Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Privatisation of nationalised health care – aka the NHS – was never on the agenda. But by autumn 1952 there was considerable pressure on the new Minister of Health, Iain Macleod, to get a tighter grip on costs. This pressure came partly from the Treasury, dismayed by the way in which a generous award to doctors earlier in the year had led to a chain reaction of wage claims across the NHS; partly from hard-line elements in the Cabinet, keen on major tax cuts as soon as possible; and partly from the City, which, according to the Financial Times in October, was looking for a ‘re-think’ of ‘the principles of Government expenditure from the beginning’. The upshot was a decision to appoint an independent committee to examine NHS expenditure – a decision that involved a considerable tussle over both the committee’s terms of reference and its composition. The hardliners lost both: they wanted the committee’s explicit goal to be a reduction in costs, but instead it was merely asked how to avoid ‘a rising charge’ on the Exchequer; while the chairman was to be a leftish economist (and Macleod’s old tutor) from Cambridge, Claude Guillebaud, abetted by four figures of impeccable political balance. Macleod himself had no desire to dismantle the NHS or significantly reduce the service it provided, and indeed for an ambitious young politician in 1952 it would have been folly to have harboured such aspirations. That autumn Charlie Chaplin paid a much-publicised visit to the London slums where he had grown up and told reporters about the contrast between the ‘rotten teeth’ he had once known and the ‘rosy-cheeked children, vigorous, smiling with confidence’ that he saw now. ‘They are the future of England,’ he added in words that carried a powerful emotional charge, ‘and, if for nothing else, socialised medicine, if I may say so, is a grand thing for that reason.’ The following spring, a Gallup poll found that seven out of ten were satisfied with the treatment they received under the NHS.

  The more consensual Tories were encouraged anyway by the improving political climate. By November 1952 – against a background of the government winning three by-elections in a row, the economic situation (including the balance of payments) looking better, Butler succeeding ‘in making the pound suddenly look more bobbish’, houses ‘going up at a faster clip’, food ‘all at once far more plentiful in the shops’, the ‘first cold snap and foretaste of winter unaccompanied, for once, by warnings of a coal crisis’, and above all the failure to come to pass of Labour’s dire warnings of ‘large-scale unemployment, possibly war, and anyhow the pulling down of the welfare state brick by brick’ – it was clear to Panter-Downes that the Tories were firmly in the box seat: ‘This seems like a really serious moment for the Socialist Party, badgered as it is by Bevan from the rear and faced with the necessity of thinking up a new policy to take the place of the old, outdated emotional appeals to the voters to save their hard-won rights from the wicked Tories.’ Nothing mattered more than the increasingly benign economic picture, in large part a reflection of the falling price of raw materials and the start of the long peacetime boom for the industrial West, and in his budget the following April, Butler took full political advantage by taking sixpence off income tax, as well as reducing purchase tax on some household articles. ‘Personally I shall not profit very much as my income is so small,’ lamented Gladys Langford, still living in a hotel in north London and about to turn 63. ‘If only I could give up smoking!’ The general reaction, though, was predictably positive – so much so that Gallup soon afterwards found that the government’s satisfaction rating was at a well-nigh unprecedented 60 per cent, up some 14 points from January. ‘The Socialists have a theme,’ Churchill somewhat smugly reflected the day after Butler’s budget. ‘We have no theme – we just have a way of life.’

  Even so, rationing remained widespread. Tea did come off in October 1952 and sweets (this time conclusively) in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs were all still on the ration. So too was margarine, but more generously than butter. ‘The Food Ministry should give us more butter,’ implored ‘Wanderer’ in the Dumbarton-based Lennox Herald. ‘The youth of the nation cannot build up a physique on “marge”.’ The middle-aged and elderly Chiswick housewives interviewed in November 1952 for Mass-Observation’s ‘Margarine Survey’ would have wholeheartedly agreed:

  I ’ates the stuff and I always did. Wouldn’t eat bread and marge if you paid me. Often I don’t get our ration. I’ll tell you what I do – I mix the cooking fat with the little bit of dripping out of the Sunday joint, and if there’s a drip of bacon fat I put that in too, and we haves that on our bread with pepper and salt, and it’s a lot better than any margarine.

  Frankly I don’t like the stuff, though it’s all right in cakes. I know in a minute if they give me margarine on bread, if I’m out to tea. And as for butter, well, there’s butter and butter . . . The National butter is several degrees better than margarine, but there’s a lot of room for improvement in it. The only good butter is at Sainsbury’s. They call it National but it’s not, it comes from Denmark or Holland and it’s lovely.

  When you think the war’s been over for seven years, it’s terrible to think of that miserable two ounces [ie of butter]. Margarine is a lot better than it was years ago, but it’s not nice on bread.

  I think margarine’s horrible stuff, really. I’d give a lot for more butter.3

  ‘Can’t tell Stork from butter’ was for years the optimistic slogan of one of the leading brands of margarine. Or, as my father would provokingly say when I was in one of my sulks as a small boy, ‘Can’t tell talk from mutter.’

  Just before 8.20 a.m. on Thursday, 8 October 1952 – barely a month after the Farnborough Air Show disaster – there was carnage at Harrow and Wealdstone station. The night train from Perth, running at least an hour late, crashed into the stationary back of a semi-fast train from Tring to Euston, and then moments later the Euston–Manchester express went headlong into the wreckage on an adjoining track. Amid appalling scenes, as the footbridge came down and those waiting on the platform were swept away like leaves, 112 people were killed and more than 200 injured – England’s worst-ever railway disaster. ‘To sympathy for the victims and praise for the rescue workers, including many volunteers who rallied to help in the spirit of the air raids, can be added confidence that, after a most detailed enquiry, the facts will be made available,’ The Times reassured the nation. ‘Pride in the record of the British railways is strong and well founded.’ And the Daily Mirror quoted an American first-aid man at the scene, praising the stoicism of the injured: ‘The British don’t cry.’

  Less than two months later, on Friday, 5 December, a young actress called Mary Sutherland was travelling from Aldershot to London. The journey should have taken about three-quarters of an hour, but ‘the train kept stopping and got slower’, she recalled half a century later. ‘Nobody knew what was going on and then we realised there was very thick fog. The journey took hours. When we eventually got to Waterloo we didn’t know we were there. A guard came along hammering on the doors, “Get out. Get out. You’ve come to the station, get out.” You couldn’t see the platform, you had to take it on trust.’ By late afternoon a greeny-yellow vapour had enveloped the capital, bringing it to a virtual standstill – and that evening it was so all-pervasive that a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells had to be stopped because the audience could no longer see the stage. Over the next three nights and days the smog retained its grip:

  6 December. The town being enveloped in a thick and filthy fog the whole day through, ventured out only to go over to the TH [St Pancras Town Hall] and back in morning, and with M & F [his wife Marjorie and their son Anthony, nicknamed Frainy] round to Euston & back in afternoon for the opening of the St Pancras Church bazaar by Richard Hearne (now known to televiewers as ‘Mr Pastry’) in his customary comic old dodderer get up. (Anthony Heap)

  7 December. Fog. It was simply dreadful. Visibility about six feet. And it got down the throat & nose & stung like pepper. The Automobile Ass. says it is the worst they have known. All buses etc are suspen
ded. I tripped on a curb & fell on my poor old bosom, left side. (Marian Raynham)

  8 December. Oh! The fog! At 10 am it was so thick I was afraid to cross Holloway Rd. At 4 pm, I had to hold the side of a passing perambulator to guide my steps. There was practically no traffic on the streets . . . Kendall [a fellow-lodger] said people were ‘panicking’ at King’s Cross Tube as hordes of passengers who usually use buses sought to board trains. (Gladys Langford)

  Raynham’s experience in Surbiton was particularly telling, given her proximity to the power station opened at Kingston four years earlier and since then belching black smoke into the air as remorselessly as its earlier counterparts in Southwark and Battersea.

  The coming of the smog coincided with preparations for the annual Smithfield Show at Earl’s Court, starting on the Monday. ‘The last of the stock arrived at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning,’ related Farmers Weekly:

  At noon on Sunday the hall seemed almost as full of fog as the street outside and a number of cattle were heavily distressed and were removed to the show’s hospital.

  Finally, exhibitors of no fewer than ten beasts were compelled to send their animals for slaughter; three other animals died and at least two others were sent home. A very heavy and unprecedented blow.

