T. C. Worsley in the New Statesman, meanwhile, frankly expressed the hope that, now the English play had shown it could ‘break through the class barrier at will’, its ‘period of intoxication’ with working-class plays would be ‘short’. Worsley’s hope led to an equally frank riposte from 15 Clapton Common, E5:
So, we ‘prole’ playwrights must make the most of it, must we? We’ve been given our little say and now the hierarchy is a bit tired and we must finish amusing them, is it? . . .
Now, listen to me, Mr T.C.W., I’ve been waiting for twelve years and it’s only in the last year that I’ve been given my chance. I didn’t write Chicken Soup with Barley simply because I wanted to amuse you with ‘working-class types’ but because I saw my characters within the compass of a personal vision. I have a personal vision you know, and I will not be tolerated as a passing phase. You are going to see my next play soon, and I am going to write many more and you are going to see them as well, not because I’m a young ‘primitive’ writer out on a leash for a bit of airing but because I’m a good writer with a voice of my own!
A fellow playwright not quite yet in Arnold Wesker’s camp was in London a couple of months later. ‘I went to A Taste of Honey,’ recorded Noël Coward, ‘a squalid little piece about squalid and unattractive people.’7
Television was doing its bit for the revolution. There would be ‘no costume dramas, no classical plays, nothing of a contemplative nature’, Sydney Newman, a forceful Canadian producer who looked like a Mexican, had promised after taking over Armchair Theatre the previous autumn on Sunday nights on ITV, with a new emphasis on plays by British writers. By March he was declaring his ambition ‘to marry the intellectual idea to the requirements of a mass audience’. Some two-thirds of Britons now had a set, with no programme still more consistently popular in early 1959 than the farcical comedy The Army Game. Tony Hancock continued to ride high. ‘What can one say further than my small son’s remark: “He’s so funny even when he’s not”?’ rhetorically asked a viewer in January after the latest episode (including Rolf Harris as a sailor) of Hancock’s fourth series. But for another gifted comedian, Tyneside’s ‘Little Waster’, the small screen proved a disaster. The Bobby Thompson Show began on Tyne Tees in March, with a sketches format quite unsuited to his stand-up talents, and, after a reasonably promising start, the series bombed, almost wrecking Thompson’s life and career.8
The highbrow critics could be harsh. The Black and White Minstrel Show may have been a viewers’ favourite (‘a grand show, wonderful songs, wonderful singing, great comedy and bags of talent all round’), but the Listener’s Ivor Brown saw ‘no point in white singers (and fine ones) putting on a grotesque make-up, which has nothing to do with the natural good looks of an African, in order to sing popular songs which have nothing to do with the coloured world’. Tom Driberg found Huw Wheldon’s presentation of Monitor – for which ‘Kenneth’ Russell directed on 1 March a filmed portrait of Betjeman – ‘too arch for my taste and too mannered in his emphases and pauses: the upper-middlebrow’s Pete Murray’. And Henry Turton compared Richard Dimbleby’s fronting of Panorama (‘almost uncomfortably polite . . . a holy attitude to the rich and glittering things of life . . . pronounces most words elaborately . . .’) unfavourably to Ludovic Kennedy’s of This Week (‘achieves his atmosphere of urgency by crisp reading or a stern expression’). Turton also had it in for the anchorman of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. ‘I understand that he has won a great following (much of his own act was devoted to telling us so), and I am glad for him,’ he wrote in March. ‘At the same time I cannot believe that a compère should fluff quite so often when announcing the names of performers.’ Even more unkindly, Turton referred to Forsyth’s ‘vague resemblance to Tommy Trinder, a trickle of lame gags, a strange London accent and a matey grin’. Hughie Green, star of Double Your Money (in which the footballer Bobby Charlton appeared in January and won £1,000, promising to buy a car for his father, a miner), put it all in perspective. ‘Highbrow – low rating,’ he crisply told an interviewer.
I’m not interested in the people who live in Mayfair and Westminster, but those in Wigan and Bermondsey . . . We like people at home to feel that they might be able to answer some of the questions. That’s why some of the first questions are not too hard. It’s a matter of audience participation nowadays. People like to see someone like themselves on the screen. They like to feel that it might be themselves up there.9
It was ‘The Miner-Author’, a regular columnist on the Neath Times, who bitterly anticipated St David’s Day. ‘Where are our harps in these days?’ asked B. L. Coombes.
Where are the small orchestras which used to be in every village? Where are our first-class instrumentalists, or our really top-class singers? Yes, and dramatists also who can truly depict the life of our folk? How many of our choral singers can read music? No! The land of song is a comforting piece of ballyhoo to make our folk feel they can do one thing at least better than other nations.
On 1 March itself, television had two more victims, as Universal and Gaumont closed down their cinema newsreel operations; next day in Leeds, Holbeck Working Men’s Club voted that members’ wives should be permitted to become lady members; and on the 4th, Bertrand Russell was John Freeman’s second interviewee on Face to Face (following on from the celebrated lawyer Norman Birkett), while in the Romford Times a ‘quick-witted, fast-talking’ would-be magnate had his first newspaper profile (‘money rolls in faster than John Bloom ever dreamed it would a year ago as he tramped streets, persuading housewives to buy washing machines’). On Monday the 10th, the notoriously divisive Cutteslowe Walls in north Oxford at last came down, having according to a local journalist become not only pernicious but also illogical, given that ‘the size of a wage packet may now be higher in a council home than in an owner-occupied home’. Next day, Florence Turtle visited the recently much-extended Woolworths in Dundee (‘a really fine store’); Ernest Marples announced that telephone operators were to have greater freedom to be themselves and sound like human beings; and Britain’s Pearl and Teddy came second at Cannes to Teddy Scholten’s ‘Een Beetje’.10
The following day was the last Take It From Here written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden (though the programme limped on for a final series); Muriel Young in Small Time on Friday the 13th was inviting young viewers ‘to meet Joan, Angelica and Jeremy the Cat’; and by the end of Saturday the last three left in the FA Cup comprised an improbable trio. ‘I don’t mind about Norwich particularly,’ Philip Larkin conceded graciously enough about a Third Division club that had overcome Manchester United, Cardiff, Tottenham and Sheffield United. ‘I can’t say I want any of them to win the cup – in my day Luton were 3rd Divn, Nottingham Forest, oh, 2nd I’d say, & Norwich didn’t exist. None of them seems quite serious to me.’ In the event the Canaries went out 1–0 in a replay against Luton the following Wednesday, the same day that 19 students from Hatfield Technical College secured a world record by piling into a telephone kiosk and two days before Madge Martin had ‘a horrible shock’ lunching in the Grill Room at the Regents Palace Hotel: ‘Gone the old-fashioned, comfortable ordinary surroundings, gone the attentive familiar waiters, gone the large extensive menu. Now given place to harsh modern décor, colouring, lighting. Small, uncomfortable plastic tables, “floozies” as waitresses, fresh from school, paper “serviettes”, food served all on one plate, wines in ugly jugs.’ Still, it was better than being a horse at Aintree, where at next day’s Grand National only four finished out of 34 starters, and among the 14 fallers at Becher’s Brook one had to be destroyed after breaking its back. A ‘disgusting, bloody circus’, complained the League Against Cruel Sports, but the course’s managing director, the formidable Mirabel Topham, yielded no ground: ‘They don’t know what they are talking about. How dare they talk of banning the race!’11
On the 18th, the political terms of trade changed significantly. ‘Mr Iain Macleod, the immensely able Minister of Labour, unexpectedly rose in
the House to announce – with obvious enjoyment, and minus notes to help him with the complicated statistics that he reeled off to the silent benches opposite and to the cheering ranks behind him – the first significant drop in unemployment figures,’ reported Mollie Panter-Downes. ‘He got a relieved ovation from his party, which now feels that its major election worry has been removed.’ This was hardly cheering news for Gaitskell, who had something else weighing on his mind. ‘Hugh made one observation to me which he had got from Mark Abrams,’ recorded Crossman next day.
One of our long-term problems, he said, is that the kind of emotions and behaviours which held the Party together in the past were all based on class. Yet, since the war, progress has all been such as to weaken these senses of class loyalty upon which the Labour Party is based. More and more the younger people don’t feel class-conscious in that sense of the word, and they are actually repelled by what they feel to be the fusty, old-fashioned, working-class attitudes of the people who run the Labour Party.
The perception was probably not inaccurate: ‘tired, grizzled men and grey-haired careworn women’, was how a Times journalist had described Labour workers at the recent Southend West by-election.
Ultimately, of course, the question for the left as a whole was whether it would be able to grasp – let alone empathise with – the larger social and economic forces now at work. John Vaizey for one was sceptical. ‘Surely the problem for socialists is to understand the life of the suburbs, the problems of the semi-detached society – attached in part to the working class in its origins, but to the middle class by aspiration,’ he argued in that month’s Socialist Commentary in a swingeing attack on the backward-looking romanticism of the Bethnal Green school of sociology (i.e. Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship, supplemented by Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People).
These are the people who are becoming articulate, who provide the new social problems – lonely life, ambitious life, but a secure life, and a life with often surprisingly broad horizons and directed by a serious intelligence that has enabled its people to rise into the ranks of the skilled and the white-collar people. These people call beer beer [a dig at George Orwell’s preference for calling it ‘wallop’], and prefer babycham. To do otherwise voluntarily is dangerously near sentimentality.
Women’s magazines pointed in the same direction. Old-fashioned, un-glossy, non-aspirational ones like Home Chat and Everybodys had recently folded, but to glance at an issue (14 March) that spring of the hugely successful Woman is to be struck by a world of colour, of burgeoning consumerist modernity, of apparent classlessness – and of a seemingly total disconnect with current affairs of any sort, let alone politics as such. Instead, jostling with ‘My Strange Life’ by the Duke of Bedford and ‘Learning to Wait’ by Anna Neagle (a regular columnist), ‘The Wooden Spoon Club’ assembled this week at the Brighton home of reader Eileen Timms, who with six other ‘keen cooks’ chatted to the magazine’s cookery editor about ‘everyday eating’:
Pat Taylor: Half our trouble is that families are so conservative about food. I’m so tired of all this cooking a Sunday joint, but my husband and children don’t like anything else.
Eileen Timms: They will if you make it sound exciting. Every now and then I promise my family a continental dish as a special Sunday treat. We call it ‘going travelling’. The favourite, up to date, is Hungarian Goulash.
Mary Carter: That sounds most exciting, but isn’t it terribly difficult to make?
Eileen Timms: Not really, it’s only another name for veal stew . . .
Elizabeth Taylor: High tea is my problem. My children are tired of eggs.
Jane Fraser: It’s mine, too. My husband likes something savoury to eat in the evening.
Pat Taylor: I find the new condensed soups and packet soups used half-strength like sauce are good for quick snacky dishes. You can make all sorts of egg, fish and meat dishes with them. I often use two kinds of soup mixed together.
The last, robustly sensible word went to Mary Carter: ‘My standby for all occasions is Irish stew. It cooks itself and there’s only one saucepan to wash up.’12
And the young, those objects of Gaitskell’s special concern? They were not yet voters, but about the same time some 2,000 ‘candid’ teenagers were surveyed for the Woman’s Mirror. Four in five said they would bring up their own children in an organised religion; 35 per cent intended when they were 21 to vote Conservative, 35 per cent Labour, and 20 per cent were ‘don’t knows’ or would refuse to vote; and half the girls thought it wise to marry before they were 21, their favourite dream was to be a model (no longer an air hostess), and 68 per cent said that parents were right to disapprove of premarital sex (compared to 40 per cent of the boys in the sample). The girls’ favourite TV stars were Robert Horton of Wagon Train and Clint Walker of Cheyenne, while the boys plumped for Tony Hancock and Popeye; on the big screen, the respective favourites were Dirk Bogarde and Brigitte Bardot; and the majority had no favourite politician, though among those who did, Churchill was ‘easily’ the front-runner. What about work? Two-thirds of Britain’s youth were in employment by the time they were 16. Soon afterwards, the Industrial Welfare Society published recently written, unedited essays on ‘What I expect from work’ by a cross-section of school-leavers:
I have chosen to be a scientist because I have always felt a sense of vocation for this type of work. I know that society should, and will, provide me with a job suited to my capabilities. (Norman, 18)
One thing I hope to gain is really a combination, poise, self-confidence and good taste. (Patricia, 14¾)
I dont suspose I will have much choice of work, but I will just have to be satisfied with the Job I get and hang on to it. I will not expect high wages at first, and will learn to respect the manager. I know most of my libities will be cut out a little when I am earning my living, but theres always the feeling you get that you’r no longer a child and wish to be treated as a grown up. (Frank, 14¼)
The Civil Service offers security which forms the basis of any man’s life especially if he intends to marry. (Raymond, 17½)
Every one wants a well decorated house with all the modern conveniences fridge, washing and so on. I am sure a dustman could not afford this. (Peter, 14)
I would like to work in a shipping office, where you have a full Navel dress, shoes, shirts, tie and be well respected with all the office workers. (Maurice, 15)
At the moment, I have doubts about being a shipping magnate or head of an atomic power station. (Leonard, 14)13
‘Seems to be leaving realism further and further behind and developing only in the direction of an atomic, sophisticated Sapper,’ was Maurice Richardson’s verdict in the Observer on 22 March on Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, with Bond himself becoming ‘from a literary point of view . . . more and more synthetic and zombie-ish’. The villain was almost called ‘Goldprick’, after the hot-tempered, left-wing architect Ernö Goldfinger had threatened to sue; indeed, back in the 1930s, Fleming had been among those protesting against the demolition of cottages in Willow Road, Hampstead to enable the building of Goldfinger’s modernist house. Neatly enough, the book’s publication almost coincided with the outcome of another Hampstead run-in, this time over Goldfinger’s plans for an ultra-modern four-storey block of flats, resting on pillars over a car port, to be built in the Vale of Health. One nearby resident, Anthony Greenwood, Labour MP and chairman of the Hampstead Labour Party, claimed that it would ‘help to make us a Mecca for students of architecture from other parts’, but 53 other local residents disagreed, signing a petition that described the proposed development as ‘out of keeping’. At the two-day public inquiry in November 1958, Goldfinger’s expert witness, the recently knighted John Summerson, described ‘the greater part’ of the Vale of Health’s architecture, full of ‘dreadful little Victorian villas’, as ‘rubbish chaotically arranged’, while Goldfinger himself not only was equally adamant that the surrounding buildings had ‘neither architectural nor aest
hetic merit, nor any charm in their own right’ but insisted that working-class people in the Vale were fully behind him. In the event, the Housing Minister (and Hampstead MP) Henry Brooke deliberately sat on the decision so long that by the time consent was given, in early March 1959, the architect’s client had gone elsewhere. ‘It was Goldfinger’s misfortune in the 1950s,’ his biographer would reflect in 2004, ‘to have come up against a succession of proto-Prince Charles figures with their ill-thought-out conservative mantras of “local character” and “fitting in”.’14
It had been a triumph for ‘the Hampstead preservationist lobby’, as the Architects’ Journal noted crossly, but of course Hampstead was not London. ‘Whichever party won the next election there would be an enormous amount of work for them to do,’ Lord Stonham, who until recently had been Shoreditch’s MP as Victor Collins, reassured the London Master Builders’ Association at a luncheon in December 1958. ‘Some people said that it was a shame to pull down some of the old buildings,’ replied the Association’s president, ‘but each generation must build for its own needs and many of the new buildings were very fine indeed.’ By this time work was under way on what would become the Stifford Estate – three 17-storey towers dominating the Stepney Green skyline, replacing (in Paul Barker’s words) ‘low terraces, built by the Mercers’ Company in the early 19th century, which had lasted satisfactorily for about 130 years’ – while a few months later The Times surveyed Bethnal Green, where ‘from Spitalfields to Victoria Park the whole face of the borough is being changed’. No fewer than 15 blocks of 10 storeys or more had been built or were being built in the square mile of Bethnal Green alone; by the end of the process, a third of the borough’s 50,000 inhabitants would have moved into new flats built since the war. Walking round the borough’s eastern end, between Roman Road and Old Ford Road, the special correspondent observed that ‘whole streets have already been demolished in the Cranbrook Street scheme’, adding how ‘again and again someone has chalked on the shattered walls “I lived here”, with the dates’.
Modernity Britain Page 33
