Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The Aluminium War was the making of Warburgs, ushered in an era of contested takeover battles and generally struck a blow – though not a fatal one – at the City’s traditional ethos of gentlemanly capitalism. For Portal, it was part of a distressing winter, with his MCC tourists taking a pounding down under against a notably uncompromising Australian side. ‘Cowdrey,’ noted Philip Larkin on 27 December shortly before the Second Test, with England already one down, ‘is clasped in some cloudy private inhibition: Bailey is like the old horse in Animal Farm – “I will bat slower”; Dexter, well, don’t know much about Dexter: pas sérieux, I’d say. Fenner’s playboy.’ All three were amateurs, the team’s captain (Peter May) was an amateur, and of course the dissenting professional, Johnny Wardle, had been left behind. Things failed to improve at Melbourne, with the visitors being rolled over in their second innings for a miserable 87. ‘Never can I remember such a dismal batting display,’ declared one old salt, Alec Bedser, while Frank Rostron in the Sunday Express blamed May and the manager Freddie Brown (yet another amateur) for ‘their staggeringly slack attitude and complacence from the beginning of the tour’. It got still worse. England eventually went down 4–0, and in one match the supremely professional off-spinner Jim Laker, pausing as was his habit to check his field before coming in to bowl, noticed that down at deep square leg the young Cantab Ted Dexter was . . . practising his golf swing.14

  11

  Morbid Sentimentality

  A suburban vignette, and an ill-natured turn against a sporting hero, helped mark the start of 1959. At Finchley Central on the evening of the 2nd, a Friday, passengers travelling on the Northern Line – for so long ‘the misery line’ – refused to leave their carriages when ‘all change’ was called. Holding the doors open to prevent the train from moving, they wanted, according to eyewitness Ernest Lindgren of 57 Ventnor Drive, N20, ‘to know what the reason was’. Eventually most got out, after the police had been summoned, but Lindgren in his letter to The Times was adamant that ‘this sudden, spontaneous demonstration was not provoked by one incident or one official, but by the accumulated resentment of rational people at being treated habitually and consistently as unreasoning cattle’. The mood was also dark the next afternoon at Old Trafford, where, after winning a penalty for his visiting Blackpool team, Stanley Matthews found himself being booed for the first time in his 28-year career.

  Three days later, on 6 January, Anthony Heap took his nine-year-old son to the King’s Cross Gaumont to see Norman Wisdom’s latest, The Square Peg, with the star taking a ‘gratifying – and well seized – opportunity to get away from his customary cloth capped “little man” character’; on the 8th the Daily Express exposed in 48-point type the double life of Edwin Brock (‘PC 258 CONFESSES I’M A POET . . . THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE PECKHAM BEAT’), after he had had some poems published by the Times Literary Supplement; and at Earl’s Court on the 12th, Bellingham’s Henry Cooper became British and British Empire heavyweight champion by outpointing Blackpool’s Brian London over 15 gruelling rounds – ‘an extraordinary fight!’ declared Philip Larkin, as he listened on the radio to what one reporter called Cooper’s ‘superbly judged’ performance against the ‘bull-like rushes’ of his opponent, left at the end looking like ‘an over-grown schoolboy receiving a caning’. Macmillan meanwhile was heading for the north-east, for a three-day tour that included a series of factory visits, largely convincing him that, with order books still thin, it would be sensible to postpone the general election until the autumn. In Sunderland on his final morning, the 15th, he toured the North Sands shipyard of Joseph L. Thompson and Sons. ‘There was Mr Macmillan, in a nest of girders, watching the workmen watching him,’ recalled an accompanying journalist, Alan Brien. ‘Then the noon-day hooter gave its bronchial blast. The motionless men sprang to life and poured past him in a hurrying, preoccupied flood. His eyebrows twitched in surprise and he muttered something to his wife. Lady Dorothy was quicker on the uptake. “When the whistle blows,” she explained, “they all go off for their luncheon.”’ That evening in Newcastle was the first night of Tyne Tees Television, and Macmillan gave an interview. ‘They are rather like fish, the further north you go the better they get,’ he said of the people of the north-east. And, after noting how impressed he had been by the sight of workers and employers pulling together, unlike in the old days, he added: ‘It has given me a tremendous inspiration – even a few days like this. In London you really don’t see what is going on.’1

