Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  By this time some 4,250 self-service grocery shops were doing around 17 per cent of the UK’s grocery trade, with those shops including 175 supermarkets (i.e. self-service with a sales area of at least 2,000 square feet) – of which 83 were owned by the Co-op and 75 were in London and the south-east, though Ken Morrison was getting going in Bradford (with all of three checkouts). Even so, a Gallup survey this summer of housewives’ shopping preferences revealed that small independent shops were still much preferred, often involving considerable residual loyalty and/or conservatism, with 65 per cent buying their groceries from the same shop, and 75 per cent from the same butcher. ‘Their main criticism against large multiple stores [preferred by only about 17 per cent of housewives] is that they are unfriendly,’ reported the News Chronicle. ‘They complain that the self-service stores encourage them to buy too much; then that lack of over-the-counter warmth pops up again.’ Increasingly, though, supermarkets (led by Tesco and, from July, followed by Sainsbury’s) were significantly reducing their prices on branded goods, especially foods. ‘I am not cutting prices,’ an independent grocer in a well-to-do London suburb so far reasonably free of supermarkets defiantly told the Mail. ‘My customers want delivery and monthly bills. I need big margins to give this service.’

  The problems for that business model would become increasingly apparent, while in 1958 other signs of change were the start of Green Shield Stamps (begun by Richard Tompkins, who had seen trading stamps in action in a flourishing petrol station near Chicago) and of another phenomenon, cash-and-carry (pioneered by a Huddersfield wholesaler, Lawrence Batley). The multiples, meanwhile, were offering an increasingly attractive shopping experience. Florence Turtle, a stationery buyer for British Home Stores, visited in Birmingham ‘our Super Duper new Store which really is a store to be proud of’, while a full-page advertisement in the Kentish Mercury for Lewisham’s ‘beautiful new C&A’ set out its wonders:

  Great modern arcades of superbly lit windows – you can window-shop to your heart’s content!

  Big, modern showrooms, beautifully decorated and arranged so that you can reach out anywhere and touch a bargain

  Twice as many self-contained fitting rooms, where you can try things on in comfort and privacy

  Importantly, there also seems to have been a greater willingness on the part of shoppers to buy on credit. A survey in August found that 58 per cent of people (and 65 per cent of those under the age of 45) approved in principle of the practice, and that 23 per cent of all adults were at that time making payments. It was an area of life that could cause domestic tensions. ‘Your father and me were talking about TV Friday night,’ Tom Courtenay’s mother Annie wrote to him earlier in the summer from working-class Hull. ‘He seems to think he can get one that gradually reduces to 1/- a week. So we nearly ended up arguing.’22

  Advertising roared on, in 1958 for the first time since the war regaining its pre-war proportion of 2½ per cent of all consumer expenditure, as naturally also did commercial television. ‘Three in every four viewers affirm that the advertisements on television interest them,’ noted a survey in June. ‘Cartoons with jingles continue to lead the popularity stakes. The most popular advertiser in 1958 to date: Sunblest. The least popular advertiser in 1958 to date: Omo.’ New brands on the market this year included Blue Daz and Tango (heavily promoted through the ‘Tango Wobbly Ball’ offer), while successful rebranding campaigns included Kattomeat (hitherto struggling, in a pre-Whiskas world, behind the market leader Kit-E-Kat) and the continuing Bronco story, with first a ‘gay’ wrapper pushing up sales and then the testing in Tunbridge Wells of the toilet paper itself in pastel shades of pink, blue and green demonstrating a clear public preference for colour. Two new television advertisements, meanwhile, had particular resonance, becoming in their way classics: ‘Go to work on an egg’ (contrary to myth not devised by the copywriter and future novelist Fay Weldon but by a colleague of hers at Mather & Crowther) and the creation of the impeccably middle-class, long-running Oxo family, with the young, attractive housewife Katie (played by Mary Holland) happy to ‘give a meal man appeal’ – virtue that husband Philip would occasionally reward with a patronising ‘good girl’.23

