Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Even at the quality end of journalism there was great reluctance to cover the subject in a sober, detached way, not least at the BBC. ‘It would be a waste of time to do any serious work on the subject,’ asserted Donald Boyd, a senior figure in the Talks Department, in an internal memo in November 1953, having already in another memo called homosexuality ‘a distortion of the natural appetite which is incurable and unpredictable’. Moreover, his ultimate boss, the director-general Sir Ian Jacob, was adamant that the time was not right for such a programme, rumours about which were causing consternation to the Church of England’s Council for Sex, Marriage and the Family. At least one Christian, though, saw things differently. Chad Varah moved in the autumn of 1953 from a parish in Clapham to St Stephen’s Walbrook in the City of London, where within weeks he started the Samaritans. ‘In the early days,’ he recalled, ‘a frequent cause of a suicidal intent or attempt was that a male homosexual had been discovered to be such by some ill-disposed person who was blackmailing him.’9

  The topic was briefly alluded to when Take It From Here returned on 12 November for its seventh series. It was in its way a historic transmission. ‘Our family, the Glums, are very ordinary people,’ declared the announcer David Dunhill about halfway through, heralding the birth of a new radio family. ‘They might be you or you or you . . . all five of them are shifty, obstinate, argumentative and dim.’ They were in short, as the writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden fully intended, very different from cosy, upstanding families like the Dales, the Archers and the Huggetts (which several years after the films still had their own very popular radio comedy series). Jimmy Edwards played the rascally Mr Glum, Dick Bentley his mentally challenged son Ron, and June Whitfield (a newcomer to the show, just pipping Prunella Scales for the role) Ron’s loyal, long-suffering fiancée Eth. It took a while for the characterisation to emerge fully, but an exchange from the first episode already gave a flavour:

  MR GLUM: Well, now, you two, what can I say? You’re embarking on the Great Adventure in very unsettled times. There’s trouble on the borders of Treest, uprisings in British Guinea – they’re clamping down on vice in the West End – I tell you the future looks black.

  RON: Dad, what you don’t seem to realise is, we are the future. Me and Eth. The torch has been handed on. We’re trying to build a world that’s strong and splendid and fearless and – and – what you scratching for, beloved?

  ETH: I think it was that dog. I’ll sit on the sofa if you don’t mind.

  Long afterwards, Whitfield explained that she had based the way she played Eth on her mother’s daily, who not only ‘had a high-pitched voice and a terribly earnest way of speaking’, but ‘kept a very tight grip on her grammar, as though terrified that it might let her down, revealing her to be impolite’. The other female newcomer was the singer Alma Cogan – ‘a large, happy girl’, in Muir’s words, with a ‘swinging, chuckly style of singing’ – and TIFH was soon more popular than ever, with the Glums an immediate hit, occupying the whole second half of the show. ‘I never thought I’d miss Joy Nichols so little,’ noted Nella Last after the fourth episode. ‘One of the girls [presumably Whitfield] seems to have picked up her “vital” style.’

  Other popular newcomers this autumn were the new Anglia and the new Prefect – essentially Ford’s answer, in the small-car range, to the Morris Minor, Austin Seven and Standard Eight. The Anglia, applauded Autocar, was ‘austerely furnished’, but with a ‘very modern and pleasing appearance’, while the Prefect was ‘a clean-looking car devoid of unsightly frills’. Altogether, ‘the comfort standards of today’s small cars are a far cry from the time when almost anything was good enough for the man with a slender pocket’. Even so, the magazine did note that whereas Britain ‘continues to scale down her larger familiar models’, French designers (for instance of the 750cc Renault or 385cc Citroën) had ‘sat down in front of a clean sheet of paper and banished, with considerable success, all thoughts of the previous products of their companies’. As usual, Dagenham’s finest were unveiled at October’s annual Motor Show, an event opened by Prince Philip in characteristically robust, go-ahead form. ‘I am not always convinced,’ he declared, ‘that the driver’s comfort is given enough thought. Why is it that there always seems to be a handle or a knob just opposite one’s right knee?’ Later in his speech he called on the motor industry to produce ‘a Comet of the car world’, in other words ‘something really revolutionary in price and overall performance’. And after noting the increasing amount of freight on the roads and the ever-greater congestion, he concluded: ‘However much some people may regret it, you cannot put the clock back. An efficient road system is essential to the industry and commerce of this country both in peace and war.’

  The royal hold on the popular imagination continued unabated. ‘Girls dressed up as Queen and Duke of Edinburgh in my bridal head-dress and Abbé’s battle-dress respectively,’ recorded Judy Haines in Chingford on the third Monday of November. ‘I was the crowd waving and cheering.’ Exactly a week later, on the 23rd, at least 6,000 were at London Airport to see the couple leave for a six-month tour of the Commonwealth – an event to which the Mirror, calling the tour ‘a rendezvous with the future’, devoted the best part of six out of sixteen pages. ‘It was immensely moving,’ reflected Noël Coward after watching the television coverage. ‘The Queen looked so young and vulnerable and valiant, and Prince Philip so handsome and cheerful. A truly romantic couple, star quality in excelsis. True glamour without any of the Windsors’ vulgarity.’ Their departure meant an adjustment to one rather different rendezvous. In early December the Mirror announced the result of its Teen Queen contest in which young female readers voted for their escort of choice. Max Bygraves, Tony Curtis and Gregory Peck all came close, but number one was Prince Philip, sadly unavailable. Instead, the Teen Queen – Olwen Evans, a shorthand typist from Ashford, Kent – was awarded a date with the number two, Dirk Bogarde. ‘Goodness knows what agonies he went through,’ speculates his biographer, ‘but he was usually stoic.’10

  Philip also missed, by just two days, ‘The Match of the Century’ as it was tagged even before kick-off. ‘I defy all logic,’ proclaimed the Mirror’s Bob Ferrier on the fateful Wednesday the 25th. ‘I defy all reason. I refute all argument . . . I have a hunch. The hunch is that England will beat Hungary at Wembley today . . .’ England had never lost at home, while Hungary were unbeaten in 25 matches, so that afternoon something probably had to give – and Ferrier was adamant that ‘moral courage’ would see the English through. It did not. Hungary won 6–3, a triumph epitomised by their marvellous third goal, a silky dragback by Ferenc Puskás (leaving the England captain, Billy Wright, flat on his bottom) before a rasping shot into the roof of the net. It was a stunning reversal near the end of a year of almost unbroken British sporting glory. Even during the first half, wrote the journalist Peter Wilson, ‘the grey ranks huddled round the rims of the great stone bowl fell silent, as mourners at a national funeral rather than spectators at a national sporting festival’. Even so, A. Brook Hirst, chairman of the FA, took a cheerful line at the post-match dinner for the two teams: ‘We are not downhearted and not disturbed by the defeat we have sustained.’ Replying, the Hungarian vice-minister of sport was graciousness itself: ‘We are looking forward to the coming visit of England to Hungary and hope you have better luck in Budapest next May.’ As for the press, few differed from Alan Ross’s verdict in the Observer that the difference between the two teams (England’s including a ‘sluggish’ Alf Ramsey at right-back) had been ‘the difference between artists and artisans, strategists with a flair for improvisation and stumbling recruits bound by an obsolete book of words’.

  It was a match that kept its lustre over the years – Jean-Luc Godard in his 2005 film Notre Musique claimed that it was the last great triumph for socialism because the English played individually and the Hungarians collectively – while in its more immediate aftermath the Orkney Herald’s regular diarist ‘Islandman’, pseudonym f
or the poet George Mackay Brown, remarked that listening to the radio commentary had made him quote Kipling to himself about Nineveh and Tyre. England’s ‘defeat on this particular occasion was refreshing’, he added, ‘just as Orkney’s defeat on the Bignold Park last August was refreshing’. Would the humiliation make English football alter its parochial ways? It was certainly a deeply insular society in which the weekly ritual was played out, as instanced about this time by the distinctly tepid response to Philip Harben’s new television series Continental Cookery. The first programme, giving his recipe for ‘Onion Soup from France’, earned a Reaction Index of only 62; the second, with his recipe for ‘Pasta, from Italy’, got 60; and there were calls from the BBC’s Viewing Panel for ‘more everyday dishes’, as well as ‘remarks to show that the “foreign introduction” was not always popular’.11

  ‘Cratered and pocked with bomb-sites,’ was how Liverpool struck Lorna Sage as she regularly went there during the winter of 1953–4 for dental treatment. She ‘saw in reality the cityscape of the newsreels – the remains of blitzed tenements, wallpaper, fire grates and private plumbing exposed, clinging to walls which were buttressed with wooden props while they waited for demolition’, while around the Anglican cathedral lay ‘a great emptiness where swathes of streets had been razed to the ground’. All that, in other cities as well as Liverpool, lay ripe for development even before, in early November, Macmillan opened a new front. After telling the Commons that there were at least half a million ‘slum houses’ that needed to be demolished as soon as possible, he went on:

  We can no longer afford to put off, to put aside, the question of the slums. We can no longer leave people living in cramped, dark, rotten houses with no water, sometimes no lavatories, no proper ventilation and no hope of rescue . . . I shall ask each local authority to set before me a definite programme setting out the size of their slum problem and the methods by which they propose to deal with it . . . In some great cities it will take perhaps 10, 15 or 20 years for us to clear away the whole thing.

  There had already been a certain amount of slum clearance since the war, but these words signalled an imminent step-change.

  What about those actually living in the slums? Shortly before Macmillan’s announcement, all five families residing in damp, rundown, now condemned houses in Battersea Church Road declared unambiguously that they did not want to be rehoused in flats. ‘This place is small and dirty, but it is a little home of my own,’ explained Mrs Essex at no. 7 (where she had been for 44 years). ‘You don’t get any privacy in flats.’ Her next-door neighbour Mrs Bonard did not want to go at all. ‘I have lived here since 1915, and I should hate to move. With a little repair these could be quite nice homes.’ She was not alone. ‘Strangely enough,’ Liverpool’s City Architect, Ronald Bradbury, explained to the Housing Centre in London in February 1954, ‘there is no desperate anxiety among many slum dwellers, specially older folks, to get out of the slums’:

  Some of them have lived their whole lives in the same slum house which holds for them those memories which somehow turn a dwelling, no matter how poor it may be, into ‘home’. Many wish to stay and die where they are. One tenacious old lady has refused no less than ten offers of suitable accommodation. Her refusal to move meant that the building of many new dwellings was delayed, and, kindness and persuasion having failed, the Housing Committee was obliged to have her evicted. This is an extreme case, but a great deal of persuasion and salesmanship has to be exercised to secure the rehousing of many slum families.

  But ‘eventually’, he added, ‘there comes the glorious day when the demolition contractor’s men reduce the old dwellings to rubble and cart it away’. During discussion after his talk, he noted that 60 per cent was a realistic target in terms of the proportion of the existing population that could be rehoused in the central areas, and that ‘at present mainly flats were being built in central areas, so that as many people could be rehoused as quickly as possible’. He ‘agreed that flats were not ideal, but he thought that if a man had to live near to his work, then he must make do with a second best’. Someone raised the question of provision at these blocks of flats for children’s play. ‘Mr Bradbury said areas were being set aside for this purpose, and apparatus provided, some of which lasted while some did not. At present they were investigating the possibility of designing a concrete tree, but did not know whether it would last any longer than a real one!’12

  The prospect of slum clearance gave a new urgency to architectural and planning debates generally, not least the long-running clash between the ‘urbanists’, who saw the future as predominantly lying in the big cities, and the ‘dispersionists’, who did not. Michael Young, the new sociologist on the block, was moving ever more towards the former camp. By late 1953 he was starting to write up his LSE thesis, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London’, based on 96 interviews conducted between April and October that were almost equally divided between the traditional working-class district of Bethnal Green and the just-completed LCC out-county estate of Debden in Essex to which many Bethnal Greeners had moved since the war.

  In the East End he found an intensely attractive world of its own, a world quite different from the London he had known hitherto:

  When dusk is falling, the homing pigeons glide down over the Mansion House, the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England before fluttering into the backyards of Bethnal Green. As the country-bound business men hurry away from their offices in Lloyd’s or Mincing Lane a few hundred yards away, Mr Smith gets back from the docks, waters the flowers in the window-box and settles down to his tea. Mrs Smith pulls the curtains aside to see if she can spot her children playing under the railway arches. All she can see is the rush-hour trains to Ilford and Colchester steaming out of Liverpool Street Station and gathering speed past her windows . . .

  It was, Young discovered, a deeply intimate world, with the mother/daughter relationship at its functional as well as emotional heart. ‘I don’t think,’ Mrs Silverman told him, ‘I’d like to move out of Bethnal Green. You see my family’s always lived here. Mum’s always lived in Bethnal Green. I was bred and born here.’ Mrs Arding agreed: ‘I was bred and born in Bethnal Green and my parents and their parents before them: no, I wouldn’t leave Bethnal Green, I wouldn’t take a threepenny bus ride outside Bethnal Green.’ In two key sentences, Young tried to sum up what had ‘struck one observer from outside’: ‘Bethnal Green has a sense of community; it has a sense of history; it has a kinship system. These are all independent variables, and yet in this district they are closely connected in such a way that each reinforces the other.’

  It was utterly different 12 miles away:

  Debden is separated from Bethnal Green by half an hour in the train and an age in behaviour. Instead of the bustle and shouting of the street markets, there are the hygienic halls of a few multiple stores. Instead of the fierce loyalties of the turnings, there are the strung-out streets in which everyone is a stranger. In Debden the bevy of groups which surround the household has disappeared. Instead of the compact group of kin there is the geographically isolated household. Not that geography makes a gulf. Many families at Debden do preserve some contact with their relatives. But compared to the people of Bethnal Green, the families of Debden are on their own.

  ‘In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep but there is none of that in Debden,’ a reluctant Debdenite told him. ‘You’re English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I don’t know why. It’s like being in a box to die here.’ Above all Young was struck by the malign consequences of Debden’s dearth of a public domain:

  In Bethnal Green the lack of space inside the home is compensated for by a rich variety of community provision, from pubs to cinemas, from clubs to markets. People are driven out of the home by its very inadequacy – the wife with no copper or bath to the wash-house or the public bath where she has dozens of other wives to gossip with, the husband with no space in the evenings to the fireside at the pub wh
ere he talks football with his cronies. In Debden things are the other way round. The homes have spaces, they have baths, hot water and gardens, and the community has virtually nothing. And so life is lived behind the garden gate and the front windows are shrouded by curtains.

  Most symbolic of this privatised lifestyle was the television set – at this point in almost twice as many of Debden’s households as Bethnal Green’s. ‘Instead of going out to the cinema or the pub, the family sits night by night around the magic screen in its place of honour,’ Young wrote somewhat bitterly. ‘Television is something which complements, and reinforces, the isolation of the immediate family and the lack of opportunities for community life. Its influence will not diminish.’

  Young was also during 1953 laying plans for a new organisation. ‘The Welfare State recognises that it is the common responsibility of all to relieve the material distress of anyone,’ was how he began his proposal for what would become the Institute of Community Studies. ‘What is much less widely recognised is the need, not only to relieve distress, but to prevent it.’ And after defining the surest way of prevention as being to find out the best conditions for family and community life to flourish, he went on: