Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

Eden: I must say, I do resent that question. I could resent it very much. But I can’t believe that, you know, the ordinary socialist leaders really believe it themselves. Anyhow, anybody who makes such an insinuation is making a very unworthy one, in my view. Because there’s nobody in this country who doesn’t want peace: may I add, especially those who’ve seen war at first-hand.

  Mitchell: No, indeed.

  Eden: The last thing we want is any more of it. But of course you can argue about how to keep the peace, can’t you?

  Mitchell: Yes, one can . . .

  ‘Certainly you’ve made the policy very clear, sir,’ concluded Mitchell. ‘May I say thank you very much indeed for letting me question you?’ Soon afterwards the comedian Eric Barker did a send-up on television of this ultra-deferential approach. ‘We were all anxious about how it would be received,’ recalled his young sidekick Nicholas Parsons, ‘and while it was quite gentle, and viewers enjoyed it, messages were sent to Eric from above advising him to be careful and not to satirise too many of his employers’ serious programmes.’18

  After the election, Gallup found that whereas 82 per cent of people had listened at some point to radio broadcasts (and 12 per cent to television), only 24 per cent had been to indoor meetings and 10 per cent to outdoor ones. The electorate’s interest in the proceedings was, in other words, essentially passive rather than active. Even so, from a candidate’s point of view, the primacy of the public, ticketless meeting was still absolute. ‘I seldom spoke at fewer than three a night,’ recalled Labour’s Willie Hamilton about his campaign in West Fife, where the challenge came from left as well as right. ‘The Communists’ most eloquent advocate was not Mr Lauchlan [their candidate] but Lawrence Daly [Lauchlan’s agent], a young coalminer. He was a fluent public speaker and was well versed in Scottish culture, especially in the songs and poetry of Robbie Burns. He was a good singer, too, and loved his drink.’

  Heckling at meetings was still frequent, as when the broadcaster and journalist W. J. Brown (himself standing as a Conservative-supported Independent in West Fulham) spoke at Luton Winter Assembly Hall in support of Charles Hill:

  Brown: There is only one thing to do at this election –

  Heckler: Vote Labour.

  Brown: You know how different things would be if you did a bit of labour.

  One of Labour’s keenest candidates, the young Peter Parker at Bedford (‘It is going to be a tremendously fierce fight, but it is going to be fought cleanly’), even addressed the 6,347-strong crowd as they left the town’s football ground on a Saturday afternoon, though he might have thought better of it if the visitors, Aynesbury Rovers, had not lost 3–0. Tellingly, the equally youthful, equally keen Anthony Wedgwood Benn, defending Bristol South-East, encountered disquieting signs. ‘People are apathetic and there aren’t the young ones at meetings that there ought to be,’ he reflected with a fortnight to go. And the following week a local alderman took him to ‘my first dinner-hour meeting, outside the Co-op furnishing factory’ – but ‘not a single soul came out of the factory to listen’. Meanwhile, the journalist Edward Hodgkin was taking the pulse in the capital. ‘Any visitor who landed in London last week-end would have found it hard to discover from external evidence which of the two forthcoming attractions – the General Election and Christmas – was due first,’ he wrote in the Spectator’s final issue before polling day. ‘There was no sign of urgency, no passion, indeed no interest discernible . . .’19

  One constituency, Bristol North-East, was the subject of a detailed academic study. ‘In many ways the findings substantiate the rule-of-thumb practices of the professional politician,’ noted Mark Abrams, a close observer of social and political trends, in his foreword: ‘Each of the two major parties enjoys the support of a substantial core of voters who are undisturbed by issues, candidates, meetings and literature. The Labour Party core is mainly male, working-class and young; the Conservatives draw their solid support from women, the middle class and older people. The typical voter is loyal to an “image” which his party has built up by annexing a limited range of sloganized issues.’ Three specific findings were especially striking. About one-third of voters receiving election literature failed to read or even glance at it; under 10 per cent (way below Gallup’s estimate) attended even one political meeting; and, perhaps most piquantly, whereas only 7 per cent of Conservative voters agreed with ‘certain statements or propositions selected as being typically “Labour” ’, as many as 27 per cent of Labour voters agreed with typically ‘Conservative’ maxims. Perhaps not so much had changed in the 70 years since an aged Disraeli had told a British Marxist that ‘it is a very difficult country to move, Mr Hyndman, a very difficult country indeed’.20

  John Fowles, barely a month after gazing on the unnaturally well-ordered queue lining up to visit the South Bank, might have agreed. ‘Election,’ he noted at the start of October. ‘But now it is a choice between Tory romance and Socialist practicality. The Tories offer nationalism, the Empire, freedom of enterprise and so on; the Socialists increasing uniformity, the death of the ancien régime individual. As a social unit, I shall vote for the Welfare State. I vote for what I think best for society.’ For another young but already published novelist, Sid Chaplin, the assumption seems to have been that the Labour Party was swinging left – an assumption for which the recent Scarborough conference had given considerable evidence – and that a Labour victory would soon be followed by Attlee’s exit. ‘Bevan is a brilliant man, but rigid in his old-fashioned socialist prejudices,’ he wrote to a friend on the 10th from Ferryhill in County Durham. ‘As a Prime Minister he would either be a complete failure or the greatest we’ve had.’ For Jean Rhys, a published novelist since the 1920s but in temporary eclipse, this was a rare moment when politics impinged. ‘There is an election going on,’ she reported from Maidstone to her daughter in the Far East three days before polling, ‘but nobody seems to care much, not in this town anyway.’ For which she offered a characteristic explanation: ‘Perhaps they are too exhausted.’

  Who was going to prevail? ‘Jim thinks we may win the election; Tony doesn’t,’ the veteran Labour politician Hugh Dalton noted after lunching with his two protégés Callaghan and Crosland the day after Attlee’s election announcement. The general expectation, not least on the part of Churchill himself, was that the Tories would win. ‘He told me how Liverpool had cheered him, and as he spoke of the “love and affection of the people” his eyes filled with tears,’ recorded Moran after seeing him during the campaign. ‘ “There was rapture in their eyes. They brought their children. I’m not conceited,” he said, “but they wanted to touch me.” ’ Even so, the Tory lead in the weekly Gallup poll steadily narrowed – from eleven points at the end of September to four and a half points by 19 October. ‘But on the figures we should be home,’ Macmillan sought to comfort himself on that last Friday, while acknowledging that ‘it is all on the knees of the Gods’. And of course, ‘a small thing might influence the vital 2% or 3% one way or the other . . .’21

  The final week coincided with the Motor Show at Earl’s Court – including, on the Monday, an appearance by Princess Margaret, ‘wearing a salmon-pink off-the-face, feathered hat and veil’, with the hat matching ‘a waisted salmon-pink coat trimmed with a collar of grey lamb’s wool’. Headlines had already been made by the prominent display of a gold-fitted, gold-plated Daimler inscribed with the initials of Lady Docker, the famously free-spending wife of the prominent industrialist Sir Bernard Docker, but more significant was the stylish, streamlined Porsche that marked the German car industry’s return to the international market. Reviews were also starting to appear of Zip Goes a Million, running from the 20th at the Palace Theatre. Cecil Wilson in the Daily Mail was reasonably kind about the Formby performance (‘he cracks flat-capped jokes, sings in a thin but oddly tuneful voice, and shuffles at his own gentle tempo through a glittering succession of scenes’), but The Times declared that he was ‘extraordinary only in his ordinariness’. A few days la
ter, Tynan in the Evening Standard was unamused: ‘I cannot laugh as he fidgets and gapes and fusses flat-footed across the stage . . . And I am unable to accept the theory that a banality or a catchphrase acquires wit or “philosophy” when delivered in a North-country accent. Simplicity and unaffectedness can be carried to extremes; Mr Formby works with what Henry James called “great economy of means, and – ah – effect”.’

  ‘I wish I’d have stayed in bloody Manchester,’ Formby told Gracie Fields on the phone. ‘At least up there folk know what I’m all about!’ His consolation, though, was that the punters did not agree with the critics, and Zip was soon settling down for a long run with full houses. In Manchester itself, ‘Who’s going to win the election?’ one misfit young Welshman, Frank Lewis, asked himself on Tuesday the 23rd. ‘I couldn’t care less. At least, that’s almost my feeling. I’m almost indifferent.’ Next evening his sole concern was his date with Winifred: ‘This time we went to the Grapes, just off Oxford Rd near the Roxy. At 10 p.m. went back to our dark spot, up against the garage wall near Dunlop’s. Made physical contact, hand contact all over the body. She called me “Professor Delver” because not only did she invite me “to delve” to use her own word but because I always take note most logically and humorously of what is going on and comment on the proceedings.’ ‘She had corset on,’ he added rather regretfully. ‘She doesn’t like me calling her fat.’22

  Back in the political arena, there was a significant moment on the Tuesday when the Manchester Guardian followed the example of Picture Post and came out against the desirability of another Labour victory. Although acknowledging that the party had been ‘the instrument of a mainly beneficent social revolution’, the paper could not ignore the disturbing fact that ‘behind their façade of unity there is Mr Bevan and the hate-gospellers of his entourage’. Meanwhile, the politicians themselves continued to bang away. John Profumo, Tory candidate for Stratford-upon-Avon, treated a mass meeting in Coventry on Monday to some timeless humour (‘If we have another five years of Socialist government in this country, somebody in the Ministry of Education will have to start re-writing our nursery rhymes – such as “There was an old woman who lived in a queue”, and “Sing a song of sixpence the value of a pound” ’), Churchill was in Plymouth on Tuesday stoutly denying the characterisation of him as a warmonger (‘the opposite of the truth’), and, that same evening, Hill in Luton gave some female hecklers short shrift (‘All right, girls, shout as much as you like, but you won’t pick the Government’).

  There was also, played out at schools all over the country, the ritual of the mock election. One such was at the County High School in Carlisle, where the candidates were all sixth-formers. ‘It was obvious from the beginning,’ recalled Margaret Forster (13 at the time), ‘that the appearance and popularity of these candidates were going to count more with us schoolgirl-voters than anything they said’:

  The Conservative candidate was the most attractive but she wasn’t a good speaker. She was very pretty, with long, blonde hair, beautifully brushed, but her voice was rather squeaky and her manner solemn. She went on about Winston Churchill and how he’d saved us from the Nazis and how ungrateful we’d been not to vote him in after the war. The Liberal candidate wasn’t much better as far as the content of her speech was concerned, but she had a much louder and more forceful voice. She was very sporty too, in all the school teams, and made her party seem very healthy, the party for fit people who were not ‘stuffy’ like the Conservatives. The Labour candidate was just too emotional. She actually wept when she read out some newspaper report on how the poor were living in our big cities. This was, it seemed, the fault of the Conservatives even though they were not at the moment in government – Labour had done what it could but had only made a start and needed many more years in power to carry on the good work. Then there was the Communist candidate – small, ugly, bespectacled, scruffy, but what a brilliant speaker. Our entire system of government, she bellowed, was a farce. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and nothing would change until outdated democracy was swept aside and replaced by the people as the state and the state as the people, one for all and no more class divisions, no more inequality . . . I went straight home and announced I had no doubts, I was a Communist.

  Forster’s parents were deeply shocked, her father even walloping her for cheek, and in the end she gave her vote to the Labour candidate. It hardly mattered: ‘The Conservative won with the Liberal a close second and Labour a poor third. The outstanding Communist candidate got only three votes and I was ashamed not to have voted for her.’23

  ‘Polling Day & a fateful one for the Country,’ recorded Florence Speed in Brixton on the long-awaited Thursday. ‘If the Socialists are returned for a third time, it is goodbye to the Empire & to everything it has stood for.’ Three front pages that morning particularly caught the eye. The final Gallup poll in the News Chronicle had the Tory lead down to three and a half points; the Daily Mirror’s was a ‘Trigger’ special, complete with large drawing of a menacing gun and hand; and the Daily Mail featured a masterly cartoon by Illingworth, showing a middle-class couple at breakfast with a polling station visible through the window, the wife reading a paper with headlines like ‘Inflation’ and ‘Cost of Living Soaring’, and the husband getting up determinedly from the table and saying, ‘We Are The Masters Now.’ Among the diarists, Haines in Chingford voted Labour and then did her shopping (‘how they do keep you waiting’), while Lewis delayed until after work and also voted Labour, before going to the Odeon to see Valley of Eagles starring Jack Warner. Speed’s brother Fred was a polling clerk. ‘ “All I want is to see England on her feet again,” one old woman said dropping her ballot paper into the box,’ summarised Florence. ‘She was so poor looking, that Fred thought she would be voting for Labour. And a man said, “Third time lucky. But I suppose there are too many b— LCC [London County Council] flats round here.” ’ Naturally, though, most voters kept their thoughts and intentions to themselves during a generally dry if rather chilly day. One among millions was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. ‘I voted Labour in the last election though in my heart of hearts I wanted the Tories to get in,’ he told a friend some months later. ‘But the old spirit of opposition crept up and with all the country shouting for the Tories I determined to be on the other side.’24

