Three days later, nearly fifty teenagers (almost certainly all white) attended the newly opened Dale Youth Club to take part in a subsequently reported discussion:
They felt that it has been a small minority of the coloured population that has provoked the white people in the area. The general consensus of opinion was that mixed marriages were wrong and that there was a certain amount of feeling against white girls who married coloured men. During the discussion many of the teenagers quoted actual cases of their own experience, of the appalling low standards of living, among the coloured people. As regards the housing problem, they were annoyed that ‘West Indians could come here and get houses when white people are overcrowded and have not got houses’. They agreed that some sort of immigration restriction should be imposed particularly in their area.
Finally, these four dozen white youths were asked whether the riots had been justified. ‘They would give no definite answer,’ the club leader, Mr Hale, told the local paper, ‘but they would rather say yes than no.’
Up in the West Midlands (which had the second-biggest concentration after London of non-white immigrants) there had been no serious disturbances, with the partial exception of Dudley, but that did not prevent some uninhibited correspondence in Wolverhampton’s Express and Star:
I do not advocate an inhospitable attitude towards foreign elements within our midst, but surely we have the undeniable right to choose our guests and ‘weed out’ the sick, the lame and the lazy? Our outraged intellectuals would do well to visit their local pubs where more common sense is aired than in many a Parliamentary gathering. (‘Geordie’)
Jobs are scarcer, rent and rates higher, yet people are entering this land and going straight on to public assistance. It is completely wrong. Friction in such circumstances is inevitable, regardless of colour or creed. If common sense and less sentiment were employed, everyone would stand to gain. (Florence Beamand, 49 Butts Road, Penn, Wolverhampton)
We dread the summer or any nice weather, as a crowd of Jamaicans gather in the next-door gardens to play cards, and make the neighbourhood hideous with their noise . . . It is useless for Cabinet ministers or anyone else to attempt to whitewash. They should live amongst these coloured immigrants and suffer as we have done. (‘Long-Sufferer’)
Colin Quayle of Himley Road, Dudley also had West Indian neighbours. ‘The lines of clean washing which hang above their well-tended gardens testify to their cleanliness and industry,’ he insisted. ‘They are good neighbours, who wish to interfere with my way of life as little as I wish to interfere with theirs.’
The third place was Kentish Town in north London, where a local by-election was due to be held on 25 September. The Conservative, Labour and Communist candidates all agreed to keep race issues out of it, but a fourth candidate stood as an independent specifically on a ‘Keep Kentish Town White’ platform. He was William Webster, a 51-year-old publican and former boxer at whose pub, the Black Horse in Royal College Street, only whites were admitted. ‘My platform is primarily a moral one,’ he explained. ‘The so-called Teddy boy era is the most healthy reaction we have had to date. Even if the coloured people were acceptable biologically there is neither work nor accommodation for them in this area.’ And to another journalist about his opposition to a multiracial society: ‘It is a matter of racial survival and I can see in this a lowering of standards. The Negro is on a lower evolutionary plane so far as I can see.’ As for his policy at his pub, Webster maintained that ‘if I did not keep coloured people out of my house I should have no customers at all’. Shortly before polling day, the brewers Watney, Combe and Reid gave him a year’s notice to quit, and the chairman of the Central Panel of the Brewing Trade wrote to The Times making it ‘abundantly clear’ that ‘this trade dissociates itself entirely from all forms of racial discrimination’, prompting in turn a letter from Webster’s wife Emmeline, who claimed that all her husband was trying to do was ‘to keep the area in which his wife and children reside, and the house wherein he earns his living, morally and socially respectable’. The voters (predominantly white) duly gave their verdict: 479 votes for Webster, out of a total of almost 6,500 cast.
In other words, the non-white immigrants – of which there were by now a critical mass – were here to stay. Including Sylvester Hughes, who in his early thirties had sailed from Antigua on Christmas Eve 1957, started in London as a kitchen porter in Lyons Corner House, and over the next 15 years would work as a carpenter (rising to foreman) before turning himself into a self-employed stallholder, eventually becoming in the early 1980s the first-ever West Indian stallholder in the Portobello Road fruit-and-veg market. Year-round, on stall 109, he wore the same outfit, recalled his obituarist Emily Green in 1991:
Tweed hat, pressed cotton shirt, knotted tie, wool jumper. He never hawked. There was no easy familiarity. He addressed others as ‘Miss’, ‘Missus’ or ‘Mister’ – never ‘Love’, ‘Lovey’ or ‘Darling’. And he was known locally, even by those who knew him well, as ‘Mr Hughes’.
