After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Butler in 1944 had allowed schools to be under the spending control of local government authorities, which still accounts for the current state of muddle in British education. Bevan made sure that spending for the health service was nationalized and centralized, the responsibility of central government: and that probably accounts for the current state of chaos in the health service. The truth is, that with an organization on such a scale, however it is funded, and whoever is doing the funding, some measure of chaos is inevitable. Butler’s aim was to give grammar school-quality education to all, all who would benefit from it, regardless of their wealth and of where they lived. He broadly achieved his aim, until the educationalists themselves introduced the dogma that it was socially divisive for schools to distinguish between clever pupils and stupid ones. In health, the fundamental aims were always more rational, even if in an expanding population, with limited resources, and a medical profession ever growing in skill and knowledge, the aims were unaffordable: namely health care, free of charge, for all.

  This had been the aim of the Labour party for a very long time, at least since 1909, when Beatrice Webb, in her report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, wanted a ‘state medical service’. By 1930, such was the chronic state of health in the big cities, the BMA itself was suggesting ‘a general medical service for the nation’. Beveridge recommended a comprehensive health service. The question which faced the incoming Labour health minister in 1945 was how to implement it.

  Hospital care in Britain, very much like education, had grown up in a haphazard way, with a mixture of old foundations, and more recent ones established by Victorian philanthropists. There were 1,334 voluntary hospitals. These included nearly all the great teaching hospitals, as well as specialist research hospitals such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. By the end of the 1930s most of these voluntary hospitals were desperately strapped for cash, with most of their investments reduced in value. (In 1891, 88 per cent of their income came from investment; in 1938 only 33 per cent.) As for the municipal hospitals, many of them had grown up as workhouse infirmaries. They were run by local councils with money from the rates and most of them were awful. Bevan’s genius was to see that the health service could only be made to work by nationalizing the hospitals, and putting them all under one central authority with government funding. To make it work, he had to persuade the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, Physicians, and Obstetricians. And he enlisted the help of ‘Corkscrew Charlie’, Lord Moran. Conversations such as this took place:

  BEVAN: I find the efficiency of the hospitals varies enormously. How can that be put right?

  MORAN: You will only get one standard of excellence when every hospital has a first-rate consultant staff. At present the consultants are all crowded together in the large centres of population. You’ve got to decentralize them.

  BEVAN: That’s all very well, but how are you going to get a man to leave his teaching hospital and go into the periphery? [He grinned] You wouldn’t like it if I began to direct labour.

  MORAN: Oh, they’ll go if they get an interesting job and if their financial future is secured by a proper salary.

  BEVAN: (after a long pause) Only the State could pay those salaries. This would mean the nationalization of the hospitals.21

  Bevan made some concessions which must have upset him; they certainly upset his leftist colleagues. He allowed the doctors in hospitals to continue their private practice, which effectively meant that many of the best consultants were only offering part of their time to the new health service. But some time was better than none. The profession which had collectively cheered when Beveridge was booted out of Parliament in 1945 formed a determination, by 1950, to make the new health service work. By and large, they, with the nursing profession, succeeded in doing so. The failures to fund or administer the unwieldy health service in the last thirty years have led to hospitals in many parts of Britain being reduced to a state which Bevan, Moran and Beveridge would find completely incredible if they were to return to Britain in the twenty-first century. It does not diminish Bevan’s achievement. Apart from his eloquence, and his wit, which inspired so many who heard his oratory both on the hustings and in the House of Commons, he was that very, very rare thing in the history of politics, a man whose decisions on behalf of those he served brought about human betterment. This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and human wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of. The National Health Service, which inspired so many other countries in the world to imitate it, did what it set out to do, and with all its many mistakes and shortcomings, it still does so: it provides free medicine, free advice, free surgery, free nursing to everyone, regardless of their income. Others could have bungled things at the outset as, one must candidly say, Butler bungled education by not abolishing private education. Bevan’s bold and patient nationalization programme of the hospitals, together with his drawing into the national fold the general practitioners and the dentists, was a formidably skilful achievement. He deserves the laurel crown as the British politician who did least harm and most good.

