For a boy in the 1950s, if being an airline pilot seemed too nerve-racking, there was now the dream of becoming an atomic-energy engineer. ‘Andrew is intelligent and go-ahead,’ started a typically improving strip cartoon in the Eagle. ‘He thinks there is a great future for Engineers in this Atomic Age.’ Mary King in Birmingham, approaching the end of her life, found moral comfort in the new age. ‘The first Atomic Power Heating apparatus was opened today at Harwell [the nuclear research station near Oxford],’ she noted in November 1951. ‘I cannot carry the details in my mind, but it is so good to hear of these wonderful researches by man being put to use for the good of man, and not fiendish War bombs.’ She was only half right. Certainly there was a civil nuclear energy dimension to the unfolding technology – reflecting not so much a fanciful mirage of some golden age of cheap, limitless power as a pragmatic concern about the future of coal supplies in the context of significantly increasing electricity consumption – yet military considerations were paramount. ‘The first small and impure billet was produced at Windscale,’ Sir Christopher Hinton recorded in his diary in March 1952. The gifted, demanding Hinton had been charged soon after the war with the task of producing fissile material for bombs; the billet was of plutonium, with the first consignment travelling south the following month under police escort to Aldermaston.
On 3 October, more than three years after Russia had exploded its first atomic bomb, Britain belatedly exploded its own. Hinton in his unpublished memoirs blamed many people and factors for the lag – including the Ministry of Supply and the Treasury for recruitment problems, the Ministry of Works generally (‘completely unsatisfactory at first’), and the general uselessness of Lord Portal as Controller of Atomic Energy for five and a half years from March 1946 – but in October 1952 the press reaction to the spectacular explosion off the Monte Bello Islands, complete with smoke plume topping out at 15,000 feet in the clear western Australian air, was one of elation. ‘Today Britain is GREAT BRITAIN again – in the eyes of the world,’ began the Daily Mirror’s front-page report: ‘The orange-coloured flash of the explosion of Britain’s first atomic bomb did more than signal the unleashing of a new and terrifying weapon of war. It changed a world still ruled by power politics. It signalled the undisputed return of Britain to her historic position as one of the great world powers. Today she stands alongside America and Russia in possessing not only the secret of the atomic weapon, but also the power to produce it.’ Or, as the Daily Mail proudly put it, ‘Those both at home and abroad who have written off Britain as a second-rate Power will have to revise their views.’24
This particular autumn, though, the application of science had a more immediate, domestic relevance. ‘There’s a war between manufacturers of soap powders now going on,’ noted Gladys Langford towards the end of September. ‘Lever Bros have launched a new powder “Surf” and send thro the post coupons to those on the voting list, which entitle the recipients to buy 1/11 size for 7d which only goes to show how much profit is made normally. Meanwhile Crossfield’s – Persil manufacturers – advertise extensively and hold housewives’ meetings & what not to popularise their production.’ There was indeed a war. Tide, originally developed in the US by Procter & Gamble, had built up a strong share of the market in detergent powders since its British launch in 1950, and rival manufacturers were determined to pull it back – not least through the impending noisy launch (in November) of Daz, reputedly ‘the most efficient washing product in the world’.
Tide, however, knew this was its time. ‘Until Tide came in, it would have been absurd to talk of doing the weekly wash without rinsing,’ ran part of a full-page advertisement in the Mirror three days after the news from Monte Bello. ‘But you never had anything like Tide! It’s something new in this world. It’s not just a little better than other products. It’s miraculously better!’ The ad also featured a drawing of two young housewives looking at the washing. ‘Look – It’s True! Dazzling Clean! Without Rinsing!’ says one. ‘I’d Never Have Believed It!’ responds the other. Meanwhile, an older woman looks on enviously and remarks: ‘If Only We’d Had Tide In My Young Days!’ But perhaps most expressive of all was the chorus at the foot of the ad, seemingly oblivious to the dangers of false consciousness, let alone reification:
Week after week millions of women see it – say it – sing it!
CLEAN! CLEAN! CLEANEST WASH OF ALL!25
PART TWO
6
Not Much Here
‘My father hadn’t minded Lancashire,’ Ian Jack recalled in the 1980s:
The terraced streets shut my mother in, but my father, making the best of it, found them full of ‘character’; men in clogs with Biblical names – Abram, Eli – and shops that sold tripe and herbal drinks, sarsaparilla, Dandelion and Burdock. He bought the Manchester Guardian and talked of Lancashire people as more ‘go-ahead’ than the wry, cautious Scotsmen of his childhood. Lancastrians were sunnier people in a damper climate. They had an obvious folksiness, a completely realised industrial culture evolved in the dense streets and tall factories of large towns and cities. Lancashire meant Cottonopolis, the Hallé Orchestra playing Beethoven in the Free Trade Hall, knockers-up, comedians, thronged seaside resorts with ornamental piers. In Fife, pit waste encroached on fishing villages and mills grew up in old market towns, but industry had never completely conquered an older way of life based on the sea and the land.
