Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Come rain or shine, we would trail down the cliff path to our beach hut, No 2,378, with a plastic beach bag stuffed with sliced white bread, margarine, meat paste, a couple of Lyons individual fruit pies and, on the last day, a pack of Kunzle cakes.

  Once news got round our digs that we had a hut, other guests would often ‘just happen’ to pass by. ‘Could we just dry our Jenny out of the wind?’ A tricky one to refuse, so a cuppa would be offered, which generally extended into lunch. By the end of the week, our four-seater hut was accommodating a dozen interlopers most days.

  ‘Look at the time!’ my father would say each day at precisely 5.10 p.m., followed by a mad dash up the path to the digs, seconds after the hallowed 5.30 p.m. unbolting of the front door.

  After dinner, still hungry, we would stroll out to our favourite Forte’s café and tuck into vanilla slices and mugs of Horlicks.

  And then, with the sky dark, the final ritual of piling into the Austin, which ‘chugged along the seafront between Boscombe and Bournemouth piers, as we oohhed and aahed at fairy lights on lamp posts and the moon shimmering on the sea’.5

  On Sunday 16 August, eight days after the Hagues left Bridlington and the day after the East Riding smallholder Dennis Dee dropped off his wife and four children for a week’s caravan holiday there, the Street Offences Act 1959 came into action, immediately driving prostitutes off the street. Three days later it was the end of trolley buses on the East End’s Mile End and Bow routes; two days after that, Princess Margaret’s 29th birthday was marked by the release of an official portrait (photographer: Antony Armstrong-Jones); and on Saturday the 22nd (Dee fetching the family from Brid, ‘all looked fit & brown, good weather’) the Manchester Guardian announced that from Monday it would be known as the Guardian, reflecting the fact that two-thirds of its 183,000 circulation (72,000 behind its ‘chief competitor’ The Times) lay outside the Manchester area. The following Tuesday evening, Everton played away at Burnley and lost 5–2, bad news for the football special back to Liverpool. ‘The train’s return route was marked by broken glass and various missiles hurled from windows,’ reported a local paper, ‘and the trip was punctuated by halts as passengers pulled the communication cord.’ Altogether, 20 coach windows were smashed, and many electric light bulbs removed from their fittings and smashed, but a British Railways spokesman opted for the laconic: ‘Two policemen travelled with the train and they had their hands full.’ Four days later the Toffeemen were at Bolton, lost again, and the home goalie Eddie Hopkinson was ‘pelted with broken glass, sticks, apple cores and other missiles by hooligan fans behind the goal’.

  In Liverpool itself that Saturday evening, the opening night of the Casbah Coffee Club, in the cellar of a large Victorian house in the West Derby district, starred the Quarry Men, the start of a welcome residency after treading water. They got a warm reception from almost 300 – the more troublesome Teds kept out by a bouncer – but Paul McCartney’s brother Mike vomited after swallowing hair lacquer from a bottle claiming to be lemonade. The weekend’s big story, though, was the mass break-out from Carlton Approved School in Bedfordshire. Over 80 boys absconded on Sunday, but by next day, after a police search with tracker dogs, only 11 were still free. ‘It is not true that we are allowed too much freedom at the school – it’s just the opposite,’ a non-absconder told the press. ‘Although we know an approved school is for punishment, the discipline is much too harsh. Our only recreation is a film show on various occasions, and otherwise we work hard in our different trades. Only the other night one member of the staff smashed our portable radio, and another took the pick-up arm from a record-player.’ ‘I am sorry,’ he added, ‘to see all this rioting happen, but some good may probably come out of it.’6

  The weather was at last getting a little cooler, and Madge Martin on the 31st detected in Oxford even ‘a real autumnal nip in the air’, albeit short-lived. That Monday the British Home Stores head office in Marylebone had a telling absence. ‘Frankie [a much younger colleague] not in,’ noted Florence Turtle, ‘her sister in law had had a baby, & Frankie had to mind the baby boy aged two. I should never have dreamed of staying from work for such a reason. Jobs are so easy to come by nowadays.’ The presence of the day was Ike’s, as Macmillan, only six months after the publicity coup of a summit in Moscow, now stage-managed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s visit to London, including a live television conversation – full of mutually warm bromides – between the two men, both in dinner jackets, direct from No. 10. The American’s ‘simplicity and directness came over rather better, most Londoners seemed to think, than the Prime Minister’s urbane style, which appeared a shade uneasy’, Mollie Panter-Downes informed her readers.