  Three weeks before the general election which returned Churchill to power as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1951, Clem Attlee addressed the Labour party:

  I am proud of our achievement. There is an immense amount more to do. Let us go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake:

  I will not cease from mental strife,

  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land.22

  Labour lost the election largely because of national mood. England was not a green or pleasant land, and nor were the other parts of the United Kingdom. Housing was a problem which the government has still not solved. Many of the bombsites were not cleared until the 1960s. It was the Britain captured in Rose Macaulay’s beautiful novel The World My Wilderness, a story of the London bombsites. ‘The squalor of ruin … was a symbol of loathsome things, war, destruction, savagery; an earnest, perhaps, of the universal doom that stalked, sombre and menacing, on its way.’23

  The films and literature of the period reflect the sense of drabness, greyness and bureaucracy threatening people’s lives. George Orwell’s telling political satire, Animal Farm, was the most devastating possible analysis of Communist Revolution. He followed it up with the much sourer 1984, a book which foresees a world in which thought police and totalitarian interference into personal life in effect destroy humanity. As with Animal Farm, he had in his sights the Soviet Union, but the drabness of his invented world surely owed much to the actuality of Attlee’s Britain.

  Passport to Pimlico was the first of the famous comedies to emerge from the Ealing Studios. Pimlico in those days was a melancholy district of London which had known more prosperous days. The eruption of an unexploded bomb makes a crater in which the local grocer, played by Stanley Holloway, discovers hidden treasure, belonging to a medieval duke of Burgundy. The researches of the learned Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) establish beyond doubt that Pimlico was actually on Burgundian soil. (The starting point for the original joke was that the government of Canada officially made a hotel room in Ottawa a part of the Netherlands so that Princess Juliana could bear the heir to the Dutch throne on Dutch soil.)

  Wearied by the bureaucracy of the Labour government, and by the austerity of rationing, the people of Pimlico declare their independence of Britain. In the pub, they all tear up their ration books; it must have been a wonderfully liberating fantasy to watch in 1949. As well as being a film which expresses exasperation with the dreary state of things in Britain, it is also a gentle expression of consensus politics. After extensive negotiations, the little London area is reabsorbed into the United Kingdom in return for assurances that it will have many of the social amenities which became commonplace in the 1950s. The bomb crater, for example, becomes a publ
ic lido where the children can bathe. Although Tory in its anti-bureaucratic instincts, the film has embraced the centralized public service ethos of Attlee’s government, and which would remain a characteristic of all subsequent Westminster governments, however right-wing or radical they wished to appear to their fans.

  The gallant little Burgundians of Pimlico also reflect the insularity of Britain in its relation to Europe. The European Coal and Steel Community began in 1950 with France and Germany agreeing to pool their production of resources. Britain’s attitude to Europe was well summed up by the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin’s, remark to Christopher Mayhew in 1948: ‘Well you know, Chris, we’ve got to give them something and I think we’ll give them this talking shop in Strasbourg – the Council of Europe – we’ll give them this talking shop.’24 Bevin as Foreign Secretary and Stafford Cripps as Chancellor both resented deeply the Marshall Plan for Europe, and the American desire that Britain should get involved with the origins of the Common Market with Konrad Adenauer of Germany, the Christian Democrat leader, with Jean Monnet, the effective architect of the Common Market, and with the French foreign minister Robert Schuman. Attlee’s government wanted nothing to do with it. Britain, like Pimlico in the film, was to go it alone. And this spirit was reflected also in the Festival of Britain of 1951. Whereas the 1851 exhibition in Hyde Park had reflected Britain’s cosmopolitan place in the world, the Festival of Britain was in part a celebration of her natural history and cultural heritage of an unashamedly insular kind, in part a hopeful looking-forward to the new nation which would emerge from the war. Much of the exhibition space was devoted to housing, to domestic and industrial design. Those looking round the exhibition must have felt, surveying the clean lines of the Scandinavian-inspired furniture and architecture, that a new world had come into being.

  Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory, had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?

  The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1921 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.

  Powell was a close friend of Malcom Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water.25 By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.

  * Direct grant schools depended in part on government funding and in part on private fees charged at the school’s discretion.

  37

  The Hereditary Principle

  In 1953, two young men came into the Eagle pub in Cambridge at lunchtime. One was an American called James Watson, aged twenty-five, who had studied zoology at the university of Chicago before moving to Europe for a period of study. The other, an Englishman called Francis Crick, was thirty-seven years old. He was a physics graduate who had spent the war working on mines for the Admiralty. Both were now working on cell biology. They owed much to the work of other scientists, especially to M. H. F. Watkins, Rosalind Franklin and Erwin Chargaff. But it was Watson and Crick who finally worked out the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Hence Crick’s famous announcement in the pub – that together they had discovered the secret of life. ‘I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,’ Watson wrote later.1

  The science of genetics was grounded in the papers on inheritance in peas by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in 1865. Since then, scientists had known that, but not how, the principle of heredity worked. Crick was one of those scientists who see their work as in direct opposition to mysterious or religious interpretations of phenomena. His mission was to explain things in terms of physics and chemistry. DNA is the substance in every living cell, or almost every living cell, which is the repository of hereditary information that determines the characteristics of the organism. Eventually, science would be able to translate the language of the DNA code, to read the signature of each and every organism, thereby seeing that we human beings, no more or less than other living beings in the universe, are the products of our genes.

  ‘How do genes replicate, and how do they carry information?’ These were the two questions to which Watson and Crick had provided seemingly irrefutable answers.

  The discovery revolutionized the study of biology, and in time it would revolutionize many other studies too, including forensic science. Henceforth, the old-fashioned detective story or whodunit was redundant. Such questions as had exercised the minds of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple – motive, opportunity for murder, and so forth – were hardly going to bother a scientist who could identify the murderer by the smallest particle of hair or fingernail left on the body of the victim; the tiniest smear of sweat from the palm of the criminal’s hand left on the doorknob.

  The exact structure of DNA, the Double Helix, was a discovery, but it was in one sense the confirmation of a hunch which the human race had always had. Why else does all old poetry, from the Book of Numbers to the Iliad and to the fragments of the Norse Edda, consist of rehearsing the names of supposed ancestors? The hereditary principle was as old as European civilization itself, and probably all other pre-twentieth-century civilizations also. Proust, in one of the later volumes of his great sequence, The Captive (La Prisonnière), notices, as he grows older, how he is coming to resemble all his relations – his mother, his grandmother, his father, and even his reclusive aunt Léonie, who at the beginning of the book sees all life from her bedroom window at Combray, just as the novel itself is coming to us only because the narrator has retreated to his own bizarre bedroom solitude to meditate upon the past.

  When we have passed a certain age, the soul o
f the child that we were and the souls of the dead from which we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation. Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and beyond these, the past of my parents and relations, blended with my impure love for Albertine the tender charm of an affection at once filial and maternal. We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our lives, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.2

  The ideologies which tore the twentieth century apart had been assertions of the will. Fascism, according to Mussolini, had replaced ‘the century of the individual’, that is the nineteenth century, with ‘the collective century, the century of the State’.3 Hitler would have approved this idea. So would Stalin, and the various exponents of state Bolshevism or Communism who had moved in to take over so many of Hitler’s conquered peoples in Eastern Europe. Mao Zedong in China would expound a similarly impersonal and collectivist creed.

  Yet in every single country such views flew in the face of the simple experience enunciated by Proust, and eventually demonstrated by Watson and Crick, that we are not cogs in a machine, nor building blocks in a dictatorial state, even if dictators choose to so regard us. We are, more than anything, members of a family. We are the sum of our parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, even if we resent or dislike the idea. C. S. Lewis, in his book Studies in Words, points out that for the Greeks the word ‘philos’ meaning friend or beloved also means ‘our own’. We love what is our own; it is our own because it is beloved.

  It is this, surely, much more than any feelings of superficial snobbery, which underpins the idea of an aristocratic society. Mysteriously, when all the other Continental countries, during the nineteenth century, abandoned the aristocratic principle of government, the British adapted it. Victorian society was enriched by commerce, industry, capitalism. But it always modelled itself on the old Whig agreement of 1689, that the country should be run by landed grandees. Those who enriched themselves, whether in professional or commercial life in the Victorian age, ended up, very often, joining the peerage. Everything was determined by pedigree, adopted or otherwise.