A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  In some ways, Korea can be compared to the Iraq wars, the first of which had UN backing, and both of which were American wars in which Britain played a secondary role. As with Iraq, at the time of Korea half a century earlier, British public opinion found the country’s regional allies unattractive and undemocratic. The Syngman Rhee regime in the south was as despotic as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia but more ruthless and vicious, as well as being spectacularly ungrateful. As with Iraq, British journalists did much to spread disenchantment about the war. James Cameron, a brilliantly talented left-wing reporter with a huge reputation, lost his job with the then-popular magazine Picture Post after revealing the condition of political prisoners held by the south. ‘They were skeletons,’ he later wrote, ‘they were puppets of skin with sinews for strings – their faces were a terrible, translucent grey and they cringed like dogs.’ As with Iraq, Britain struggled to use what leverage she had. Attlee flew to Washington to try to persuade Truman not to use atomic weapons, as Tony Blair flew there to persuade George W. Bush to try harder for UN support. As with Iraq, British troops behaved bravely under difficult conditions and returned home to find a country that did not want to know.

  East Germany’s Communist leader bragged that after Korea, West Germany would be next for liberation with tanks. Stalin had indeed considered trying to grab the rest of Germany, as well as Spain and Italy, and had discussed with his advisers an attack on the American Pacific fleet. In October 1950 he told Mao that a Third World War should not necessarily be avoided: ‘If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years’ time.’ In West Germany, comfortably based in former SS and Luftwaffe barracks (the Germans had provided double-glazing, central heating, sports facilities and cinemas for the fighting men of the Third Reich), some 80,000 British soldiers were waiting for the Red Army to make a surprise attack. As in Korea many were National Service conscripts. Many of the British tanks were hopelessly out of date, 1939 Valentines and clapped-out Churchills. As Soviet aircraft buzzed Western defences to test them out, there was an assumption in Whitehall that when the attack came Nato would be able to hold out with conventional forces for only a few days. It would have been 1940 all over again with one stark difference. To protect itself against the Soviet blitzkrieg the West would have had to go nuclear at an early stage. Politicians and commentators would become obsessed by the technical detail of the arms race as it lurched forward.

  The huge rearmament that followed, with the Americans leading the way, Britain and France following, had grave consequences for Britain. Having been a founding member of the UN and Nato, Britain felt confirmed as a global player, with global responsibilities. The cost was crippling. Korea itself was not the cause of the financial squeeze – the official historian of that war pointed out that ‘the sum was a mite compared to the volume of British rearmament for Nato during the same period’. It was, however, part of the shift of resources back to khaki and jets which meant Labour hurriedly diverting money from the new National Health Service. Some 300,000 men a year were taken out of the job market at a time of serious labour shortages. Another unplanned consequence was that West Germany was quickly back on her feet again since her new machine tool factories were desperately needed to re-equip Britain. Soon these same factories would be exposing archaic, ill-managed British industry to serious competition in other areas. But perhaps the most serious domestic consequence of rearmament was on morale or the spirit of the times. The Cold War shaped post-war Europe. In Britain it helped quickly blight the sunny optimism about a better future that so briefly bloomed in the years after the war.

  26

  Jerusalem Falls

  In the 1950 general election, Labour won 13.3 million votes, not so many fewer than it did in 1997, when the electorate was far bigger. Its majority then however was slashed to just five. Herbert Morrison mordantly reflected that the British people hadn’t wanted to kick out Labour, just to give it a kick in the pants; ‘but I think they’ve overdone it a bit’. The impression of fading strength was manifested in the bad health of Labour’s relatively elderly leaders. Morrison had nearly been killed by a thrombosis during the crisis of 1947; new drugs given to him caused his kidneys to pour with blood. While he was still in hospital, Ellen Wilkinson, the education minister who adored Morrison and may have been his mistress, died from an overdose of barbiturates. Though Labour succeeded in raising the school leaving age to fifteen, and embarked on an ambitious school-building programme, education had been a relative failure for the Attlee government. There was too much hunger for manpower, too few qualified teachers, shortages of everything from school furniture to modern textbooks and, in the end, too little cash. Wilkinson, a small flame-haired woman who had been on the pre-war Jarrow Crusade and was much loved in the party, became increasingly depressed at the slow pace of change. On 25 January 1947, in the middle of that icy winter described earlier, she insisted on opening a theatre school in a blitzed, open-to-the-sky building in south London. Ellen became ill and seems to have muddled her medicines, though others believe she killed herself, out of a mix of love and disappointment; the coroner recorded ‘heart failure following emphysema, with acute bronchitis and barbituric poisoning’.

