The Housing Committee itself, on giving its approval in late August to not only the blocks but also the whole layout for the development area (including shops, restaurants and much else), called Spence’s scheme ‘a new method of living in cities at high densities without loss of humanity’, while the Glasgow Herald had no qualms about what would become ‘the Queenies’: ‘The special feature is the provision of small garden or patio for each house, no matter at what height . . . By this perpetuation of the familiar tenement “green”, it is hoped to create a community spirit.’ A few days later, in a piece on ‘The Hanging Gardens of the Gorbals’, the Architects’ Journal expressed the hope that Spence ‘succeeds in his enterprising attempt to civilize the tenement’. In the words soon afterwards of the almost legendary journalist Hannen Swaffer (who back in 1950 had written powerfully in ‘I have Ascended into Hell’ about the overcrowded, rat-ridden tenements of the Gorbals) this was a scheme to ensure that in five years’ time the Gorbals would have ‘one of the finest community centres in the world’.
Swaffer was writing, in his column in the People, the week after claiming that London was ‘gradually becoming a monstrosity of utilitarian architecture’, typified by how the first sight on coming out of Paddington station was ‘a beehive of offices – one block is almost 20 storeys high! – which is ugly beyond belief’. He added that he had recently expressed his views ‘to Authority’ (unnamed) and been blandly informed: ‘That is the modern style.’ Swaffer’s attack on modern architects provoked a riposte, printed in the paper. ‘They are not the inhuman, callous Big Brothers that Mr Swaffer would have us believe,’ declared a young architect from Hull. ‘The majority are working thoughtfully and sincerely, in face of complex and difficult problems. Many are succeeding.’ Calling them ‘the envy of the world’, Alan Plater cited the LCC housing estates: ‘They have brought fresh air and light to people who previously knew only backyards and smoky squalor. All great architecture was once “modern”.’28
7
Stone Me
On Friday, 11 April – four days after the end of the Aldermaston march and just as Balthazar, the second instalment of Lawrence Durrell’s projected ‘four-decker novel’, left the literary critic Walter Allen ‘eagerly awaiting the next shake of the kaleidoscope’ – Accrington Stanley’s vice-chairman, Charles Kilby, heard about the imminent sale, at an army depot in Aldershot, of the double-decker stand previously used for the Aldershot Military Tattoo. It seated 4,700, was on offer at a give-away £1,450 and seemed the heaven-sent answer to the perceived need to increase Peel Park’s meagre seating capacity of 800. On Monday he and the chairman, Bob Moore, inspected the stand, and by Tuesday the club had successfully bid for it. Even allowing for the £10,000 cost of dismantling, conveyance and re-erection, Stanley were on course, reported an enthusiastic Accrington Observer, to save something like £25,000. Moore explained his rationale: ‘The whole future of football is in the melting pot. There is a possibility in seasons to come of a super-European League, and with Stanley’s ambitions as high as the sky we wish to be “in” on the ground floor and make Accrington one of the centres of football.’ Sadly, there were three snags. Spending even £11,450 would push an already financially troubled club into further debt; it was completely the wrong type of stand for a football ground; and the notion of Stanley, never yet in one of England’s two top divisions, as part of a European super-league was, to put it mildly, a stretch. ‘We’ll never fill it,’ the cash-strapped, departing manager Walter Galbraith commented bluntly to a supporter, ‘and I could have had three new players with the money.’ As it happened, the Football League itself was about to be restructured, with Divisions Three and Four as national divisions replacing Third Divisions North and South. Stanley would be in Division Three, so a touch of nobility characterised the club’s veteran director Sam Pilkington successfully pleading in May at a Football League meeting that there should be four-down and four-up between the two new divisions. ‘Remember the Fourth Division clubs,’ he urged. ‘Give them a chance to rise again.’1
The week after Stanley sealed the fateful deal, Tony Hancock explored the infinite boredom of ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’. The opening lines, with their unscripted pauses and sighs, took a full 48 seconds to deliver:
Tony: (Yawns) Oh dear! Oh dear, oh dear. Cor dear me. Stone me, what a life. What’s the time?