  That same evening, 825 men reported for work at Morris Motors’ first night shift at Cowley, as the company sought to boost production to meet ever-growing demand, while down the road a new revue, Pieces of Eight, opened at the New Theatre. Peter Cook, still at Cambridge, wrote most of the sketches (‘warm, human, topical and spot on the mark’, according to the Oxford Mail), additional material came from Harold Pinter with ‘several bright sketches’, and the senior member of a youthful ensemble was the ‘quite irrepressible’ Kenneth Williams, ‘this small, cherubic bundle of high spirits’. The cherub himself recorded his mixed emotions: ‘I hang above flies while cast do the opening & then descend on a wire. It was unadulterated agony. The audience was wonderful. They behaved charmingly throughout. There were quite a few vultures from London but I didn’t care reely.’7

  Two distinctive new novels were up for scrutiny in the TLS in early September. ‘Low-life pastoral’ was the reviewer’s unenthusiastic tag for Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, a novel about teenagers two years after his City of Spades about black immigrants. ‘Sarcastic and facetious rather than humorous’, an ‘unsuccessful mixture of picaresque invention and knowing “copy” ’, a 19-year-old narrator who was not only a ‘pornographic photographer’ but ‘an extremely sententious young man’ – there was praise only for the ‘vivid’ London (mainly Notting Hill) descriptions, though even they were ‘largely written in a sort of up-to-date Runyonese’. D. J. Enright in the Spectator was also unconvinced – ‘Mr MacInnes himself can hardly be a teenager, and much of his “teenage thing” rings false’ – but the New Statesman’s critic was far more positive. ‘Although the decade is almost over, there are few novelists writing about the late nineteen-fifties,’ he declared, whereas this ‘sings with the vitality and restlessness that is seeping out of the glass skyscrapers and the crowded streets’. He quoted with pleasure how the novel’s hero looks around him and says, ‘My lord, one thing is certain, and that’s that they’ll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.’ Altogether, MacInnes had done ‘a first-class reporting job’ on ‘a generation that has more money, leisure and independence than any of its predecessors’, a generation instinctively impatient of class distinctions.

  The reviewer was a 30-year-old Daily Mirror journalist, Keith Waterhouse – whose own new novel, Billy Liar, was the other one being appraised by the TLS. There, enthusiasm for the subject was muted, the reviewer calling Billy Fisher, the undertaker’s clerk, ‘a hapless welfare-state Yorkshire chap’; but the novel as a whole was acclaimed as ‘a brilliantly funny book, rich in absurdities and beautifully edged writing’. Other critics also dished out the plaudits, with Maurice Richardson in the Statesman applauding how ‘Billy’s daydreams, with their amalgam of telly-formed consciousness and literary ideas and juke-box sex, and his dialogue, with its scriptwriter’s wisecracks and puns, are contemporary right up to the minute’. A long, multimedia life lay ahead for Waterhouse’s creation. But in retrospect, arguably what is most striking is not so much the contribution that Billy Liar made to the cultural northern drift, but more Waterhouse’s delight in guying the crusty, stolid, narrow-minded northern stereotype, whether in Billy’s uncomfortable encounters with Councillor Duxbury or in his fantasy conversations with the Stradhoughton Echo’s columnist ‘Ma
n o’ the Dales’. One reviewer, John Coleman, referred to ‘that humorist’s playground, the grim North’, but this was humour with a sardonic albeit half-affectionate twist.8

  Yorkshire’s cricketers did their bit on Tuesday the 1st by winning the county championship – ‘one in the eye for J. Wardle’, noted Larkin – and thereby ending Surrey’s remarkable seven-year run. The following weekend included a section of the West Ham crowd starting a slow handclap and chanting ‘Take him off’ after the visiting goalkeeper was knocked out; Juke Box Jury (Murray and Stranks joined this week by Eric Sykes and Cleo Laine) in its now regular Saturday early evening slot; the death of Kay Kendall, only 32; and a one-off performance at the Royal Court of Wesker’s early play, The Kitchen. Too many characters becoming ‘People, and then Ideas’, reckoned Brien, but Alvarez called it, ‘without any qualifications at all, the best play of the decade’. Next day, Monday the 7th, saw the unveiling in Bethnal Green – in the new Roman Road market square adjacent to the fairly recent Greenways housing estate – of a group of modernist bronze statues. Depicting the borough’s traditional ‘Blind Beggar and Dog’, this was the work of 29-year-old Chelsea sculptress Elisabeth Frink, who calmly told a local paper, ‘I never worry about people’s reactions to my work.’ The mayor, Alderman Bill Hart, did the honours, but among those watching, one woman apparently spoke for most. ‘It’s disgusting,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t see how it has cost £1,000. Fancy spending money like that. The council ought to have their heads examined.’ A youngster got hold of one of the blind beggar’s legs, which swayed slightly before he was told to stop by a man who then said, ‘It’s very frail. I bet it won’t be there after Saturday.’ There was more vox pop next morning when the TV cameras visited. ‘It looks all right,’ remarked 69-year-old George Biggs, ‘and if I knew what it was it would be even better.’ But Councillor G. A. Hadley, chairman of the Housing Committee which had commissioned it, was adamant: ‘It’s typical Bethnal Green. Put a fence round to keep people away? Certainly not. People will like it when they get used to it.’9