  Wilkinson was an early casualty of the brutal lives lived by ministers then but far from the only one. Attlee had to be suddenly hospitalized at a key moment in the Korean crisis, with a bleeding ulcer. Bevin, utterly broken by overwork and over-indulgence, died that April. Cripps had been extremely unwell since 1949, suffering from devastating pain caused by a tubercular abscess in the spine, which eventually killed him during one of his regular Swiss hospital visits, in 1952. By the late forties, according to one account, ‘the ministers began to gossip about one another’s health rather like old village women. Attlee confided to Dalton his deep concern about the frailty of both Bevin and Morrison. Bevin, himself apparently on his last legs, was in turn “alarmist about Attlee”. He remarked that “his mind’s gone…” And so on, through the cabinet.’ By modern standards the Labour cabinet was not very old, the important players being in their early sixties or late fifties, but this was a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking and pressured time to be a politician. Most of these ministers worked late into the night, every night, and spent hours in the Commons arguing with more junior MPs. When they travelled, it was still in unpressurised, slow aircraft. Their holidays, taken mostly at home near at hand, were regularly interrupted for yet more crisis cabinet meetings. Ill-health and botched operations would dog not only Labour but the Tories too through the post-war years, with Hugh Gaitskell, Eden and Macmillan succumbing to health crises. (Only Churchill, with his cigars, brandy and strange hours of work, continued into late old age. International fame, and the habit of being listened to attentively even when you are being boring, proves a great boost to longevity.)

  Apart from being ill and in some cases disillusioned, the Labour leadership had begun to fracture. The row that propelled Nye Bevan and his then acolyte Harold Wilson, ‘Nye’s little dog’, out of government was with hindsight a silly one. The economy had been doing rather better than during the dark year of 1947. Though the country was short of dollars, the generosity of Marshall Plan aid the following year had removed the immediate sense of crisis. By 1949, it was estimated to have raised the country’s national income by a tenth. Responding to the national mood of revolt over restrictions and shortages, Wilson had announced a ‘bonfire of controls’ in 1948 and there seemed some chance that Labour ministers would follow the change in national mood and accept that the British wanted to spend, not only to queue. Labour was always divided between ideological socialists and more pragmatic people, but there was no obvious necessity for the party to have a row with itself towards the end of its first majority government, with so many whirlpools navigated, and so many rocks narrowly avoided.

  The problem was the familiar one. Should money be concentrated first on Britain’s overseas commitment, symbolized by her involvement in founding Nato, and her large army
facing the Russians across the Germany border; or on protecting the social advances at home? The new Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, had proposed charges for dental and eye treatment to help fund the massive cost of rearmament demanded by the Americans and accepted by London as the price for remaining a great power. Spending on defence would rise from 7 per cent of Britain’s income in 1948 to 10.5 per cent four years later, an astonishing proportion for an economically weak country. In money terms the proposed charges hardly signified in the bill for tanks and planes, and were small too as a proportion of the new NHS budget. But hot blood and simmering rivalries turned this into a great struggle of socialist principle. Gaitskell wanted to establish his authority as chancellor. Bevan wanted to protect his ground-breaking achievement, the NHS. Neither position looks wise half a century later. Britain could not afford to be a great power in the old way, but nor could she afford to spend the Marshall Plan aid windfall mainly on better welfare, while other countries were using it to rebuild their industrial power. At Westminster the words grew hotter. Attlee had lost his old power to hold the ring. When Bevan and his friends resigned, a wound opened in the party which would never fully heal. Bevanites began meeting in livid little cabals. Their enemies denounced them in ever nastier terms.

  And so the party, which had won by such an overwhelming landslide six years earlier, seemed to have lost the will to keep going. One journalist at the time described it as like ‘an old, wounded animal, biting at its own injuries’ and another thought the debates in the Commons showed ‘a Government suffering severe internal haemorrhage and likely to bleed to death at any moment’. With hindsight, the post-war Labour years were a time almost cut off from what followed. So much of the country’s energy had been sapped by war; what was left was focused on the struggle for survival. With Britain industrially clapped-out, mortgaged to the United States and increasingly bitter about the lack of any cheerful post-war dividend, it was perhaps not the best time to set about building a new socialist Jerusalem. Most attempts at forced modernization quickly collapsed. The direction of factories to depressed areas produced little long-term benefit. Companies encouraged to export at all costs were unable to re-equip and prepare themselves for tougher markets. Inflation, which would be a major part of the post-war story, appeared, rising from 3 per cent in 1949-50 to 9 per cent by 1951-2.

  Again and again, Britain’s deep dependency on the United States was simply underestimated by the politicians. Harold Wilson, for instance, slapped import duty on Hollywood films in 1947, when the sterling crisis made saving dollars such a priority. The Americans simply boycotted Britain, a devastating thing for a country then so film-besotted. Labour tried to encourage home-made, patriotic films to fill the gap and there were wonderful British films, and directors, but already glamour was something that came from the Pacific coast. When the tariffs and boycott were lifted, the wave of American releases swamped British studios. So the tariffs were taken off again. Then there was the dream of a ‘British empire of the air’, fleets of giant new commercial airliners criss-crossing the oceans in patriotic livery. Again, it was an expensive lesson in hubris. Vast aircraft like the Brabazon I and the Tudor IV proved no match for America’s Lockhead planes. The best of the British jets, the Comet, was to suffer lethal commercial delays after crashes in the early fifties. Britain seemed to succeed best in international competition with a plucky, wire coat-hanger and empty squeezy-bottle approach.

  But nothing sums up the paradoxes, the hope and chaos, the old State-direction and the coming consumer society, better than the famous Festival of Britain of 1951. Even now its defining images can be recalled by millions of people – the great modernistic Dome of Discovery, like a friendly flying saucer just alighted on the south bank of the Thames opposite Parliament, and the Skylon, a great aluminium spear, an anorexic rocket, seemingly suspended in mid-air – rather like, people said, the British economy. The Festival had been talked about during the war, but it was the editor of a liberal-minded, leftish newspaper, the News Chronicle, who championed it. Gerald Barry was in many ways like the Labour ministers he appealed to – high-minded, the son of a clergyman, radical, but also upper-crust by education. He wanted the festival to be not merely for people to enjoy but ‘an expression of a way of life in which we believe’. The government liked the notion and set up an equally high-minded committee to take the project forward, including senior civil servants, an architect, a palaeontologist and a theatre manager.

  In a famous essay about the Festival, Michael Frayn later said it had been devised by the ‘herbivores’, by which he meant the leftish post-war establishment people, ‘the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC…guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass’ – what a later generation would call the chattering classes. Luckily for the herbivores, political responsibility for the shindig was soon taken over by Herbert Morrison who, whatever his faults, was no snob and who had a robust understanding that people wanted fun and colour. A chance, as he put it later, for ‘the people to give themselves a bit of a pat on the back’. It was a lesson forgotten when his grandson Peter Mandelson took charge of the Millennium Dome in the late nineties.

  Eventually, 8.5 million people would visit the Festival on the Thames, and 8 million more went to the associated funfair in Battersea. Up and down the country innumerable others attended local events, everything from village pageants to a ship touring the seaports and a netball display at Colchester. The Festival showed what planning and risk-taking could achieve, and what it could not. While it lasted, a weed-covered, marshy, muddy, semi-derelict wasteland was turned into the scene of a great national display. The project had survived endless Whitehall wrangles on every issue from the materials its buildings were to be made from, to where in London they should be sited, to what the displays should be about – which turned out to be an immense display of the best of British design and manufacture, plus historical and scientific tableaux and some wonderful modern art. Airy pavilions surrounded piazzas; there was a whimsical model railway; the Ministry of Pensions hoped for a modest display of artificial limbs. Right-wing newspapers, led by the London Evening Standard, ridiculed the whole idea as a waste of time and ‘Morrison’s folly’. Americans wrote to oppose it, in one case on the grounds that it was essentially un-British and tourists wanted ‘England to be the same, battle-scarred but beautiful’. In the final stages of construction, the rain teemed down and work was halted by strikes. As with the failing British airliners, there was clear and vivid ambition; but often, it seemed, not quite the ability to carry it through.

  Yet the Festival was carried through. It was a moment of patriotic tingle. The State directed something which, though mocked by many, did catch the national imagination. Conservative MPs came round and so, grudgingly, did most of the newspapers. High culture, represented by abstract sculptors, classical music, the latest in design, did manage to hold hands, however briefly, with popular culture, as represented by the cafes selling chips and peas, the funfair rides, fireworks and Gracie Fields in cabaret. Opinion polls eventually showed a hefty majority in favour of the Festival. Herbert Morrison, whose official title was Lord President and who had come close to being ridiculed for the looming failures, was now known affectionately in the press as Lord Festival. It had been a close-run thing, fun snatched from the jaws of depression. Perhaps after all, Labour’s 1945 dream of a socialist commonwealth, high minded and patriotic, standing aside from crass American consumerism, could be built on England’s grey and muddy land?

  The Festival turned out to be Labour’s farewell to the country for a long time. Michael Frayn summed it up later as a rainbow, riding the tail of the storm and promising fairer weather: ‘It marked the ending of the hungry forties, and the beginning of an altogether easier decade…it may perhaps be likened to a gay and enjoyable birthday party, but one at which the host presided from his death-bed.’ If the host was a certain vision of British socialism then this grimly humorous image is spo
t on. Labour had made Britain a little more civilized and certainly fairer. But it had accomplished nothing like a revolution. By the time it returned to power in 1964, Britain had experienced something more like a Festival of America.

  Part Two

  The Land of Lost Content

  Between the fall of old Clem Attlee’s Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky, wisecracking Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe a golden-tinted era of lost content. To others they were the grey, conformist, ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Tory misrule. Either way, this part of our past was truly a different country. Much of it has disappeared. You might climb into your Austin Sheerline for a visit to the Midland Bank, stopping off at a Lyons to read your News Chronicle or Picture Post while smoking a Capstan, looking forward to a weekend visit to the Speedway by tram. It was possible to imagine a different way of being British. To leaf through newspapers and magazines of the time is to glimpse just how very different the future might have been. There are the unfamiliar all-British cars with their bulky, rather innocent styling – Jowett Cars of Idle, Bradford, advertise their Javelins and Jupiters; or you could be ‘well-off in a Wolseley’. There is no sign that, just as the great age of the car begins, Britain’s sprawling independent car industry is about to be wiped out. Nor, for that matter, that the ‘freedom of the road’ will soon be replaced by a maze of new regulations, fines and documents; there are no motorways, no out of town speed limits. There are drawings of the coming passenger heliports.