Voters found it harder to warm to the more obviously cerebral Hugh Gaitskell, even though in private life it was Macmillan who was the roundhead and Gaitskell the cavalier, fond of parties, of dancing, of extramarital activity. Such was the strength and obvious appeal of the Tories’ relentless focus on material gains that it proved impossible for Labour to shift the focus to an alternative central battleground. ‘We hear of prosperity, but it is not what it should be if you really want a government which planned expansion in this country,’ declared Gaitskell at Peterborough on the 26th, speaking on behalf of 29-year-old Betty Boothroyd. ‘The fact remains that millions of our fellow citizens are still living under conditions of hardship and poverty which the rest of us ought not to tolerate any longer.’ Of course, Labour tried: in a magazine-style radio broadcast the day before, in addition to Barbara Castle promising that Labour would ‘protect the housewife’ against ‘hire-purchase ramps and shoddy goods’, Harold Wilson inveighed against Tory-blessed ‘City deals based purely on get-rich-quick gains for a few’, Aneurin Bevan promised that a Labour government representing Britain would not be ‘tainted’ at a diplomatic summit ‘with the poisons of the Suez adventure’, and the author Compton Mackenzie flatly said of the Tories that ‘as I approach advanced old age, I feel my mind cannot be at the mercy of these boneheads’. Wilson in particular – quick-witted and starting to develop just a hint of the cheeky chappie – was emerging as a campaign star. Accusing the Tories of selling the prime minister ‘like a packet of tablets’ and of turning the Stock Exchange into ‘a casino’, his speech at Luton on the 20th was typical. ‘Thirteen Old Etonian ties!’ he exclaimed of the Cabinet in his homely Yorkshire accent. ‘They believe they were born to rule, as the Prime Minister’s favourite expression, “Masters and Men”, shows. They see the country divided into first- and second-class citizens. Their only problem is to get the second-class citizens to go on voting them their privileges and their perks.’2
It was not an easy campaign for Wilson’s one-time master. ‘He looks tired and weary,’ privately noted (early on) the Daily Herald’s Geoffrey Goodman, who was accompanying Bevan on his campaign. ‘Oppressed by the scale of the problems inside the Labour movement and outside in the wider political arena. Still bitterly critical of Gaitskell whom he regards as “sincere enough in his own beliefs – but no Socialist”.’ Soon afterwards, Goodman described for Herald readers how, on ‘a draughty corner in grey and smoky Blackburn’, outside the gates of the Mullard radio factory and listened to ‘in attentive silence’ by a thousand workers, the shadow Foreign Secretary ‘stood on a rickety chair beside an ageing car, speaking political poetry into a small microphone’, claiming among other things that the Tories if returned to power would at last get their wish and wreck the principle of a free National Health Service. More private gloom followed in more hotel rooms, as the late-night whisky flowed. ‘I am heartily sickened by the Parliamentary Labour Party,’ Bevan told Goodman at Llangollen on the 24th. ‘It is rotten through and through; corrupt, full of patronage, and seeking after patronage; unprincipled.’ Two days later, in Coventry, he was described by Goodman as ‘angry, frustrated, like a fenced tiger’, yet at the last – although probably already seriously ill – refusing to yield to defeatism. ‘There is always the unknown factor,’ he insisted. ‘You must carry on on that, if there is the chance of winning or at least doing something. If you forget that, you might as well commit suicide.’3
Altogether, 1,536 candidates – including 76 women, only one more than in 1955 – were contesting 636 seats. At North Devon a rising Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe, did much doffing of his brown bowler; at Epping and Falmouth two cricket-minded broadcasters, John Arlott and Alan Gibson, also stood for the Liberals; for the Tories, Finchley of course had Margaret Thatcher (‘A vote for any other person is a vote for a Socialist Government. Do not shirk this issue’) and Gower had the embryonic magazine publisher and property developer Michael Heseltine (‘I’m a young man looking to the future, not an old man grumbling about the past’). Labour’s ranks included, at Hampstead, a charismatic black GP, Dr David Pitt; at Southampton Test the 29-year-old Shirley Williams (promising ‘long-overdue provisions’ for the NHS, including a plan to encourage doctors to see patients by appointment); and, at Buckingham, the 36-year-old publisher Robert Maxwell, who had only recently become a party member and spent much of the campaign fending off accusations about his business reputation, military record and even racial origins. Another Labour candidate, Anthony Crosland, made at his adoption meeting a particular pitch to the young (‘They are bored by the Victorian restrictions we still maintain, by the stuffed-shirt and fuddy-duddy atmosphere of so much of life in Britain, by the lack of gaiety and opportunity open to them’), while at West Fife the Fife Socialist League’s Lawrence Daly continued to receive well-meaning advice from Edward Thompson in Halifax (‘You have got somehow or other to introduce more urgency and more sense of constructive politics into the campaign . . . Pit-head meetings are a “must”, whatever the difficulties’) and wore a full miner’s outfit, including pit boots and protective helmet, when he arrived at Dunfermline Sheriff Court to lodge his nomination. In its unpleasant way the most resonant candidacy was at North Kensington, where Sir Oswald Mosley stood for the Union Movement. ‘More sound and fury than anything else,’ recalls Bernard Bergonzi of ‘a rhetorical mode that was already becoming obsolete’. But Paul Barker remembers how, at a meeting in the Golborne Road, ‘that barking voice, those clutching gestures, were impossible not to rise to’ – so that eventually he ‘called out in protest’ at ‘the drip, drip, drip of innuendo’, leading to one of Mosley’s henchmen turning round and inaccurately shouting, ‘Go back to Jerusalem, sheenie!’4
In theory this was the first ‘TV election’, in the sense that a majority of voters now had sets, but in practice there were no interviews with party leaders (and of course no debates between them), while Tonight was taken off the air and Panorama told to ignore the contest. In any case, quite a few in the political class wished that the small screen had never been invented. A former Tory MP, Christopher Hollis, lamented in the Spectator that politicians were having to address the electorate in its own, debased language; Bevan claimed it was turning them into ‘pure salesmen – like American politicians’; and, addressing one evening a meeting of barely 50 people in a chilly hall, Labour’s candidate for North Kensington, George Rogers, lamented that ‘nowadays it is hopeless for a political candidate to compete with Wagon Train’. It was unlikely, moreover, that the television revolution significantly enhanced or deepened political engagement – even from the comfort of voters’ own homes. Audiences for the BBC’s Hustings programmes, involving candidates in generally rather sterile, formulaic debate, were found to be ‘very much less than might have been expected had the normal programme, Tonight, been broadcast’. Only 30 per cent of the viewing public watched party political broadcasts, 7 per cent down on 1955, and whereas normally the TV audience dropped by about one-sixth at 10 p.m., during the election (with the PPBs being broadcast simultaneously on both channels, at the parties’ insistence) the drop was over a quarter. Tellingly, that precipitate fall was ‘entirely due to the behaviour of ITV viewers’, barely half continuing to watch, whereas ‘the proportion of BBC viewers who continued to view actually rose somewhat’.
No one disputed which party took most of the PPB honours. ‘When I sat down to watch the first programme, it was absolutely catastrophic – awful,’ recalled the government’s chief whip, Edward Heath, about the first Tory effort, broadcast on the 19th and showing (as filmed in late July) Macmillan at his country home in discussion with Butler et al:
It was meant to be a report on our term in office, and there was Mr Macmillan sitting very comfortably in an armchair with his senior Cabinet colleagues around him. And Harold said: ‘Well now, Rab, I think we’ve done very well, don’t you?’ And Rab said, ‘Oh yes, I think we’ve done awfully well, particularly the things I’ve been doing.’ And Iain Ma
cleod then said, ‘Yes, well, I’ve done awfully well and we’ve all done very well indeed.’ After we’d had a quarter of an hour of this we were driven absolutely up the wall.
By contrast, the techno-savvy Anthony Wedgwood Benn was masterminding Labour’s efforts, assisted by Tonight’s Alasdair Milne, and the first one was unveiled two evenings later. Fronted by Benn himself – ‘a nice, intense jeune premier’, thought a critic – it consciously adopted a topical, Tonight-style approach, including Gaitskell direct to camera, film profiles of several contrasting Labour MPs, a report on the inadequate level of pensions (focusing on the Kingston upon Thames constituency of the pensions minister), and an attack on government waste and inefficiency. ‘Nearly every visual device was employed in a rapidly changing mélange of cartoon, diagrams, film shots, and direct interview,’ praised The Times. Other papers largely agreed. Altogether, reflected Benn, ‘we have scored a tremendous advantage’. The PM reluctantly concurred. ‘The Socialists had a very successful TV last night – much better than ours,’ noted Macmillan on the 22nd. ‘Gaitskell is becoming very expert.’5
Helped also by continuing fallout from the ‘Jasper Affair’ (a City scandal involving takeover malpractice and the misuse of building-society funds), Labour at this point appeared surprisingly buoyant, and Gaitskell in particular a plausible prime minister. Within days of the election being called, he had given a virtuoso performance at the TUC at Blackpool, making it impossible for Cousins to cause difficulties during the rest of the campaign, while his promise – highlighted in almost all his speeches – to raise pensions by ten shillings and thereby ‘once and for all abolish poverty in old age’ gave him the moral high ground. ‘He has suddenly become a television star, a political personality in his own right – confident, relaxed, a Leader,’ reflected Crossman on the 22nd, adding two days later, as opinion polls showed the Tory lead starting to narrow, that ‘the Gaitskell boom has been rapidly swelling’. On Saturday the 26th, the sage of Hull took pessimistic stock. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if Labour did better than people expect,’ Larkin informed Monica Jones. ‘I am sure that elections go by purely irrational factors such as are we tired of having a Conservative government & wdn’t it be more fun to have a change, rather than any considerations of record or programme, and the “innate British sense of fair play” may well give them a go, despite their farcical front line & jumbled policies.’ He was also worried about the threat of a serious Liberal revival, predicting that ‘Laughing Boy Grimond will get many votes by his a-plague-on-both-your-houses line.’
That evening on television was Labour’s second PPB, with Gaitskell ‘coming over’, according to the Spectator’s Peter Forster, ‘charming and persuasive as Older Brother rather than Big Ditto, the hysterical grace-notes of his Suez appearance on TV quite gone’. That same evening, Gaitskell predicted to Roy Jenkins that he would win. Next day, spending Sunday in bed, a temporarily exhausted Macmillan (finding comfort in ‘Miss Austen’s Mansfield Park’) did not rule out the possibility. ‘If everyone keeps calm, it will be all right,’ he reckoned. ‘If our people begin to panic, the result might be serious.’ The following morning, Monday the 28th, the poll in the Daily Mail had the Tory lead down to 2 per cent; according to Walter Terry, the paper’s political correspondent, Gaitskell had ‘won hearts not with emotional gestures and cries but with economics and figures’. And although the latest jobless numbers showed a further fall (taking the unemployment rate down to only 1.9 per cent), Crossman at Labour’s HQ at Transport House described the mood there as ‘on top of the world’. So too Benn. ‘The tightest, slickest show we have done,’ he wrote in his diary that evening after his third television PPB, with John Osborne and Ted Willis (creator of Dixon of Dock Green) among those giving reasons for voting Labour. In short: ‘We have definitely got the Tories on the run.’6
Occasionally the election seemed to pervade everything. ‘Your reviewer of Miss Compton-Burnett’s new novel describes its characters as “upper-middle-class”,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to The Times. ‘They are in fact large landowners, baronets, inhabiting the ancient seat that has been theirs for centuries. At this season, when we are celebrating the quinquennial recrudescence of the class war, is it not desirable to be more accurate in drawing social distinctions?’ Nella Last, though, was more typical. Her diary during September kept its running preoccupation with matters televisual – even a letter back from Hattie Jacques (‘such a nice one, as warm as her beautiful voice’) after Last had sent her a fan letter – before this on the 27th: ‘We settled to read till the Flying Doctor on ITV & then the Palladium Show. I suddenly realised today how near the General Election is – not a fortnight, & we both agree we never knew less excitement – even interest.’ About this time, Mollie Panter-Downes took the pulse in a Tory marginal and found neither leaflets nor posters, nor loudspeakers from ‘slowly cruising cars’, managing to disturb ‘the equanimity of the local inhabitants, who plod along on their daily rounds as though October 8th were no special date in their minds’. Indeed, ‘the very atmosphere of Wandsworth Central sunning itself on a fine September afternoon, with the men out at work, the front doors shut tight, and only a non-political cat or two dozing on the railings, is marginally mum’. For another writer, very much an expat, these weeks were an eye-opener. ‘In justice I must say that England was marvellous this time,’ Lawrence Durrell informed Henry Miller after a lengthy autumn visit. ‘You really would have been startled to see what three months of solid sun (first time in 200 years) can do to my compatriots; such humour, kindness, serviceability, exquisite manners, rugged laughter. It was uncanny! It was like a real move forward. People were sparkly, alive, forthcoming, devil may care; and all as brown as berries. Food’s improved too.’7
It was not all sunshine, though. Scotland had its worst mining disaster for 70 years when on the 18th almost 50 miners died in Lanarkshire’s Auchengeich Colliery; that day the Romford Recorder devoted a full page to a comprehensive round-up of the latest exam results, with no hiding place for low achievers – though surnames only for those at secondary moderns, unlike private schools and grammars; and on the 28th the musician, artist and humorist Gerard Hoffnung died at only 34 of a cerebral haemorrhage, less than a year after his ‘Bricklayer’s Lament’ to the Oxford Union. The literary event was Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, a collection of stories with a working-class setting that, according to one critic, resembled ‘a war correspondent’s reports from some fantastic front which although it is all round us, is only sometimes visible’. On the stage, Pieces of Eight’s arrival on Shaftesbury Avenue earned mixed notices (‘Bernard Levin in the Express gives it an absolute stinker!’ recorded Kenneth Williams. ‘O dear o dear. I’m so depressed – this pile trouble is back again’), and on the small screen, the welcome start of The Saga of Noggin the Nog (created by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate) was offset by how Robert Robinson in Monitor interviewed T. H. White in his Alderney home and, according to a TV critic, ‘took it upon himself to treat Mr White not merely as an equal but as an intellectual inferior, attempting to browbeat him, snub him, correct him’. Larkin meanwhile inspected the newly released Carry On Teacher (‘just about the unfunniest “comedy” I’ve ever seen’) and read the most recent Iris Murdoch. ‘The Bells [in fact The Bell] is balls,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s dotty stuff, with a faint whiff of the most creepy & pretentious scenes of Women in Love, and I wouldn’t give it room on my shelves, let alone money to have it there.’
It was a notable Saturday the 19th in East London. That morning, despite a waist-high metal fence having just been erected, Elisabeth Frink’s controversial ‘Blind Beggar’ statue was found lying horizontally across its concrete base and, later in the day, was moved to a council depot for repairs and restoration. ‘We are certain it is the work of irresponsible young hoodlums,’ insisted Bethnal Green’s Deputy Town Clerk, Mr E. Woolf. ‘Many people said they didn’t like it, but I don’t think they would stoop to this sort of thing.�
� A mile or two away, at about six o’clock, All Saints’ Hall, Haggerston Road saw the arrival of the celebrity to present the prizes at the annual show of the East London Budgerigar and Foreign Birds Society. This – at the suggestion of the secretary’s nine-year-old son, having read in a magazine that she was fond of birds – was Jayne Mansfield, currently filming Too Hot to Handle at Borehamwood Studios and who had recently switched on the Blackpool illuminations. The hall, reported the Hackney Gazette, was ‘besieged by youngsters who climbed to windows to get a glimpse’, but ‘smiling Jayne enjoyed every minute of it’. An organiser declared, ‘She’s lovely, absolutely charming, and a good sport to come here.’8
Elsewhere, an election campaign did nothing to halt the tide of progress. Shell-Mex and BP launched a huge advertising campaign (‘Mrs 1970’) to promote the spread of oil-fired domestic central heating; the imminent demolition was announced (for the usual redevelopment reasons) of the Victorian central colonnade at Cleethorpes; ‘First Look at £1m Shopping Centre Plan for Shrewsbury’ was the front-page headline in the local Chronicle; Madge Martin ‘on top of a dear old 13 bus’ saw the new Finchley Road, ‘where great blocks of flats have replaced the small, pretty houses, many of which were destroyed in the Blitz’; and The Times published a photograph of demolition in progress at 145 Piccadilly, the Queen’s childhood home. The latter’s purpose was a road-improvement scheme for Hyde Park Corner, and at the start of October the Architects’ Journal brought out a special issue, ‘Motropolis: A study of the Traffic Problem’. This included a lengthy analysis (‘Can we get out of the jam?’) by Malcolm MacEwen, advocating huge investment in both public transport and the large-scale reconstruction of city centres, but not the building of roads for their own sake. ‘My approach was essentially technological rather than humanistic or ecological,’ he conceded many years later. ‘I was looking for a top-down professional solution rather than a bottom-up democratic one.’ The same issue featured a full-frontal attack by a Birmingham architect, Leslie Ginsberg, on that city’s under-construction Inner Ring Road, which ‘unhappily looks like being the greatest traffic and town design tragedy yet to afflict an English city’; even more damningly, he dubbed Herbert Manzoni’s brainchild as the native equivalent of ‘those “highwaymen” across the Atlantic who are destroying the souls of the American cities with their monstrous routes’.
Modernity Britain Page 42
