A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Then it becomes a matter of global strategy, something needed as leverage to influence US policy. Answering the appeal of the defeated Admiralty after the war, the mandarins bluntly admitted: ‘The UK has ceased to be a first-class power in material terms. The United States and Russia already far outstrip us in population and material wealth, and both have vast untapped resources. Canada, India and China, to name only three…in time will certainly outstrip us.’ But, they pointed out, the much more powerful hydrogen bomb was transforming the military situation around the world: ‘If we possess these weapons, the Americans will be prepared to pay attention to our opinions in a way they would otherwise not. The same applies to our standing in the eyes of other countries, such as Germany. And our lesser potential enemies, such as Egypt, will feel that we might, if pushed too far, use nuclear weapons against them.’ ‘These’, concluded the mandarins rather chillingly, ‘are great advantages…’

  From early on, Whitehall intelligence reports to ministers identified the peril of war being triggered by a pre-emptive strike from America, hitting the Russians, before they had devised their own nuclear systems at a level which would allow them to properly retaliate. With British troops on the vulnerable front line in Germany, Britain would be thrown into the midst of the new war for which she was not prepared. Persuading the Americans to stay their hand might be easier, the British policy-makers suggested, if Britain was herself an independent nuclear power. In the summer of 1947 work began in deepest secret to build a plutonium-producing plant at Windscale, a little place on the coast of Cumbria, and work started on designing a bomb under the guidance of one of the British scientists who had been at Los Alamos, William Penney. A few years later, the tiny Berkshire village of Aldermaston, with its twelfth-century church, brick labourers’ cottages and ancient Roman defences, which had been looking forward to quieter times with the closure of an airbase, was chosen as the site for Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. More money spent on defence and status was of course less money available for a New Jerusalem.

  6

  A Winter Landscape

  The winter of 1947 has gone down in history and personal memory as a time of almost unendurable bleakness. For three months, Britain seemed more like one of the grimmer scenes in a medieval Flemish painting. It was not only the shortages of almost everything in the shops, and what was described as a virtual peasant diet, heavily based on potatoes and bread – though by then even the bread had now been rationed, and potatoes ran short. It was not only the huge state bureaucracy still interfering in so much daily life, controlling everything from how long you could turn your heater on, to what plays you could see and whether or not you could leave the country. It was not the 25,000 regulations and orders never seen in peacetime before, administered by a government which though anti-Communist, still urged people to learn from the ‘colossal’ industrial achievements of Soviet Communism. It was not the smashed and broken homes. It was not even all those war dead – for this war had involved far fewer soldiers than the First World War, and far fewer dead – 256,000 as against nearly a million, as well as the 60,000 British civilians who had died in air-raids. Relief at the final victory was still strong across the country, and pride in Britain’s part in it. No, the crisis of 1947 was set off by that most humdrum of British complaints – the weather.

  At the end of January with an efficiency the Red Army could not have mustered, a great freeze had swept across from Siberia and covered the country in thick snow, a bitter cold which brought the exhausted British very nearly to their knobbly, ill-clad knees. The country still ran on coal. But at the pits, the great piles of coal froze solid and could not be moved. The winding-gears ceased to function. Drifting snow blocked roads and closed the rail lines. At the power stations, the remaining coal stocks ran swiftly down until, one by one, power stations began to close. Lights flickered off. Men dug through snowdrifts, tramping for miles to find food to carry back to their neighbours and homes. Cars were marooned on exposed roads. With shortages of power, factories across the South and Midlands of England had to stop work and within a week two million people were idle. Attlee suspended that still unusual middle-class diversion, television. Much worse, electric fires were banned for three hours each morning and two each afternoon. Everywhere, people shivered, wrapped in blankets in front of barely smoking coal fires, or those rationed electric ones. Around London, commuters were completely unable to reach the capital. Scotland was cut off from the rest of the country. Then things deteriorated further. It was the coldest February for 300 years. Another half million people had to stop work. One young office worker from Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt, recorded herself sitting in her house, the water in washbasins frozen, looking out at the ice-blue sky: ‘I am wearing thick woollen vest, rubber roll-on, wool panties, stockings, thick long-sleeved wool sweater, slacks, jacket, scarf and two pairs of woollen socks – I am just about comfortable.’ The sun was so little seen that when it came out briefly, a man rushed to photograph the reassuring sight for the newspapers. Green vegetables ran out in the shops. ‘CHRIST ITS BLEEDING COLD’ howled the future novelist Kingsley Amis to the poet Philip Larkin, from his Oxford student rooms.

