Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Almost inevitably, a year and a half after Sputnik had apparently revealed the Soviet lead in the global power game, he looked east for the solution. ‘I believe the Russians have judged the situation sensibly,’ boomed Snow.

  They have a deeper insight into the scientific revolution than we have, or than the Americans have. The gap between the cultures doesn’t seem to be anything like so wide as with us. If one reads contemporary Soviet novels, for example, one finds that their novelists can assume in their audience – as we cannot – at least a rudimentary acquaintance with what industry is all about.

  At the end, he issued a ringing call for education to become more scientific, more technological, more progressive, more modern:

  All the arrows point the same way. Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense, as well as in the most practical. When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom. For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country’s special danger, for the sake of the western society living precariously rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans and the whole West to look at our education with fresh eyes.2

  This sunny Thursday was also the day of local elections. Labour overall sustained some 200 losses – ‘the Tories have got in!’ exalted Kenneth Williams in St Pancras, adding ‘so that’s got rid of all those Red Flag merchants who have queened it so arrogantly & for so long’ – but soon afterwards a cautious Macmillan definitively confirmed that there would be no general election before the autumn. ‘On a hot summer night,’ wondered a Labour agent about the poor turnout, ‘was Diana Dors or Bob Monkhouse more important than exercising the long-fought-for right to vote?’ Results were still coming in when on Friday morning, at Pentonville Prison, a 25-year-old scaffolder, Ronald Marwood, was hanged for stabbing to death a policeman outside a dance hall in Seven Sisters Road, Holloway. ‘Cassandra is out of touch with public opinion when he suggests that the case against Marwood was prejudiced because the victim was a policeman on duty,’ a letter to the Daily Mirror asserted earlier in the week after the paper’s star columnist had vainly called for a reprieve (as had 150 MPs, almost all of them Labour). ‘The reverse is the case, for the public, in the main, do not like policemen.’ A few weeks later, an opinion poll showed over half of British adults believing that ‘all murderers should be liable to the death penalty’, with barely a tenth wanting outright abolition. On the evening of Marwood’s execution, Frankly Howerd, the new TV sitcom starring Frankie Howerd, had its second outing, and it was already clear it was shaping up to be a humiliating flop. Whereas ‘we never quite know how Hancock will respond,’ observed Punch’s Henry Turton, the Howerd character was ‘entirely predictable’; soon afterwards an unforgiving BBC executive privately called him a ‘neurotic performer unable to make up his mind whether he wants to be a slapstick comedian or a comic actor’. For Howerd himself, as with Bobby Thompson up on Tyne Tees, it seemed a career-destroying moment. Next morning, Saturday the 9th, Tom Courtenay’s father duly caught the 5.45 from Hull and the duo made it to Wembley, but the RADA student was distracted by the prospect of performing in Chekhov that evening at Senate House and had to leave shortly before half-time. Hull crashed 30–13 to a Wigan outfit spearheaded by Billy Boston – powerful, Welsh and black.3

  Dealing ‘tactfully’ with ‘all shades of opinion in a controversial issue’, was how The Times’s film critic the day before had praised Basil Dearden’s London-set whodunit, Sapphire. The issue in question was race, and Oswald Mosley – veteran fascist and now the Union Movement’s prospective parliamentary candidate for North Kensington – spoke on the Sunday for an hour in Trafalgar Square, undaunted by continuous chanting of ‘Down with Hitler’, ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘Gestapo’, as well as being struck on the shoulder by an orange. ‘Mosley is back, here in London, and anyone who thought Fascism was dead in 1945 is a fool,’ Alan Sillitoe wrote soon afterwards to his brother. ‘He and his thugs are on the streets, organising meetings, stoking hatred.’ Then, in the early hours of the following Sunday, the 17th, a young black carpenter from Antigua, Kelso Cochrane, was attacked and murdered in Notting Hill by white youths, as he walked back – bespectacled, with hand in bandages – from Paddington General Hospital after going there for tablets to ease the pain of his broken thumb. That Sunday evening, with the news of the murder having rapidly spread, the local reporter Colin Eades toured North Kensington. ‘Young white boys walked the streets in twos and threes giving an occasional whistle and jeer at known coloured men,’ while in West Indian clubs ‘the general attitude was one of patience and determination – a determination not to be pushed around’. Two days later, with the police insisting to general disbelief that the murder had no racial significance, Mosley issued a statement, describing as ‘nonsense’ the suggestion that he had contributed to racial tension and thus Cochrane’s death. Would the murderers be found? ‘Notting Hill has closed its eyes and its ears to this crime,’ conceded the Kensington News and West London Times on Friday the 22nd. Indeed they never were tracked down – at least in part a reflection of how deeply and impermeably there ran in the police culture at this time what one can only call institutional racism.

