Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  8 January 1953, Thursday. Foggy. Up at 5.00 am. Garage 6.30 am. No 3 Duty. Called for haircut on way home. Mother called at night with firewood. All at home. Made football coupon out.

  14 January 1953, Wednesday. Up at 5.00 am. Garage 6.20 am. Number 4 Duty. Hannah went to Lewis’s for cotton 5½d. I dressed aunty’s foot again. Little better. Mother brought a bag of coke. On our own, Bill out.

  28 January 1953, Wednesday. Day off. Hannah & I go to circus at Belle Vue matinee. On our own at night.

  28 March 1953, Saturday. Backed winner of Grand National ‘Early Mist’ 20 to 1.

  15 June 1953, Monday. Rainy. 11 coaches for old age pensioners. Manley Park [Manchester] & Albert Park [Salford]. Police escort through B/pool. Raining. No meals. They had meals at Woolworths. Left 7.00 pm. Home 10.00 pm.

  16 June 1953, Tuesday. 8.15 am. 5 coaches to Rhyl. Brooke St old age pensioners. Dinner & tea at Ira’s Café. Raining slightly all day. Left at 7.00 pm. Home 11.00 pm. OK.

  22 April 1954, Thursday. Up at 5.15 am. Made fire. Garage 6.25 am. No 5 duty. On our own at night watching T.V. Mother called with coupons.

  8 May 1954, Saturday. T.V. poor.3

  Papers, cigarettes, drink: those were the three staples of the working-class, especially male working-class, way of life – call it ‘culture’.

  Despite up to a fifth of the adult population being illiterate or semi-illiterate, the reading of newspapers was a boom activity in post-war Britain: by 1952 the average total weekday circulation was 29 million, comprising 16.1 million for national morning papers (almost double the 1930 average), 2.5 million for provincial morning papers, 3.4 million for London evening papers and 7 million for provincial evening papers. On Sundays, when most people read more than one paper, the average total circulation was an extraordinary 31.7 million, more than double the 1930 average. UNESCO figures around the same time revealed that daily newspaper circulation in Britain, about 610 per 1,000 inhabitants, was decisively ahead of all other countries, with Sweden next on 490 and France on only 240.4

  Which papers did the working class favour? The following, according to the authoritative Hulton Survey of 1949 (based on a national sample of more than 7,000 people), were the most popular six titles:

  News of the World: 55.0 per cent (ie read by 55 per cent of the working class)

  People: 35.9 per cent

  Sunday Pictorial: 33.8 per cent

  Daily Mirror: 28.6 per cent

  Daily Express: 25.7 per cent

  Sunday Express: 15.1 per cent

  By contrast, only 3.4 per cent of the working class read the Daily Telegraph and only 1.2 per cent the Observer, while men read more than women, with 59.3 per cent compared to 51.3 per cent in terms of the News of the World.

  The Press and Its Readers was the title of Mass-Observation’s illuminating 1949 survey. ‘You know it is all reading, sort of thing, something to read,’ an unskilled working-class woman explained about her Daily Mirror habit. ‘To see how things are going on in the world. I like to hear about murders, I hear about all the murders going on, how it all happened. Proper blood curdler for that sort of thing I am.’ The survey included a rich array of other testimony:

  I read the Mirror. Not anything particular I like about it at all, except the cartoons. I don’t read any particular page, just if anyone says anything interesting I pick it up and read it, but I don’t bother with it much. (Unskilled working-class man, 45)

  I’ve had the News of the World for years. I like to read all the crimes and sensational things, and the medical part too. (Unskilled working-class woman, 35)

  I read the News of the World. It seems to me to have all straightforward news in it, and we’ve been having it for years. (Artisan-class woman, 50)

  I read the People. I like the fashions and all that. (Unskilled working-class woman, 36)

  I read the Express . . . All the sport, see? (Unskilled working man, 19)

  I read the Mirror. I open it at the Live Letters – I read that when I’m feeding the baby. (Unskilled working-class woman, 30)

  I read the Sunday Express . . . I always read the letters – that’s the first thing I always read – they have columns about tittle tats from all over the world. (Woman, artisan-class, 19)

  I read the Pictorial. I buy it for the baby to look at the pictures. (Housewife, unskilled working-class, 30)

  When I’ve the time, I look at the Mirror – Live Letters – they seem to learn you a bit, they give you the answers, you know. And Jane! I’ve not much time to read really, but when I do I prefer the Mirror. (Unskilled working man, 35)

  The last word went to a middle-aged charwoman. ‘Lord love a duck!’ she replied to being asked why she read her local paper. ‘What a lot of silly questions. Just for curiosity of course. Not for anything in particular.’

  The undaunted investigators also watched readers in action in public libraries. A couple of examples were reasonably typical:

  Picks up the Daily Graphic [forerunner of the Daily Sketch] and looks at front-page headlines. Reads ‘Woman Recluse 89 Dead in Trunk’. Reads length of column, turns to back page and continues to read further column (as continued from front page) about the murder (time 4 minutes). Reads column ‘Anne’s Wedding etc.’ (1 minute), back again to front page – reads column on extreme right ‘The Dyke’, etc. Turns to centre pages, looks at pictures (another minute). Turns to page 2 and reads ‘Money is no object’. Puts elbows on table. Also reads article on lower page 2 – ‘20 years on your age’ (5 minutes). Turns over to page 3 – reads cartoon ‘Blondie’. Looks up and sees that another woman has finished with magazine Britannia and Eve – leans over and takes it. (Skilled working-class woman, 45)

  Picks up Daily Mirror, glances at front page news items (headlines only). Opens Daily Mirror to page 3 and reads cartoon – glances at remaining reading matter but doesn’t settle down to read anything special. Turns to page 4 – reads ‘Jane’ – looks at pictures. Leaves Daily Mirror open centre page – walks away. (Unskilled working-class man, 30)

  ‘On the whole, although the majority of people look at the political news, it is only to glance at it,’ was M-O’s key, unambiguous conclusion. ‘Relatively few ignore it completely, but on the other hand equally few show signs of any real interest in it. And although most of people’s reading time, insofar as dailies are concerned, is devoted to news, it is largely the sort of home news that is partly gossip, and that has an easy personal appeal.’5

  By far the two most popular dailies in the country as a whole were the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, each selling around four million copies by the early 1950s. But whereas the Mirror’s readership was overwhelmingly working-class, the super-patriotic, drum-beating, right-wing Express enjoyed a strong following across the classes – helped by its three leading adult cartoons (Osbert Lancaster, the Gambols and Giles), each having a different class subject matter and, presumably, appeal. The paper’s editor was the legendary Arthur Christiansen, for whom the test of a story was reputedly whether it would appeal to someone living in the backstreets of Derby. As for the Mirror, two of its most distinctive features were its American-style strip cartoons – usually about seven on any one day, including ‘Buck Ryan’, ‘Belinda’ and ‘Garth’ as well as ‘Jane’ – and its ‘Live Letters’, answered since 1936 by the Old Codgers, definitely not American. ‘I am informed by my comrades that I could be fined £2 for taking my place in a fish and chip queue out of turn. Is this true?’ asked ‘Fishy’ from RAF Hednesford in July 1951. ‘If we had a queue jumper to deal with we’d tell him the same,’ was the reply. ‘No, laddie, we’re not spoiling it for your comrades.’ Celebrity featured strongly – in this same issue Judy Garland and Noël Coward on the French Riviera, Vera Lynn’s summer season at Blackpool and ‘freckled’ Glynis Johns’s make-up for her latest film role – while editorial space devoted to hard news (excluding crime and sensation) was significantly less than in the worthier, TUC-backed, commercially struggling Daily Herald. ‘We’ve taken th
e Mirror since 1940,’ a 30-year-old gas fitter explained to M-O. ‘I forget what particular reason it was now, I believe it was something to do with some women’s patterns that my wife liked . . . Well, myself I like it because the sports page is quite enterprising, and we all clamour for Jane, and the comic strips.’6

  Kingpin of the Sunday papers was the News of the World, with a circulation of around seven million, a readership of around eighteen million, and a relentless diet of crime-based stories. ‘He Felt a Darkness – And Found Death’ jostled on 23 November 1952 alongside ‘Scandal Exposed by Writing on the Wall’ and ‘ “I Let Him Have It With The Hairpin” ’, not to mention ‘Attack in Cubicle Number 38’ and ‘He Trailed Wife’s Car and Got a Black Eye’. There was also in this issue a leader advocating the return of flogging, an article by the high-profile Tory MP Robert Boothby on how ‘Empire Can Show The World The Light’, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s ‘Care of Your Cat’ column (‘How Clever Are Cats?’), a lengthy investigative article (‘Vice in the Heart of the Capital: A Stain on Britain’s Good Name’) about the Paddington district, and a fashion competition (1½d entry fee for two coupons, £500 prize) requiring contestants to arrange in order of merit ‘photographs of a distinguished West End model wearing nine different jumpers or cardigans taken from Selfridge’s stock’.

  Tellingly, though, the paper’s dominance did not extend to Scotland, where instead the obligatory Sunday reading for a staggering 77.3 per cent of adults in 1949 was the altogether homelier, more down-to-earth, Glasgow-published Sunday Post. Typical items on this particular Sunday included ‘Our Food Reporter’ on the latest prices and supplies, ‘Magic Tricks for the Xmas Party: Priscilla Tells You the Secrets’, a story called ‘The Silken Web’, and the ‘Pass It On’ column of domestic tips from readers, including Mrs M. Dunnett of 4 Main Street, Clackmannan: ‘A half-burnt coal on the last fire at night can be saved by making an air hole with the poker in the centre of the fire. The flames die out quickly, leaving the charred coal for easy lighting in the morning.’ There were also, as ever, the latest adventures of the long-running cartoon characters, notably ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’, with the latter’s strapline entirely characteristic:

  Oor Wullie’s job of paper lad

  Aye makes him late for school. Too bad!

  He’s bolted twice, and more to come,

  But third time’s lucky for our chum!

  Oor Wullie was a tenement boy with dungarees and boots, his spiky hair invariably uncombed and ungelled; his creator was Dudley D. Watkins, a devout member of the Church of Christ in Dundee; and the world he evoked was, in the subsequent words of the Scottish publisher Bill Campbell, ‘a Scotland of quaintness, kindness, and community intimacy, where political thoughts or aspirations are taboo’.7

  In the Sunday press as elsewhere there was abundant, wholly shameless advertising of the joys of smoking. ‘ “The cigarettes for me” says football genius Stanley Matthews,’ ran an ad for Craven ‘A’ in the News of the World in December 1952, while earlier in the year, in Autosport, the up-and-coming ‘speed merchant’ Stirling Moss was positively eloquent: ‘I’m a light smoker, and that makes the taste of the cigarette an important consideration. Craven “A” gives me all I want of a smoke – and nothing I don’t!’ It is impossible to exaggerate the ubiquity of smoking. ‘People smoked at work, at home, in the cinema, down the pub, on public transport,’ remembers Anton Rippon (born 1944) about his Derby childhood:

  One of my earliest memories of floodlit football at the Baseball Ground is of thousands of cigarettes glowing in the darkened stands. Abstainers just had to lump it. I grew up in a house full of tobacco fumes. My father [a linotype operator] smoked cigarettes and a pipe – St Bruno tobacco for his briar and either John Player’s Navy Cut or Gold Flake cigarettes. He was never without one or the other and could smoke a cigarette down to the tiniest nub. Still alight, it stuck to his bottom lip and wobbled up and down when he spoke . . .

  Phil Vidofsky lit one cigarette from another as he cut hair at his barber’s shop . . . Ted Barker, a butcher whose shop was at the top of Gerard Street, smoked as he prepared Sunday joints, his fingers stained brown by nicotine, ash falling on the meat. Nobody seemed to mind . . .

  It was much the same for John Sutherland (born 1938). ‘I was brought up in a household as thick with fumes as a kippering shack in Arbroath,’ he recalls of his more or less working-class childhood in Colchester. ‘I was routinely woken up by a morning chorus of hacking, or phlegmy or dry coughs, as distinctively identifiable as the voices of the coughers. I could, from my earliest years, distinguish “Willy Woodbines” from Senior Service or Three Castles Virginia by their smell alone.’

  In fact, almost half the adult population were only passive smokers. The Hulton Survey for the first quarter of 1949 revealed that whereas 79.1 per cent of men were smokers (mainly of cigarettes only), only 37.7 per cent of women were. Moreover, women who did smoke averaged just 6.5 cigarettes a day, compared to 14.9 for the average male cigarette smoker. Importantly, smoking was a thoroughly cross-class activity: not only were members of the working class just as likely (or unlikely) to smoke as members of other classes, but if anything their men on average smoked slightly fewer cigarettes daily than better-off men. If beyond that there was a specific working-class twist to smoking, it was perhaps threefold: a marked disinclination to smoke pipes; on the part of the poorer working man an economically enforced penchant for roll-ups, with the French-owned Rizla by this time already a brand leader; and an almost tribal loyalty to untipped Woodbines, often sold in corner shops in ones and twos out of an opened packet kept by the till.8

  ‘Should We Smoke Less?’ asked Picture Post in September 1948, exactly two years before the publication of the first British research – only slowly disseminated – on the link between smoking and lung cancer. The context was a serious tobacco shortage, brought on by balance-of-payments difficulties, and graphic photographs of anxious queuers outside London tobacconists were accompanied by some eloquent captions about the smoking motivation:

  Mrs Mary Whittle, of St George’s Buildings, London E., goes into a queue twice a day to collect five a time for her two sons. They get cigarettes on the way to work, but rely on her to make it up to 20 a day each. ‘They don’t drink, they work hard, and Charlie would rather go without his dinner money than be without a smoke. They’ve smoked since they were men, and I don’t see why they should stop. It’s their only bit of consolation.’

  The old age pensioner in the trilby is a regular. He is Alfred Harris of Ashmore Road, Paddington, who rations himself to ten a day because of the price. He has his coupon allowance and works as an assistant stoker because it helps with his tobacco money. He couldn’t afford it otherwise, and he can’t give up smoking. He has tried but his resolution lasted only a couple of days. He became irritable and went back to ten Woodbines. Tobacco, he says, soothes him and helps him at work.

  John Equilant, plumber, once gave up cigarettes altogether because of the cost. Smokes twenty a day now because it is ‘comforting’. His assistant, Gerald Tubbs, smokes fifteen a day. Won’t give it up or cut it down.

  Mr R Meatyard is a GPO linesman. He gets through a packet of twenty a day – sometimes more. He tried to stop smoking when the price was raised in the last Budget, but after three days ended the struggle. ‘Why should I give it up, anyway?’

  Perhaps most typical of all, though, was the 20-a-day, 35-year-old factory worker highlighted soon afterwards by Rowntree and Lavers in their study English Life and Leisure. ‘Cannot afford so many because he is married with two children, but cannot do without,’ noted his mini case history. ‘Has tried several times to give up smoking, but becomes so irritable that home life is impossible and his wife begs him to start smoking again.’9

  So too with the demon drink. ‘Drinking is definitely [double-underlined] a form of escapism from the pits – from the steel works – from the surroundings – from the depressing atmosphere of a small mining town,�
�� declared Mass-Observation’s investigator in his 1947 report on drinking in Blaina, south Wales. In fact, consumption of alcohol was on a long-term downward trend: annual per-head intake of beer (overwhelmingly the most popular drink) had been some 27.5 gallons before the Great War, 14.2 gallons by 1938, and by 1951–2 was down to 12.5 – though even that last figure worked out at well over three-quarters of a pint a day for every beer-drinking adult, with relatively little difference across the classes. Of course, there were those (including in the late 1940s about 22 per cent of the male working class and 61 per cent of the female working class) who never drank beer; while for women who were not teetotallers, there was by the early 1950s a new, sparkling drink available in the form of the affordable (1s 3d), brilliantly marketed ‘champagne’ perry with the appealing Bambi deer symbol. Babycham’s creator was Francis Showering (of the Somerset cider-making family firm), who thereby at last freed women from the dismal inexpensive alternatives of, in an obituarist’s words, ‘milk stout, sweet cider or the sickly VP wines’.10

  How much drunkenness was there? When Mass-Observation undertook in 1947–8 a comprehensive survey of drinking habits, involving some 5,000 hours being spent in pubs and clubs by its team of investigators, the striking result was ‘less than a dozen cases reported at first hand of people being violently drunk’. Three years later the findings were much the same in an M-O survey (involving Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Nottingham and Salford) that focused specifically on the question. ‘Pretty free from drunkenness,’ a Bristol policeman avowed. ‘It all depends what you mean by drunk. Somebody out cold or just merry. I mean unable to look after themselves. There’s not very much in this particular town. For myself I expect to see one drunken person per day when I’m on duty.’ He added that the ‘really drunk’ tended to be ‘the very lowest class person’. Also in Bristol, a middle-aged, working-class woman (and ex-licencee) living near a pub agreed that times had changed. ‘Nothing like it used to be,’ she declared. ‘People know more how to conduct themselves now-a-days. People used to be more free and easy. Now the police have got more control. They didn’t used to mind.’ Amid much continuing ‘activator’ whittering about the drink problem – typified by the disapproving, deeply condescending chapter in the Rowntree/Lavers survey – this relative new sobriety was a deep disappointment to the defiantly non-puritanical Raymond Postgate, pioneer of the Good Food Guide. ‘When I was small, in a provincial town in the reign of Edward VII, there was real drinking, heavy continuous drinking by great masses of people,’ he fondly recalled in 1949. And once, when he had pointed out to his mother a swaying, tottering, shouting man on the pavement in broad daylight and asked why he was behaving like that, she had answered casually: ‘He is a working man, my dear; he is drunk.’