Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  It is a refreshing change from the deluge of treatises on problem families, Teddy Boys, juvenile delinquency, broken homes, and child neglect which have created an impression that working-class families are disunited, unsocial, and unhappy.

  Mr Willmott lived in Bethnal Green for two years during the researches with his social-worker wife, Phyllis, and two young children. He enjoyed the rich, down-to-earth, companionable life so much that he left only because he wanted a garden for the children.

  The reviews themselves were largely positive, typified by the conclusion of George Bull’s in the Financial Times: ‘This shrewd – and in places extremely amusing – book combines warmth of feeling with careful sociological method. It should make us look at the new towns and estates with a keener eye.’2

  One avowedly left-wing critic (whose own Fabian pamphlet Socialism and the Intellectuals had made a mini-splash at the start of the year) took on both books. ‘The main trouble with Mr Hoggart’s diagnostics is that they are as thin in illustrations as his reminiscences are rich’ was Kingsley Amis’s negative reaction to the second half of Uses:

  He sees his ‘mass publications and entertainments’ from the outside. He tells us in a note that ballroom dancing is the second-largest entertainment industry in the country with its 500-odd ballrooms, but he might never have been in one of them for any sign he gives of understanding the part they play in their patrons’ world. His account of modern popular songs is evidently based upon an exiguous, ill-chosen sample and is riddled with precarious intuitions about such imponderables as the kind and degree of self-consciousness displayed. He does not know what television programmes are like or how people behave while they watch them; he does not know that Astounding Science Fiction prints some of the best works in its genre despite its name and cover which are doubtless all he has seen of it; he does not even know that there is more than one kind of comic strip.

  Amis’s final sentence was a disdainful flick of the wrist from someone who had himself come a long way in barely three years: ‘It would be pleasant to say of the book written out of such obvious earnestness and decency of feeling that it represented an achievement, but it is only an attempt.’ He was on the whole warmer towards Family and Kinship, praising Young and Willmott as ‘observant, tactful, sympathetic, humorous – and able to write’. But he did wonder about the key element in their treatment of community in Bethnal Green:

  The central figures of this network are the mums, educators, providers of the family meeting-place, non-technical obstetric consultants, child-care advisers, regular lenders of that vital ten-bob note. I hope I can say without undue disrespect that if I were a working-class girl in Bethnal Green I should probably find somewhere like Holyhead or Wick a handy place to conduct my relationship with Mum after marriage, but then I am not, and on the evidence here presented I cannot doubt that my feelings are shared by few. Or I would not doubt it if I were certain that the authors never confused seeing Mum every day and liking it with seeing Mum every day and being too pious, too timid or too lazy to complain.

  ‘Anyhow,’ as he added with a certain weariness, ‘a lot of Mums are seen a lot of the time.’

  Other readers also had their reservations, with undoubtedly the spikiest intervention coming in May from Leonard Cottrell, a BBC producer who for several months had been researching the New Towns clustered around London (including Stevenage, Bracknell, Crawley and Hemel Hempstead). Declaring himself ‘sick of middle-class reviewers and sociologists who persist in sentimentalising the working class’, he continued in a riposte in the Listener to its recent favourable review (by an academic psychologist) of Family and Kinship:

  ‘Mum’ is a monster . . . In my investigations I have found, time and time again, that working-class wives are happy and relieved to put thirty miles between themselves and ‘Mum’; that she is no longer there to interfere with her aboriginal warmth, her glutinous, devouring affection. Young wives who had been dominated throughout childhood, adolescence, and marriage by these stupid, arrogant, self-pitying matriarchs have suddenly found that they can do without them, to the benefit of their own happiness and that of their husbands.

  Strongly suspecting that the same was true in ‘Greenleigh’, and lamenting that Young and Willmott ‘will not face up to the fact’, Cottrell went on:

  In my experience a small minority of New Town residents long for the pubs, the fish-and-chip shops, the ‘chumminess’ of the crowded streets; perhaps three or four per cent, not more. The rest are extremely glad to have, for the first time in their lives, a home of their own, with fitted carpets, ‘contemporary’ furniture, and a washing-machine – all the middle-class trimmings over which middle-class social investigators shake their heads but which working-class people value, when they can get them.