  So much was new in 1958, such as stereo ‘hi-fi’ equipment and discs, throwaway Biros, and eye-level grills on gas cookers. For teenage girls there was now, in shocking pink and peacock blue, the ‘Pink Witch’ bicycle, produced by Triumph and recommended by Jackie Collins: ‘My, if you’d gone round asking girls what they wanted it couldn’t have been nicer. It’s so vivid – and so gay – and so marvellously sensible too.’ The Continental influence was becoming ever more apparent. Italian Lambrettas and, to a lesser extent, Vespas dominated the motor-scooter market; for the young Howard Jacobson and friends, the moment when ‘the first Italians opened up a coffee bar on Oxford Road in the centre of Manchester’ around this time ‘changed our lives’; and even in a ‘poorish suburb’ of Bournemouth with ‘nothing in the least imaginative in the shopping line’, related an amused Frances Woodsford in April to her American correspondent, there was a new shop which was ‘all frills and flounces, and they have called it “Mes Petits”’.24

  Yet as always there were limits to the appetite for the new. ‘Confident and distinctly modernist’ is how Terence Conran’s biographer describes his 1958 furniture catalogue, but the range flopped commercially. Nor, owing presumably to lack of consumer demand, was the sandwich revolution even remotely in the offing, with the travel writer Arthur Eperon lamenting in July how he had ‘recently been charged 3s in pubs for a sandwich consisting of dry scrapings from an old chicken carcase between hunks of cardboard bread’. Instead, 1958 saw in Reading the first of a chain that would become the reliable home of the unreconstructed breakfast fry-up: an 11-seater Little Chef, modelled on an American roadside diner.25

  On 26 July, at the close of the Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, the Queen’s recorded voice announced that Prince Charles, future hammer of the modernists, was to be known as the Prince of Wales – surprise news that, noted Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘seems to have caused emotion among the middle-aged and over, for whom it revives memories’. Over the next few days three other stars were born or at least sighted. From nearly 3,000 talking budgerigars from across Europe, the winner of the BBC’s Cage Word Contest was revealed as Sparkie, a budgie not only possessing a wide vocabulary and capable of singing in Geordie but also soon to become a household name and, almost half a century later, to inspire a Michael Nyman opera. ‘Look, an original comic!’ was the Mirror’s ‘Telepage’ headline above praise for Bruce Forsyth’s appearance on the The Frankie Vaughan Show as that of ‘an original performer who takes trouble with his material, has a deft delivery, and tops it with a personality which, though assured, is not in the least cocky or big-headed’. And also in the Mirror, Patrick Doncaster’s weekly column on new records looked ahead to the release on 29 August of the first single by ‘a 17-year-old dark-haired dark-eyed singer and guitar twanger from Cheshunt Herts’, reckoning that Cliff Richard had ‘a personality that shines through the grooves’ and ‘could succeed in discland’.26

  Kenton and Shula Archer were born on 8 August, and the Australian novelist Patrick White, staying in London, might have preferred to be in Ambridge. ‘It is so terribly dirty, ugly, the people so drab – also ugly and dirty – the women like uncooked dough, the men so often suggestive of raw veal,’ he informed a friend on the 12th, adding that during a recent lunch with his English publisher he had been struck by Douglas Jerrold’s ‘habit of chewing his words in the best English manner – as if they were a difficult and unpleasant meat’. On the 23rd the BBC finally consented to give starting prices with its racing news; two days later Midland announced it would be the first high-street bank to offer personal loans; and on Wednesday the 27th Madge Martin went to a matinee of My Fair Lady (‘well-nigh perfect’), Gladys Langford treated herself to a long ride on the 179 bus to Grove Park (where, with female toilets ‘conspicuously missi
ng’, she ‘had to take a 2d platform ticket, find someone who would unlock lavatory & found it smelly, cistern chain not working’), Ted Hughes had a selection of his work read on the Third Programme (‘It is not often that one is so excited by the work of a new poet,’ said the Listener), and Philip Larkin boldly predicted to Monica Jones that the England cricket team (‘swollen with pride’) that had been selected to tour Australia would ‘come a cropper’.27

  These were not the all-time-best summer holidays. ‘Wakes week’ may have been the episode that on 14 July finished the first series proper of radio’s The Clitheroe Kid, but such was the seriousness of the downturn in the Lancashire cotton trade that, as the Rochdale Observer gloomily reflected about this time, some would have no alternative but to ‘regard the annual holiday as a luxury which will have to be sacrificed this year’. Nor did the weather help, with Macmillan himself noting on 20 August that ‘it has now rained, practically without ceasing, for 6 weeks in every part of the country’. Still, there was always plenty to see and do in ‘The Most Magnificent Gardens In The British Isles’. An advertisement itemised the attractions of Staffordshire’s Alton Towers:

  Fully Licensed Bars and Catering – Boating – Children’s Paddling Pool – Miniature Railway, and many other amusements for all ages – Unrivalled Woodland Walks – Flag Tower – Chinese Temples, etc., etc.

