Hitler did a good job when he blew up my parents’ house in Portsea. I wouldn’t change this for anything.
You can’t know our relief when we moved in.
At last, something I can take a pride in.
I have a garden now and we catch the sun all day in the front room – no need for candles in the daylight now.
Just over a year later, the paper returned to the estate and focused on how the work of ‘the magnificent new schools’ had resulted in a significant improvement in youthful behaviour, in spite of class sizes averaging around 40. ‘How can they talk of us as the hooligan schools!’ declared one head teacher. ‘We have children here of all types and I say they are a perfectly wonderful lot. The parents are splendid, helping us in every way they can to do the most for their children.’ The report itself optimistically identified ‘a growing community spirit’ on the estate generally; and it predicted that ‘the association of the words “Paulsgrove” and “hooligan” ’ would soon become ‘totally obsolete’.
The outwards migration could also be from villages as well as cities and towns. Such was the case for the family of Lorna Stockton (the future literary critic Lorna Sage), whose remarkable autobiography, Bad Blood (2000), relates how her parents in about 1951 moved into a brand-new council semi half a mile ‘up the lane’ from Hanmer, a Flintshire village just inside the Welsh border. It was a house, complete with open-plan living room, ‘designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert’. For her grandmother from south Wales, after years of living a proud but discontented life in the local vicarage, ‘the raw council estate, where cows wandered over the unfenced garden plots on their way to the fields and the neighbours could see in, was Hanmer squared, essence of Hanmer, and she scorned it with a passion’. It was an unprepossessing estate of about a dozen houses – ‘built on a flattened field at the top of a windy rise’ – and the nine-year-old Lorna, who had also lived at the much more spacious vicarage, ‘refused to feel at home there’ and spent as much time as possible ‘wandering the fields and footpaths in squelching wellies’. Indeed, the whole experience seems to have been a mismatch – ‘unlike the other houses, ours didn’t have net curtains, an act of impropriety which showed from the start that we didn’t know how to behave in our new life’ – and not even the arrival of a new three-piece suite could compensate for what Sage unsentimentally records as a (probably far from unique) ‘case of emotional claustrophobia’.11
One new, much-publicised council estate had no country fields anywhere near.12 This was the Lansbury estate in the bombed-out East End, named after the legendary inter-war Labour politician George Lansbury and serving during 1951, in its incomplete early development, as the ‘Live Architecture Exhibition’ for the Festival of Britain. ‘Here at Poplar you may catch a glimpse of that future London which is to arise from blitzed ruins and from the slums and chaotic planning of the past,’ declared a Festival brochure with typical confidence and forward-lookingness. John Summerson, visiting the estate in June, identified some key elements:
The general idea is the redevelopment of a ‘neighbourhood’ as envisaged in the Abercrombie-Forshaw plan of 1943. The old street-pattern is wiped out and a new pattern, with fewer streets, imposed; houses and flats are loosely and agreeably mixed, there is fluent adequacy of open space, and churches and schools are well sited . . . The completed dwellings include three-storey blocks of flats and a longish row of small houses. . . The market place or shopping centre, designed by Mr Frederick Gibberd, is a challenging departure. No traffic enters it and the shops are recessed under the buildings, arcade-wise . . .
Chrisp Street market (London’s first pedestrianised shopping centre), complete with clock tower, was indeed designed as Lansbury’s heartbeat – though revealingly, when Gibberd offered to design new stalls for the traders, they told him they preferred to carry on with their untidy, shabby old ones.