  The trouble is that some middle-class people, such as authors and book-reviewers, will persist in romanticising aspects of working-class life of which they themselves have had no direct experience – ‘neighbourliness’, ‘kinship’, etc., and the stifling, claustrophobic intimacy of crowded tenements, which have been forced upon working people by sheer economic circumstance.

  That autumn, in Encounter, Tosco Fyvel called ‘surely too romantic’ the authors’ ‘sweeping conclusion’ that ‘Bethnal Greeners should be rehoused on the spot so that their family ties could be kept intact’, arguing from their own evidence that at ‘Greenleigh’ the ‘significant answer was that given to the investigators even by discontented families: that they would not think of returning to Bethnal Green because of the undisputed advantage of the new Estate for their children’. Soon afterwards, a damning-with-faint-praise review in the TLS (‘their field work was reasonably careful’) took particular issue with how ‘the authors deplore the fact that workers moved to Essex developed middle-class, particularly lower middle-class, ways’:

  The fact is that in Bethnal Green these families were isolated from those social patterns increasingly characteristic of Great Britain. It was rather in Essex that they encountered the current face of things for the first time. The authors regret the destruction of working-class traditions, but their own remedies will hardly alter the larger movement of British society.

  Perhaps the most suggestive review was in the obscure pages of Case Conference, ‘A Professional Journal for the Social Worker and Social Administrator’. Justifiably praising the book’s many-sidedness, and Young and Willmott’s ‘ear for language’, the young housing expert David Donnison thought aloud about whether ‘Greenleigh’ itself (depicted by the authors as cold, non-communal, materialistic, etc.) was really the prime culprit for the feeling of loss and helplessness among many Bethnal Greeners newly or recently settled there:

  Could the old community also be to blame – a community with so sheltered a social life that its warm human relationships are all ready-made for children to grow into without ever consciously ‘making’ a friend? It may be that the cosy neighbourliness of our traditional, long-settled working-class areas has been achieved at the cost of a dangerous isolation from the outside world: people may feel surrounded with friends and relatives in neighbouring houses and streets, yet look with suspicion on those who live the other side of the main road, or in the next borough; people may achieve a warm sense of comradeship with other working men, and nurse an unreasoning hostility towards foremen, managers, clerks and professional workers.

  ‘Communities such as Bethnal Green have many strengths which our society needs to preserve,’ Donnison concluded, ‘but in other ways they may be as unfitted to the modern world as the streets that are scheduled for clearance.’3

  For Young himself – the driving force in what was a fruitful, complementary partnership with Willmott – the appearance of Family and Kinship was the justification of his decision some six years earlier to move away from party politics and into sociology and social policy. ‘Yours is a study of living people, who come and go, all through, – rather like a novel, and at times like scenes from a play,’ his benefactress and c
o-dedicatee Dorothy Elmhirst wrote to him from Dartington Hall after receiving her copy:

  I feel I know the individuals, – they seem to come right out to greet me. Surely this is a new method, – I mean the interweaving of charts, statistics, factual statements with the spontaneous, individual voices of human beings speaking their thoughts and feelings. The effect is vivid and exciting. And how well you bring out the contrasts between Bethnal Green and Greenleigh! The implications of migration are quite startling, aren’t they? – the shift in the whole balance of family roles, the class distinctions that arise, the importance of possessions, and that dreadful competitive struggle to keep up with the neighbours. And yet surely the only answer can’t be to improve conditions in Bethnal Green. Will you be challenged, I wonder, in that conclusion?

  Michael, – this is an important book – and it achieves something that Chekhov used to talk about – the art of saying serious and profound things in a light vein.