After twenty-two years in England, Harry Jack, a maintenance engineer, took his family (including seven-year-old Ian) back to Scotland in October 1952. They travelled by train. ‘Red-brick terraces with advertisements for brown bread and pale ale on their windowless ends gave way to austere villas made of stone. The wistfulness of homecoming overcame my parents as we crossed the border; Lancashire and Fife then seemed a subcontinent distance apart and not a few hours’ drive and a cup of coffee on the motorway.’ After speeding across the Forth Bridge at dusk, they were met on the platform by Harry’s father-in-law:
Nobody kissed and nobody touched (we never did; did anybody there, then?), but my grandfather was pleased to see us. ‘Come in, come in, you’ll be hungry.’ A refugee from the pits and now retired from his later work as a riveter’s labourer, he lived as a widower at the top of an old house with crowstep gables and a pantile roof. Plates of chips and mutton-pies arrived at the table. The gas mantle was lit – plop! – while my mother took a torch and led me downstairs to the outside lavatory. Then I dozed on a makeshift bed as my parents talked about their journey, idly and endlessly as adults always did.
‘Thon was a queer-like chap who got on at Preston. Him and his fancy socks and his meat-paste sandwiches.’
‘Och but there was no harm in him. He was a cheery soul.’
‘The English are great ones for their meat-paste, right enough.’
Next morning Ian woke to the noise of riveters drilling in the nearby shipyard and express trains whistling along the embankment by the sea. ‘The smells of damp steam and salt, sweet and sharp, blew round the corner and met the scent of morning rolls from the bakery. Urban Lancashire could not compare with this and, like my mother, I never missed it.’1
It was different again at the Red Lion at Blaina, a south Wales town of about 8,000 with an ironworks and nearby collieries as its main sources of employment. In 1947, while the Jacks were still in Bolton, a Mass-Observation investigator embedded himself there and got to know the all-male regulars. Owen Williams, secretary of Blaina’s rugby club, worked for the County Council at Abertillery, voted Liberal (the family tradition), and usually wore a sports jacket and grey flannel trousers: ‘Call him sane or level-headed or anything you like but his general attitude towards life is reflected in his drinking habits. He drinks half pints when everybody else is drinking pints.’ Jimmy Jones, a former miner and factory worker, was now on the dole, supposedly too ill to work, but did enough odd jobs to keep himself in plentiful beer. ‘There is not much here except going to have a drink and a smoke,’ he reflected. ‘You can’t
go racing because there is not a track around here. I usually spend my time having a few drinks and meeting the boys.’ Tom Wathan, an undertaker’s assistant, was ‘a strange-looking individual’ never seen to smile, who sat for hours with his fat old spaniel in the corner beside the fireplace in the public bar and broke his taciturn silence only to tell lewd stories about his corpses. His reward was to be ‘one of the privileged few who are allowed to stay after hours for a few bolters in the corridor’. Eli Curtis, a collier who doubled as a notably inefficient, unhygienic part-time barman, was handicapped as a drinker by his busy, purposeful wife being in charge of his pay packet: ‘Inv [Investigator] has watched him sitting in the public bar with an empty half-pint glass in front of him for the whole of the afternoon. He just sits still gazing ahead with a cow-like expression on his face. He prides himself that he can sit the whole afternoon and think of absolutely nothing . . .’ Bert Lawrence, a boilerman in the pits, was king of the darts board: ‘As soon as he comes into the pub he looks around for prospective players. Bert drinks pints, but when playing darts tips his half-pint winnings into his pint glass.’ Evan Davis, surface foreman at the colliery, had a boxer’s face, permanently played the tough guy and as a special treat would bring his quiet, much more intelligent wife to the Lion on a Saturday night to drink a glass of bottled beer. Gwn, the milkman, had a pint every afternoon at the end of his round, still wearing his tie and full-length brown overalls: ‘He seems to be a chain smoker and Inv has always seen him with a Woodbine sticking out of the corner of his mouth.’ And Dai Minton, the dentist, had a red face, a glass eye, always kept his overcoat on, and drank heavily, sometimes becoming bad-tempered and vindictive. ‘However much people dislike going to him as a dentist because of his drinking habits it would be difficult for them to go anywhere else and probably more costly.’2 Were they lives of quiet desperation? The Inv did not say. But they were real lives lived in real time in a real, intensely circumscribed world.
Women also had lives, and in their 1951 survey, English Life and Leisure, B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers included a decent sprinkling among their adult case histories (some of them supplied by Ferdynand Zweig):
Miss R. is a copy-typist in a large office. She is 21 or so, and lives in a bed-sitting room. She finds it difficult to make both ends meet but is happy because she is free, because she has plenty of boyfriends and plenty of entertainment. She is quite promiscuous and sees no harm in it. Indeed, she doesn’t see why people make so much fuss about it; it just seems natural.
She is most of all interested in ‘boys,’ then in clothes, then in dancing and cinemas. She hopes to marry one day and settle down, but not for a long time.
She reads a daily paper and an evening paper, and always the News of the World. She doesn’t bother about radio except sometimes the Light Programme.
She doesn’t gamble usually, but sometimes in the office they put up 1s each and back a horse just for fun.
Not a churchgoer. She thought the very idea funny. ‘Me – like all the stuffy people in their best clothes? That’s a good one. Fat lot of difference it seems to make to them anyway. No, not me.’
Miss Z. was formerly Mrs X. But she divorced her husband and resumed her maiden name. She is a rather dull and disillusioned woman of about 35. She divorced her husband for cruelty after he had beaten her with a dog whip in a drunken fit, and had been found by the neighbours with both hands around her throat shaking her.
Miss Z. works in a factory and is happy enough there, but is lonely in the evenings in her bed-sitting room. She is fed up with men and has enough of women all day.
She does a football pool coupon, and most days has a shilling or two on a horse.
Not interested in religion. ‘Went to church once too bloody often I did,’ she says, referring to her wedding.
Drinks two or three glasses of Guinness each night on her way home from work. Is a chain smoker.
Her world really has just come to pieces with the failure of her marriage. She mopes because there is nothing she really wants, or that really interests her except a home and a husband, and she knows she is too dull and unattractive to have a chance of a second marriage.
Mrs N. is a working-class housewife of about 45. She has three sons. Her husband always gives her his wage packet intact. She allows him £1 for beer and tobacco, another 10s for five dinners in his works canteen, and 5s for fares. She is left with ‘less than £4 10s’ for all household expenses, and that includes 10s family allowances. They live in a council house and Mrs N. says that her whole life is ‘scraping and pinching to make do’. She can afford no recreations for herself – no smoking or drinking, although Mr N. sometimes brings her a bottle of beer from the public house.
She cannot afford to go to the cinema except as a very rare treat, and as for going to church she says she spends ‘enough time on my knees scrubbing floors without kneeling on Sundays’. She adds, ‘Anyway, what good does it do?’
She likes listening to the radio and her greatest joy is sometimes during the daytime, when everyone is out, to make a cup of tea and sit down and listen to Woman’s Hour.
Mrs B. is a widow of about 55–60. She is in full-time employment as caterer-cook at a small industrial canteen. She earns a good living and is able to save the whole of a small pension as well as part of her wages towards the time when she cannot work. She is a simple woman with no enemies, no close friends and few relatives. She is not unhappy, having a small comfortable flat and enjoying her work.
She does not drink or gamble but smokes occasionally.
She listens a good deal to the radio and goes occasionally to the cinema. She reads novels from the 2d library and reads the News of the World.
She says she is better fed now than she has ever been in her life and her wages are bigger than her husband ever earned. He died some years ago and she speaks of him quite impersonally.
Went to chapel as a girl but has not been for years. When asked why not replied, ‘Well, people used to go years ago. It’s different now. I don’t see I’m any worse for it.’
Rowntree and Lavers also included the case histories of some teenage girls. ‘Miss F. has a great desire to “make the best of” herself and to marry someone who can give her a “nice” home,’ they noted of a 17-year-old who was the oldest of five daughters and worked the telephone switchboard in a solicitor’s office. ‘She is fond of children and hopes to have two of her own. She thinks it is unfair on the children to have more than two as it reduces their material prospects.’3
So many individual lives, so many individual fates – inevitably it makes one wonder about the validity of terms like ‘class’, ‘culture’ and ‘community’. Yet at the level of generalisation, one can plausibly argue that in some sense British society was ‘frozen’ during the ten or so years after the war, that there was for most people, following the shake-up of the war, an instinctive retreat to familiar ways, familiar rituals, familiar relations, all in the context of only very slowly lifting austerity and uncomfortably limited material resources. The continuing bombsites in city centres could hardly have been a more visually eloquent symbol of this protracted hiatus pending a barely imagined onslaught from the – far from unwelcome – forces of change. This was the final authentic phase of what before long would come to seem a distant, irrecoverable epoch of urban civilisation, stretching back to the late nineteenth century and rent asunder from the mid-1950s.
7
A Different Class of People
‘And then there was this business of Britain’s class system,’ recalled Doris Lessing about leaving Rhodesia in 1949 and coming to London. ‘It shocked me – as it does all colonials . . .’ One day she and an ex-RAF friend from Rhodesia went into a pub in Bayswater: ‘It was the public bar. We stood at the counter, ordered drinks. All around the walls, men sat watching us. They were communing without words. One got up, slowly, deliberately, came to us, and said, “You don’t want to be ’ere. That’s your place,” pointing at the private b
ar. We meekly took ourselves there, joining our peers, the middle class.’ The following year another young writer, Dan Jacobson, arrived from South Africa and was struck by ‘the appetite the English had for “placing” not only a stranger to the country like myself, but perhaps even more pressingly those who were not strangers, who were native to the islands, and whose hands, faces, accents, clothes and bearing would, if studied with sufficient attention, reveal valuable items of information about them: the most important of these, inevitably, being the social class to which they belonged’. He added that it was a ‘kind of detective work’ that reminded him of ‘an insect stroking an object ahead of it with its feelers, or of a cat sniffing a person’s shoes’ – and that the process reflected a society ‘deeply, obsessively divided by a host of invidious, criss-crossing “social indicators” that would go a long way towards determining relations between its members’.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 16