The verdict of most critics was at best lukewarm (‘not overwhelmingly impressive’, reckoned Summerson overall, ‘worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’, thought J. M. Richards), while only 87,000 people visited the site during the Festival’s five months. But as usual, most of those (mainly drawn from Poplar itself) who moved in to the new houses and flats were pleased to be doing so. ‘Our new place is just a housewife’s dream,’ Mrs Alice Snoddy told the press in February 1951 after her family (husband Albert a welder, she a part-time paper-sorter, two young children, one mother-in-law) had been the first to be given keys, in this case to a ground-floor flat. ‘There are fitted cupboards and one to air clothes in, a stainless-steel sink, hot water tanks. It’s the sort of home to be proud of.’ During 1952 two well-disposed sociologists, John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, interviewed several hundred of those who had moved in. ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury,’ was the heartfelt assertion of a lorry driver’s wife; ‘I can’t stop laughing to myself – I’m so happy,’ confessed a housewife who with her husband and two children had been living in one room in a condemned house in Stepney. Equally predictably there were complaints – the new market’s layout was too congested (‘you can’t take a pram round’) as well as discouraging to those wanting to have an initial recce before buying anything, there were too few facilities for mothers with small children, the kitchens were too small for eating in, the rents were on the high side. But overall, ‘the view that Lansbury offers a fundamentally satisfactory environment is shared by most of the people within and around the new neighbourhood’. Mrs Snoddy herself was settling in for the long haul. Three decades on, in the mid-1980s, she told the BBC that when she first saw her flat, ‘I can’t say I was all that keen on it, I would have preferred to have gone and lived in a house.’ But by 2001 she was happy to concede to the Guardian that ‘once other people from Poplar began to move on to the estate, I soon began to adjust’, adding, ‘I must have adjusted rather well as I’m still here 50 years later.’13
On almost all the new council estates, severe financial constraints – sometimes allied to a lack of imagination and drive – resulted in a damaging absence of those accompanying facilities that might have made the ideal of a complete neighbourhood unit closer to reality. In March 1952, for example, when Glasgow Corporation’s Sub-Committee on Sites and Buildings heard an application from Pollok Estate Tenants’ Association ‘requesting the erection of a hut or hall for the use of the tenants of the flats for aged persons at Kempsthorn Crescent as a recreational centre’, it was compelled to refuse it; at the same meeting there was a similar response to an application ‘for an area of ground at Drumchapel for the purpose of erecting a cinema in the new Drumchapel township’. The sociologist Charles Madge published that year a striking audit of community facilities on 100 post-war housing estates:
Facility Number planned Number built
Day nursery 13 0
Nursery school 46 1
Infant welfare clinic 24 6
Infant play space 22 2
Open playground 52 14
Health centre 33 0
Community centre 50 4
Branch library 46 11
On all estates, whether built before or since the war, there was also the problem of maintaining facilities. ‘What we really want is a supervisor on the lines of a park ranger, whose full-time job it would be to patrol the flats and find the culprits,’ declared a tenant in October 1951 after it emerged that children at the huge, showpiece Quarry Hill estate in Leeds were in danger of losing their three playgrounds unless vandals methodically destroying sets of swings were detected. ‘The police can’t be here all the time.’
The following June the subject arose on Any Questions? of the social status of public housing. ‘Of course I don’t think for a moment it’s degrading to live in a council house, obviously that goes without saying,’ declared the young, ambitious Labour MP Anthony Crosland. ‘But there certainly was a time obviously, twenty years ago, when it was considered degrading to live in a cou
ncil house, to some extent.’ This was, he insisted with undisguised egalitarian passion, an issue of central importance:
Today the situation is much better, partly because council houses obviously are so improved in quality that it’s nonsense to say that they’re worse than other houses. They’re extremely good on the whole now; and partly also because council house estates are manned by a much wider social group than they used to be, I mean they’re much more widely drawn. Now I feel very strongly about this because I’m a Socialist and my definition of Socialism quite simply is a classless society – it’s a society in which people don’t think of themselves as belonging to the working class, or the middle class, or the upper class, or whatever class you like, they haven’t got that feeling. Now at the moment I think very strongly what still allows this sense of class to persist, isn’t so much income differences that people have, it’s differences in education and housing and general social and family background like that. And the most important thing that one could do to eliminate the sense of class in Britain today, isn’t now so much to tackle income differences – although that’s still important – as to tackle these sort of things like housing and education and to make certain – and this is the crux – that you can’t tell that a person belongs to this class, that class or the other class, by looking at the sort of house he lives in or by asking him what school he went to. And when we’ve got to that state of affairs we shall have a jolly good society . . . HEAR. HEAR. APPLAUSE.
