Yet for all this, much of the middle-class vox pop – gathered while the authors held glasses of sherry ‘gingerly in the left hand while unchivalrously scribbling notes with the right’ – revealed keen status anxieties and resentments:
There’s all this emphasis on material possessions. People seem to think that if they’ve got something you haven’t got they’re better than you are. And they’re not really what I would call well-educated people. They’re people who’ve got the money but not the educational background to go with it.
As soon as next door knew we’d got a washing machine, they got one too. Then a few months later we got a fridge, so they got a fridge as well. I thought all this stuff about keeping up with the Joneses was just talk until I saw it happening right next door.
The working class is better off, which is a good thing if they know how to use their money. Which they don’t, I’m sorry to say.
I think the richest class today is the working class, and they don’t know how to spend their money. They waste money on fridges, washing machines, TVs and cars. It’s the old tale – the person born to money knows how to use it, the person new to getting it doesn’t.
Those people from the East End are good-hearted folk, but you couldn’t make friends of them. Sounds a bit snobbish, I know, but we’ve got nothing in common with them.
Unsurprisingly, the working-class interviewees were far from oblivious to this censorious disapproval:
In Woodford they haven’t got much, but they’re what I class as jumped-up snobs. They think they’re better than what you are.
The middle-class people here are snobs. They put on airs and graces. They are all out for show – nothing in their stomachs but nice suits on.
Some people here are more classy – or they try to be. They’re just the same as we are, but they try to be something different.
‘Inside people’s minds,’ concluded Willmott and Young about this Essex suburb, ‘the boundaries of class are still closely drawn. Classlessness is not emerging there. On the contrary, the nearer the classes are drawn by the objective facts of income, style of life and housing, the more are middle-class people liable to pull them apart by exaggerating the differences subjectively regarded.’ In short, there were ‘still two Woodfords in 1959, and few meeting-points between them’.
Such sociological concerns, though, were not the stuff of parliamentary debates – unlike the question of the moral state of the nation, on its way to becoming a hardy perennial. ‘The disease is in the body politic itself,’ declared Lord Denning in the House of Lords the day after the Budget. ‘It is a loosening of moral standards, a decay of religion. It is up to us, each of us, to do our part in leading our country to a strong and healthy opinion, condemning wrongdoing and upholding the right.’ Perhaps he should have visited Gardenstown in Banff, a male-dominated fishing village (population 1,200) that was a stronghold of the Plymouth Brethren. From there, earlier in April, the national press reported not only the disapproval directed towards ‘fair-haired’ Mona Tennant (manager’s wife in the solitary pub) for wearing slacks, but also the case of Diana Norman, the only girl to wear make-up. ‘I find the Lord is sufficient,’ replied a Plymouth Brethren girl, her long hair tied in a bun, when asked her views. Elsewhere in Scotland, at almost the same time, the Weekly News (from the hugely successful D. C. Thomson stable in Dundee) published a letter by Miss A. F. of Maryhill, Glasgow in which the 17-year-old complained how she found it ‘very humiliating’ to be spanked with a slipper by her mother after she had returned from a dance after midnight, and asking what other readers thought. ‘Miss A.F. should be thankful her mother uses only a slipper on her,’ reckoned 18-year-old Miss J. S. of Dundee. ‘My aunt keeps a tawse, and regularly warms my fingers and posterior with it.’ And among ‘dozens’ of other letters, 19-year-old Miss A. Davidson of Drongan spoke for the majority: ‘I’m always home by 10.30. As long as she is under her parents’ roof, they have a right to spank her, whether she is 17 or 37.’27
It all depended. Few had a bad word to say about Russ Conway – twinkle-eyed pianist, regular on The Billy Cotton Band Show, favourite of the Queen Mother, his honky-tonk ‘Side Saddle’ topping the charts in early April – but the troubled rock ’n’ roll singer Terry Dene (former bicycle messenger, timber-yard labourer, plumber’s mate and odd-job boy in a clock factory) was another matter. ‘DENE DRINKS CHAMPAGNE – to the Army that found he was unfit,’ announced the Daily Mirror on Easter Saturday, two days after his discharge from National Service after only eight weeks, most of them spent in psychiatric wards. ‘The Army has made a new man of me,’ he told the press from his ‘luxury flat’ in Gloucester Place, Marylebone. ‘I was a crazy, mixed-up kid. Now I have been straightened out. I hope my public will stay loyal to me. It will be several months before I can even think of going back to the stage.’ In fact, less than three weeks later, the manager of a cinema in Burnley went on stage to test audience reaction to the news that Dene had been booked as part of a forthcoming Dickie Valentine bill touring mainly northern cinemas. ‘The response was shocking,’ a Star circuit executive revealed. ‘They booed. But during the interval we talked to teenagers individually and discovered they were anxious to welcome Terry.’ On 20 April the Derby Evening Telegraph broke the news to locals that the following Sunday, the 26th, would be the start of Dene’s comeback, at the Majestic on the outskirts of Derby. ‘He is able to make the Chaddesden stage appearance at short notice because he recovered from his breakdown earlier than expected.’