  After a short thaw March had brought terrible storms and snowdrifts thirty feet high. People talked about snowflakes the size of five-shilling coins. There were ice-floes off the East Anglian coast. Three hundred main roads were unusable. Still to come were the worst floods in memory, cutting off towns, inundating huge areas of low-lying England, and destroying the crops in the fields. On the hills the sheep were dying. Their carcasses would be piled into pyres, causing foul-smelling smoke to hang over rural Wales, a precursor to the foot-and-mouth and BSE episodes of later decades. It was, in short, about as near as this country has been to experiencing at first hand a truly Siberian winter, though without the sturdy boots, furs and vodka that help the Russians get through. It would be followed by the real political storm – the run on the pound made inevitable by the Keynes deal in Washington, and a balance of payments crisis. As people were digging out frozen vegetables from fields and despairing of the empty shops, the Treasury was finally running out of dollars to buy help from overseas. This was the moment when the optimism of 1945 shivered and died among many voters.

  Summer did come, as summer does, and it was a good summer. The sun shone, cricketers blazed away at Lords and a nation sweltered. Economically, though, Hugh Dalton’s year of misery continued. The clauses negotiated by Keynes insisting that sterling should become freely convertible to American dollars were triggered, and the inevitable happened. The world rushed to change pounds into greenbacks, and such was the outflow that convertibility had to be hurriedly stopped. The economy was simply too weak – a message that echoed round continental Europe’s finance ministries too. British housewives might have been more worried still had they known of a secret plan during the sterling crisis drawn up by the civil servant Otto Clarke (father of the later New Labour minister Charles Clarke). With Britain running out of dollars to buy food from America, Clarke drew up preparations for a ‘famine food programme’, including taking children out of school to help in the fields. It never came to that but the rationing of bread, which had not been necessary during the war was now in place. There was not enough cash left to buy wheat supplies from the United States, yet British ministers had to ensure there was no actual famine in other parts of the world for which they were responsible, including India and defeated Germany.

  The answer, bread rationing at home, was hugely unpopular and long remembered. Along with the sterling crisis and the subsequent devaluation of 1949, a further but necessary humiliation, it gave Churchill’s Tories the essential ammunition they needed to turn Attlee out. Their manifesto would later remind voters that ‘In 1945, the Socialists promised that their methods of planning and nationalization would make the people of Britain masters of their economic destiny. Nothing could be more untrue. Every forecast has proved grossly over-optimistic. Every crisis has caught them u
nawares. The Fuel Crisis cost the country £200 millions and the Convertibility Crisis as much.’

  The next year, though, the government did try to cheer the country up, holding the 1948 London Olympics. Cost over-runs were trivial. Security was barely an issue. The games were a triumph of determination in a war-scarred, rubble-strewn city, during which the athletes were put up in old army camps and hospitals, and the Union Jack was missing for the opening parade. And though the medal toll for British competitors was very meagre, holding the games was a genuine sign that Britain was back. For all its weaknesses, this was still a country that could organize itself pretty well.

  7

  The Sun Also Sets

  The deep nostalgic vision of Empire was dented too in 1947. The King ceased to be Emperor. The jewel in the imperial crown, India, was moving towards independence long before the war. Gandhi’s brilliant insight that through non-violence the British could be embarrassed out of India more effectively than they could be shot out, had paid off handsomely in the inter-war years. London was dragged to the negotiating table despite the attempts by Churchill and others to scupper every deal from the thirties to the late forties. The war delayed independence but showed how much goodwill there was on the subcontinent, if Britain was wise enough to withdraw gracefully. During the conflict some two million Indians fought on Britain’s side or served her forces directly, their contributions being particularly strong in the campaigns in North Africa against the Italians and defeating a pro-German regime in Iraq. Gandhi himself was sentimentally fond of Britain and saddened by the Luftwaffe attacks on London. While Nehru was in prison, he kept a picture of his old school, Harrow, in his cell.