  Probably the most unfortunate of the exhibitors who suffered these losses was Frank Parkinson Farms Ltd, whose lovely Aberdeen-Angus heifer Portia 5th of Stisted was among those which died.

  ‘There is no doubt,’ added the report, ‘that she would have stood high in the prize list.’

  Government response to the overall choking, eye-watering problem was undistinguished. Not only was there an attempt to conceal the true extent of the lethalness of the four-day smog – in reality killing some 12,000 people, mainly elderly, not the official estimate of 4,000 – but the Housing Minister, Harold Macmillan, barely saw it as a government matter and resisted pressure to reduce the burning of coal on open fires and do more to persuade local authorities to exercise their smoke-abatement powers. ‘We do what we can,’ he wearily replied to one parliamentary critic, ‘but, of course, the hon Gentleman must realise the enormous number of broad economic considerations which have to be taken into account and which it would be foolish altogether to disregard.’4

  The sequence of disasters was completed during the appalling weekend of 31 January/1 February 1953, as a huge storm first sank the Princess Victoria car ferry crossing from Stranraer to Larne, with the loss of 133 lives, and then swept down the east coast of England from Lincolnshire to Kent, leading not only to severe flooding but to terrifying, life-threatening walls of water breaking through inadequate sea defences. Crucially, there was no system in place warning people to evacuate as the storm neared them, and surprisingly little use seems to have been made of the radio. Worst affected was Canvey Island in the Thames Estuary – ‘all bungalows and jerry-built’, as John Fowles had noted mordantly a few years earlier, and entirely below sea level. The storm reached it in the early hours of Sunday morning. ‘My mother woke me by bursting into the bedroom I shared with my brother,’ Barrie de Lara recalled:

  She stood me up on my bed and dressed me, rapidly pulling trousers, jumper and school raincoat over my pyjamas. I sat down to reach for the Teddy Tail annual I had dropped when I fell asleep and found it soggy and swollen. Water was cascading, roaring, four or five feet high, through the front door. My brother, older than me by ten years, earned my lifelong respect by standing up to his knees in water in front of a mirror and putting on a white shirt and his Essex County Cricket Club tie. ‘If I’m going to drown, then I’m going to drown decently dressed,’ he announced to us all.

  There was a scramble for the roof space. Father hauled himself up through the trap door. Then Mother climbed onto my brother’s shoulders and was manhandled aloft. I was passed up like a package. Last came my brother . . .

  My father had grabbed two cylindrical tins of Player’s cigarettes, a bottle of rum, a pack of cards and matches: you could tell he was an ex-Navy man. My mother had collected candles, money, her fur coat and jewel box. My brother had taken his best shoes and his cricket bat.

  The de Lara family survived the night, but 58 Canvey Islanders did not, many of them drowned in their beds. Altogether, 307 people on the east coast died in the storm and 32,000 had to evacuate their flooded homes. It was, by any yardstick, a huge, calamitous tragedy. Yet perhaps because it did not chime in with the much-desired early to mid-1950s narrative of material progress and increasing optimism, perhaps also because most of its victims were poor people living on low-lying, marginal land, it failed to achieve a central place in the national memory.

  Canvey itself had largely been developed between the wars as a favoured retirement spot for working-class Londoners with enough savings to buy a plot of cheap land and put up an inexpensive bungalow. Now, in their hour of adversity, most of Canvey’s flooded-out inhabitants returned to London to find temporary accommodation with their extended families. ‘The relatives in Bethnal Green, or Hoxton, or Hackney, were waiting with open doors,’ noted one admiring observer, Michael Young, adding that the whole process was a ‘remarkable testament to the strength of kinship ties’. Young’s fieldwork in March left a marked impression on him, but perhaps he should have been on the bus with Mollie Panter-Downes crossing the causeway from the railway station at South Benfleet some ten days after the storm. She found herself sitting amid many returning evacuees:

  A typical greeting shouted across the bus is ‘What happened to your place?’, and if the answer is ‘Well, we’ve still got three foot of water everywhere, but we can’t complain. Lucky to be alive,’ the other Canvey Islanders nod and say, ‘That’s right.’ All the same, everyone’s raging preoccupation is to get back into his own three feet of water as soon as possible, for the general feeling seems to be that that is far preferable to being high and dry among married daughters, squalling grandchildren, or well-meaning friends. ‘Where did you go?’ someone on the bus asked a sharp-faced little woman in an oilskin pixie hood sitting beside her grey-faced husband. ‘We never went,’ the woman replied tartly. ‘We just came in a couple of hours ago to buy a few things. We was evacuated in the war and we don’t intend to have none of that again.’