Coming hard on the heels of Marty Wilde’s exemption from National Service on account of flat feet, a week of controversy ensued. ‘In view of the fact that he is a “rock and roll” expert, has the War Office consulted the Admiralty as to whether he would be suitable for sea service?’ asked Herbert Morrison in the Commons, while Gerald Nabarro promised, ‘I would have smartened-up Terry Dene’s parade for him.’ And in Derby itself, not only were there hostile letters in the local paper – ‘I wonder what the veterans of two wars are thinking of it’ and ‘In my opinion the only emotional strain Terry Dene suffered was the fact that his wages dropped from hundreds of pounds per week to a mere 17s 6d and he wasn’t man enough to take it’ – but anti-Dene slogans (such as ‘GET ON PARADE!’ and ‘GET YER ’AIR CUT’) were daubed overnight in yellow on the Chaddesden Majestic. On Saturday, despite protest letters to the BBC, Dene appeared on Drumbeat, and then on Sunday evening came the big test:
As soon as he appeared cheers were mingled with a storm of booing. Some of his songs were completely drowned by the din as the barrackers jeered, booed and chanted: ‘LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT.’ As the boos reached a crescendo so his fans cheered even louder . . . right through his 16-minute act.
And while the uproar raged, Terry Dene sang and quivered, oblivious to the noise. His show went on.
‘That was good,’ he told a journalist afterwards. ‘I think they still like me.’ Sadly, they did not. Dene’s next single, ‘There’s No Fool Like a Young Fool’, failed to trouble the charts, and by the end of the year he was a forgotten man.28
‘M still looking pretty grim with no top teeth and it seems likely to remain so since they won’t make her an upper denture unless she has all her lower teeth out as well,’ related Anthony Heap on Sunday the 26th after a second visit to his mentally unwell wife Marjorie (who during the winter had gone missing) at Horton Hospital, Epsom. ‘To which, of course, she won’t agree and I don’t blame her . . . Why must these dentists be so damned awkward?’ Three days later, 11-year-old Gyles Brandreth, at a prep school near Deal, bought Rolos at the tuck shop (‘They don’t have Aeros or Spangles, but can order them if enough people want them’) and Accrington Stanley had their last match of the season, going down 5–0 at Reading, barely a week after a 9–0 drubbing at Tranmere. ‘It is now very strongly rumoured that 11+ results come out next Tues,’ noted Judy Haines on Thursday. ‘I fluctuate between quiet confidence in a satisfactory result to agonies in case it isn’t.’ Friday, 1 M
ay was a suitable date for the consecration service of the leftish Mervyn Stockwood at Southwark Cathedral (Princess Margaret present ‘in a grey two-piece velvet suit and a pink hat’), while elsewhere the local comedian Arthur English crowned the Fleet Carnival Queen (‘Gor blimey, there are some real smashers up there’), Nella Last watched ‘that moronic Army Game’, Richard Crossman addressed Labour’s annual rally at Grantham (‘just over 100 people, stolid and totally apathetic, all of them waiting for the dance to begin’), and, in the small hours, the plucky but limited Brian London was knocked out by world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson in Indianapolis, despite the support of ‘a party from the north of England, who had flown over, complete with bowlers and umbrellas’.29