  These were challenging, invigorating days for Edward Thompson. During August he signed a contract to write a textbook of 60,000 words on working-class politics between 1759 and 1921 – a commission that ultimately came out in 1963 as the rather different The Making of the English Working Class. More pressing, though, was the organising and supporting of the New Left’s only candidate in the almost certainly imminent general election. This was the highly intelligent miner Lawrence Daly, who after leaving the Communist Party had founded the Fife Socialist League and was now about to stand in West Fife. ‘Brother, I cannot produce a loudspeaker & van,’ Thompson wrote from his Halifax home to Daly at the end of August. ‘It is just possible we might lay hands on a speaker, but not a van. People just don’t have vans to lend around.’ More missives followed:

  Look. This Ernest Rodker lad is a first-class lad. He is, what a young socialist comrade ought to be, heart soul and body in the cause. He has initiative and good ideas. He is willing to listen and learn. He has proved himself as an organiser – did most of the publicity in London for the first Aldermaston. It would be good for him. The only problem? A beard. I have written to him and suggested to him he takes off his beard. If he does, I am telling you Bro. Daly, you will damn well have him for your campaign, and you will thank us all afterwards. (2 September)

  I think Ernest Rodker has been choked off with the beard business; but he might be up for a weekend . . . In my view you ought to send an address to every elector, since I think there will be arguments inside families, especially between young voters and their parents. (8 September)

  The 8th itself was yet another warm, sunny day; Gallup put the Tories 5½ points ahead; and Macmillan at last fired the starting gun, with polling day to be exactly one month hence.10

  Galaxy, Picnic, Caramac (‘Smooth as chocolate . . . tasty as toffee . . . yet it’s new all through!’), Knorr Instant Cubes, Bettaloaf, Nimble, New Zealand Cheddar (‘Now I’m sure they’ll grow up firm and strong’), Jacob’s Rose Cream Marshmallow Biscuits, Sifta Table Salt (‘Six Gay Colours’), Player’s Bachelor Tipped, Rothmans King Size, wipe-clean surfaces, Sqezy (‘in the easy squeezy pack’), coloured Lux (‘four heavenly pastel shades of blue, pink, green and yellow, as well as your favourite white’), Fairy Snow, new Tide with double-action Bluinite, Persil (‘washes whiter – more safely’), Nylon, Terylene, Orlon, Acrilan, Tricel, Daks skirts, Jaeger girls, ‘U’ bra by Silhouette (‘Gives You the Look that He Admires’), Body Mist, Mum Rollette, Odo-ro-no, Twink (‘The Home Perm that Really Lasts’), Pakamac, Hotpoint Pacemaker, Pye Portable, Philips Philishave, ‘Get Up to Date – Go Electric!’11 Irrefutably, 1959 was the year of consumption: refrigerator sales up from 449,000 (in 1958) to 849,000; washing machine sales up from 876,000 to 1.2 million; vacuum cleaner sales up from 1.1 million to 1.5 million; radio and electrical equipment sales up by 21 per cent; motor-car sales (including exports) up from 1.05 million to 1.19 million; jewellery sales, ladies’ underwear sales, money spent on eating out – all up by significant percentages. Even so, there still remained a considerable way to go in the consumer durables revolution: TV sets may have been in roughly two out of three British homes by the summer of 1959, but the ratio for telephones was one in two, for washing machines one in four and for refrigerators one in ten, while only one in three households had a car.12

  Integral to the FT’s analysis in July of the ‘Consumer Boom’ – fuelled by the end of hire-purchase restrictions, reductions in purchase and income tax, and a ‘general feeling of buoyancy and optimism’ – was ‘the rising trend in sales of radio and television sets, records, cameras and photographic equipment’. Soon afterwards, in late August, the National Radio and Television Exhibition at Earl’s Court (heavily plugged by the BBC, including on Saturday Club) featured not only the technological breakthrough (and Anthony Heap’s future nightmare) of the transistor radio, but also the latest TV sets, whose sales as a whole had almost doubled during the first half of 1959. Hitherto the great majority of sets had been 17-inch, but by now there were signs (noted the FT in its exhibition preview) that the 21-inch set was ‘at last beginning to make some headway’, with ‘the new wide-angle cathode ray tube’ making it ‘possible to design a far slimmer model reducing the 21-inch set to more manageable dimensions’. Up in Liverpool, to chime in with Earl’s Court, the prominent local retailer T. J. Hughes held its own Radio and Television Exhibition, with the sets on display still the smaller screen size but with plenty else to compensate, such as the Philco Slender Seventeener II:

  Takes up only a fraction of the space that older bulkier sets needed

  Biggest possible picture from 17" tube

  Finest full circuit gives perfect clarity and definition

  Finely proportioned in the contemporary style

  Rich walnut veneers with scratch-resistant finish

  Ekco still had the largest market share among set manufacturers, but Bush, Pye, Ferguson, Murphy, Philips and Sobell were all pushing hard. ‘Elegant slim cabinet covered in simulated pigskin with matching mouldings and carrying handle’, promised a recent ad for the Ferguson Flight 546, while a rival made creative use of its name: ‘Touch of genius! BUSH BUTTON channel change TV . . . With this exclusive Bush feature, you can change channels instantly. Once you’re switched on, you have BBC or ITA at your fingertips – accurately, instantaneously!’13

  In the kitchen – itself transformed by the mass arrival of light plastics, whether (itemises the historian Jan Boxshall) in the form of washing-up bowls or bins or laundry baskets or storage jars or tablecloths – two of the keenest marketing wars during 1959 were over soups and breakfast cereals. Heinz Tomato still accounted for one in every four tins of canned soup, and chicken and mushroom soups were still stalwarts. But, noted the FT, ‘green pea and spinach are not what they were, and the present tendency is towards lighter or “cream” soups, and those with a meat content’, while Knorr-dominated packet soups,
‘almost negligible five years ago’, now made up over 20 per cent of UK soup sales. As for breakfast cereals, their production some 33 per cent up since 1953, ‘the latest arrivals on the market have been for the most part sugared, or pre-sweetened, cereals, almost all of which have contained some kind of free gift and have been carefully packaged to appeal to children’, though the pink paper did not deny that ‘brand loyalty is fairly strong among the old-established brands – Cornflakes (Kellogg Company of GB), Shredded Wheat (Nabisco Foods) and Puffed Wheat (Quaker Oats) for instance’. In terms of trends more generally, the National Food Survey carried out this year found that convenience foods (i.e. already cooked and canned, quick-frozen or dehydrated) were increasingly popular, taking around a quarter of total food expenditure on the part of younger housewives; that old-fashioned staples like potatoes, tea, herrings and kippers were being consumed less, while relatively expensive commodities like poultry, coffee (especially instant) and fresh citrus fruit were being consumed more; that housewives had lost much of their appetite for turning fat into dripping; and that, among regional variations, the people of the north-west ate the most carrots and onions, Midlanders the most canned and bottled tomatoes, and the Welsh the most pickles and sauces.14

  If dripping’s halcyon days were over, so too were tripe’s. In July the Manchester Evening News ran a large, rather desperate, front-page ad for UCP tripe (‘EVERY-NIGHT supper dish – because it is LIGHT, TASTY and NOURISHING . . . and ensures a good night’s REST . . . with plenty of ZEST for tomorrow’) that convinced few, just days before, in the same paper, Mary Murphy’s feature ‘NOW TRY THAT SALAD THE FRENCH WAY’ included a recipe for French salad dressing. Other signs of Continental influence in 1959 were the popularity not only of Italian motor scooters but also of three-wheeler bubble cars like Isettas and Messerschmitts; the opening in Soho of the informal, modestly priced La Terrazza, ‘the Trat’; and at Burton’s, the arrival of the Italian suit (lighter, brighter, slimmer). The American influence had of course been spreading through the decade, but it was in 1959 that the Hungarian-born rag-trade salesman Willi Gertler won the UK distribution rights for Levi’s jeans. Further straws in the wind pointing away from the rigidities of the black-and-white past and towards a more relaxed, easeful, sophisticated future included electric razors becoming increasingly available, Colston marketing its first dishwasher, sales of untipped cigarettes dropping but those of filter-tipped rising fast, and Bronco’s coloured toilet paper successfully going national, with pink the most popular, followed by blue and green – perfect accompaniments for the new coloured bathroom suites.15