Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  On New Year’s Day 1951, ‘an everyday story of country folk’, as The Archers was invariably billed, began its three-month trial on the Light Programme, rather awkwardly going out only half an hour after Mrs Dale. Even in its first week, however, it attracted audiences double those of Morning Story, the programme it had replaced; soon afterwards it was being ‘listened to rather more by town than by country dwellers’, with as yet only 1.6 per cent of the upper middle class tuning in, as compared to 6 per cent of the working class. The turning point came at Easter, when the programme moved to the choice spot of 6.45 p.m., thereby dislodging (indeed killing off) Dick Barton itself; within a week it was being listened to by 10 per cent of the adult population. As with any soap, most people were hooked primarily for human-interest reasons, but almost certainly there was something else going on. ‘A gentle relic of Old England, nostalgic, generous, incorruptible and (above all) valiant’ was how the BBC publicity machine described the village of Ambridge. ‘In other words the sort of British community that the rootless townsman would like to live in and can involve himself in vicariously.’

  The BBC itself remained in the early 1950s the starchiest, most paternalistic of organisations. Three weeks after the launch of The Archers, it ordained that news bulletins on national radio were henceforth to be read only by men – and what was more, men (including a youngish Robert Dougall) with ‘consistent’ pronunciation, in other words devoid of a regional accent. ‘Experience has shown that a large number of people do not like the news of momentous or serious events to be read by the female voice’ was the smooth official explanation for the gender aspect. Even more typical of the BBC’s stuffiness was its continuing half-hearted attitude towards television. ‘This invasion of our homes must cause something of an upset in family life’ was how in symptomatic, authentically Auntie tones the Controller of Scottish Broadcasting, Melville Dinwiddie, would only semi-celebrate in Radio Times Scotland’s inclusion in March 1952 in the national television service:

  Sound broadcasting as such is upsetting enough when reading and school lessons and other home tasks have to be done, but here is a more intensely absorbing demand on our leisure hours, and families in mid-Scotland will have to make a decision both about getting a receiver and about using it. At the start, viewing will take up much time because of its novelty, but discrimination is essential so that not every evening is spent in a darkened room, the chores of the house and other occupations neglected. We can get too much even of a good thing.

  This genuine, high-minded concern about the possible impact of television on family well-being directly echoed fears expressed by the guardians of the nation’s spiritual health – foremost among them T. S. Eliot. ‘I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime, and especially about its effect on small children,’ he wrote to The Times in late 1950 after a visit to America, where television was much more common. One BBC man had already had enough by then of the Corporation’s lack of dynamism in relation to the young medium. This was Norman Collins, who on his way to becoming Controller of Television had been a successful publisher and best-selling novelist (London Belongs To Me). In October 1950 he resigned: partly in protest against, in his words, ‘a vested interest in sound broadcasting’ being ‘allowed to stand in the way of the most adventurous development of television’, and partly because he had come to believe that British television would remain stunted until the BBC was compelled to relinquish its monopoly – a position naturally anathema to the Corporation. There was an opportunistic streak in Collins, and he now devoted his formidable energies to ending that monopoly at the earliest possible moment.23

  In fact, this was a question already under sustained public scrutiny, in particular through the forum of a government-appointed committee (largely of the great and good, under the chairmanship of Lord Beveridge) that since the summer of 1949 had been considering the future of broadcasting. Reporting on 18 January 1951, its main conclusion was that leaving broadcasting in the hands of a single, public-service, not-for-profit provider remained overall to the public benefit, provided that the BBC made ‘steady progress towards greater decentralisation, devolution and diversity’. In effect, Beveridge accepted Lord Reith’s argument (advanced in his 1949 autobiography) that only ‘the brute force of monopoly’ could preserve the BBC’s standards, which otherwise would be dragged downwards by commercial competition.