  Also the world’s largest ‘00’ Gauge Model Electric Railway.

  Celebrated Bands Sundays and Bank Holidays. (The Jaguar Car Works Band will play in the Gardens on Sunday, August 17th.)

  Judy Haines spent a Sunday morning in early August in Littlehampton. ‘Butlin’s have a place there right on the front,’ she noted. ‘But for that it’s very pleasant.’ The Butlin’s in question was only an amusement park; for the real Butlin’s experience she should have gone to the holiday camp at Clacton-on-Sea, where soon afterwards Cliff Richard and the Drifters began a residency at the Pig and Whistle Bar. ‘Campers used to go for a knees-up and a sing-song,’ recalled a Redcoat, Stan Edwards. ‘They thought Cliff’s music was a racket and nobody went in there when he was playing. Cliff only knew about eight numbers at the time, and they were all Elvis Presley songs. He used to look like Elvis, and wiggle in the same way. You can imagine the campers who wanted a sing-song liking that sort of music!’ It transpired that Cliff had been put in the wrong bar; on transferring to the recently opened South Seas Coffee Bar, ‘he went down well’ and also did afternoon sessions in the Rock ’n’ Roll Ballroom. One night towards the end of the season a terrific thunderstorm left the top end of the camp completely flooded, including the South Seas. ‘It had glass tables with live goldfish, and was really sprauncey,’ remembered another Redcoat, Roy Hudd. ‘The place was three feet deep in water, and the drains couldn’t take any more. We were all woken up at three in the morning, and told to get up there.’ A less than gruntled Hudd reluctantly did so. ‘About 2,000 campers were there, baling out the water, cleaning the tables, checking everything was OK as if they were employed by Butlin’s. One of them wading in the water turned to me and said, “Marvellous, isn’t it? Just like the Blitz.”’28

  On Saturday, 30 August, while a teenage Jimmy Greaves scored five at Stamford Bridge against the usually formidable Wolves defence, the Empire Theatre in Portsmouth prepared for its last performance. Variety theatres around the country were by this time closing down at a rapid rate, and a supermarket was to be built on the site. That evening, for the second house, there was standing room only to watch Terry (Toby Jug) Cantor’s ‘Folies à la Parisienne’, with others on show including the Hungarian acrobats the Great Alexis troupe and the double-jointed comedian Dale Robertson. After it was all over, and the audience had departed, some stagehands took to the stage and started to sing. Whereupon, according to the local Evening News:

  Someone opened a side door, just as 63-year-old Mrs Lilian Salmon was going by on her way home. She paused as the noise flooded out into the almost deserted Edinburgh Road, and went inside. Through the maze of passages and stairways she found her way to the stage – and took command.

  This was no longer Mrs Salmon, of 21 Sommerville Road, Southsea. This was Lilian Ravenscroft, ‘Lancashire’s Singing Mill Girl’ of World War I, when the theatre was in its heyday.

  On that same stage she made her professional debut in 1914 as one of The Six Red-heads. Another member of the group was Gracie Fields . . . A pianist joined in, and soon the theatre was ringing with The Singing Mill Girl’s rich contralto voice.

  Song after song she sang, and before long there was a small gathering at the open side door, including a police sergeant and two constables. Their interest was not surprising, since it was long past midnight.