Bill [Kerr]: Two o’clock.
Tony: Is that all? Cor dear, oh dear, oh dear me. I don’t know. (Yawns) Oh, I’m fed up.
A few lines further on, Sid James put the Sunday feeling into global perspective: ‘Look, so am I fed up, and so is Bill fed up. We’re all fed up, so shut up moaning and make the best of it.’ Making the best of it . . . Sundays were still Sundays, the Victorian age was still alive, and for children especially it could be an endurance test.
Even so, for all the ennui, a Gallup poll a few weeks after Hancock’s radio episode revealed almost two-fifths of people not wanting places of entertainment to open on Sundays as on weekdays, 41 per cent disapproving of the idea of professional sport on Sundays, and 44 per cent favouring the existing shorter opening hours for pubs on Sundays. To each of those questions there were about 15 per cent of ‘don’t knows’, so overall it was hard to discern an overwhelming desire for change.2
The 32-year-old Paul Raymond, hitherto best known for his nude touring revues, was probably not a sabbatarian. Raymond’s Revuebar, opening on 21 April in Soho, had a conscious strategy: being a members’ only club would get round censorship problems; the striptease would be appreciably more sexually explicit and ‘Continental’ than at the nearby, by now rather old-hat, Windmill Theatre; and altogether it would, as the historian Frank Mort puts it, ‘evoke a world of contemporary metropolitan leisure’. This child of affluence was a success from the start. ‘Already he has enrolled 10,000 half-guinea members,’ recorded the People’s roving reporter Arthur Helliwell on the first Sunday after opening, ‘and all last week they were queuing up in the bright afternoon sunshine for tables around the raised floor on which 20 beautiful girls appear in various degrees of nudity.’ Raymond himself reassured Helliwell: ‘I have never put on an indecent show in my life. In fact, I won’t engage any girl with a bigger than 36 bust because I wouldn’t like to embarrass my customers.’
Raymond’s Revuebar had its first police raid on the evening of Friday, 2 May. The clientele found there included military men, impeccably middle-class gentlemen from the Home Counties, foreign tourists – and, noted the police statement, a party that had ‘come down’ from Stockport ‘with their pals’ for next day’s Cup Final and had, via a local tour operator, booked tickets for Soho as well as Wembley. They were probably supporting Manchester United, as indeed was most of the country, only three months after Munich. Their opponents were Bolton Wanderers. ‘We went down to London three days before the game,’ remembered Bolton’s captain Nat Lofthouse, ‘and we all got a suit from Burtons, two pounds ten shillings – we all looked well.’ Matt Busby was present, frail and with a walking stick, but an emotionally drained United were never really in it. The defining moment, with Bolton one-up, occurred not long after half-time. ‘This shot came across,’ Lofthouse recalled in 1992, ‘and their goalie palmed it up, and before he caught it I went in and shoulder-charged him, and the ball, Harry Gregg and me finished in the back of the net, and the referee gave a goal. If that had’ve happened now I would have been sent off.’ But in 1958 it was still a self-consciously man’s game and there were no hard feelings from the United players, though next day, as the Bolton coach travelled through Salford on the way home with the cup, ‘there were Manchester United supporters waiting with flour bombs in little packets, and they bombarded us’.3
The following evening, the middle-aged Labour frontbencher Richard Crossman encountered the youthful New Left, in the form of a Universities and Left Review Club meeting at a hotel in Monmouth Street, where ‘a certain Raymond Williams’ was giving a lecture on which Crossman had been asked to comm
ent afterwards. ‘I found it absolutely packed with some 300 young people, mostly under 30 and mostly, I fear, open-necked, swarthy and ugly,’ he recorded. ‘I noticed it was a bit of a dumpy atmosphere and I was slightly surprised when nobody, on an appallingly hot evening, welcomed me or offered me a drink at the bar.’ The 50-minute lecture by Williams, an adult education tutor, was ‘very competent, not at all stupid, but read in a dull, competent, dreary voice’; its theme was that ‘there was not a good, high-class press and a bad, popular press, but various presses appealing to various audiences and catering for various tastes’. Crossman in response explained the difference between writing for the New Statesman and the Daily Mirror, before his evening then deteriorated: during the interval barely anyone spoke to him, while afterwards in the discussion an ‘entirely humourless’ attack on him ‘consisted of disagreeing with things I had written in the [Mirror] column’. Watching was the tyro playwright Arnold Wesker. ‘Boy!’ he wrote next day to his future wife Dusty (about to do a stint as a waitress at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness),
He just did not know where he had come. He thought he could toss a few humorous crumbs to the crowd and a couple of observations and they would be satisfied. He didn’t even prepare anything. Beside Williams he was a loud showman. And when the discussion came – Jesus! he didn’t know what hit him. The boys stood up and lambasted him in clear, precise terms. How could he, as a socialist, support a paper [i.e. the Mirror] which, for its vulgarity, was an insult to the mind of the working class; a paper which painted a glossy, film-star world. The smugness left his face, he evaded every direct question and even in winding up said nothing except ‘Well, you high-class people are just as easily led up the garden path in your papers!’ Which may be true – but that does not justify him leading the working class up the garden path in their papers!
Crossman’s own take on the evening was rather different. These ‘ex-Communists who broke away during the Hungarian crisis’ were now, he concluded, ‘creating a Chapel for themselves with an even more sectarian atmosphere’.
There was undeniably a cultural turn to the New Left. ‘A reportage and critique of the “culture” of post-Welfare Britain’ was one of the ULR’s central aims, stated an editorial soon afterwards, adding that ‘we want to break with the view that cultural or family life is an entertaining sideshow, a secondary expression of human creativity or fulfilment’; while later in the summer David Marquand, still an undergraduate at Oxford, stated in the Manchester Guardian that Oxford’s socialist intelligentsia were far more concerned with ‘culture’ than ‘politics as usually understood’, and he quoted one prominent university left-winger as having shouted at him recently, ‘Look Back in Anger is a more important political document than anything the Labour Party has said since 1951.’4 Arguably, moreover, this was not just true of Osborne’s play. For by the summer of 1958 the British theatre was in the middle of an extraordinary year, among other things taking the ‘1956’ revolution to a whole new place and level, if not necessarily always immediately appreciated.
Ann Jellicoe’s uninhibited The Sport of My Mad Mother at the Royal Court in February had set the ball rolling – Anthony Heap dismissing it as ‘putrid piffle’, but Kenneth Tynan acclaiming ‘a play of spectacular promise and inspiring imperfection’ and especially enjoying the ‘raucous and lissom’ Wendy Craig as ‘the gang’s symbolic mother’ – before an intense theatrical sequence, lasting barely two and a half months, began at the Saville on 23 April with the musical Expresso Bongo. Principally the creation of Wolf Mankowitz (who via a scholarship had journeyed from East Ham Grammar School to being taught at Cambridge by the literary critic F. R. Leavis), and essentially a Steele-inspired satire on callow youths being discovered in Soho coffee bars and turned into pop stars by ruthless managers, it was warmly greeted as a latter-day Beggar’s Opera. Heap was among the first-night admirers, praising ‘a caustic and devastating wit that is no less effective for being essentially good-humoured’, finding the songs ‘engagingly bright and lively’, and singling out Millicent Martin’s ‘excellent performance’.
