ve passed your Eleven Plus. You’ll be going to the Kingston High School.’ How wonderful. ‘What about Arthur [his best friend]?’ ‘No. You and Billy Spencer. Just you two.’ Out of a class of fifty. I was beside myself with excitement . . .

  ‘Can I go and tell me mother, sir?’ ‘Of course you can.’ And I ran the very short distance to our house as fast as my legs would carry me. Mother’s face shone with delight when I told her, and we hugged and kissed. I had to go back to lessons, of course, though I could scarcely concentrate. Billy and I had been thought the most likely to pass. Three or four other lads had had hopes, however, and looked very disappointed. Arthur didn’t seem fazed.

  In general, it may well be that most children who failed the exam were unsurprised and took the news with a shrug of the shoulders. But among those for whom it was a major, even traumatic blow were Harry Webb (‘that failure permanently ruined my confidence in any kind of written examination,’ he recalled as Cliff Richard) and Brian Clough (from a family of nine brought up on a Middlesbrough council estate and, though he tried to pretend it was only football that mattered, the only one to fail). The customary parental reward for passing was a new bike. John Prescott, sitting the exam in his school in South Yorkshire shortly before his family moved to Cheshire, failed, did not get the bike and thereafter never quite forgave the world.6.

  In 1950 just under 20 per cent of 13-year-olds at local authority-maintained schools in England and Wales went to grammars (though with considerable regional variations), the great majority of them single-sex. There was often an awkward rite of passage for the less well-off new boy or girl. ‘Our intake sported heaps of blazers and shiny new satchels,’ remembered Courtenay. ‘Jacketed in homely tweed, I made do with a not even nearly new imitation leather attaché case in which to carry my homework. I thought it was a contemptible object with which to launch my grammar-school career, and it was a difficult thing to hide.’ Understandably, some working-class parents, in their anxiety and/or ignorance, went to the opposite extreme. ‘They sent me out for my first day at grammar school weighed down with everything the school catalogue said I should have: rugger boots and cricket boots and football boots and the right number of regulation shorts and all that stuff,’ recalled Ray Gosling, son of a Northampton factory mechanic. ‘I mean they didn’t know. The other kids had a right old time laughing at me on that first day, me with me gear, togged out like somebody about to assault Everest. And I felt so ashamed of my parents, and so proud at the same time.’

  The 20 years after the war were the heyday of the grammar school. The images from the male version remain particularly strong – the teachers (often Oxbridge-educated) in their long black gowns, the boys in their caps and blazers, the undeviating rigour of the whole performance – but possibly the best account we have is of Stockport High School for Girls, which the daughter of an engineering draughtsman, Joan Rowlands (later Bakewell), left in 1951 after seven moulding years:

  I was overwhelmed by a body of women resolved to shape and instruct me in their shared world-view. They were a cohort of the army of self-improvement, steeped in the same entrenched, spinsterly values of learning, duty and obedience, tempered with a little laughter when exams weren’t too pressing. The school motto set the high-minded tone:

  Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

  These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

  – lines taken from an obscure poem by Tennyson, ‘Oenone’, which no one could pronounce. The lines were engraved on the four all stained-glass windows along one wall of the assembly hall, and I fretted regularly about what they might mean . . .

  The school was relentlessly competitive and selective. Even within its grammar-school framework we were streamed into A and B classes. (The As did Latin, the Bs domestic science.) The six houses [‘named after significant women of achievement’] competed for a silver cup awarded to ‘the most deserving house’, the winner arrived at by compiling exam results, with netball and tennis tournaments, house drama competitions and musical achievements. There were even awards for deportment – for anything that could be marked. We got hooked: it became a way of life – so much so that a gang of friends within the fifth form set up their own ratings system and subject schedules, marking charts, and fines. I know because I was their secretary . . .

  The rules were remorseless, dragooning us in every particular of behaviour. Uniform even meant the same indoor shoes for every pupil; hair-ribbons had to be navy blue. The school hat had to be worn at all times to and from the school; girls caught without were in trouble. The heaviest burden was the no-talking rule: no talking on the stairs, in the classroom, in the corridors, in assembly – anywhere, in fact, except the playground. We were a silent school, shuffling noiselessly from class to class, to our lunch, to the cloakroom. Each whisper in the corridor, each hint of communication on the stairs was quashed, conduct marks apportioned and lines of Cicero copied out in detention . . .

  Among this welter of disapproval – conduct marks, detentions and, finally, a severe talking-to by Miss Lambrick [the headmistress] – physical chastisement was unnecessary. We were cowed long before things became that bad. The cane in the headmistress’s room was redundant. When a girl got pregnant – the worst conceivable crime – she was expelled without fuss before she could contaminate the rest of us.

  In Stockport as in most other towns or cities, there was considerable prestige attached to the grammar schools, which perhaps more than any other institution set the moral as well as the intellectual standards of the community, especially but not only among the middle class. And almost all their pupils were deeply imbued with a guilt-free sense of belonging to the present and future local elite.7.

  Bakewell’s experience was, for all the constraints, broadly positive. It was different for a tailor’s son, the future playwright Steven Berkoff, who went to Raines Foundation Grammar School in Stepney in 1948:

  The archaic form of punishment was to be given an ‘entry’ in the teacher’s book for some alleged misconduct. After three pencil entries you would have an ink entry, which was getting serious, and after three such entries, which could have been accumulated for nothing more than chatting in class, you would
be thrashed with a cane by the PT master. I was the first in my class to suffer this humiliation. I was taken in front of the others and told to bend down. I could not believe the ferocity of the first strike across my tender cheeks. My breath was sucked out of me and I burst into a wail, but suffered two more and then sat down on my three stripes. The stripes became quite severe wheals on my backside. Mum was shocked, but thought it was something to do with grammar school discipline. You accepted your punishment since you always did what you were told.

  A year or so later, on the Wirral, Glenda Jackson was starting to rebel at West Kirby Grammar School for Girls. ‘When I hit puberty at thirteen the genes kicked in and I became seriously uninterested in scholastic subjects,’ she recalled. ‘I became part of a group of girls who were less academic. There were cupboards in the classrooms and our great joke was to remove the shelves and sit inside. Then the door would be locked and the key hidden and during the course of the lesson rappings and noises would emanate mysteriously . . .’ In due course, she fell three subjects short of the necessary six for her School Certificate and left without going to the sixth form. Her parents were working-class; now in her mid-teens she found herself, despite having been to a grammar, working on one of the long mahogany counters of the local Boots Cash Chemist.