  The polls closed at nine and the early results started to come through not long after ten – by when, according to Gallup, half the electorate had gone to bed, presumably either calm or indifferent about the outcome. But in Trafalgar Square a crowd of some 15,000 gathered to watch the posting of the results on a large screen, while at the Savoy there were 3,000 guests for the traditional election beano given by Lord Camrose, owner of the Daily Telegraph. There the restaurant had been converted into a results room, with cheers every time the Tories won a seat, boos if Labour held on. Cecil Beaton took the visiting Greta Garbo with him. ‘So great were her spirits as the Conservative victories came through,’ he recorded, ‘that she did not seem to mind even the attentions of the photographers.’ Macmillan, though, skipped the crush: ‘I felt I cd not stand it. I do not like the Noel Cowards etc. It is equally bad whether we win or lose.’ Nor was the triumphalism necessarily justified. ‘By 3 am,’ he noted, ‘it was clear that there had really been no swing at all for us’ and that ‘it will be a stalemate, or a small Tory majority’. Everything would turn, all sober observers agreed, on the results declared on the Friday.

  Next morning the writer Ronald Duncan was at Charing Cross:

  The voracious station disgorged its crowds of office workers as the 8.15 steamed in. The same anxious poker faces looking a little tired from their debauch of statistics on three cups of coffee. As usual they hurried toward the ticket collector, straining the digestion of the gate.

  I walked up the platform, watching a ferret-like porter going up the train, slamming the doors of the empty carriages. From one he retrieved a newspaper which had been left on the seat.

 
As the train shunted out he paused, to study the Stop Press results, and thoughtfully lit a fag-end. I glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Good. It looks as if the old man will just get in after all.’

  ‘Which old man?’

  ‘Winston, of course.’

  ‘Did you vote for him in spite of your union?’

  ‘Of course not. Being a working man I voted Labour, but all the same I ’oped old Winston would get in this time.’

  ‘You mean to say you voted Labour although you wanted the Conservatives to get in?’

  ‘It’s like this mate. I ’ad to vote for me own side out of loyalty like, but what I say is this’ (and here he whispered lest his mate should overhear), ‘the proper bloke to have on a footplate is an engine driver, and that’s why I’d like to see old Winnie back at No 10, ’cause he knows his way around, having been brought up to it like.’

  ‘It looks as if it will be a narrow thing,’ I said.

  ‘So it was at Dunkirk. The old b— likes it narrow.’

  At which point ‘the noisy arrival of the 8.35’ ended their conversation.25

  In the event it did prove a close-run thing, though in terms of seats not as close as the previous election. ‘At 1.0 the two parties were neck and neck,’ recorded Anthony Heap in his flat off Judd Street, St Pancras, ‘and by 5.0 when the Conservative score reached 313 against Labour’s 292 and the Liberals’ 5, it was all over bar shouting.’ By about six Churchill was Prime Minister, having driven to the Palace in a car flying the flag of the Warden of the Cinque Ports. The eventual Tory overall majority was 17 – a majority achieved despite the somewhat startling fact that, on an impressively civic 82.5 per cent turnout, they had received almost a quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour. Among the youthful losers were Margaret Roberts in Dartford and Peter Parker in Bedford; Willie Hamilton won comfortably in West Fife; Charles Hill in Luton and John Freeman in Watford were re-elected, the latter narrowly; and W. J. Brown lost in Fulham West. If for some Tory supporters there was a sense of disappointment, even anti-climax – ‘Conservatives are “in”, but alas! only just,’ reflected Florence Speed at 6.30 that evening – for others there was an irresistible feeling that the natural order of things had been restored. ‘I can date my political awakening,’ the theatre critic Michael Billington would recall, ‘from the moment a peculiarly detested fellow pupil burst into my public school classroom the day after the 1951 general election shouting: “We’re in” – meaning, of course, the Tories. His arrogant assumption that we were all of the same persuasion meant I became a lifelong Labourite on the spot.’ Or as Vere Hodgson put it less rebarbatively next day in her West London diary: ‘At last I can write it. MR CHURCHILL IS AGAIN PRIME MINISTER. How wonderful!’26