  Essentially a shy, reserved man who had known relatively little love in his life, Young replied with a deeply revealing letter:

  It is certainly true that B. Green is somewhat idealised. Some days, walking through the streets, I see it all in a different way, cramped, grey, dirty, with all the beauty pressed out of it into the pitiless flag-stones; and that vision is perhaps as true as the one that I usually have, which is not of the place but of the people, who live with such gusto and humour, are earthy although there is little of it there, and who are admirable (& maybe have much character) just because they have imposed life upon such a terrible city environment. The people of an Indian village even, have more cultural resource in their surroundings. I hardly dare talk about the people, & tried not to make judgements on them in the book, except obliquely, because when I get away from the description, I become sentimental. My unconscious engages gear. The secret of why I am so attached to these working-class people lies buried there, and has remained inviolate even to the analysis.

  ‘It is disconcerting, but somehow exciting (if one could bring it out),’ he finished, ‘to recognise that the book is not about Bethnal Green but Michael Young.’4

  Whatever the psychodramas involved, the two books – Uses and Family and Kinship – bequeathed, taken together, three significant legacies.

  The first was the way in which they decisively moved the working class into the centre of the cultural frame, after 12 post-war years of what seems in retrospect almost perverse marginalisation. In 1955, in his coruscating Encounter essay on British intellectuals, Young’s American friend and colleague Edward Shils had forcefully made the point that the absence of the working class – at least two-thirds of the population – was the glaring, seldom-discussed elephant in the room of British intellectual life, whether in terms of treatment or of the personal backgrounds of the intellectuals themselves. From the late 1950s on, this would no longer be the case, at least as far as subject matter was concerned. There were, however, two problems, both owing at least something to Uses and Family and Kinship. One was that the working class now at last getting proper attention tended to be the traditional working class – just as that very class was starting to fragment, not least through the devastating impact of huge slum clearance programmes. The other problem was the implicit exaltation of working-class over middle-class ways of life and values – an exaltation that in time would influence not only the unnecessarily brutal destruction (irrespective of the underlying rights and wrongs) of the grammar and direct grant schools but also the disastrous emergence by the 1970s in the Labour Party (and on the left generally) of what the commentator David Marquand has helpfully called ‘proletarianism’.

  The second legacy also had political implications. This was the profound, puritanical mistrust of modern, commercial culture and American-style, TV-watching materialism – that ‘Candy-floss World’ vehemently denounced by Hoggart, that competitive acquisitiveness in ‘Greenleigh’ described by Young and Willmott with understanding but without warmth or approbation. By the late 1950s the Labour Party’s relationship with affluence was becoming increasingly tortured – theoretical acceptance of its desirability combined with visceral dislike of its manifestations – and these two much-read, undeniably moralistic books (especially Uses) played their part in delaying for over three decades a resolution of this troubled relationship.

  Finally, especially with Family and Kinship, there was the bittersweet (but for many years mainly bitter) ‘urbanism’ legacy. If the main thrust of 1940s-style planning had been towards dispersal, epitomised by the New Towns programme, by the late 1950s the prevailing mood – at least amongst the ‘activator’ intelligentsia – was the other way, and undoubtedly Young and Willmott, with their powerful, emotionally charged exposition of the virtues of community in traditional urban settings like Bethnal Green, helped to fuel it. Yet there were two fundamental ironies involved: not only did most Bethnal Greeners of the 1950s and after, especially younger ones, have a much greater desire to leave the area and move upmarket than Family and Kinship suggested (as the authors would explicitly concede in their introduction to the 1986 edition); but in the climate of the time, ‘urbanism’ inevitably meant the wholesale demolition of rundown (if often homely) Victorian terraced ‘cottages’ and, in their place, the large-scale erection of high-rise blocks of flats – this despite Young and Willmott’s adamant insistence that such blocks were at best only a partial solution to the housing problem. ‘One of the most extraordinary aspects of this sorry affair is that in practice the new flatted estates had little in their favour,’ they would ruefully reflect in 1986, in relation to inner-city areas all over the country, not just Bethnal Green, during that fateful, transformative period between the late 1950s and early 1970s.5 It was a sad legacy for an inspiriting, life-enhancing book.