His produce, too, was an exercise in contrast . . . Jamaican peppermint, white and yellow yams, plantains, ackee, limes, several types of root ginger, a good variety of chillies, coconuts, smooth Jamaican avocadoes and the exotic squash chayote.
On the day of Hughes’s funeral, at All Saints’ Church, Notting Hill, ‘stall 109 was heaped with bouquets from shoppers and neighbouring stallholders, who had grown quite fond of the quiet man with the queer fruit’.11
‘Today the Do-It-Yourself Exhibition opens at Olympia,’ noted the Evening Standard on 4 September, adding that ‘in no section has there been such a boom as in sailing craft’. Marinas and suchlike, however, were not on the minds of those gathered at Bournemouth that week for the Trades Union Congress, with Frank Cousins an increasingly vexed participant. ‘The general atmosphere of apathy & display of unreadiness to enter into a real examination of major problems was increasingly apparent,’ he privately reflected after it ended, and went on:
It seems we have too many men in the Council of the T.U.C. who either do not believe fully in the principles of public ownership or do not understand it in relationship to the control of the country’s economy . . . Even subjects such as security in employment, mobility of Labour, social services, full employment, productivity & the like appear to be matters of no concern . . . Many of the leaders seem to have no forward purpose except to maintain their individual status. Not a solitary lesson was learned from the Bus Strike of May 1958 & every one seemed satisfied to have reached a position where no one was wrong & no one was right on the issues involved.
Even more disenchanted, though, was Les Cannon, the ex-Communist trade unionist who was by now in bitter dispute with his union, the Communist-dominated Electrical Trades Union, over its shameless ballot-rigging practices. On the eve of the TUC he gave a high-profile press conference. But in the event he received precious little support (Vic Feather an honourable exception), with the sympathy of the capitalist press, together with the ETU’s vehement line that an attack on one union was an attack on the movement as a whole, probably having the effect of turning many trade unionists against his cause, or at least just wishing it would go away.
In terms of employer–employee relations it was in many ways still a paternalistic world. Take the giant ICI, whose Billingham sports club, the Synthonia (a portmanteau of Synthetic Ammonia), had a new ground, superbly appointed for both football and athletics, officially opened by the Earl of Derby on Saturday the 6th. ‘I must express on behalf of the members our sincere and grateful thanks to the Company for yet one more act of supreme generosity towards us,’ declared the club’s president at the ceremony. Paternalism was also usually the order of the day in the many small or medium-sized family-run firms that largely comprised the City of London. The merchant bank Antony Gibbs & Sons was one such, holding this autumn for family, partners, staff and pensioners a cocktail party at the Grocers’ Hall to celebrate its 150th anniversary. ‘Mac’, the recently retired Stanley McCom
bie, naturally received an invitation after 44 years’ service, but, stricken with dermatitis, he warned ‘Mr Antony’ he might be unable to attend. ‘So far I don’t consider my retiring to be an unqualified success,’ he wrote on the 20th from his home in Leytonstone, ‘and my wife is threatening to send me back to the office as a washout so far as home is concerned . . . I miss you very much, but I’m sure all goes on as usual without me.’12
By this time Sunday Night at the London Palladium had a new host, following Lew Grade’s abrupt sacking of Tommy Trinder, possibly for telling a racist or anti-Jewish joke. This was the 30-year-old Bruce Forsyth, who a year before had talked of giving up comedy to run a tobacconist’s. Clifford Davis on the Mirror’s ‘Telepage’ charted Forsyth’s early progress. In his first show, 14 September, ‘a likeable personality – without being too forceful’; a fortnight later, ‘packed in some topical material’ but ‘will have to stop overworking the word “wonderful” every time he interviews contestants for “Beat the Clock”’; and a week later, ‘managed to hold this rather indifferent show together . . . versatile . . . tailor-made for the job . . . gets better each week’. The Mirror in September also gave its appraisal of a new British film. ‘Unabashedly relies on beating customers over the head with a bladder of lard,’ reckoned Dick Richards, adding ‘the jokes come thick and fast’ and that, although ‘sometimes the comedy sags’, this was ‘only while the cast is getting its second breath’. Carry On Sergeant owed a fair bit to television’s The Army Game, not only being similarly set amongst a bunch of National Service squaddies but also featuring three of its stars in William Hartnell, Charles Hawtrey and Norman Rossington, who helped out Bob Monkhouse, Dora Bryan, Kenneth Connor and Kenneth Williams. In any case, it was such an instant hit that at the Last Night of the Proms a huge banner proclaiming ‘Carry On Sargent’ was waved behind the unwitting conductor, Sir Malcolm. At the outset the film had been conceived by producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas as a one-off, but within weeks Carry On Nurse was in production.13
On a damp Thursday four days after Forsyth’s debut, an American professor of genetics, George W. Beadle, arrived in Oxford with his wife Muriel and son Red to take up a visiting professorship. Their brisk, matter-of-fact landlady showed them round their rented house – small and cluttered – in Headington and, as recalled by Muriel in her nicely humorous memoir of an often baffling year, offered some local guidance: ‘“Thursday is early closing,” she said, “and if you wish to lay on supplies you must get to the shops before one.” The butcher shops shut their doors on Monday and Saturday afternoons, in addition, she told us; and the wine merchant was open (for the purchase of spirits) only during “hours”, which I later found out meant during the same hours the pubs were open.’ Umbrellas in hand, they set out for some immediate groceries:
At Berry’s, the bakery, I bought a small round loaf of bread, receiving it with a piece of thin paper loosely wrapped around part of it. At Murchison’s the Headington greengrocer, I added newspaper-wrapped potatoes, carrots, and a limp head of lettuce to the bundles in Red’s arms. Our final stop was H. E. Weaver’s Quality Meats, and there I made a mistake. Walking along, I had made a quick calculation as to what might be the simplest menu to prepare, and I had answered myself: a good Irish stew. So I asked Mr Weaver for ‘a pound of beef for stew’, expecting the succulent squares of chuck that the same request would have produced at home. I don’t know what he gave me, because I never ordered it again.
That evening at 8.30, with a fork still unable to penetrate the meat despite four hours of cooking on top of the Rayburn, Muriel’s patience snapped:
I said, ‘Let’s eat it. If we cut it into small enough pieces, we won’t even have to chew it.’ I did chew one piece of mine to see what it tasted like, and it didn’t have any taste.
Red, sensing my distress and doing his best to relieve it, said, ‘The potatoes are awfully good, Mom.’
‘I’m glad you like them,’ I said with savage politeness, and burst into tears.
Later, she lay awake for hours, listening to the rain. ‘I let my thoughts drift back to the electric range in my California kitchen, and to the furnace we lit by pressing a button, and to the big living-room in our Spanish-style house.’
One of John Bloom’s washing machines would probably not have made the difference. ‘Britain’s Greatest-Ever Washing Machine Value!’ boasted an advertisement on the back page of the Mirror six days later for the ‘Electromatic Washing Machine and Spin Drier’. ‘From 49 [in huge type] Gns. A Brand New Combination . . . A Complete home laundry for 1/3rd deposit and only 7/3 a week for 2 years!’ A remarkable story was under way. The 26-year-old Bloom was the son of a Polish-born tailor and had grown up in the East End before leaving school at 16. By 1958 he had tried his hand at various things (salesman at Selfridge’s, running a road-haulage business, selling paraffin door-to-door), but not got very far in any of them. But that year, in quick succession, he started selling cut-price washing machines imported from Holland, grew a beard to make himself look older, and now, in September, took a punt by advertising in Britain’s best-selling daily paper – so successfully that more than 8,000 readers sent off the coupon requesting details about the Electromatic. It was a propitious moment. Hire-purchase controls were about to be abolished, washing machine sales for 1958 would be 44 per cent up on the previous year, the market leader (Hotpoint) largely eschewed price reductions, and at this point Bloom was one of only two entrepreneurs who saw the gap in the market for (to quote the historian of domestic electrical appliances) ‘really cheap and less indestructibly durable appliances, using high-pressure salesmanship to sell them’, mainly to ‘working-class homes, still so understocked with many appliances’. Bloom’s rival was the Manchester-based A. J. Flatley, who in the course of the year began to make clothes dryers and gave his name to the advertising jingle ‘Mum deserves a Flatley’.14 History, however, would remember Bloom.