  The weather during much of January and February was miserable – peasoupers, a flu epidemic carrying chesty complications, and, as Mollie Panter-Downes put it, ‘every theatre, train, and bus crowded with customers barking like a vaudeville dog act’. Frost damage caused the famed Preston Bypass to be closed for over a month, but the weather was probably not responsible for the death on 22 January of the recently retired motor-racing champion Mike Hawthorn, racing his customised Jaguar against a friend’s Mercedes on the Guildford by-pass. ‘About ten minutes of the fifteen minutes was wholly concerned with it,’ grumbled Kenneth Preston after the six o’clock news on the radio. ‘It is a comment on the time that so much should be made of a young man for travelling fast in a car. What sort of values have we got nowadays?’ A week later in Chingford was the eve of Pamela Haines’s 11-plus exam. ‘I set her hair and got clean blouse, cardigan, etc, ready for tomorrow,’ recorded Judy. ‘Cleaned shoes, too, as I intend going to school with her, even though she’s taking the exam at her own school.’ Next day: ‘I went down with her. She looked lovely and at this eleventh hour – relaxed. I am so grateful . . .’ And even better: ‘Pamela came home radiant (as did Ione last year) saying she had had a lovely time.’ By now it was almost exactly five months since the Notting Hill riots, and late on Friday the 30th the BBC showed live from St Pancras Town Hall half an hour of the first Caribbean Carnival. Its stars included Cleo Laine, The Southlanders and The Mighty Terror; a Carnival Queen beauty contest was won by the very black Faye Craig; and decorative palms from Kew Gardens gave a suitably tropical feel. The presiding spirit of the event (direct forerunner of the Notting Hill Carnival) was Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian Communist who had been deported in 1955 from the United States and who in March 1958 had founded the West Indian Gazette. ‘West Indians newly transplanted to British soil,’ she wrote in the souvenir brochure, ‘strain to feel and hear and reflect their idiom even as they strain to feel the warmth of their sun-drenched islands and its immemorable beauty of landscape and terrain,’ while the events of the previous summer had been ‘the matrix binding West Indians in the United Kingdom together as never before’, so that ‘those who have filled St Pancras Hall’ were ‘determined that such happenings should not recur’.2

  Most politicians spent the first week of February reading with horrified fascination Labour MP Wilfred Fienburgh’s posthumous novel No Love for Johnnie, accurately acclaimed by Bernard Levin as ‘a modern Fame is the Spur . . . a dagger-sharp observation and a deep understanding of the itch that bites at a politician’. Among public condemnations, Richard Crossman in the Daily Mirror called it a ‘nauseating caricature of Labour politics’, and J.P.W. Mallalieu in the New Statesman complained that Fienburgh had ‘almost totally excluded’ from his hero’s character (apparently based in part on James Callaghan) ‘any trace of integrity or any real feeling for the movement of which he is a member’. Privately, George Wigg thought the book an epitaph not only for social democracy but for the parliamentary system itself, and Macmillan reflected that if Fienburgh ‘hadn’t died, the other Labour MPs would have killed him’.

  The latest death in the news, though for the most part far from banner headline, was Buddy Holly’s. Four days after the plane crash, early in the morning on Saturday the 7th, the eight-year-old Brian McHugh heard ‘a loud scratching’ from the particularly squalid Glasgow tenement next to his rather better one and looked across:

  A window was open, and the ragged remnants of a curtain were pulled to one side
. A young man was standing gazing out of the window. Suddenly, the loudest noise I thought possible exploded from the window. It was Buddy Holly singing ‘That’ll Be the Day’.

  I can still remember [in 2011] the look of sad but bewildered ecstasy on the man’s face. The music was blaring from a brand new portable Dansette record player. As the music finished there was commotion in the further recesses of the room; I could make out a young woman and two small, semi-clad children scurrying about.

  The window was closed and there was more noise – wailing, arguing, someone crying . . .

  The noise was more decorous that evening, as the married couple Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson zestfully performed ‘Sing, Little Birdie’ to become the British entrants for the Eurovision Song Contest. How would they fare the next month in Cannes? ‘Although it has a catchy tune,’ reckoned one viewer, ‘I can’t imagine it having much chance on the continent.’3

  Undeniably there was a whiff of the Continental about Jack Clayton’s film of the bestselling John Braine novel Room at the Top, and not only because of Simone Signoret’s starring role. ‘Its camera-work has an unheightened truth so foreign to our feature films that one often drifts into looking for the subtitles,’ noted an admiring Penelope Gilliatt in the February issue of Vogue. ‘Casually and baldly, as Fellini would, it states what a Northern town is like: cobbled streets, smudged views of chimneys, women cooking at ranges, wet slaps of washing to be dodged by children playing in the street.’ The film also involved – despite the British Board of Film Censors insisting that words like lust and bitch be removed – a serious examination of sex and social class, and altogether marked the start of the British New Wave in the cinema. ‘So moving, so raucous, so pertinent’, wrote the Spectator’s Isabel Quigly; ‘a British film that shatters the pattern’, agreed the New Statesman’s William Whitebait; and even in the Sunday Express, Derek Monsey praised its ‘sheer, blatant honesty’, claiming that ‘in this case at least, and at last, the X certificate [introduced in 1951 for adult-only films] looks like a badge of honour’. Inevitably, there was the odd facetious snicker. ‘Now Britain joins the BEDROOM BRIGADE . . . and adds a slice of Yorkshire pudding,’ was the Daily Herald’s headline; ‘By gum,’ declared Picturegoer, ‘this scorching analysis of bed and brass in a Yorkshire town rates its X certificate.’ Room at the Top deservedly proved a considerable commercial success. ‘Only once before in the history of the Plaza cinema [in London] has more money been taken by a film,’ noted the Birmingham Mail at the end of February, shortly before its local opening, ‘and that was The Ten Commandments, which ran at increased prices.’ For any Brummie doubters, the paper applauded the movie for being ‘up-to-the-minute in its audacious frankness’.4

  A more British type of frankness characterised the year’s most popular film, hitting the nation’s screens during March. ‘Mr Bell?’ asks the nurse, a glamorous Shirley Eaton. ‘Ding dong, you’re not wrong,’ replies the patient, an urbane Leslie Phillips. Carry On Nurse begins with an ambulance hurtling to hospital, the crew urgently wanting to hear the latest racing results; Matron is criticised for her pettifogging rules; and throughout there is a mildly subversive streak. The critics were divided. ‘Script and director rely for laughs on nurses’ endeavours to undress men and supervise their baths,’ complained the Manchester Guardian, but for Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times this hospital farce brought ‘a welcome breath of good, vulgar music-hall fun’. In due course Anthony Heap took his son to the Century. ‘Something of a sequel to that surprising box office hit of 1958, “Carry On, Sergeant”,’ he noted, finding that ‘the humour – mainly, as one might expect, anatomical – is on much the same broad, unsophisticated level’. Even so, Carry On Nurse is now generally viewed as the first authentic Carry On film, and in Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Connor the nucleus was in place for what would become a rolling – and in its early years still fresh – national institution.5

  Following that astonishing burst between the previous April and July, the theatrical revolution continued in early 1959 to cause ripples and occasionally waves. The Long and the Short and the Tall, opening at the Royal Court on 7 January, was the title that the director Lindsay Anderson gave to Willis Hall’s claustrophobic anti-war play about young working-class British soldiers in the Malayan jungle. Hall himself was from Hunslet, as was the 26-year-old Peter O’Toole, praised by Alan Brien for ‘the arrogant casualness of his performance’, having ‘exactly the right blend of sardonic irreverence and aggressive satire for the unspoiled Jimmy Porter from the Lower Depths’. Perhaps ‘not a great play’, conceded Brien, but it was still ‘a great portent . . . another one of the trail-blazers towards a live British theatre’. The following Monday, at the Birmingham Theatre Centre, saw the first performance of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party since its Hammersmith debacle. It was performed by Stephen Joseph’s pioneering theatre-in-the-round Studio Theatre – based in Scarborough and aimed, as Joseph told the Birmingham Mail, at getting audiences ‘to take part in the actual excitement of creation, of imagination at work’ – and the playwright had travelled to the resort for pre-tour rehearsals. ‘He was in a very defensive, not to say depressed state,’ recalled Alan Ayckbourn, then a 20-year-old actor charged with playing the part of Stanley. ‘I remember asking Pinter about my character. Where does he come from? Where is he going to? What can you tell me about him that will give me more understanding? And Harold just said, “Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.”’ In the event, the Mail’s critic found it ‘a profitless form of playmaking’ for all Pinter’s technical adroitness, whereas the Post reckoned it ‘not a pleasant play’ but ‘impossible to dismiss lightly’; among those providing ‘its tautly theatrical effect’ was Ayckbourn’s ‘tormented pianist’. A month later, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop had another new play, in fact a quasi-musical, to present at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. This was Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be: music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, book by five-time former convict Frank Norman and the whole, heavily cockneyfied performance set in a gambling den. ‘Matter-of-fact, jocular, argumentative, and optimistic’, noted Brien about what became an instant hit; in addition to Littlewood’s ‘slap-up, street-party production’, he had especially warm words for Yootha Joyce, ‘surely genuine star material’, as one of the three whores: ‘She looks like a leopardess – beautiful, intelligent and terrifying, all in one feline glance.’6

  Fings appeared the week after Littlewood’s most acclaimed production of 1958, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, began a much-publicised run in the West End. ‘Just because we have some big money now, we have no plans to leave our council house,’ her 43-year-old widowed mother, down from Lancashire with the rest of the family, told the press shortly before the curtain went up at Wyndham’s on 10 February. ‘What has happened has made no difference between us and the neighbours.’ The play got eight curtain calls (though Delaney herself declined to take a bow), Michael Foot called it ‘absolutely first class’, and among those in the audience were Margot Fonteyn, David Niven and Vivien Leigh. A local government official from St Pancras presumably did not join in the applause. ‘How the censor came to pass this first crude play-writing effort of Shelagh Delaney, a 19-year-old Salford ex factory worker, is as much of a mystery as why any reputable management should have brought it to the West End from the East End where it first got presented under the odious auspices of the communist Theatre Workshop,’ wrote Anthony Heap that night. ‘A squalid and thoroughly obnoxious story of a gormless teen age slut who, neglected by her whoring mother, has a baby by a nigger seaman and is befriended and nursed through her pregnancy by an equally half-baked young homosexual, it is about as savoury as a sewer and as edifying as a dunghill.’ Next morning, Alan Dent in the News Chronicle tended to agree. Condemning the play’s ‘all-pervading murkiness’, and deploring the West End succumbing to ‘the kitchen-sink’, his review declared it ‘an odd sort of evening altogethe
r when the one likeable character is the young coloured sailor’ who ‘at least knows what he wants, gets it, and gets out’.

  It was the start of a short but intense storm, further fuelled by a front-page letter in the same paper on the 13th. Attacking Dent’s ‘air of patronage and insensitivity’, John Osborne declared that the critic had ‘an image of Britain which seems to be derived principally from the pages of the daily newspapers, Jane Austen, and glossy magazines devoted to gun dogs and girls at point-to-point meetings’ – whereas, he went on, ‘Miss Delaney has written an acutely sensitive play about a group of warm, immediately recognisable people.’ Dent the next day flatly dismissed her play as ‘squalor, impure and simple . . . the latest example of the Lavatory School of drama’, adding that ‘Miss Delaney has a gift for pungent natural low dialogue, and no other discernible talent as yet.’ On the 15th the Sunday heavies came to her defence – ‘a dramatist born, not one manufactured by study’, insisted Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times; ‘a very intelligent, moving and original play’, asserted Angus Wilson in the Observer – but Derek Monsey in the Sunday Express took no prisoners: ‘It has its few moments of truth, but it also has acres of hooey, whole slices of sheer incompetence, and long stretches of boredom.’ Next day the News Chronicle published an avalanche of letters – including one from Correlli Barnett, author of The Hump Organisation, calling Osborne ‘a Welfare State Byron without a Missolonghi’ – and by Thursday, when the editor called stumps, opinion was running three to one in Dent’s favour.