Family Britain, 1951-1957
Page 38
Later in June a Gallup poll found that if the BBC were to provide alternative television programmes to the existing ones, then only 19 per cent still wanted commercial stations to be set up – a significant decline in support for commercial television from the previous year, explicable partly by the ‘alternative’ proviso, partly by the huge boost in prestige that its Coronation coverage had given the BBC. That boost may have been fading by early July, when a Daily Express poll showed that 45 per cent favoured ‘sponsored TV programmes’, 36 per cent objected to them, and 19 per cent were don’t knows. There was also by July a rival to the NTC, with the emergence of the cross-party but Tory-backed Popular Television Association, essentially the creation of the powerful triumvirate of the ex-BBC man Norman Collins, the Old Etonian businessman Sir Robert Renwick and Charles Stanley of television manufacturers Pye Radio. The PTA proceeded to lobby at least as hard and as ruthlessly as the NTC, probably more so, and its high-profile supporters included the historian A.J.P. Taylor and the cricketer Alec Bedser. There was little doubt, moreover, which way the popular press was leaning. ‘What About The Viewers?’ was the Daily Mirror’s disloyal headline after Attlee in June had stated that a future Labour government would reverse any attempt ‘to allow television to pass into the hands of private profiteers’, with the paper asserting that ‘the politicians wrangle, but the viewing public stands by, unconsulted, ignored’. Ian Coster, television critic of the News of the World, showed himself less than in thrall to the BBC’s timeless spiritual values when in July he offered a simple remedy for the small audiences and lack of appeal of the Sunday-night plays on television: ‘The solution, which I keep on proposing, is to cut out intellectual drama and put on thrillers and comedies.’18
One soap opera, though, had everything. ‘The Queen Mother looked very happy and radiant,’ a Cheshire schoolgirl wrote in her essay about going to London and attending the Coronation procession, ‘but Princess Margaret looked rather sad.’ If not sad, certainly preoccupied, for the divorce of the 38-year-old Group Captain Peter Townsend (now serving as Comptroller of the Queen Mother’s Household) had gone through the previous December, while the bond between the 22-year-old Margaret and the war hero had grown ever closer. On Coronation Day itself, while the two were standing near each other in an anteroom to the Abbey, an observant foreign reporter noticed how she brushed away ‘with a tender hand’ a piece of fluff on his RAF uniform. Assumptions of intimacy were made, and next morning the story broke in the New York press. Eleven days later, on Sunday the 14th, the People ended the British silence. Under the headline ‘They must deny it now’ and next to photographs of the two, a front-page editorial began: ‘It is high time for the British public to be made aware of the fact that scandalous rumours about Princess Margaret are racing around the world.’ After identifying Townsend and filling in his background, there followed a passage of ‘sheer cant’, in Nick Clarke’s subsequent apt phrase: ‘The story is, of course, utterly untrue. It is quite unthinkable that a Royal princess, third in line of succession to the Throne, should even contemplate a marriage to a man who has been through the divorce courts.’ The story then went quiet for the rest of the month, but the decision was taken – by a mixture of court, government and Townsend himself – that he would be posted abroad for two years, as air attaché at the Brussels Embassy, and that the romance would be put on hold until after Margaret’s 25th birthday in August 1955. Margaret herself at the end of June accompanied her mother on an official visit to Rhodesia, with the Daily Mirror applauding their choice of aircraft: ‘The Comets fly triumphantly on. Their designers know them to be world-beaters – and so does our Royal Family.’19
In her absence during much of July, public controversy at last flared up. ‘If They Want To Marry, Why Shouldn’t They?’ was the provocative title of Charles Wintour’s piece in the Sunday Express on the 5th. After a glowing tribute to Townsend – war record, character, not the guilty party in his divorce – Wintour roundly declared that ‘the Church should not harm the life of a Princess whose welfare the people hold so close to their hearts’. Other papers also entered the fray, to the consternation of Nella Last in Barrow. ‘I’m puzzled about the articles about Princess Margaret & the aide-de-camp Townsend,’ she reflected on the 9th. ‘Wondering how they could ever think the match would be approved after the Duke of Windsor’s affair. There’s so much church disapproval.’ However, it was not, she mused later in her customary lengthy entry, any longer quite so simple: ‘Times have changed – I often feel a bit surprised at the number of divorces in our own town & district. Women don’t stand what they used to take for granted – desertion & cruelty, as well as “unfaithfulness”, & others claim the same “freedom” as men. No one thinks as they used to do – and “thought” is the thing that causes “conduct” – and everything seems so fluid, so chaotic, & people have to solve their own problems, as best they may.’ ‘My heart bleeds for her I must say,’ was Joyce Grenfell’s private view next day, but on the 12th the Sunday Express revealed that letters from readers had been three to one against Wintour’s liberal perspective. ‘The stigma of divorce has NOT gone completely,’ declared Kenneth Gange of Rainhill, Lancashire. ‘There are, I think, a few millions of us who know it is wrong.’ Mrs M. Rossiter of Whixley, York, flatly stated that ‘I am not one of those who consider a married man with two children suitable for any young girl of about 20.’ That same day the People ran a front-page story (‘Exiled: Why Have They Done This To Her Hero?’) about Townsend’s imminent posting to Brussels. ‘IT MEANS THAT THEY WILL BE GIVEN NO CHANCE TO MEET AND SAY GOODBYE,’ screamed the paper, though adding in normal type that their marriage remained ‘out of the question because the Queen’s sister cannot marry a man who has been through the divorce court’. And it quoted the Archdeacon of Birmingham, the Venerable Michael Parker, who the day before had responded to recent critical remarks about the Church of England’s overly prim attitude to the whole question: ‘There are many people who are caught up with the secular approach to life, and they have little concept or understanding of the basis of Christian marriage.’
Next morning Britain’s best-selling daily paper (having a few years earlier overtaken the Daily Express) typically upped the ante. ‘The Daily Mirror believes,’ pronounced a front-page leader, ‘that the time has come for the voice of the British people to be heard in the problem of Princess Margaret and her friend, Group-Captain Peter Townsend.’ Accordingly, a voting form appeared further down the page, with readers invited to mark the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box as to whether she should be allowed to marry him. All over the country it was now the great talking point. ‘My husband was in a dim mood – & Mrs Salisbury [the cleaner] was in one of her most trying,’ lamented Nella Last on the Wednesday:
Her disgust & indignation about Princess Margaret being ‘such a silly little fool’ held her up at times . . . ‘It’s not nice Mrs Last. I’d belt our Phyllis for acting like that. And a lot of silly girls who copy Princess Margaret’s clothes will think they can just do owt! . . . And fancy her being a stepmother . . . And I bet she would miss all the fuss she gets. I wonder if she has any money of her own. If she has any, she will find a change from being a Fairy Princess – having every one make a fuss over her.’ I felt the ache in my head grow to a real pain.
Noël Coward for one was appalled by the ‘journalistic orgy’, not least the Mirror’s poll. ‘It is all so incredibly vulgar and, to me, it is inconceivable that nothing could be done to stop these tasteless, illiterate minds from smearing our Royal Family with their sanctimonious rubbish.’20
On Friday the 17th, with Townsend banished and Margaret about to return, the Mirror announced the result. More than 70,000 readers had voted, of whom almost 97 per cent thought that she should be allowed to marry him. The Sunday Express reaction offers a valuable corrective in terms of public opinion as a whole, but this was still a very striking expression of sentiment. There was no doubt, to judge by letters printed by the Mirror three days later, ab
out which institution was public enemy number one:
The Church should remember that, had it not been for Group-Captain Townsend and his kind, there would be neither Church nor Throne in England today. (P. G. Higginson, Stanmore, Middlesex)
Let us get back to Christian principles, and to hell with the dogmatic attitude of the Church. (J. Hart, Little Thurlow, Suffolk)
Don’t let the Church spoil the wonderful smile that belongs to our beloved Princess. God gave her a heart. Let her use it as she chooses.
(E. Weller, Stroud, Glos)
Even Gilbert Harding agreed. ‘It seems to me to be silly and pompous for the Church of England, which has fewer than four million active communicants, to put itself forward as “The Church” and to produce rules that we are all expected to follow,’ he wrote that weekend in his regular column for the People. ‘I still wish that people would leave the Princess alone – to marry whom and how she wishes.’
Inevitably the controversy faded, to be put on hold for two years, but before it did so The Times offered its troubled thoughts on ‘Royal Affairs’. Intensely critical of the recent ‘bandying about’ of Princess Margaret’s name ‘in public gossip’, it offered only two sentences on the crux of the matter: ‘That she shall be happy in all that she does is everybody’s wish. That she will choose her path according to duty and conscience as well as inclination, and always in harmonious concert with her beloved sister, is doubted by nobody.’ Margaret herself was back on the royal treadmill, including on Tuesday the 22nd. ‘I lived in Queen Elizabeth’s Close,’ recalled Alan Fox about growing up in a prefab next to Clissold Park in north London:
It was the custom of the Queen Mother, a keen gardener, to visit ordinary people’s outstanding gardens. My mum and dad were chosen. Alas, the Queen Mother was unable to attend on the day and Princess Margaret stood in. Her mother’s love of gardens and flowers had not rubbed off. At the start of the visit, the court flunky advised my mum ‘to keep the conversation going’. What a mistake! Mum could talk nonstop if you let her, and she did, until Princess Margaret, shell-shocked from a botanical barrage, was escorted back to her Rolls.
‘Her trip,’ he added, ‘was immortalised by her very high-heeled shoes which impressed into the tarmac – newly laid just for the occasion.’21
By contrast, the Prime Minister was making no public appearances during July – and no one told the public why. In fact he had had a serious stroke barely three weeks after the Coronation, leading to a hastily convened meeting of three press barons (Camrose, Beaverbrook and Bracken) and in effect a gag on the fourth estate. ‘The Prime Minister has had no respite for a long time from his arduous duties and is in need of a complete rest,’ ran the innocuous bulletin they cobbled together for No. 10, duly released on 27 June. ‘Churchill Is Ill: To Rest A Month’, was the People’s obliging headline next day, with the story stating that ‘his trouble is simply tiredness from overwork’. The Daily Mirror, anti-Churchill and not part of the magic circle, had its suspicions – to the extent that its headline on the 29th was ‘Should Churchill Retire?’ – but even so the story started with the unambiguous statement that ‘Churchill is fagged out,’ with no reference to anything more sinister. ‘No word of all this has appeared yet in the Press,’ noted with relief the well-connected Tory diarist ‘Chips’ Channon at the start of July – more than a week after the stroke – nor did it until the third Monday of August, by when there had still been no public sighting of the great man. ‘What Is The Truth About Churchill’s Illness?’ demanded the Mirror’s banner headline, with the story describing how rumours had continued to mount, including an American paper reporting that he had had a stroke in late June. ‘Is there any reason,’ the paper asked, why the British people ‘should always be the last to learn what is going on in their country? Must they always be driven to pick up their information at second hand from tittle-tattle abroad?’ Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, had been hoping that morning to go to the Test at the Oval, but instead was summoned to Chartwell, where he found Churchill furious about the sheer gall of such a worthless rag. ‘ “Five million people read that,” the P.M. said grimly. “It’s rubbish, of course . . .” ’22
The Churchill stroke story was not the only cover-up going on this summer. On 14 July, the day before John Christie was due to be hanged for multiple murders at 10 Rillington Place, a government-appointed inquiry by J. Scott Henderson QC reported – in apparent defiance of the evidence he had heard – that Christie had lied in his confession about murdering Timothy Evans’s wife and child. Accordingly, though Christie himself took the drop next morning, it continued to be denied that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the case of Evans, hanged in 1950. Subsequently, in Ludovic Kennedy’s bitter words, ‘it took thirteen years for officialdom grudgingly to admit what was obvious in 1953 to all but the wilfully blind; that there were not two stranglers of women living in 10 Rillington Place, but one.’ In July 1953, it may have been a factor that at the start of the month a motion to suspend capital punishment for five years had been defeated in Parliament – a context unlikely to encourage any immediate official admission of guilt. Still, public opinion was almost certainly on the side of the parliamentarians. ‘Nice young man at table tonight,’ noted Gladys Langford shortly after the vote. ‘He says his uncle is a Detective Sergeant in Liverpool & that he (the uncle) favours the retention of the death sentence and would like the power to administer a birching to be restored.’ It was also just after the vote that on 2 July a murder took place on Clapham Common. Two groups of teenagers clashed, words were said (‘Walk round the other side, you flash bastard!’), knives were pulled out, a 17-year-old was left bleeding to death on a pavement. Six male youths were arrested, charged and, in the autumn, put on trial at the Old Bailey, with one of them, a 20-year-old labourer called Michael Davies, convicted of murder though in the fullness of time reprieved because it was impossible to know for certain which of the six had actually done the deed. Reports during the trial emphasised how Davies and the others were flashy dressers, liking to get themselves up as Edwardians. It was the start of a new phenomenon: the ‘teddy boy’.
There was also fear in the air on the evening of Saturday, 18 July, when at 8.15 – after ‘Interlude: The Picnic, by Tissot’ and before ‘A film of wild life in Africa’ – there appeared on the nation’s screens one of the earliest dramas specifically written for television. Nigel Kneale’s six-part science-fiction series The Quatermass Experiment, involving an idealistic government rocket scientist battling the spread of a mind-bending alien vegetable brought home on a spaceship, from the first made a huge impact. ‘We were still living in a bomb-blasted Britain and there was the Cold War,’ he explained many years later. ‘On a day trip to Brighton, I remember seeing promenaders flinch when they heard the buzz of a light aircraft. Was it a Russian rocket?’ ‘Last night’s Terrorvision’ was the News of the World headline after the fifth episode, with one reader having phoned in: ‘I have seen nothing so frightening in my life . . . I won’t look in next Saturday unless I have someone with me, but I must know what happens.’ Viewers’ log sheets sent to the BBC confirmed the fearful addiction: ‘Wouldn’t have missed this for anything. Even missed a day’s holiday to see it.’ And: ‘Everything stopped at our home when serial time came round.’
There was nothing (despite events on Clapham Common) unsettling or futuristic about the programme that made its debut only two days after Professor Bernard Quatermass. The Good Old Days came live from the City Varieties Music-Hall at Leeds, reconstructed for the purpose as an Edwardian music hall, with the audience dressing in Edwardian clothes. The ‘chairman’ was Don Gemmell, succeeded from the third show by Leonard Sachs, whose speciality – before he finally got to ‘Your own, your very own . . .’ – was long words in alliterative combinations, provoking ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the almost invariably obliging audience. ‘Deeply dejecting’ was Peter Black’s verdict in the Daily Mail on the programme’s first outing, because ‘the
attempt to recreate the atmosphere of 1912 was so pathetically artificial,’ but Barney Colehan, the show’s producer (who was also responsible for radio’s Have A Go!), almost certainly knew he had a nostalgia-driven hit on his hands.23
Increasingly, though, the present day had its own appeal, with 1953 at last the breakthrough year in terms of moving away from austerity and towards improved living standards and even a measure of affluence. ‘We’re Buying More Now’ was a News Chronicle headline in August, on the basis of Treasury figures for the first quarter revealing sharply increased expenditure on food, clothes, shoes, household goods and new cars (nearly 60,000 registrations, compared with about 40,000 in the first quarter of 1952), but relatively less expenditure on drinking, smoking and entertainment – the three staples of the austerity years. The trend continued, with food-consumption figures for the first seven months of 1953 showing meat up by 50 per cent on two years earlier, and bacon up by 24 per cent. Certainly, despite the continued existence of rationing, there was more meat in the shops. It was reported in late June that butchers were able to sell freely once they had provided their registered customers with their 2s 4d weekly ration, while Panter-Downes noted in July that butchers were now finding it difficult to sell their lowest-grade stuff, a development that ‘sharply marks the end of the time when housewives meekly queued up and paid for anything the butchers liked to give them’.