These were still early days after Nottingham and Notting Hill, and, quite apart from issues of immigration and race relations, there were the implications to be considered of the Teddy boys’ violent behaviour. The industrialist Sir Halford Reddish, appearing on a Brains Trust television panel just before Forsyth’s Palladium debut, had no doubts: ‘I would like to see corporal punishment brought in and these young thugs given a good thrashing.’ A few weeks later, at the Tory conference, Butler managed to fend off vociferous demands to restore flogging, though at the price of promising harsher youth detention centres to ‘de-Teddify the Teddy Boy’, while also in October the government set up a committee under Lady Albemarle to consider the youth problem, including the question of facilities. Phyllis Willmott, meanwhile, offered a beady perspective. ‘The Committee members absolutely appalled me at first sight,’ she wrote after attending in late September her first meeting as a member of the Managing Committee of Westlea Hostel for the aftercare of teenage girls. ‘They seemed very middle-aged, rather frumpish, and overpoweringly middle class.’ Next day she and other committee members visited Dixcot Hostel, a large Edwardian house near Tooting Common that catered for ‘difficult’ girls of 11–15:
The hostel is ridiculously spic & span for a children’s home. Poor little dears, no wonder they spend all their free time out on the Common. The Warden seemed a very stiff person. I should think most children would feel immediately uneasy with him . . . It was like a hotel not a home . . . ‘Not a single scribble on the wall’ as one handsome well-dressed Tory woman said. One can’t help wondering in such a place whether the hostel is run for the children or the adults supposed to be caring for the children . . .15
‘The publisher who accepted the manuscript told me that it was the sort of book he liked to have on his list, a very reputable work, but of course very few people would want to read it,’ recalled Raymond Williams. ‘He said: “I’ve got another book called The Uses of Literacy, of which I would say the same.”’ The publisher was Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus, and Williams’s Culture an
d Society, 1780–1950 eventually appeared in September 1958, a year and a half after Hoggart’s book and four months after Crossman’s disconcerting evening listening to him speak at a New Left meeting. Culture and Society, like Uses, hugely exceeded expectations: some 200,000 copies sold by 2005, and over the years it has often been identified as the start of ‘cultural studies’. Williams was 37, the son of a Welsh railway signalman; via Abergavenny Grammar School, he had gone to Cambridge – for a time falling, like so many, under the influence of the powerfully moralising F. R. Leavis – before (in 1946) becoming an adult education tutor in East Sussex. Culture and Society was not his first book, but it was his breakthrough into a much wider readership, and over the next three decades he emerged as arguably the leading British public intellectual.
At the heart of Culture and Society was its sympathetic recapitulation of the views of those English writers (including Coleridge, Carlyle, the ‘Condition of England’ novelists, Mill, Morris, Lawrence and Orwell) who, according to Williams’s reading, had reacted, whether from a conservative or a more socialist standpoint, against the utilitarian assumptions of laissez-faire industrialism – the phenomenon that in his eyes, looking back over the previous two centuries, was the worm in the Enlightenment bud. Williams wrote with particular warmth, and clear personal empathy, about D. H. Lawrence:
He had the rich experience of childhood in a working-class family, in which most of his positives lay. What such a childhood gave was certainly not tranquillity or security; it did not even, in the ordinary sense, give happiness. But it gave what to Lawrence was more important than these things: the sense of close quick relationship, which came to matter more than anything else. This was the positive result of the life of the family in a small house, where there were no such devices of separation of children and parents as the sending-away to school, or the handing-over to servants, or the relegation to nursery or playroom . . . in such a life, the suffering and the giving of comfort, the common want and the common remedy, the open row and the open making-up, are all part of a continuous life which, in good and bad, makes for a whole attachment.
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