  Eventually, a stagehand announced that everybody had to go home. The Singing Mill Girl led ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and the Empire Theatre was dead.29

  8

  Get the Nigger

  Just after closing time on the evening of Saturday, 23 August, exactly a week before the curtain came down on the Portsmouth Empire, a 21-year-old blonde, Mrs Mary Lowndes, and her miner husband were leaving a pub in the rundown St Ann’s district of Nottingham, to go back to their two small children, when she was apparently punched in the back by a black man. ‘The next thing I knew,’ she related afterwards, ‘my husband was being punched from one side of the road to the other by a group of coloured men. I heard bottles being smashed and everyone started screaming and shouting.’ Things rapidly escalated. There were knife attacks on several white men; a crowd of some 1,500, mainly white, rapidly gathered; counter-attacks began against blacks; and it took the police an hour and a half to restore order. Over the next day or two it emerged that the initial events had been a reaction against the previous fortnight’s series of assaults by white Teddy boys on the area’s heavy concentration of black residents – assaults mainly fuelled by an atavistic dislike of black men having white girlfriends and eventually leading to some West Indians taking the law into their own hands. The following Saturday, the 30th, Teds and others turned up in St Ann’s en masse, a milling mob of up to 4,000, with revenge on the agenda amidst cries of ‘Let’s lynch them’, ‘Let’s get at them’ and ‘Find some niggers’, but with their targets almost all staying prudently at home, they fought instead with the police, resulting in 24 arrests. ‘This was not a racial riot,’ insisted the Chief Constable, Captain Athelstan Popkess. ‘The coloured people behaved in a most exemplary way by keeping out of the way. Indeed, they were an example to some of our rougher elements.’

  Between the two Saturdays, the Manchester Guardian had on Wednesday the 27th an optimistic headline: ‘Other cities not perturbed about Nottingham: It-couldn’t-happen-here feeling’. Even so, the accompanying report did note that in the Notting Hill Gate–Shepherd’s Bush area, where ‘between three and five thousand West Indians are living, mostly in poor housing conditions, among a white population largely composed of people who are themselves not Londoners and have little community life’, the previous three weeks had been ‘unsettled’, including ‘fights and attempts to run down pedestrians with cars on Saturday nights’. Meanwhile the Hammersmith area had witnessed ‘a recent outburst by gangs of Teddy boys said to be cruising the streets on week-end evenings, looking for Africans or West Indians’, with those gangs ‘said to choose streets where only the occasional coloured person is to be seen, and then attack in the ratio of half a dozen to one’. In fact, there had been a particularly vicious episode the previous Saturday night – just an hour or two after the first Nottingham battle – when a gang of nine white youths, mainly from Shepherd’s Bush, had gone out ‘nigger-hunting’ (their term) and, armed with iron bars and other weapons, had wantonly indulged in unprovoked attacks, injuring five black men, including three seriously. On Friday the 29th the Kensington News and West London Times noted more broadly that ‘Nottingham must be a warning to North Kensington’ (aka Notting Hill), where almost 7,000 ‘coloured’ people lived, approaching a tenth of the population.1

 
Taking place in increasingly warm weather at the fag-end of what had been a dismal summer, the ‘Notting Hill Riots’ – by some distance the most serious civil unrest of the decade – began shortly before midnight on Saturday the 30th. ‘A bottle bomb was thrown through a basement window of a house in which coloured people rent rooms,’ reported the Daily Express, and over the next few hours other ‘coloured’ houses were attacked, as were random black men as well as white women known to be going with blacks, often by roaming white gangs with, according to another report, ‘iron railings, choppers and in some cases bicycle chains’. It was worse on Sunday night, with threatening, violent crowds of some 500 or 600 on the streets, and 17 arrests made after, noted the Kensington News, ‘West Indians had been savagely assaulted and petrol bombs had been thrown by the mobs into the homes of coloured people’. For four hours, stated the ensuing police evidence, ‘there were running fights continuously between coloured and white people and, at times, the two opponents were ganging up against the police’.2

  Monday, 1 September was the climax. ‘I have seen nothing uglier, or nastier, than this,’ declared one reporter, Merrick Winn, about an incident that became emblematic:

  A young man, coloured, a student, walks alone in the middle of a shabby road, Bramley Road, Notting Hill, London. It is three in the afternoon. He carries a brown bag, for he has just come to the area. He looks about him, jumpily, wondering about the silent people, white people, crowding the pavements. He has not heard about the race riots.

  The people watching, violently. Suddenly a voice yells: ‘Get him.’ Other voices yell: ‘Get the nigger.’ The people sweep after him. Middle-aged people, but most of them young people. And many are children.