  That Friday evening, the journalist John Gale stood outside a youth club in Notting Hill and found out what a handful of white youths thought about the blacks:

  With the white women and that. The birds. Whores, like. Buying up all the houses. Riding around in big cars. Layabouts.

  Well, they do jobs you don’t like. You wouldn’t like to work in the gasworks or the sewers, would you?

  They don’t like to work. They’re lazy. I’ve worked with them. Metal polishing. Do they work? Do they nothing!

  Between you and me, as long as there are coloured blokes in this district there’ll be trouble. Giving the area a bad name. If you’re on holiday, and you say you’re from Notting Hill no one wants to know you. We was in Southend and a copper picks us up and we was in the nick all night.

  Altogether, Gale discerned in the youths ‘a reflection of the environment: of the peeling stucco, littered newspapers, festering basements’.4

  Next day, Colin Jordan – a 35-year-old Coventry schoolteacher, visiting North Kensington at weekends in his capacity as national organiser of the recently founded, pro-repatriation White Defence League – spoke to the press. ‘We are reflecting an opinion,’ he insisted. ‘It may be that it goes unspoken most of the time, but it is held by the overwhelming majority of people in this country.’ Parading the banner ‘Keep Britain White’, the League held a meeting in Trafalgar Square on the Sunday, as students chanted in riposte, ‘No Colour Bar in Britain’ and ‘Who Killed Kelso Cochrane?’ In the event, contrary to some expectations, Notting Hill did not blow up as a result of the Cochrane murder – on the 26th, Eades walked at dusk around ‘a troubled area’ and found ‘emptied streets’ and a ‘deathly hush’, with ‘people watching the streets below from open windows, or, more cautiously, from behind curtains’ – but after Cochrane’s packed Ladbroke Grove funeral on 6 June, some 1,200 mourners formed a procession a quarter of a mile long from there to Kensal Green cemetery. ‘I was pregnant with my second child and I stood in line feeling the shame of my colour,’ remembered (many years later) Maureen, an Irishwoman who earlier in the decade had married a black musician called Ozzie. ‘Those near me were all white, all feeling that it was our fault for not stopping the poison. Ozzie changed from that day. He was so carefree when we met. I was a singer. He became dark, afraid, and sometimes he took it out on me. He saw me as white, not the woman he had fallen in love with. When he died [in 1970], I was the only white woman at his funeral.’

  Racial harmony, let alone racial integration, seemed a distant prospect in the summer of 1959. ‘The immigrants are living in tight pockets turning inwards to themselves and it would seem intent on creating a “l
ittle Jamaica” or the like within the City,’ reported Mr A. Gibbs, Birmingham’s Liaison Officer for Coloured People, to the City Council at around the time of Cochrane’s killing. After spelling out some salient facts – 35,200 non-white immigrants in Birmingham occupying only 3,200 houses; those immigrants including 24,000 West Indians, 7,000 Pakistanis and 2,000 Indians – most of the well-meaning, deeply paternalistic report was a plea for a properly resourced home-visiting service, on the grounds that by the time immigrants reluctantly visited his office it was usually too late to help: ‘They talk things over with each other, follow suggested courses of action which are ill-conceived and doomed to failure, and they finish up talking “colour bar” when they finally come to the office.’ Situations where a home-visiting service would be able to help, went on Gibbs, included child welfare when mothers went out to work, complaints by tenants, domestic troubles, health issues, employment problems and voluntary repatriation. Such situations were epitomised by (in a local paper’s summary of the report) ‘the prostrate mother of a murdered girl; the father in Jamaica asking for news of his son – last address Birmingham; the West Indians who lost their house deposits “through criminal activities of certain estate agents”; the West Indian who wrote to the Queen asking for help’. And Gibbs himself solemnly (though in the event to little avail) made his case:

  The normal outside influences which are brought to bear within the homes of white people are absent because there is no way open at the moment to introduce them. Unless the apparent mistakes of the present are rectified, neither integration nor a stable community will be achieved. There will exist a coloured quarter made up of people who wish to have the best of both worlds yet are not prepared to accept the moral obligations of either. Very few people will have access and very little information will leak to the outside.

  He might have wished, though, for a rather different headline in the Birmingham Mail: ‘White Women Who Live With Coloured Men’.5

  During the second half of May, intense scorn was directed at the England football team for losing successive friendlies in such minor outposts as Peru and Mexico; the days of the Aldershot Show seemed numbered after disappointing attendances despite Princess Margaret’s presence; the first Commonwealth Day (replacing Empire Day) was marked in a low-key way; Dame Margot Fonteyn appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium; Gladys Langford lamented how ‘boys & girls, tiny or adolescent, wear gaudy trousers, long or short, plastic hair slides, multi-coloured, plastic rings for horse-tail hair styles’; and the property developer Charles Clore provoked virulent opposition by bidding for Watneys. ‘I disapprove of take-overs,’ declared A. P. Herbert soon afterwards. ‘It’s simply not right for someone to reap the benefits of other people’s work just by offering a ridiculous amount of money. What does this Mr Clore know about pubs, anyway?’ The two great emerging Marxist historians were in contrasting modes. E. P. Thompson declared in the New Reasoner that the New Left of the future would ‘break with the administrative fetishes of the Fabian tradition, and insist that socialism can only be built from below, by calling to the full upon the initiatives of the people’, just as Eric Hobsbawm (no friend of the New Left) was publishing, as ‘Francis Newton’, his survey The Jazz Scene. Larkin’s Observer review was respectful enough – though ‘there are times when, reading Mr Newton’s account of this essentially working-class art, the course of jazz seems almost a little social or economic parable’. He added that ‘Mr Newton has little charm as a writer’.6

  Class could not be avoided. Ian Rodger’s radio column in the Listener besought the writers of Mrs Dale’s Diary to create ‘something more than permanently ignorant “proles” and continually omniscient middle-class managing women’, while the release of the film version of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (by now ‘easily digestible and mildly dated’, according to Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express) prompted discussion about whether Richard Burton had become too grand to play an authentic working-class anti-hero. On Saturday the 30th, Oh Boy! – live from the Hackney Empire, as usual – bowed out with a Cliff Richard/Marty Wilde duet, and two days later pop music on television took a decisive ‘family’ turn with the first Juke Box Jury. The impeccably smooth David Jacobs was in the chair, and – in addition to ‘Britain’s number one Dee-Jay’, Pete Murray – the pioneering panel comprised ‘the popular songstress’ Alma Cogan, ‘popular recording star’ Gary Miller and, almost ex officio, ‘a typical teenager’ in Susan Stranks. The programme was immediately followed by the first British showing of Bronco, with the BBC trusting to Ty Hardin as the roving cowboy to challenge the dominance of a hugely popular genre that ITV had established through Cheyenne, Gun Law and above all Wagon Train.

  These TV developments coincided with the piquant case of Eftihia Christos. ‘SCANDAL OF THE HARD WORKING MOTHER’ was the Sketch’s indignant front-page headline on Friday the 29th after Mrs Christos, from the council estate at Dog Kennel Hill, East Dulwich, had been sentenced by the Lambeth magistrate to two months’ imprisonment, waking up this morning (her 39th birthday) in Holloway Prison. She was a widow, her husband having died six years earlier of TB; three of her four children had TB; and her crime was concealing the fact that on various occasions in the past four years she had supplemented a National Assistance allowance by earning two or three pounds a week at home – mainly by sewing hooks and eyes on clothes, with the two shillings per dozen garments set aside for the benefit of her children. The Mirror was similarly indignant, fiercely attacking the magistrate, 69-year-old Geoffrey Rose, for his lack of compassion; next day it was able to report that over a thousand London dockers had not only signed a petition calling for Christos’s release but were collecting money for the children. The double denouement came on Monday, 1 June, as Christos was released on bail and Rose was taken ill at his Oxfordshire farmhouse, dying hours later. Even-handedly, the London dockers sent a telegram of condolence to the magistrate’s widow.7

  The rest of June was the time of part of Southport Pier burning down (machines crashing apart on the beach, people instantly gathering to pocket still-warm pennies); of the Minister of Supply, Aubrey Jones, going to Paris to propose the joint building of a supersonic civil aircraft; of Vanessa Redgrave appearing in Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘played Helena in the tradition of that fine old English schoolgirl, Joyce Grenfell’, observed Al Alvarez); and, in Madge Martin’s words, of ‘such a spell of lovely weather’, though on another day ‘hotter and more trying than ever’. On the 8th, Nigel Pargetter was born and George Lyttelton in Suffolk hosted his old pupil John Bayley and his wife Iris Murdoch (‘I liked the tousled, heelless, ladder-stockinged little lady’); on the 9th, Heap took his son to Littlehampton, where ‘in a dingy café alongside the Funfair’ tea was served in ‘small cardboard cartons at 5d a cup!’; on the 15th, Macmillan recorded with satisfaction (‘the crowds were enormous, & very enthusiastic’) the first time the Trooping of the Colour had been on a Saturday; on the 17th, Liberace won £8,000 damages plus costs after the Mirror’s Cassandra had strongly implied that the pianist, a ‘slag-heap of lilac-covered hokum’, was homosexual; and on the 19th, Charles Clore bowed to the hostile mood music by reluctantly withdrawing his bid for Watneys. The following week, some five dozen miners at the Devon Colliery near Alloa in Clackmannanshire spent 52½ very cold hours underground – ‘singing, playing card games and draughts’, with local people sending down food at regular intervals – in protest at the colliery’s announced closure (along with 15 others). Eventually, recalled one of them, ‘the pit committee called us up. The Coal Board had agreed to meet a delegation of miners in Edinburgh to discuss the closures. But the net effect was that the pit still closed.’8

  The collapse in the demand for coal, the sunshine blazing, a national printers’ strike under way that affected magazines, local papers and book publishers (including delaying the last volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet), the Tories ahead in the polls – June would have been a difficult time
for Labour even without the start of a major defence row, particularly unhelpful just as Gallup was about to show only 15 per cent in favour of unilateralism. ‘I have led more controversies and rebellions than anyone else here,’ Nye Bevan as shadow Foreign Secretary admonished the unilateralist Frank Cousins at a heated meeting on the 23rd between Labour Party leaders and the TUC, ‘but whenever Elections approach I call for unity against the common foe.’ Eventually a form of wording was temporarily agreed, causing Macmillan to worry that Labour’s ‘“compromise” policy on the H Bomb’ might ‘have a rather spurious success’. But a lengthy private letter to Gaitskell on the 26th made it clear that Cousins would continue to press for a pledge that Britain not only would not use the nuclear bomb first but would suspend production of it – ‘in the firm belief’, he helpfully explained, ‘that ambiguity on any aspect of our defence policy would be the most damaging thing in our approach to the electorate’. Gaitskell’s even lengthier reply to Cousins on the 30th gave little ground, insisting that if Labour won the election he did not want to find himself in the position ‘in a year or two hence unable to do something which I believed to be right for the country because of some commitment I have made now’. He ended by pointedly expressing confidence that ‘you will appreciate the great importance of presenting, as far as we are able, a united front at the moment’.9

  Also on the 30th, Arnold Wesker’s Roots, his second play of a projected trilogy that had begun with Chicken Soup with Barley, had its London opening. Joan Plowright (about to become Lady Olivier) starred as Beatie Bryant, ‘an ample, blonde, healthy-faced young woman’ who had returned to impoverished rural Norfolk after living in London, and Heap that first night called it ‘an exceeding well written and richly rewarding play, frequently funny, occasionally moving and never in the least dull’, all of which made Wesker ‘a far more promising playwright than John Osborne’. Reviews were mixed, but most were favourably struck by Wesker’s full-frontal, unsentimental treatment of the working class. ‘Even in the Welfare State,’ reflected Alan Brien,