Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  A headache for the organisers in the early weeks was litter, but the situation improved once the public-address system began to say loudly and frequently, ‘This is your exhibition; please help to keep it tidy.’ The problem had been ironed out by the second Monday in June, when Henry St John, a misanthropic civil servant living on his own in Acton, paid 5s to take his father to ‘the South Bank exhibition’ on what seems to have been a particularly busy morning:

  We explored part of the Dome of Discovery, but a broadcast voice asked people to keep on the move, as others outside were waiting to get in. The Dome contained exhibits on synthetic dyes, electrical instruments, mutation of species, physiology of sex, a megatherium or ground sloth, a developing embryo, and many other things which require, but did not get, unhurried study . . .

  After a long wait in another queue, we had a fair lunch at 3/3 each in a cafeteria. D showed some desire to go in the shot tower into which however a long queue was winding, so we had a superficial look round the health pavilion, which dealt with blood, the nervous system, vaccination, training of nurses, surgical instruments, burns etc. The only noticeable foreigners I saw at the exhibition were 2 Asiatics, 2 American servicemen, 1 negro, and 1 woman talking French.

  Another diarist, Anthony Heap, waited until a Tuesday evening in mid-July:

  From what I’d read and heard about the Exhibition, I’d surmised that there was very little in it likely to appeal to anyone of my unscientific, unmechanical and generally unprogressive turn of mind. And how right my surmise proved to be! 99 per cent of the exhibits on view in the various pavilions are devoted to different aspects of the ‘Land’ and the ‘People’ of Britain and the entire contents of the dimly-lit Dome of Discovery were of no interest to me whatsoever.

  Admittedly the whole thing is handsomely designed, laid out and, at nightfall, illuminated. And, unlike the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park, there are hundreds of comfortable chairs all over the place where one can rest one’s weary limbs free of charge – as well as a continuous supply of good tuneful music relayed through amplifiers so that it can be heard where e’r one wanders – or sits.

  Even so, the evening scarcely seemed worth the 6/6 it cost me . . .

  Next evening his wife Marjorie went. ‘M thinks the South Bank Exhibition an absolutely wonderful show,’ noted a fair-minded Heap, ‘and, after dark, a really enchanting spot.’8

  It was not just on the South Bank that a clear drift towards the modern was under way. July 1951 saw not only the publication of the first (Cornwall) of the Buildings of England series by the broadly pro-Modernist, anti-Victorian architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner but also the gathering at High Leigh, a rather rundown Victorian mansion near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, of the delegates from CIAM 8 – the eighth meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, a body which since the 1930s had in large part been devoted to the ideals of Le Corbusier, who was himself president. As usual, the application of the very latest technology to the problems of mass housing was CIAM’s particular preoccupation; the Congress looked ahead in its familiar utopian way to ‘an unlimited, inexhaustible, universal and completely flexible flow of atomic and molecular materials and energy . . . the age-old dream, hope or demand for unlimited, universal, automatic, and almost magical abundance and leisure’. Nevertheless, there was on this occasion some criticism of the Modernist dream, to judge by the account of a dissenting home delegate, Frederic Osborn: ‘I was amazed, and momentarily encouraged, by support from all the French housing planning people present, whose spokesman not only brilliantly exploded Le Corbusier’s mad 14-storey glass-house at Marseilles [the renowned Unité d’Habitation, nearing completion], but expressed astonishment that England, the envied country of the family home with garden, should be increasingly piling houses on top of each other,’ he reported soon afterwards to Lewis Mumford in America. ‘The high officials of our own housing and planning ministry were undoubtedly impressed by these attacks, which were really unanswerable.’

  Osborn, in charge of the Town and Country Planning Association, had for years been waging a doughty campaign in favour of dispersal from the unhealthy, overcrowded inner city to new towns and, if necessary, elsewhere, and against what he saw as the multi-storey, high-rise fallacy. His letter went on about ‘high officials’:

  But the drift of things is simply too much for them. I am more and more convinced that we must lose unless somehow we can bring the force of popular opinion to bear – and I just don’t see how to do it. I can’t get the money, and I can’t get together even a dozen passionate enthusiasts to splutter along with me. I feel spent and futile, and can take no pleasure in dialectical triumphs that are just throwing the sand against the wind. Your way is the only way: to write books that build new foundations of thought. But that is a twenty-five year process, and therefore not for me at my age [66].

  ‘I shudder at what will happen in the meantime,’ he ended bleakly. ‘And so I pursue the short cut route which isn’t open.’9

  A month later, on 15 August, the winner was announced of the competition to design a new cathedral for Coventry, to be built next to the ruins of the blitzed old one. Three assessors – all of them architects, selected by the Royal Institute of British Architects – chose an up-and-coming Scottish architect, Basil Spence, who had been responsible for the Sea and Ships pavilion on the South Bank and whose design for Coventry was very much in approved ‘Festival’ style. ‘It is the one I should have chosen myself,’ declared the Bishop of Coventry. ‘It is imaginative, modern and magnificently sensitive to the site.’ One of his clergymen, however, begged to differ. ‘So far I have only seen the reproduction of the original rough sketch,’ the Rev. H.N.M. Artus of Arley Rectory wrote immediately to the local paper. ‘It appeared to be yet one more super-cinema, mammoth insurance company’s offices, or even a block of flats. I was just wondering why there was a bit of a church attached to it when I saw, to my amazement, that this was the prize-winning design for Coventry Cathedral.’ In short, ‘I think this thing is a horror’. N. B. Waddell of 384 Radford Road, Coventry, agreed: ‘A lot of people, with great affectation, will make much of it because it is the winning design, but for me it is no more satisfying than the paintings in a modern style which deface some of our art exhibitions.’

  Over the next few weeks – as the architectural journals sang an almost unanimous chorus of praise, interrupted only by some Modernists wondering whether Spence had gone far enough – a flurry of other letters appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Not all were negative, but D. Kaye, chairman of the Coventry Society of Architects, was clearly on the defensive when he insisted that the new cathedral would ‘aesthetically be a jewel in the heart of Coventry’. His assertion earned a memorable riposte from F. Bliss Burbidge of Belvedere Road, Coventry: ‘I should like to repudiate the idea that only architects can estimate the beauty of a cathedral; it may be flattering to their own conceit but it will not hold water.’ The controversy rumbled on through the autumn, with Spence at one point reassuring a sceptical Coventry Diocesan Conference that ‘modern science can produce as beautiful work in cement as our predecessors did with stone’. But by early 1952, once he had amended his design so that the large glass screen dividing the porch from the nave no longer needed to be lowered below the level of the floor (a feature that had prompted the phrase ‘push-button Cathedral’), it was clear that the people of Coventry were eventually going to get a new, signature place of worship. ‘What I feel absolutely certain of is that it is honest and that it is original,’ Pevsner pronounced on radio’s Third Programme. ‘What it may lack in monumentality, it will gain in life.’10

  The battle in 1951 between the old and the new was played out perhaps most piquantly on two summer evenings at the Royal Festival Hall. On the first, 14 July, Princess Elizabeth was present at an explicitly ‘traditional’ concert put on by the National Federation of Jazz Organizations. Humphrey Lyttelton, Monty Sunshine and Wally Fawkes (the cartoonist ‘Trog�
��) were among the musicians, with Deryck Guyler as compère. A performance of ‘Rock Island Line’ by Mick Mulligan and his Magnolia Jazz Band introduced the night’s first vocalist, George Melly. ‘He began the song cleverly but failed to hold on to his advantage,’ noted Melody Maker’s rather sniffy reviewer, Max Jones. ‘I began to fidget before it was through.’ Indeed, Jones’s verdict on the concert as a whole was pretty disparaging: ‘For the experienced listener I believe it became something of a bore before the evening was out. Certainly there were moments when I wished I was on the North Bank.’ Two evenings later there was no royal presence at an equally explicitly ‘modernist’ concert, this time with Steve Race the compère, the Johnny Dankworth Seven (Cleo Laine on vocals) the undoubted star turn, and the American critic Leonard Feather as MM’s reviewer. ‘British jazz came of age last Monday night,’ began his piece, and he declared that the concert had gone far to ‘helping to prove that modern music in Britain need not consider itself a mere Cinderella sister of the American family’. Perhaps, though, the Princess did not unduly mind missing ‘the very cool groove of “Seven Not Out” ’.11

  There were a few last diarist-visitors to the Festival. ‘I arrived early and joined a queue, a vast, orderly line of people,’ recorded the 25-year-old John Fowles on 29 August. ‘The Festival I saw in a morning, skimming through it. All the cleverness and the practicality and the didacticism I found rather repellent.’ About the same time, on a rainy evening, the slightly older Lawrence Daly, increasingly prominent as a Communist activist on the Fife coalfield, ‘splashed around for two hours, visiting the Dome of Discovery, the People of Britain, Land of Britain, Power & Production, & souvenir stalls’ – all of which he found ‘a magnificent show, of great educational value’. The final diarist was perhaps the best qualified to offer an insightful view:

  12 September. At last to S. Bank Festival. Arrive 12 – go straight in – first impression good – smaller exhibits – schools, sports, ‘1951’ – seaside – enjoyable while not too tired. Larger – engines – boats – begins to crowd – Dome of Discovery – gloom – unorganized wandering – symbolic of muddled mind – addled with too much knowledge . . . Did not see all – too tired & hot – Polar Expedition exhibit informative. ‘Lion & Unicorn’ quite charming – quite obvious. Designs in pottery & silks delightful. Stayed 2½ hrs – enough for one day.

  16 September. To Festival 12.45 – fine day, stayed till nearly 5 . . . Homes & Gardens delightful – especially bedsitter for elderly lady – obviously having seen better days. All well designed & colour – avoidance of ‘suites’ – chairs in different colours but same pattern . . . ‘The Country’ good large picture mounted on central rod for each month – amusing material (padded) picture of Womans Institutes. Certainly humour + invention allowed. Sad to see livestock there, especially Dartmoor pony . . .

  The writer was Grace Golden, a talented but in many ways frustrated commercial artist. She returned on Friday the 28th for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, whose interior she examined with an acerbic eye. The setting for the orchestra was ‘like the crude models of cardboard I make for my own use – different colours stuck together with sticky paper & drawing pins which must surely be at the back of three walls which don’t join the ceiling!’ The sounding board was ‘like parts of a model not yet stuck together’. And the boxes ‘only remind one of the balconies outside the flats in Camden Town – needed only washing hanging to be complete’. All of which made her ask herself whether the human race had ‘developed sufficiently for it to be exposed against such nakedness as modern architecture’.12

  ‘It will be remembered as a moderately successful venture,’ reckoned the Manchester Guardian next day at the start of the Festival’s final weekend – exactly a week after a record 158,365 had flocked to the South Bank, many of them lured by the spectacle of Charles Elleano crossing the Thames on a tightrope. The mood to the last was determinedly cheerful. Saturday the 29th was Gala Night (with Gracie Fields, at her insistence paid in dollars, topping the bill in the open-air cabaret), while on Sunday there was a Thanksgiving service at the Festival Hall. That evening the Archbishop of Canterbury, in lieu of the ailing King, addressed the nation on the radio, declaring that the Festival had been ‘a good thing for all of us’ and had ‘brought encouragement just when it was needed’ – that in fact it had been ‘a real family party’. On the South Bank itself, there were almost 65,000 visitors during this final day, with well-nigh half still there by 10.00 p.m., when there began on the Fairway (the open space between the Dome of Discovery and the Transport pavilion) community singing to the accompaniment of the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards. The favourites followed one after another: ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘John Peel’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘The Old Hundredth’. Then at about 10.17 came the announcement over the loudspeakers, ‘Stand by for general black-out’, and all the lights duly went out as the three Festival flags were lowered. Then at 10.20 the lights were on again, as the still unsated crowd lustily sang ‘God Save the King’, ‘Abide With Me’ and, with hands linked, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  Now it really was over. ‘Good night, for the last time, good night,’ said the voice over the loudspeakers, efficient and brisk as ever. According to the report in the by now reconciled Daily Express, it was not only the paying visitors who left in good order and good humour. As the site emptied, ‘the Men in Grey – the attendants – smiled as they dispersed with, they said, only one in ten having a job to go to’.13 A generation earlier, the Festival’s somewhat smug herbivores might have legitimately reflected, there would have been no such relaxed confidence about what their future held.

  2

  A Narrow Thing

  Mercifully for listeners, radio programmes during the second summer of the 1950s were not entirely about the Festival of Britain. ‘We read till 8.15 and Twenty Questions,’ noted Nella Last on a Monday in Barrow-in-Furness. ‘Whatever it “lacks”, it’s not happy “friendliness”.’ Another housewife on another Monday had a more chequered time. ‘Woman’s Hour started today,’ recorded Marian Raynham in Surbiton. ‘A nuisance but I must listen, it is interesting. Also Mrs Dale & Bob Dale actress & actor were changed today & I like neither as well as last ones. This Mrs D. has a bit of a scrape in her voice, & the Bob is quite different.’ In the last three weeks of August, a BBC survey found that 59 per cent of housewives always or often listened to Mrs Dale’s Diary, 57 per cent to Housewives’ Choice (musical requests) and 30 per cent to Woman’s Hour. The Archers was not included, but it was during this time that a third diarist-housewife, Mary King in Birmingham, wrote of ‘feeling very angry with Phil Archer for not telling Grace Fairbrother what his real thoughts towards her were’.1

  That summer there was one new programme – in time iconic – that none of the diarists mentioned. ‘This series is based upon a crazy type of fun evolved by four of our younger laughter-makers,’ promised the Radio Times: ‘The members of this entertainingly eccentric quartet are old friends. They met during the wartime perambulations of the “Stars in Battledress”. Since then Secombe and Sellers have joined the successful company who can top-the-bill. Ex-Etonian Michael Bentine has won his spurs in the West End and Spike Milligan is making a reputation both as a comedian and writer (it is he who has compiled the “Goon Show” material). Now it remains to be seen what will happen when their differing brands of comedy are fused in one show.’

  Thus a somewhat nervous BBC launched Crazy People – ‘featuring Radio’s Own Crazy Gang “The Goons” ’ – on Monday, 28 May on the London Home Service, before gradually extending to other regions. The format was initially the traditional variety one of sketches interspersed with music; few of the subsequently famous characters had yet been created; and by the end of the series in September, with the shows being repeated on the Light Programme, listening figures were respectable (at around 16 per cent of the radio audience) rather than remarkable. ‘This series has drawn di
vided opinions,’ noted the BBC report summarising the reactions of its listeners’ panel, ‘and the Appreciation Indices [going up to 100] have been low in the 50s. One section of the audience found this an amusing and original show, but there are apparently many still listening to it for whom the “crazy” type of humour and accompanying “noisiness” have no attraction.’2 Still, the consolation for the quartet – whose humour was arguably a subversive take on the ITMA radio shows of the 1940s – was that the BBC did commission a second series for early 1952. This time it would, as they had always wanted, be called The Goon Show.

  One of radio’s biggest stars, the already notoriously irascible Gilbert Harding, spent the summer in enforced rustication from his trademark quiz programme, Twenty Questions, after an unfortunate outburst in April. ‘I hope that pompous “superior” Gilbert Harding never gets back on to this programme,’ reflected Last. ‘He seemed to delight in snubbing poor Jack Train!’ But by September and its 200th show, he was back in the chair. ‘I think Gilbert Harding must have had a “lesson”,’ noted a relieved Last. ‘He has thrown off that over-bearing “superiority”.’ He had also found a new game-show vehicle, this time on television – a development unrecorded by Last, who like at least nine in ten adults did not have a set. The programme was What’s My Line?, requiring a celebrity panel to work out, through replies and miming, the occupations of contestants. It made a Harding-free debut on Monday, 16 July, sandwiched between Men O’ Brass (with the Fairey Aviation Works Band) and The Lights of London (‘A visit to the South Bank to watch the scene as its buildings are floodlit. Commentator, Richard Dimbleby.’). ‘What made last night a pale imitation of the transatlantic original was the sogginess of the experts,’ was the stern verdict next morning of Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express. ‘Barbara Kelly spent much of the time scratching her pretty head. Miss [Marghanita] Laski looked as if she were only there because of the money. And the two male experts [Jerry Desmonde and Ted Kavanagh] just seemed puzzled.’ The following week they tried out Harding in the chair, but because of a mix-up over his cards it proved a fiasco, as he confused a male nurse with a motor mechanic. ‘It was a simple mistake,’ he told a reporter afterwards. ‘They put the wrong chap in the wrong place, but there was no trouble nor unpleasantness.’ Soon, though, he was a regular on the panel, with Eamonn Andrews equally a regular in the chair, and by the end of August as many as 86 per cent of sets were turned on for it, with of course no competing channels in existence.