  Indeed, of the island’s population of some 11,000, about 750 people were ‘still sticking it out on Canvey’. There, amid the general cold, wet misery and flooded-out houses with names like ‘Mon Tresor’ or ‘Kosy Kot’, there was at least one note of defiance: ‘Outside a food store stands a moth-eaten stuffed mountain bear holding in its paws a chalked notice that advises passersby to “Bear Up – Canvey Will Rise Again”.’5

  The smog and the storm were two of the few things this winter not blamed on cosh boys. The previous summer the unremittingly hard-line Lord Chief Justice, Rayner Goddard, had used the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet at the Mansion House to make a powerful plea for the restoration of corporal punishment, while Gladys Langford was noting by late October how newspapers were ‘full of accounts of further “coshings” and letters to the press advocating the return of flogging as punishment for crimes of violence’. The controversy continued unabated in November, with the Magistrates’ Association balloting its members on the question. The government, though, remained unmoved, with the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, pointing out to the Cabinet Committee that as well as Labour being solidly against it, ‘only about 3 or 4 to 1’ among Tories favoured restoration. But the issue continued to resonate, prompting Kenneth Allsop to report in December on ‘Fear in the Suburbs’ for Picture Post. ‘Acacia Avenue’s respectability is being ravaged by thuggery and coshery,’ he found. ‘A state of nerves certainly exists. I talked to men and women of all classes and callings, and in almost every one the attitude was emotional rather than rational . . . A revival of flogging was in loud demand.’ The magazine’s readers concurred. ‘No good will be done until the whip is brought back,’ declared Mrs Marjorie T. Brentnall of Congleton. ‘I feel very strongly about this, and so do al
l decent citizens.’ Mrs L. A. Kershaw of South Croydon spoke for the nation’s mothers: ‘I am a peace-loving housewife and have a grown-up son and feel for the parents of these young boys who take to violence. I am sure most of them would feel as I do – give them a thrashing and, then help them to live decently and become useful citizens.’ Soon afterwards the smog provoked a heavily publicised rash of what Langford called ‘ “cosh” attacks and hold-ups’, and in February it transpired that the magistrates’ ballot had produced a majority of more than two to one in favour of restoring corporal punishment. Next day, however, a private member’s Bill to that effect was defeated in the Commons by 159–63. The politicians had, in the words of Goddard’s biographer, ‘closed ranks’.6

  It was in this jumpy, agitated climate that there unfolded during the winter of 1952/3 the case of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old epileptic with a mental age of 11. On 2 November he and the 16-year-old Christopher Craig, both wearing drape jackets and crepe-soled shoes, attempted to rob the West Croydon warehouse of Barlow & Parkers, confectionery wholesalers. In the process, Craig shot dead Sidney Miles, a middle-aged police constable. The trial, with Goddard presiding, began at the Old Bailey on 9 December and lasted four days. ‘I think both little fuckers ought to swing,’ was reputedly the private view of Bentley’s counsel, while much turned on the police claim that Bentley had shouted out to Craig just before he shot, ‘Let him have it, Chris’ – words, if uttered, susceptible to more than one interpretation. ‘People waited 8 hours to get in to Craig’s trial,’ Langford in her north London hotel noted after the first day. ‘I don’t think he or Bentley who is being tried with him will hang. Craig is only 16 and even the police admit the other fellow is mentally sub-normal.’ Next day she went on: ‘Breakfast time talk among residents and staff centred on Craig’s trial. Most people think the verdict will be manslaughter and that Bentley will not hang as he did not actually handle a weapon. Both young men have lied again and again in their evidence. Craig says he “cried for his mother when he was injured” – no tears for the hapless constable shot dead and for his widow.’ In the event, after Goddard’s strongly pro-conviction summing-up (in the course of which he produced Bentley’s spiked knuckleduster), the jury returned guilty verdicts, though with a recommendation of mercy for Bentley. Craig was too young to be executed, but for Bentley the Lord Chief Justice saw no alternative but to put on his black cap.