  Yet many Indians had become frustrated by endless delays and the watering-down of plans for more autonomy. Leaders out of jail organized a massive wartime protest involving the burning of police stations, the beating of British residents, the cutting of telegraph lines and the blowing up of a railway line. For a while, British control of India hung in the balance, though the true story of what was happening was kept out of newspapers at home. Less dangerous if more spectacular, was the formation of an anti-British Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose, armed and supported by the Japanese. Indians were used to guard captured British troops, a humiliation designed to spread the Japanese line that this was essentially a war of Asian people against colonial Westerners. When the pro-Japanese Indians returned home after the defeat of Japan, Britain wanted them prosecuted as traitors but they were greeted as heroes by Gandhi’s Congress Party.

  As soon as Attlee took power, his government organized talks on withdrawal. Anti-imperialism had been a genuine strand in Labour thinking since the party’s formation, but now there were other motives too. There was gratitude for Indian support for the Empire at its worst moment. There was also fear – the clear evidence that delaying independence would result in mass and probably uncontrollable protest. Attlee wanted a united, independent India, Muslims and Hindus in one vast state connected by trade and military agreement with Britain. Apart from anything else, he believed this would function as a major anti-communist bulwark in Asia, at just the time when the Russians were looking south and China was in revolutionary turmoil.

  Attlee would get some of what he wanted, but not all. Sir Stafford Cripps led the first Labour delegation to post-war India but it was not socialist politicians who negotiated the end of British control in India. That job was begun by Field Marshal Wavell, a veteran of the Boer and First World Wars who had served with the Czarist Russians before fighting the Italians (successfully) and Rommel (less so) in the desert. He had come to India as commander-in-chief just ahead of the most decisive Japanese advances, and had succeeded as Viceroy in time to free the Congress leaders from prison. But this poetry-loving and mildly pessimistic soldier was unsuccessful in trying to reconcile Hindus and Muslims. Sectarian mobs began to attack one another, the first flickers of the communal violence which would soon ravage the subcontinent. Early in 1946 there was a major mutiny by the Royal Indian Navy, when about a quarter of its strength aboard ships off Bombay, Calcutta and Madras raised Congress flags. It was put down, with hundreds dead, but trouble spread to the Royal Indian Air Force and the police, and it looked as if authority was finally crumbling. Wavell’s last-ditch plan involved British withdrawal without any political agreement, evacuating whites from the country and handing it over to local state governments. This was regarded in London as likely to lead to civil war and fundamentally dishonourable.

  Attlee passed the job to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had been supreme commander in South-East Asia, organizing the reconquest of Burma. It was a wily choice. Mountbatten was a member of the Royal Family and his nephew, a naval officer, Prince Philip of Greece, was about to marry the young Princess Elizabeth, so he was a hard man for the imperialists at home to attack. Dashing and arrogant, he shared Attlee’s determination to get a swift deal with the leaders of the Muslim and Hindu peoples, which meant with Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League and Nehru’s Congress Party. Jinnah was always hard for the British to deal with or like, and was by now close to death; but Nehru proved an easy partner, forming a famously close attachment to Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina. Partitioning the subcontinent was by now inevitable. Muslims would not accept overall Hindu domination and yet across most of India the Hindus or Sikhs were in the majority. British India was duly split into Muslim Pakistan (a made-up name, an anagram of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan, the key provinces) and Hindu-dominated India. The line was drawn up by a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, and kept secret until after the handover of power.

  Mountbatten announced to widespread surprise and shock that independence would happen ten months earlier than planned, on 15 August 1947. Churchill was so appalled that his former Foreign Secretary and friend Anthony Eden had to keep him away from the chamber of the Commons. Having listened to the parliamentary statement, Enoch Powell was shattered enough to wander the streets of London all night, squatting in doorways with his head in his hands. No doubt millions of other British people felt equally that their familiar world was coming apart. And while the speed of British withdrawal may have been a political necessity, the consequences were appalling. By some counts a million people then died, many of them women and children as Muslims and Hindus caught on the wrong side of the new border fled from their homes. Sikhs rose against the Muslims in the Punjab, Muslims drove out Hindus. Rather as in Yugoslavia after the collapse of Communism, it turned out that the old central power had merely frozen and held in suspension older religious and ethnic rivalries which revived at a moment of crisis. As some 55,000 British civilians returned home, the Indian Army was hurriedly divided into two. Mountbatten had hoped for a close military alliance to continue and Karachi had even been earmarked as a base for British atomic bombers to use in attacking Russia. But no military deal could be agreed. Eventually, Pakistan broke up, with Bangladesh declaring herself independent, and succumbed to a history of coup and dictatorship. Today India and Pakistan face each other with nuclear weapons and large armies across their Kashmiri frontier.

  Britons have been told that as compared to the war in Algeria which tore post-war France apart, or the Americans’ desperate war in Vietnam, Britain managed decolonization rather well. It is too comfortable a conclusion. Who was to blame for the horrifying number of Indian deaths – far more, for instance, than have died during the mayhem in Iraq? British post-war weakness probably meant that it would have been impossible to impose a single state at the time of independence. Yet Jinnah’s Muslim League and Congress had been nearer to a mature deal before the war; had Churchill and others not stymied independence in the thirties by cynically supporting the cause of the semi-independent Indian princes, then perhaps the slaughter would have been averted. Against that, the story of the Second World War would have been very different too. And today’s India, linked by English and a growing democratic superpower, stands as one of the more successful of Britain’s old impe
rial possessions. Indian independence was a trauma to some, a relief to many more.

  Labour ministers were less enthusiastic about dismantling the Empire in Africa. Officials wrote minutes to Attlee’s ministers informing them it might take many generations before some of the colonies were ready for independence. Herbert Morrison, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, agreed. He said that to give the African colonies their freedom would be ‘like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun’. Attlee himself speculated about creating a British African army, on the lines of the lost Indian one, to help project British power around the world. The Colonial Office described Africa as the core of Britain’s new world position, from where she could draw economic and military strength. In the early fifties, the Colonial Office itself grew in numbers and was even hoping for a large new headquarters opposite Parliament Square, promised to it by Churchill. There was a grand scheme for growing groundnuts in Tanganyika, to provide cheap vegetable oil for Britain – though that was a swift and embarrassing failure. For a while it seemed that the Raj would be transplanted, in fragmented form, to Africa.

  8

  White People

  Back in the mother country in 1947, who were those people who were just beginning to adjust to a post-imperial world? They were sparser and whiter. In the years after the war Britain contained about ten million fewer inhabitants than live here today. The thirties had seen a fall in the birthrate and there was much official worry about another kind of national shrinkage. In William Beveridge’s famous 1942 report launching the modern Welfare State, he suggested that a bit of fast breeding was needed: ‘with its present rate of reproduction, the British race cannot continue.’ To Beveridge and his generation ‘the British race’ meant white natives of these islands. Before the war, around 95 per cent of people in Britain had been born here, and the other 5 per cent was mostly made up of white English and Scots whose parents had happened to be serving the Empire in India, Africa or the Middle East when they were born. There were black and Asian people in Britain but very few. In the thirties the Indian community numbered perhaps 8,000 at most – a tenth of them doctors, intriguingly – and there were a few Indian restaurants and grocery stores in the biggest cities. There had been a tiny West Indian presence. No detailed surveys were done, but there were at most a few thousand, many of them students. Black sailors and mixed-race Lascars, along with Chinese, had been settled in dockland areas of Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol and London for a long time. Again, though, the numbers were small.