  Even if they underestimated its attraction, Young and Willmott were absolutely right to pinpoint the importance of ‘Greenleigh’, emblematic of many other dispersed estates and settlements that had been built since the war and mainly housed manual workers. Indeed, one commentator, Charles Curran, claimed in the Spectator in 1956 that, in the context of the full-employment welfare state, these estates had been responsible for creating a new class in the shape of those living there: ‘They have been lifted out of poverty and also out of their old surroundings. Now they form the bulk of the inhabitants on the municipal housing estates that encircle London and every other urban centre. They are the New Estate of the realm.’ The rest of his piece was mainly derogatory, especially about the culture of this ‘New Estate’ – ‘a place of mass-production comfort, made easy by hire-purchase . . . ideas of furnishings are derived from the cinema and from women’s magazines . . . books are rare, bookshelves rarer still’ – as also was a radio talk given by June Franklin not long before the publication of Family and Kinship, about the experience of living in Crawley New Town with her family. Emphasising that they had given it every chance – ‘we have joined local organisations, two of our children attend local schools, and last year my husband was a candidate in the parish council election’ – she now admitted defeat: ‘The social life is simply that of a village. I tried, but I found it difficult, to work up enthusiasm for an endless round of whist drives, beetle drives and jumble sales. It bored me. I feel my life shrinking. And I don’t think it’s really a good way to make friends, in spite of the official advice handed out to us to “join something”.’ Almost certainly middle class, Franklin was looking forward to moving to a place into which she could get her ‘roots’ – and ‘bury the memories of five years in Subtopia’.6

  Debden itself, aka ‘Greenleigh’, has not yet been the subject of a systematic historical study, but we do have contemporary surveys of comparable places. When Margot Jefferys in 1954–5 interviewed housewives at South Oxhey, an LCC out-county estate in Hertfordshire, she found three-quarters of those transplanted Londoners ‘on the whole’ glad to have made the move, with only one in twelve ‘entirely sorry’. Perhaps predictably, those who had found the transiti
on difficult, causing loneliness and even mental illness, tended to be older women. In the late summer of 1958 it was explicitly with the Young/Willmott findings in mind that Manchester University’s J. B. Cullingworth conducted a detailed survey of 250 families who had moved to an overspill estate at Worsley, eight miles from the centre of Salford. A common pattern emerged: a six-month honeymoon (i.e. the vastly improved living conditions), a year of disenchantment (often relating to lack of external facilities) and then a pragmatic acceptance of the new environment, which did indeed tend to be less ‘communal’ (fewer pubs and clubs) and more home- and TV-centred. ‘Although nearly half said that they had not wished to move to Worsley,’ he reported, ‘only 17 per cent wanted to return to Salford. The majority of families seemed to have settled down to their suburban way of life whether or not they wished to leave Salford.’ The following summer, Cullingworth conducted a survey in Swindon – in other words of overspill from London – and found broadly similar results, with improved housing conditions again being the single most important criterion for most people.

  A particularly judicious, well-informed overview of the whole question was provided by Hilary Clark, deputy housing manager at Wolverhampton, who in December 1958 gave a paper to the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health on ‘Some Human Aspects of Overspill Housing’. Observing at the outset that building flats in central areas was not the answer – ‘houses are preferred because they are more suitable for family life – people cannot be conditioned on a large scale to believe that flats are as good’ – and that therefore overspill housing was necessary, she confronted the pessimistic ‘Greenleigh’ version: ‘In my experience, a new estate is thought of as remote and unknown at first, but as it grows and brothers and sisters of potential residents move there, it becomes less forbidding to the families who are deciding whether to go.’ Overall, she had found, ‘a high proportion of local authority overspill tenants seem to settle down well after the first few years’.7