The implacable fact remained, though, that type of housing and social class were inextricably linked. It was mainly the working class (though at this stage often the respectable, improving working class) that occupied council houses and flats, while owner-occupation was almost entirely a middle-class preserve. Also in 1952, a Gallup poll revealingly found that 65 per cent of the people interviewed, of whom 56 per cent were Labour voters, approved of the sale of council houses to tenants – a controversial policy being applied rather nervously and ineffectually by the new Tory government. ‘Socialist voters were not so wholeheartedly against the sale of council houses as Socialist councils were,’ a Ministry of Housing official reflected on the findings. Telling also, on that Any Questions? programme, was the contribution of the next panellist, the bluff, right-wing Wiltshire countryman Ralph Wightman, who deployed a sarcasm that, however unattractively, did its job in undercutting the indignant upper-middle-class product of Highgate and Oxford:
On that point of Tony Crosland’s I would suggest that they have made a completely new class, a superior class, living in council houses, they’re the only class in the community – the only class of tenants whose rents can be raised by their landlords. They’re the only class of tenant who can be turned out if they take a sub-tenant, if they don’t cut their front lawn in conformity with the Council’s instructions. LAUGHTER. They are a completely privileged class . . . LAUGHTER . . .14
‘Had party in the evening,’ recorded John McGarry, a 15-year-old schoolboy living in Bournemouth, on 8 January 1952. ‘Dorothy came, had super time. Dots really got me. Finished at 11 took Dot home. Mum said something very offending about her when I got back. Feel very rotten about it. Why can’t she leave me alone?’ Three days later, a Friday, he saw Dot in the evening: ‘Had super time, better than talking at scouts. Decide to stay in Mon, Tue, Wed to do some swotting. Dad and Mum do not want me to enjoy myself, surely that’s what the life is for. Bed at 10.45 feeling very happy as well as discontented.’ The downs and ups of adolescence continued unabated over the next few weeks:
13 January. Decide to join the Navy.
17 January. Dull day at school . . . All they talk about is exams, exams, exams what rotten fun.
22 January. Dot came round in the evening, spent quite a good evening together, but she seems very cold hearted tonight.
24 January. History exam in the morning, did terribly about 15% or less.
25 January. Had a super evening. Get a long way with Dorothy. She’s lovely, the best girl I’ve ever had.
4 February. Go round to Dorothies at 7.45 and spend the last evening of my life, so far, there. Had super time . . . Got real warmed up at some spots . . .
6 February. Find my history book at school . . . Dull morning. THE KING DIES AT 10.45 all very strange, everybody seems quiet over the strange news.
Strange but true – at 7.15 that Wednesday morning, King George had been found dead in his bed at Sandringham by an under-valet. He was 56, and it was less than a fortnight since the Daily Mirror had published a brief but to-the-point letter from Mrs Florence Price of Dunvant near Swansea: ‘Surely we had a great example of the value of prayer during our beloved King’s recovery from his severe illness.’15
At about 11.00, less than two hours after Churchill had been informed, a Mass-Observation investigator was on a number 6 bus going to Marble Arch via Edgware Road in London:
There was an undercurrent of talk in the bus – and now and again Inv. caught the words ‘Princess Elizabeth’ and ‘the King’ and ‘It’s a pity – she’ll have to come back [i.e. from Kenya] I expect’. Everybody seemed to be talking softly, and the expressions on their faces looked solemn. Inv. had a feeling something had gone wrong, so turning to the bus conductress who was standing nearby she asked ‘Is there anything wrong?’
Bus conductress – ‘Haven’t you heard? – it’s just come thro’ on the wireless – the King died in his sleep.’
Other people on the bus on hearing this remark added – ‘Shame isn’t it?’ – ‘Oh well, it’s a mercy the way it ended – he had it coming.’ ‘I’m sorry for the old Queen – Queen Mary – it’ll be the death of her.’
An hour or so later, another M-O investigator was in Hammersmith, where he asked people how they felt about the news:
Pretty rough. If anybody’s patriotic they’re bound to feel something. I think most people feel something about it. (M 40. Engineer)
I’m sorry for the King and I love him very much. (M 20. Apprentice to watch repairer)
(Didn’t know.) I think I feel shocked. Sort of bewilders me I guess. The King died? Oh gee. (F 20. Typist)
(Didn’t know.) Oh I think it’s dreadful – I’m terribly sorry. How sudden. I feel most terribly sorry. I feel as shocked as if it was someone belonging to me. (F 40. Dept Store Buyer)
Bit of rough that’s all. Can’t say very much about it at all. Sorry to hear he’s gone that’s all. (M 40. Pipe Fitter)
Well not at all pleased – it’s a funny question. (M 40+. Fitter)
Very sad and can’t help being very sad. Very sad indeed. (F 40+. Housewife)
Among the diarists, Nella Last in Barrow heard the news from a neighbour and ‘wasn’t very surprised’, with her ‘pity and concern’ going ‘in a rush of sympathy to Princess Elizabeth, whose youth dies at 26’; Judy Haines in Chingford was also told by a neighbour, with the two of them settling down for ‘a cup of tea’ and ‘a pleasant chat’; ‘hope he didn’t take a wrong pill’, was the rather sardonic reflection of Marian Raynham in Surbiton, adding that ‘it will be picturesque to have such a young Queen & Consort, a real Queen’; and Henry St John, working in the Ministry of Food in central London, mainly concentrated in his entry on how the cold in his head had ‘reached a stage of sore throat’ and ‘more nasal discharge’, though noting that ‘I never saw King George VI.’ As for the left-leaning political class, Richard Crossman, a prominent Labour backbencher who also wrote prolifically for the New Statesman and Sunday Pictorial, noted how ‘no one I have met [in the Commons that afternoon] genuinely feels anything about this, except Clem Attlee’.16
For many people, the most striking aspect of the day was the absence of normal radio programmes, apart from weather forecasts and news bulletins. There was close-down for most of the afternoon and then again after the six o’clock news (listened to by 54 per cent of the adult population), apart from four further bulletins, one of which was followed by a short memorial service listened to by 46 per cent. ‘The evening seemed so stran
ge without the wireless,’ reflected Last. ‘We joined in silently to the really lovely little service after the nine o’clock news.’ For Frank Lewis in Manchester, it was a mixed evening. ‘DATE WITH WINN,’ he noted. ‘SHE DIDN’T TURN UP, probably due to the “King” business.’ So instead, with all cinemas and theatres closed for the day (though not pubs), he went to the Chinese restaurant in Mosley Street: ‘I found I couldn’t eat it all – I’d been eating too many sweets earlier on. 4/5d it came to, I left 6d tip; I don’t intend leaving more. I like those meals though, I must go more often to these places.’ But for John McGarry in Bournemouth, the death of a monarch was not something to be shrugged off so easily: ‘Dull afternoon, get home at 3.15 do homework . . . Mum’s do is off she’s heard. Says she’s going to have a party instead. Fancy on such a sad day. Go out at 7.30, meet Dorothy. Go out for stroll on cliffs and have lovely time, stroll back through the chine stopping at every seat. Get back at 9.45 to find every body having a good time. What disgusting manners.’ The young, burdened diarist went to bed at 10.30 ‘feeling very tired and sad’.
The new Queen returned home on Thursday the 7th. ‘The most prosperous-looking among the waiting women wore black furs and hats, and the men wore black ties, but the most touching things were the bows of painstakingly tied cheap black ribbon and the homemade crêpe-paper armbands pinned on many shabby coats,’ observed Mollie Panter-Downes (in her regular London letter in the New Yorker) about the silent crowd in the Mall watching Elizabeth drive by. Elsewhere the sartorial code seems to have been reasonably relaxed – ‘surprised to see so few black ties being worn,’ noted Anthony Heap in St Pancras, adding that ‘when George V died [in 1936], practically every man in London donned one immediately’ – and cinemas and theatres reopened. That evening (the same evening that detectives called on Alan Turing), Churchill paid an eloquent radio tribute to the late King. ‘It was the best piece of prose I have heard or read from him,’ reflected an appreciative Macmillan. The next day Kenneth Preston, an English teacher in Keighley, recorded how ‘many people have spoken of the fine funeral oration that Churchill pronounced on the wireless last night.’17
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 8