Then, a week later, three days before the Cup Final, came the long-awaited My Fair Lady at Drury Lane, with Heap present again. ‘Handsomely and colourfully staged,’ he conceded, and ‘ambles agreeably through a variety of scenes’, but overall ‘far from being the wonderful show we’d been led to expect, and what all the fuss was about in New York I can’t imagine’. The paid critics were on the whole kinder: ‘perfectly delicious’ declared Derek Granger in the Financial Times, while Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times thought it a ‘near-miracle’ that, after all the endless publicity, the musical was ‘not merely as good as we had been told, it is better’ (though he added that Julie Andrews’s performance as Eliza Doolittle had ‘no interest whatever’, and that Alan Jay Lerner’s book and lyrics had ‘foisted on to the most piercing and unsentimental intellect of the English theatre [i.e. George Bernard Shaw’s] the outlook of a Berta Ruck)’. The following week’s Any Questions? picked up that theme. Should ‘musical comedy writers’, asked Mrs Carter at the Memorial Hall in Ludgershall, Wiltshire, be ‘prevented from making a musical out of a straight play after the author’s death when he has expressly forbidden this during his life?’ ‘Well,’ answered Harold Wilson, ‘I belong to one of the large majority in this country that’s absolutely sick to death of all this ballyhoo about My Fair Lady.’ Wilson went on to express himself worried about what would happen when the copyright expired of Gilbert and Sullivan (‘of which we in this country are very rightly proud’). ‘Heavens,’ he continued, ‘if those are going to be turned into New York musical comedies, or ice shows, or for that matter rock ’n’ roll popular classics, I shall be extremely upset, and I think so will the majority of decent-minded people in this country.’ This puritanical, old-fashioned, selectively modernising Yorkshireman ended by pointing out that ‘as with anyone of us here who’s been in the Boy Scout movement or Girl Guide movement knows very well, quite a large proportion of the new popular songs, jazz hits and so on, are old songs we used to sing round the camp fire a few years ago, that have been pinched by some Tin Pan Alley spiv and turned into a very big money-making racket’.5
The evening before Wilson’s outburst, 8 May, saw the London opening at the Globe of Terence Rattigan’s new play, Variation on a Theme, about a rich woman (played by Margaret Leighton) who had taken up with a young ballet dancer. It was the evening when Rattigan, in his biographer’s words, ‘finally realised the changes that had been taking place in the London theatre’. An unenthusiastic Heap was typical of the audience, while next day the critics let rip, with even W. A. Darlington, usually very pro-Rattigan, regretfully noting in the Telegraph that this time he was ‘out of form’. Even so, for all this being the unmistakeable start, four years after the triumph of Separate Tables, of what would become a long, painful retreat in Rattigan’s reputation, the theatrical revolution as a whole was still far from complete. ‘Who will put Life into our theatres?’ beseeched Alex Atkinson, a 42-year-old playwright and journalist, in the News Chronicle on the 10th about what he regarded as a lamentable failure to follow up the Osborne breakthrough almost exactly two years earlier:
The Royal Court Irregulars are fighting almost unaided against the forces of reaction and twaddle, and unless a few more enthusiasts will rally to the cause, we may go down in the history of the Drama as the country in which a leg show never closed throughout the Second World War, and the longest-running play was a who-dun-it by a lady whose more serious dialogue has been known to make even seasoned actors giggle . . . Have we no longer the courage to blast the commercial Upper Circle out of its moonstruck reverie? Who will follow Shaw? Did we ever have even the ghost of an O’Neill? Where is our Arthur Miller?6
Nine days later, on the evening of Monday the 19th, a chronicler of the Drama needed to be in three places at once. Bernard Kops’s enjoyable if sentimental The Hamlet of Stepney Green was having a generally well-received premiere at the Oxf
ord Playhouse; the Bob Mitchell Repertory Company was starting a week-long run of Jane Eyre at Crewe Theatre, with 22-year-old Glenda Jackson in her first major role as the heroine (‘does well’, noted the Crewe Chronicle); and Heap was taking his seat at the Lyric, Hammersmith. He soon discovered he was in for ‘just the sort of lunatic stuff they love to inflict on us at the Court’:
All its characters are clearly insane, all its dialogue completely irrational, and what the whole thing is supposed to convey or signify is beyond understanding. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it tedious or boring, for its young author, who is probably just trying to cash in on the stupid contemporary cult for avant-garde obscurity, has at least the knack of somehow holding one’s attention. But its utter incomprehensibility becomes irritating, its calculated idiocy, embarrassing, and not even the excellent acting of John Slater, Richard Pearson and Beatrix Lehmann as the three craziest crackpots gathered together in the dingy seaside boarding-house that comprises the setting, can redeem its lack of sense and sensibility.
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