Next afternoon, Marian Raynham in Surbiton took a walk along the Ewell Road (‘How everywhere is changing, flats going up everywhere’); Crossman joined Betty Boothroyd to speak to 38 people at Stamford Labour Club, before ‘we went across the passage to the bar, where some 50 people had been sitting throughout the meeting!’; Ted Dexter got married at Bray to the model Susan Longfield, with the Bishop of Gibraltar officiating; in South Wales, Briton Ferry Town’s first home match of the cricket season was ‘an uninspiring display’ drawing ‘only a handful of people’, with the visitors from Clydach recovering to win after losing three early wickets (G. Davis c. Mainwaring b. E. Jones 2, Will Jones b. D. Jones 0, Eifion Jones c. N. Jones b. E. Jones 0); and Arthur English was in Ash (near Aldershot) to crown the May Queen at the Red Cross May Fair. ‘I was going to Wembley for the Cup Final, but I wouldn’t let the Red Cross down. They do such a lot of wonderful work. I’ll see the last few minutes of the game on the TV at home.’30
He was in time to watch Luton Town doggedly but uninspiringly trying to equalise against Nottingham Forest, down to ten men after Roy Dwight (uncle of Reg Dwight, later Elton John) had been carried off with a broken leg. ‘Syd Owen ran up towards the end,’ wrote Alan Hoby in his Sunday Express match report about Luton’s veteran defender playing his last game, ‘and even vaulted the rails when the ball went loose.’ But Hoby, like almost every other neutral observer, agreed that Forest deserved their 2–1 triumph. Both TV channels covered the match, though neither lingered: by 5.05 on BBC it was children’s TV, by 5.10 on ITV it was (appropriately enough) The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene as Robin and Richard O’Sullivan as Prince Arthur, Duke of Brittany. One more football issue still needed resolving, and that evening the visitors at Dulwich Hamlet won 3–1 and thereby clinched the Isthmian League title. ‘Although they take some stopping,’ noted The Times, ‘Wimbledon are not a graceful side.’
Crossman’s dispiriting jaunt ended on Sunday afternoon in rain-swept Nottingham. ‘The May Day procession was about half a mile long, with 15 big floats and 4 bands,’ he recorded of a downbeat occasion, ‘but I should guess that not more than 1,200 people were marching.’ At the ensuing rally he referred in his speech to ‘the shameful Budget’, but the bigger cheer came when John Silkin, prospective Labour candidate for Nottingham South, declared, ‘Look what we brought you – we brought you the Cup!’ In fact, everyone had to wait until the next evening to see the trophy itself, when the homecoming heroes made a memorable tour along seven miles of the city’s roads. As the Nottingham Evening News reported:
At every point were gathered crowds to see the coach carrying the players with skipper Jack Burkitt waving aloft the FA Cup, and in the old Market Square there gathered the biggest crowd (some 50,000) ever seen in that arena. The thousands who had come to see Forest bring back the Cup, cheered and screamed themselves hoarse and sang ‘Robin Hood’ as vociferously as it had ever been sung. Bells were played and rattles were plied as the seething sea of red and white demonstrated its appreciation of the team’s achievement.
No royal visit has ever brought out the tumultuous turn-out on this occasion.31
12
A Merry Song of Spring
‘There’s gold in them there stock markets – and how it shines this bright May morning!’ proclaimed the brazenly pro-Tory tabloid the Daily Sketch on the 5th, the day after Nottingham’s loving cup:
These are great days for anyone who has a stake in Britain’s drive for prosperity. Share values are UP yet again. From TV to textiles . . . radio to rubber . . . banks to breweries – the markets sing a merry song of spring.
Car sales – always the best index of a boom – are hitting new heights. And the peak season is still to come.
Can we keep it up? Yes – and yes again.
Indeed, only one thing was missing from the feel-good prospectus: ‘All we want now is for the summer to follow the market’s example – and get in the golden groove, too!’
Two families this Tuesday had unashamedly local preoccupations. ‘I’m afraid Essex is a very competitive county,’ a Woodfordian had recently admitted to Willmott and Young about parental anxieties concerning the 11-plus, and Judy Haines in Chingford would probably not have pretended to be any different. Happily, a year after Ione’s success, it turned out fine again: ‘At 9.30 (as I was trying to concentrate on ironing) a loud rat-a-tat-tat came on the front door, and there was Pamela with Cynthia Gayton. “I’ve passed,” she cried. What joy. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake and then kissed them both.’ Up on Humberside, the preoccupation was with Hull’s imminent appearance in the Rugby League Cup Final. ‘I shall be pleased when it’s all over,’ Tom Courtenay’s mother frankly wrote to him in London. ‘There seems to be an atmosphere all the time.’ Tom’s father wrote also, making plans for his 10.15 arrival at King’s Cross on Saturday morning: ‘I am looking forward to a real good day. Our programme will be a drink to give us an appetite then a good feed so I’m hoping you know where a good pint and a meal can be had. We shall have plenty of time. I think if we get to Wembley Stadium by 2.30 we should be in clover.’ But for John Osborne, it was thorns all the way on Tuesday evening. The first night at the Palace Theatre of his satirical, anti-Establishment musical, The World of Paul Slickey, featured booing during the show, more booing at the end, and afterwards Osborne being chased up the Charing Cross Road. Heap reckoned it ‘crude, tawdry, puerile and putrid’; in Noël Coward’s eyes, it was a case of ‘bad lyrics, dull music, idiotic, would-be daring dialogue’, the whole thing the work of ‘a conceited, calculating young man blowing a little trumpet’. Reviews were almost unanimously hostile, Larkin noting with bipartisan pleasure that ‘it got a bashing in both the D. Telegraph & the M. Gardener’, and when Mollie Panter-Downes a few weeks later attended a matinee performance, ‘the seat holders in the stalls huddled together like shipwrecked mariners in a sea of red plush’. Of course, the conceited Osborne had had it coming, and Slickey was clearly a second-rate (or worse) piece. But Michael Billington also has a point when he argues that the way in which it was ‘elevated from a resounding flop into an instrument of generational revenge’ – John Gielgud among those booing at the curtain calls – revealed the ‘cultural chasm’ across which ‘mutually hostile groups’ were now glaring.1
This was not the only chasm. On Thursday the 7th, two days after Osborne’s debacle, C. P. Snow gave the Rede lecture at Cambridge, taking as his theme ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. It did not come out of the blue – Snow himself almost three years earlier had written in the New Statesman about ‘The Two Cultures’, i.e. literary and scientific, while Richard Crossman more recently had lamented how ‘the preservation of an anachronistic elite educational system’, in the form of public-school-dominated Oxbridge, had created ‘an Establishment with a set of cultural values hostile to technology and applied science, and with an arrogant belief that a mind trained in mathematics, classics or pure science can solve any problem to which it gives attention’. But it was this celebrated lecture, almost instantly printed as a book, that crystallised public attention around the subject. Ostensibly, Snow was the meritocratic (son of a Leicester clerk), Olympian, dispassionate observer – on the one hand an accomplished novelist who would coi
n the phrase ‘the corridors of power’, on the other hand Scientific Adviser to the Civil Service Commission – but in reality, although of course he called for a better mutual understanding between the two cultures, his principal target was men of letters.
‘If the scientists have the future in their bones,’ Snow declared, ‘then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world.’ He continued with an attack on what he saw as the elitist guardians of that Luddite, anti-scientific culture:
They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.
Modernity Britain Page 36