  On the day the report appeared, the Evening Standard solicited the views of two readers: Geoffrey Schofield (41, a chartered accountant, living in Purley, married with two daughters) and Eva Cornish-Bowden (27, married to an engineer, living in Orpington, two children). Between them they represented what was a fairly evenly divided state of public opinion:

  Schofield: At present we don’t want competition. Why? I’ll tell you. TV is an innovation now. There is no doubt it is going to have an extraordinarily important influence on national life as it progresses. Are we going to develop into a push-button nation when we turn on entertainment at will, or are we going to use this new medium as a basis for increasing and improving the average intelligence of the country?

  Cornish-Bowden: I bought a television set and I want to be either cleverly entertained or vulgarly entertained. I want to be able to pick my programmes. I feel strongly about that. I want to twiddle the switch of my set and get something I want to see. Not have something I don’t want to see pushed on to me.24

  In terms of the politics, almost everyone knew that the Beveridge line would continue to hold – at least with any certainty – only as long as Labour stayed in power. On the Conservative side there were already significant elements strongly in favour of introducing a commercial rival to the BBC, and plenty of businessmen were well aware that there was serious money to be made if Britain followed the bracing American path.

  Whatever the anxieties, there was little real danger of square eyes in the early 1950s. On most weekdays, the single television channel broadcast only from 3.00 to 6.00 p.m. (including Children’s Hour), followed by two hours of a blank screen (the so-called ‘toddler’s truce’ intended to enable mothers to get their small children to bed), followed by two or so more hours of programmes. There were also major gaps in coverage: wholly inadequate news and current affairs, few meaningful sporting transmissions and virtually no light entertainment (including comedy) as a genre in its own right. How Do You View? (starring Terry-Thomas as the smiling, gap-toothed, upper-class cad invariably sporting a cigarette holder) was a partial exception, but its reliance on gags and wisecracks left room for the invention of proper situation comedy. For many people, television was as yet an undiscovered pleasure. ‘The great surprise they sprang on me was they have a Television Set,’ noted Vere Hodgson after visiting friends over Easter 1951. ‘So after a lovely meal Neville just switched it on and behold we saw Picture Page. I DID enjoy it.’

  That same day, Florence Speed in Brixton watched the Oxford crew sink in the Boat Race: ‘Poor things. We saw it so well on T.V.’ But four days later came a cruel blow: ‘Fred’s T.V. set has had to be taken away for repair. Something has gone wrong with it & Collins’ man said they would have to get in touch with Ekco the makers so that he could give no promise about its return.’ A keen viewer of In the News, Speed thus missed a memorable edition two days afterwards on 30 March. ‘It was the occasion of a serious row between A.J.P. Taylor and Michael Foot on the one side and me on the other,’ recorded W. J. Brown:

  In the show we had much talk from Taylor about the West End restaurants of the rich and their Rolls Royce cars and so on – the sort of stuff I have had from Foot before. I couldn’t stand any more of it and said – ‘Taylor, you know this is the most disingenuous stuff. You and I have just come from an expensive West End restaurant. We have come in a fine Rolls Royce car. Can’t we get away from the Socialism of envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness?

  ‘Immediately the show ended,’ he added, ‘I was attacked with astonishing ferocity by Michael Foot who was livid
with rage. He accused me of bringing in “personal matters” – though he is by far the most “personal” member of the team.’25

  At least once a week, the evening’s schedule was dominated by a play, often long enough to leave little time for anything else. The concept of writing a play specifically for television was unborn, so invariably it was an adaptation – as often as not of something worthy rather than necessarily enjoyable – or the rather stilted transmission of an actual theatrical performance. One Sunday evening in the spring of 1950, the choice was Eliot’s The Family Reunion, which received from the BBC’s recently established Television Panel of viewers the pitiful ‘Reaction Index’ (running from 1 to 100) of 25, ‘the lowest so far recorded’. That summer, on another Sunday evening, Karel Capek’s The Insect Play picked up a 34, the lowest yet for any play apart from the Eliot. ‘This was a wash out – they all left me viewing on my own,’ complained one Panel member. There was little more appetite by 1951 for the difficult or challenging. ‘The play on the first Sunday evening of the New Year was Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent,’ noted the viewer-research newsletter. ‘With a Reaction Index of 44, it did not have a much warmer reception than had his earlier play, The Lady’s Not for Burning, with 41.’ A typical reaction was quoted: ‘I managed to yawn my way through it.’ By comparison, a programme soon afterwards featuring Wilfred Pickles’s visit to Stratford-upon-Avon got an RI of 69, while the Mineworkers’ National Amateur Boxing Championship that spring won an 85. Still, there would be some encouragement for the Reithians when in early 1952 The Cocktail Party managed a 60. ‘T.S. Eliot!’ declared a Panel member. ‘Prepared for the worst but pleasantly surprised.’26

  Eliot and Fry were the two key figures in a new movement – a movement initiated by the latter’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, a huge West End success in 1949 (featuring Claire Bloom and Richard Burton in supporting roles). ‘In a post-war theatre that had little room for realism,’ noted Michael Billington in his 2005 obituary, ‘Fry’s medieval setting, rich verbal conceits and self-puncturing irony delighted audiences, and the play became the flagship for the revival of poetic drama.’ Anthony Heap, a dedicated first-nighter, was not a fan. Labelling Fry as ‘that current darling of the quasi-highbrows and pseudo intellectuals’, he described in his diary in January 1950 attending the premier of Fry’s next play, Venus Observed: ‘As the evening wore laboriously on, it became increasingly apparent that . . . Mr Fry’s new blank verse effusion bore a closer resemblance to its predecessor . . . than it did to a play, being equally devoid of genuine dramatic interest.’ Gladys Langford, going to the St James’s Theatre a day or two later, agreed: ‘Oh, what a welter of words! Oh, what an absence of action!’ Soon afterwards, Mollie Panter-Downes noted how the play (starring Laurence Olivier) was proving ‘a smash box-office hit’ despite or perhaps because of receiving ‘bemused notices from most of the critics, who professed themselves entranced, though whacked by what it was all about’. She reflected on how the play showed ‘all Fry’s bewildering, glittering gift for language, unfortunately mixed with a deadly facetiousness that at its worst makes his lines sound like a whimsical comedian’s double-talk’.

  May saw the West End premier of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, which, notwithstanding Heap’s hostile verdict – ‘Do poets who write plays have to be so damnably enigmatic? Or is that just their little joke?’ – went on to enjoy a considerable vogue. Early in 1951, some two months after Lawrence Daly had fallen asleep listening to Venus Observed on the radio, the New Statesman’s perceptive drama critic, T. C. Worsley, sought to contextualise the apparently irresistible rise of verse drama:

  What we have seen is the development in the theatre-going public of a new hunger for the fantastic and the romantic, for the expanded vision and the stretched imagination, in short for the larger-than-life. This is easily explainable as a natural reaction from the sense of contraction which pervades at least the lives of the middle classes; and it is still the middle classes who make up the bulk of the theatre-going public.

  ‘If they are finding that they can afford to do less and less,’ he concluded with an obligatory sneer at these suburbanites, ‘it at least costs no more to please the fantasy with extravagances than to discipline it with dry slices of real life.’27

  Even so, and whatever the merits or otherwise of this latest fashion, it is difficult to deny the generally sterile, unadventurous state of the British theatre by the early 1950s. It did not help that the Lord Chamberlain continued to exercise his time-honoured powers of censorship over the precise content of plays. Nor was it helpful that the H. M. Tennent theatrical empire, run from an office at the Globe in Shaftes-bury Avenue by Hugh (‘Binkie’) Beaumont, possessed close to a stranglehold over what was and was not performed in the West End. Beaumont’s standards were high, with a penchant for lavishly mounted classic revivals as star vehicles. Typical productions in 1951 included Alec Guinness in Hamlet; Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra on alternate nights; Gladys Cooper in Noël Coward’s Relative Values; Celia Johnson and Ralph Richardson in The Three Sisters; and John Gielgud and Flora Robson in The Winter’s Tale. What there was virtually no encouragement for was drama that dealt with contemporary issues. Arguably one of the few playwrights to do so was the immensely popular Terence Rattigan – but only in the sense that his work tapped so deftly into the anxieties and neuroses of the economically straitened post-war middle class. Rattigan himself wrote in 1950 a famous essay denouncing what he called ‘the play of ideas’ and declaring that ‘the best plays are about people and not about things’.28It was a proposition that, as ‘Binkie’ would have agreed, made commercial sense.

  If there was one play that epitomised – for good as well as ill – British theatre before the revolution, it was perhaps N. C. Hunter’s Waters of the Moon. Norman Hunter was a Chekhov-loving retired schoolmaster and obscure playwright; his play, taken up by Beaumont, was set in a shabby-genteel hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, and the first night, with Edith Evans (in evening gowns designed by Hardy Amies), Sybil Thorndike and Wendy Hiller all in leading roles, backed by Donald Sinden as assistant stage manager, was on 19 April 1951 at the Haymarket. An ‘enchanting bitter-sweet comedy’, thought Heap, ‘richly endowed with acutely observed and sympathetically drawn characters’. And, he predicted, ‘It is the kind of play that has cast-iron, box-office success written all over it.’ The critics were on the whole friendly, with Worsley again on the money. Although finding Waters a play unworthy of ‘our incomparable Edith Evans’, he reckoned that it ‘will, all the same, find a large public, the public which so enjoyed Miss Dodie Smith’s plays before the war’. He observed that although Hunter had ‘added to the formula some rather crude borrowings from the Russians’, his play remained ‘essentially a cosy middle-brow, middle-class piece, inhabited by characters by no means unfamiliar in brave old Theatreland’ – including ‘the maid-of-all-work daughter of the house’ (Hiller) and ‘a lost relic of the poor, dear upper-middle-classes’ (Thorndike).

  Worsley and Heap guessed right: the play ran for more than two years and grossed more than £750,000. But for Hunter, despite a couple of reasonable successes later in the fifties, the tide would go out almost as quickly as it had come in, and he died in 1971 a semi-forgotten figure. Seven years later, the Haymarket staged a revival of Waters, with Hiller returning to the fray. The theatre management, trying to keep a lid on costs, asked the playwright’s Belgian widow Germaine whether it would be acceptable to pay a reduced author’s royalty. Germaine, through a spiritual medium, consulted Norman, and Norman replied that it would not.29

  13

  Their Own Private Domain

  ‘I almost immediately began to cry,’ wrote Gladys Langford in north London on the first Monday of April 1951. ‘The climbing of steps, the squalor of some of the households, the inability to get a reply & the knowledge that I should have to retread the streets again and again, reduced me to near hysteria.’ She
was working as a paid volunteer for that month’s Census – the first for 20 years and inevitably the source of much relevant data, most especially about housing conditions.

  Out of a total of 12.4 million dwellings surveyed in England and Wales, it emerged that 1.9 million had three rooms or less; that 4. 8 million had no fixed bath; and that nearly 2.8 million did not provide exclusive use of a lavatory. Overall, in terms of the housing stock, almost 4.7 million (or 38 per cent) of dwellings had been built before 1891, with some 2.5 million of them probably built before 1851. Put another way, the great majority of houses in 1951 without the most basic facilities had been put up by Victorian jerry-builders. The Census, moreover, revealed a significant quantitative as well as qualitative problem: although the official government estimate was that the shortage was around 700,000 dwellings, the most authoritative subsequent working of the data would produce a figure about double that.1. Of course, it was hardly news that there was a housing problem, but the Census reinforced just how severe that problem was.

  Naturally there were major regional variations, even between the large urban areas where most of the substandard housing was concentrated. The following table, derived from the Census, gives the broad picture outside London and Scotland: