Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  There was also by April the rise of the teddy boys, or the ‘Edwardians’ as they were still usually termed. The widely publicised ‘Battle of St Mary Cray’ late on Saturday the 24th marked their indisputable coming. The Orpington & Kentish Times’s horrified headline – ‘ “Gang Battle” At Railway Station: Edwardian Youths In Half-Hour Fight: Wooden Stakes, Sand-Filled Socks As Weapons’ – prefaced an account of a pretty unpleasant half-hour encounter between ‘rival gangs of youths from Downham and St Paul’s Cray’, the gangs ‘sporting “Edwardian” suits with stovepipe trousers and velvet-coloured jackets’. Trouble had started earlier in the evening when ‘a rowdy party of youths and a few girls from Downham Estate, Bromley, arrived at St Paul’s Cray Community Centre, where St Paul’s Cray Sports and Social Club were holding a dance’. At the Centre, ‘a knife was drawn when a member of the band objected to being jostled’, while ‘one man had a glass of orange juice thrown in his face during an exchange of words’. The MC, George Couchman, found himself in an unenviable spot: ‘I warned the crowd police were standing by and also took the precaution of having the band play only calming music – no quicksteps. Several older people felt there might be trouble and left. I felt the few of us responsible for keeping order were in a precarious position, and I breathed a sigh of relief when 11 o’clock came.’ The crowd dispersed quite peacefully – but then came the fight at the nearby station, until broken up by the police, with some 40 youths held overnight. And when the police returned to inspect the damage in daylight, they found a message scrawled on a fire-bucket: ‘It is time St Mary Cray was woken-up’.

  The appearance of the Edwardians was undeniably distinctive. ‘Round the fire stood a few youths dressed in the Edwardian style and with fabulous hair-dos, of the American fashion known as D.A. [short for “duck’s arse”, reputedly pioneered in Britain by the Hounslow hairdresser Len Pountney],’ recorded the somewhat misanthropic Cyril Dunn in his Borehamwood diary the previous winter about ‘Saturday Night in the Elstree Way’:

  This hair-do is unbelievable, a huge helmet of hair. It grows thick down the back of the head and is brushed in from each side towards a centre-line. Over the crown of the head it is swept back, but allowed to grow long and high, and to fall forward in front like the brush-plume of an ancient Greek helmet. The effect is of infinite and mannered attention. In fact, the result is wholly feminine, but without making the youths look effeminate. The clothes are black. The jacket is long, coming down well below the buttocks; the trousers are narrow and taper to the ankles. Here the whole elegant ensemble is suddenly and wildly contradicted. Where one expects something slender and pointed, there are bright socks and cumbersome crepe-soled shoes. The effect of the whole décor is thin, mean and sinister, and is obviously meant to be.

  Dunn also watched them in action. ‘They never for a moment stopped acting,’ he observed. ‘The model is patently a screen villain; with a little repellent research one might even identify the actor, though it could be a composite of several actors. The role evidently has several simple conventions. When “the men” are talking to each other, they never smile; the face muscles are held rigid, as if the mood is one of controlled and watchful hate.’

  Unsurprisingly, they were not the flavour of the month after the St Mary Cray episode. ‘It is about time drastic action was taken to put a stop to these scenes of violence caused by irresponsible youths called “Edwardians”,’ wrote Robert Hadden of 3 The Avenue, Bickley to the local paper. ‘The only remedy now is imprisonment and the birch. Fines are useless.’ Elsewhere in suburbia, the Mayor of Kingston upon Thames agreed. ‘Directly these silly young idiots get out of hand,’ he publicly declared, ‘then I’m coming on them with a bang. I don’t agree with this rot about spoon feeding.’ In late May an investigative article by Picture Post’s Hilde Marchant – ‘The Truth about the “Teddy Boys” ’, based on several visits to the Mecca Dance Hall in Tottenham – sought to allay fears. There she had found ‘little to criticise – a touch of vanity, perhaps, a gesture of exhibitionism’, but ‘harm and violence did not seem to be among them’, while she quoted how the manager kept saying to her, ‘No trouble at all, these boys.’ She did not deny the existence of gangs of teddy boys, sometimes leading to criminal actions, but they, she insisted, were the minority. In short: ‘Of course, there are “Teddy Boys” with evil ways; but there is a vast majority of young men who merely wish to wear Edwardian clothes as a change from boiler suits and factory overalls.’7

  The younger generation was – up to a point – better behaved at St Swithin’s. Doctor in the House, based on the novel by Richard Gordon, was released this spring and proved the box-office smash of 1954. On a Wednesday evening in late April, the civil servant Henry St John intended to see it at the Gaumont in Acton, ‘but there were queues outside, no seats under 3s 1d, and apparently few of those’. He then tried Ealing, but the queue ‘stretched from the Broadway Palladium to Bentalls’. A trio of diarists did manage to watch it, starting with Gladys Langford at the Highbury cinema on the evening of St John’s frustrations. ‘I did not care for it,’ she recorded. ‘The technicolor effects were not pleasing to me,’ while ‘the girls all looked like advertisements for sun-tan cream’. Three days later, the local government officer Anthony Heap was at King’s Cross Gaumont and found it ‘gay, bright, witty, cheery and joyously irresponsible’ – in fact, ‘the best and funniest British screen comedy since “Genevieve” ’, with Kenneth More and Kay Kendall in both. A youngish writer in Hampstead, earning his crust teaching foreign students, disagreed. ‘How banal British films are, how overpraised,’ complained John Fowles on 12 May. ‘A futile chain of stock situations, played out by stock characters.’

  Notwithstanding which, if there was one of the four trainee doctors who made the film, it was undoubtedly diffident Simon Sparrow, played by Dirk Bogarde in an overdue break from his gangster and/or neurotic roles. ‘Sparrow has no family money to support him and has arrived at St Swithin’s on merit,’ astutely notes the film historian Christine Geraghty. ‘He is training to be a GP rather than the more traditionally powerful surgeon and his major success is in helping with a home birth.’ Bogarde himself during the filming (at Pinewood and University College London) had tended to keep himself apart, retreating to his Rolls-Royce. ‘Oh, he’s Ginger, inne?’ the camera crew sometimes called out – as in ‘Ginger beer’, cockney rhyming slang for ‘queer’ – but Bogarde was always a cat who walked alone.8

  It was about the time that his Simon Sparrow was starting to woo audiences – as the very model of the idealistic young doctor in the new, inclusive NHS – that the acclaimed, also youngish writer Angus Wilson considered on the Third Programme the future of the English novel in the context of the Welfare State. He was broadly positive, arguing that that future lay with ‘a new generation’ of novelists coming from ‘the new ruling class – that strange mixture of business experts, bureaucrats, social scientists, and the rest of the Welfare set-up’. There ensued an unusually lively correspondence in the Listener. ‘For novelists who will have perforce to embrace the values and outlook of the Welfare State,’ asserted ‘a young critic’ called R. C. Burlingham, ‘there offers in all probability a prospect of arid, conforming Byzantinism.’ Kingsley Amis, fresh from his Lucky Jim triumph, took issue. ‘Does Mr Burlingham believe all that stuff about the thought police and the Ministries of Culture and 1984?’ he asked, before concluding that ‘Mr Burlingham should stick to complaining that he does not want to pay for other people’s wigs and false teeth.’ In his riposte, Burlingham accused Amis of being ‘insufficiently aroused’ to the fact that ‘the Robin Hood State – whichever party governs – is the clear heir to the future’, and he declared that in an ever-more egalitarian society, ‘the middle-class phenomenon of a liberal, lively, curious, disinterested, travelled, cultivated novel-writing intelligentsia and novel-reading literati’ was ‘unlikely to be among the amenities provided by this secular heaven’. At which point in the controversy, Amis let it r
est.

  Something was stirring on the right flank, albeit heavily camouflaged by the ruling orthodoxy that there existed between the main parties a broad Keynesian-cum-welfare consensus on domestic issues – a somewhat misleading orthodoxy recently embodied in the Economist’s February coinage of the celebrated ‘Mr Butskell’, a play on the Conservative Party’s leading moderate, Rab Butler, and Labour’s leading moderate, Hugh Gaitskell. But in his riposte, Burlingham noted how ‘an attack on the Welfare State’ had ‘been recently undertaken with devastating point and with no concessions to fashion by an able economist, Mr Colin Clark, who has presumably taken his life in his hands by doing so’. Clark’s attack was in the form of a well-publicised pamphlet, ‘Welfare and Taxation’, in which as a conservative Catholic (in his case Australian) he argued that there was a moral as well as economic imperative to reduce taxation, and that social services should as much as possible be provided by a mixture of local authorities and voluntary associations rather than by the centralised, dictatorial state. Not long afterwards, in May, the One Nation Group in the Conservative Party published a collection of essays, Change Is Our Ally, whose contributors included Enoch Powell and which placed much stress on the virtues of free-market competition. Even so, an explicit distinction was made between those virtues and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism. ‘To the Tory the nation is not primarily an economic entity,’ asserted Powell with deliberate emphasis. ‘It may place political and social ends above economic ones, and for their sake may justifiably on occasion seek to prevent change or divert it.’9

  There would be few stronger defenders of the welfare state – and fiercer critics of its inadequate scope – than the sociologist Peter Townsend, who in February 1954 joined Michael Young and Peter Willmott at the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green. He was soon under way with what ultimately became The Family Life of Old People (1957), beginning in late April with pilot interviews in Hampstead. His interviewees included a 65-year-old ‘spinster’ living in ‘a tiny attic room with sloping roof’ in Parliament Hill, working ‘part-time as a cook 10–2 nearby for a large family in Downshire Hill’, and paying 30s a week for furnished accommodation: ‘I don’t think it’s right [she told Townsend]. But there you are. Hampstead rents always were high. She’s [ie the landlady] doing pretty well out of it, I don’t suppose. She’s very particular though. But the house is always very clean. But you can’t tell me these landladies don’t make much out of it all. They do. I’m sure they do.’ Townsend also asked her about entertainment. ‘I don’t go out much,’ she replied. ‘Not to these pictures. I don’t like them. I go to a Presbyterian nearby every Sunday. I meet my friend from Muswell Hill there sometimes . . . I don’t see anyone living nearby. I don’t like prying neighbours.’ Townsend enquired about family. ‘Well, they’re all dead now. I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of my nephew at Ipswich but I don’t want to move there. I don’t like Ipswich.’

  He also interviewed a more prosperous seventy-three-year-old widow, who as a result of having run a small laundry in Fitzrovia now owned a two-floor Edwardian house in Worsley Road, where she lived on the first floor with a nonagenarian friend, while eight relatives (aged between seventy-four and three) shared the ground-floor flat. Townsend described her as looking ‘rather like a female version of Charles Laughton in one his seedier roles’, but she sounded benign enough: ‘We’re a happy family. What I like best is when they’re all up here for the television. We sit and watch it after our Sunday dinner. Fred [her 47-year-old adopted son] usually falls asleep. Every day the baby [ie the three-year-old] comes up here at 4 o’clock. He has to look at the television. He comes running rag, tag and bobtail every day at 4 . . .’10

  ‘There is almost as much speculation about the size of tonight’s crowd as about the result of the match,’ noted the Yorkshire Post on Wednesday, 5 May. ‘If the ground record of 70,198 is approached, which seems doubtful in view of travelling difficulties, the fact that most of the spectators will be arriving at much the same time will test Bradford Northern’s big-match organisation to the full.’ Bradford Northern’s ground was Odsal, neutral venue for the replay of the Rugby League Cup Final between Halifax and Warrington, after a draw at Wembley. In the event – in a cavernous ground with, in Geoffrey Moorhouse’s words, ‘terracing made of nothing more substantial than railway sleepers, and the players reaching the field through the crowds, down a long cascade of steps from their dressing-rooms on the amphitheatre’s rim’ – the Post’s prediction was seriously out. Amid chaotic scenes, during which ‘some, unable to see the game, climbed to the roof of the old stand, and despite loud-speaker appeals refused to budge until the end’, 102,575 spectators packed the ground, a world record for a rugby league match, as Warrington won 8–4. ‘Many could not see all the game,’ reported the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, and the paper’s ‘obvious conclusion’ was that ‘much has to be done at the stadium before it can be considered as the “Wembley of the North” ’. But soon afterwards, a stirring article (‘The will of the north’) in Rugby League Review argued that the match had ‘demonstrated to the rulers of the Rugby Football League in a clear and unmistakeable manner’ that people ‘desired the final of the game’s major trophy to be played in their midst’. The debate would rumble on – though, given the BBC’s continuing indifference to the game, not as a debate of much resonance south of the Trent.

  The morning after the Odsal crush, it was a distinctly southern, public-school-educated Oxford University cricket team that took the field at the Parks against Yorkshire. On a bitterly cold, windy day, with first a marquee and then a sight-screen being blown down, the visitors made 293 for 4 before declaring at teatime, leaving the students a tricky final session to bat. A fiery young fast bowler, no lover of the amateurs and their fancy caps, took the new ball. ‘The second ball of Trueman’s first over bowled Marsland, the fourth bowled Williams and from the sixth,’ reported J. M. Kilburn in the Yorkshire Post, ‘the ball jumped from Cowdrey’s glove to be caught at short leg by Appleyard, fielding substitute . . .’ That left the university 0 for 3 at the end of the first over; by 5.45, after two interruptions for showers, they were 19 for 6, with Trueman on 5 for 5; and eventually, at close, they were all out for 58. By then, however, the odd enterprising spectator might have decided to cross Oxford in search of other sporting fare.

  In any case, there were only some 2,000 spectators, each paying 2s 6d, at the Iffley Road track to see Roger Bannister, Oxford graduate and now medical student at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, make a long-planned attempt to run the mile in under four minutes. The race was due to start at 6.00, and it was only a last-minute improvement in the weather that decided Bannister and his Austrian coach Franz Stampfl not to postpone the attempt. Helped by his pacemakers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, Bannister ran a fast race and finished first. Had he done it? ‘The result of event No 9, the One Mile, was as follows,’ announced a deadpan Norris McWhirter through the loudspeakers, before a lengthy, agonising, deliberate pause. ‘First, No 41, R.G. Bannister – in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track – English native – British national – British all-comers – British Empire – WORLD record. The time is 3 . . .’ The rest of the announcement was drowned by the crowd’s noise, including repeated chants of ‘He’s done it, he’s done it,’ while an exhausted Bannister was surrounded by admirers. For several minutes the rest of the programme was delayed, until at last McWhirter declared: ‘Life must go on.’

  Bannister himself, once he had been allowed to change, left the stadium with a patriotic sentiment – ‘It is a great thing to think that an Englishman has been the first to do a four-minute mile’ – and then stopped off briefly at the Oxford sporting club, Vincent’s, before heading for London in a BBC television van. Sportsview, fronted by Peter Dimmock, had just started as a weekly sports magazine, and later that evening Bannister was at Lime Grove ready to be interviewed after the programme had shown a recording of his epochal run. Next day, the press
chorus was triumphantly patriotic. ‘So Britain has been the first to conquer Everest and to achieve the four-minute mile,’ crowed the Halifax Daily Courier, speedily making up for the town’s Odsal disappointment. ‘Both feats may be equalled, but they will never be erased, for first is always the first. Britain has pioneered the way. So let us have no more talk of an effete and worn-out nation.’11 Bannister’s run may not in reality have been quite the carefree, gloriously amateur effort that it was almost immediately portrayed as, but it was still the apogee of the determinedly hopeful, optimistic ‘New Elizabethan’ moment.

  ‘I listened to Queen’s return on wireless sometimes,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton just over a week later, on Saturday the 15th. ‘Had our last coal fire. It’s still cold.’ Amid saturation BBC coverage – from the moment the Royal yacht Britannia sighted land off Plymouth Sound – the Queen was returning from her epic six-month Commonwealth tour. Richard Dimbleby was as usual the main man, including at the point of disembarkation at Westminster Pier, where it looked as if the three-year-old Princess Anne might get into the royal carriage ahead of her mother. ‘On royal occasions these days,’ he reassured viewers, ‘you can never be sure what’s going to happen next.’ The crowds were huge, among them Madge Martin and her clergyman husband, who lived in Oxford but happened to be in London that day and on the spur of the moment decided to watch (at the Horse Guards gate) the Queen on her route to Buckingham Palace. ‘What a thrill!’ she wrote. ‘Worth all the hours [11.00 to 3.45] of waiting – and somehow being there in a crowd of good-tempered enthusiasts – on a typical London day – rather grey – but fine – such a really English day for her to come back to.’ That evening, some 28 per cent of the adult population tuned into radio’s Gala Performance – introduced by Jack Buchanan and Margaret Lockwood, with stars including Peggy Ashcroft, Max Bygraves, Eddie Calvert, Tony Hancock, Edmund Hockridge, Al Read, Michael Redgrave, Beryl Reid and Terry-Thomas – while later there was Dancing by the River, featuring Ted Heath and His Music playing on the promenade of the Royal Festival Hall. For the police on the ground in central London, many drafted in from the suburbs, it had been a relatively unstressful but long day. ‘There were four in Inv’s carriage, all looking hot, rather grimy and tired,’ recorded a Mass-Observation investigator about her train journey back to Sutton that evening: