They loosened their collars and belts, settled down to look at the evening papers or leant back and closed their eyes. One remarked: ‘There’ll just be time for two pints. I was afraid we shouldn’t make it!’
An American woman in the same carriage offered sweets all round and tried to get them to talk, but mostly they didn’t seem anxious to respond. Inv overheard one policeman say ‘they’ll be having their bread and jam by now’ and another ‘I’ll be seeing them again soon. I’m going to the garden party.’
‘The American woman thought this was serious,’ added the investigator, ‘and the other policemen laughed when he went on, “Oh, yes. We’re always there. Outside the gates!” ’
Next Saturday it was the turn of Billy Graham, for the last time on his crusade, to attract the crowds. Some 65,000 came that afternoon to White City Stadium, followed in the evening by 100,000 at Wembley Stadium, as well as another 22,000 on the playing area itself. ‘Some 2,000 people waded through the mud to respond to the Invitation,’ Graham himself recalled about that Wembley meeting, and, according to a newspaper report, ‘they were of all ages, of all classes of society’. Altogether, over the twelve weeks, Graham and his team had attracted more than two million people to meetings and won thirty-eight thousand ‘decisions for Christ’ – a remarkable achievement. That same rainy Saturday evening, Henry St John was at the Chiswick Empire. ‘I saw a variety show which included an American singer named Diana Decker, and a comedian called Peter Sellers,’ he dutifully noted. ‘The show could not be rated higher than fair; the songs were rubbish, and, as usual, jokes about excretion earned some of the biggest laughs.’ But for the evangelist, there was one final meeting before he headed home to North Carolina. ‘Tell me, Reverend Graham, what is it that filled Harringay night after night?’ asked a gloomy Churchill at No. 10 on Monday. ‘I think it’s the Gospel of Christ. People are hungry to hear the word straight from the Bible. Almost all the clergy of this country used to preach it fruitfully, but I believe they have gotten away from it.’ A sigh accompanied Churchill’s response: ‘Yes. Things have changed tremendously. Look at these newspapers [early editions of the three London evening papers] – filled with nothing but murder and war and what the Communists are up to.’12
Between Wembley and Downing Street there was Budapest. ‘Have we any chance of victory?’ the Daily Mail’s Roy Peskett asked ahead of England’s return match against Hungary on Sunday the 23rd, almost exactly six months after the previous autumn’s humiliation. ‘No England team is beaten until the final hand-shake, but I have viewed other matches with greater confidence . . .’ Even so, ‘if the ball can be wrested from Puskas and Co their defence will be in trouble’. The outcome was even worse than before: this time, 7–1 to the Magyar masters. ‘Until we can win or at least hold our own in such contests,’ argued the British minister in Budapest in the continuing Cold War context, ‘it will be better to avoid arranging them with countries such as the Satellites whose propaganda made largely at the expense of our own prestige it cannot be our policy to further.’ The Foreign Office bluntly replied that ‘it would be much worse propaganda if it got around that the West would not make fixtures with the Iron Curtain because they were afraid of losing’, and thus ‘the only remedy for this admittedly sorry state of affairs is for us to concentrate on getting good enough to win’. There were still a few weeks to regroup before the World Cup – during which Birmingham’s Diane Leather became the first woman in the world to run a mile in under five minutes but received barely a tithe of Bannister’s instant fame, and the eighteen-year-old Lester Piggott won his first Derby on Never Say Die at 33–1, coolly telling reporters that ‘it was just another race’ – but by Saturday, 26 June it was quarter-finals time at Basle, with England up against a Uruguay team that the previous Saturday had thrashed Scotland 7–0. ‘I seem to be the only person in Switzerland who gives England a chance,’ wrote the incorrigibly optimistic Peskett. ‘I feel they can win if they attack from the start . . .’ Uruguay duly won 4–2, leaving Peskett to praise ‘a gallant performance’ in ‘a heart-breaking match’ – and to make the glancing but obligatory flick at ‘the prima-donna attitude of certain of the Uruguayan players’.13
There was no footballing subtext in Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, published three days before the Budapest mauling. Its themes were existential – befitting an Oxford philosophy don who had recently written a study of Jean-Paul Sartre – and at one point the solipsistic narrator Jake, for whom life was ‘a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction’, offers a brief political critique: ‘English socialism is perfectly worthy, but it’s not socialism. It’s welfare capitalism. It doesn’t touch the real curse of capitalism, which is that work is deadly.’ Reviews were mixed. ‘A brilliant talent’, acclaimed the TLS, while Amis in the Spectator acquitted Murdoch of ‘philosophical gallimaufry’ and called her ‘a distinguished novelist of a rare kind’. But Betjeman in the Telegraph disliked the book’s ‘intellectuals, washouts, and seedy characters in general’, the Guardian thought it ‘sentimental . . . strictly for those who can take their fantasy neat’, and for John Raymond in the New Statesman it was ‘a bluestocking fantasy, a brilliant but long-winded piece of café writing’.
None of which stopped the novel from being a considerable commercial success (including a 215,000 print run for the Reprint Society book club), and J. B. Priestley may well have had Murdoch in mind, along with Wilson, Amis and probably John Wain and perhaps William Cooper as well, when in June his ‘Thoughts in the Wilderness’ column in the New Statesman considered new English novelists and found them sadly wanting. Not only were their settings insufficiently realistic (‘rather like stage scenery out of drawing and queerly coloured’), but their central characters were ‘too deliberately unheroic, and often seem such bumbling nitwits that it is hard to sympathise with them in their misfortunes’. In their attitude to society, moreover, these characters were ‘artful dodgers rather than open rebels’, and, he went on, ‘It is impossible to imagine any buying a house, bringing up children, paying taxes, organising a business, serving on a committee, standing for Parliament. They are simply not with us. They no more live in our political and economic world than children of six do.’ It was an escapism that Priestley found profoundly disturbing, given that ‘not since the Wars of the Roses has literature been held in such low esteem’, so that ‘any television mountebank is now more important than any poet, novelist, dramatist’.14 That was no doubt to exaggerate, but his critique as a whole was more than just an older writer’s jealous gripe.
June was also notable for the varying fortunes of three young performers. ‘The tension of this dramatic play was maintained by excellent team work,’ reported the Whitby Gazette on the Spa Theatre Company’s presentation of Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, running at the local theatre for a week from the 10th. Five actors were singled out for praise, including David Baron – ‘assured as the sophisticated artist, mixing charm and ruthlessness to bring the character always in focus’. The actor’s real name was Harold Pinter, not yet a playwright; but soon afterwards he left Whitby under a cloud, having resigned from the company when the young assistant stage manager, with whom he had been having an affair, was sacked by the company’s manager after being reported by her landlady for staying out into the early hours. ‘You’ll never work in the theatre again,’ were the parting words of the manager (a local butcher) to Pinter. But it was onwards and upwards for Benny Hill, who on television’s Showcase on the 21st set the nation talking by performing virtuoso live parodies – involving, in his biographer’s words, ‘super-fast changes of costumes and props’ – of Barbara Kelly, David Nixon, Lady Isobel Barnett and of course Gilbert Harding, the four regular panellists on What’s My Line?. ‘Benny Hill is the most original and refreshing comedian that British TV has discovered,’ declared the Sunday Dispatch, and many agreed. The third performer was Gerard Hoffnung, who on the 2
9th appeared with Petula Clark and Julie Andrews on television’s latest panel game, Music, Music, Music!, ‘a musical battle of wits’ chaired by David Jacobs. ‘This infectiously happy character blew his tuba to such effect,’ noted an appreciative critic, ‘that he nearly saved newest entrant in the Panel Games Stakes from the fate of an “also ran”.’15 Cartoonist and raconteur as well as gifted musician, the 29-year-old Hoffnung, who had left his native Germany just before the war, slipped comfortably into the role of an ageing, pipe-smoking music master and was well on the way to becoming one of the great British humorous eccentrics.
June also saw tragedy. Back in April the Cabinet had reluctantly agreed to allow the Home Office a departmental committee on the legal aspects of homosexuality and prostitution, while in May all four members of the Any Questions? team (the prominent Liberal figure Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the farmer-writer A. G. Street, the BOAC chairman Sir Miles Thomas and the already famed foreign correspondent James Cameron) had answered in the affirmative to the question, ‘Should the law relating to homosexuality be altered?’ That was on the 21st at a secondary modern in Yeovil – not so far from Wells, where five days later at the Somerset Assizes seventeen men were found guilty of ‘unnatural acts and acts of gross indecency’. Nine of them aged between 23 and 46 received prison sentences of between one and four years; six aged between 18 and 21 were bound over for up to two years, three of them on condition that they received ‘treatment’; and two others were put on probation. ‘Once this vice gets established in any community,’ gravely stated Mr Justice Oliver, ‘it spreads like pestilence, and unless held in check it threatens to spread indefinitely.’ Gilbert Nixon, 37-year-old holder of the Military Cross and director of a firm of manufacturing chemists in Liverpool, was given only a 12-month sentence, but within a few minutes he had fatally taken poison. That was tragic enough, but something even more resonant occurred exactly a fortnight later, when the great mathematician Alan Turing, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, dipped an apple in a cyanide solution and took several bites. After his arrest in February 1952 for homosexual offences, he had undergone, in a biographer’s words, ‘a slow, sad descent into grief and madness’. During the rest of the summer, with the committee due to start work in the autumn under the chairmanship of John Wolfenden, university administrator and former public-school headmaster, the persecution of homosexuals perceptibly eased. But the huge human damage had already been done.16
For most people, though, the summer’s dominant discourse was quite different and altogether more benign. ‘Butter is off the ration,’ gleefully recorded Marian Raynham in May. ‘And margarine which I never want to see again, & cooking fat, & Trex is back. The price is supposed to be high, I think it is sure to be cheaper soon.’ No one benefited more from growing consumer confidence and possibilities than Marks & Spencer, which had just opened a huge new store in Coventry that was 25 per cent bigger than the one destroyed during the war and, according to the admiring local paper, incorporated ‘all modern department store features, with fluorescent lighting, illuminated wall panels, furniture (other than counters) of steel, air conditioning, and terrazzo flooring’. At M&S’s annual meeting in June, the visionary Simon Marks reported record turnover and an increasingly encouraging environment:
The general conditions in which the business operates have changed markedly in the last two years. The most notable factors have been the removal of Government controls and the increasing availability of raw materials. With more abundant supplies at our disposal, and the lifting of restrictions which for so many years hampered our freedom of action, we have been able to take steps systematically to improve our values over a wide range of goods . . . There is no doubt that our goods are making a considerable appeal to the widening section of the community we now count as customers.
‘The miracle has happened,’ claimed even more euphorically the usually cautious Economist at about the same time, ‘full employment without inflation.’
Not that austerity habits were set to disappear overnight – and certainly not in the pages of women’s magazines. ‘All action, no waste!’ declared the advertisement in Woman’s Own at the start of July for Gibbs toothpaste, sold by the tin. ‘A little Gibbs equals a lot of toothpaste, with concentrated Gibbs you can clean your teeth twice a day for as little as 1d a week.’ Elsewhere, the ‘Handy hints’ part of the letters page saw readers like Miss W. of Southsea still obeying the god of thrift. ‘I save the rubber rings from bottled fruit and use them in place of string on pudding basins,’ she confided. ‘They can be washed and used many times.’ Or take the ad in Woman for a surprisingly popular coffee and chicory essence: ‘ “Camp” is concentrated to save you money. Every drop is used. Not a drop is wasted.’ And in the more upmarket Lady, an article by Alison Settle on ‘Wardrobe for a Careerist’ pointed out that ‘terylene suits such as Harrods sell (at £15) will last (in my experience) for years, keeping their pleats, and allowing the worker to wear pale shades’, while an ad from Express Handbag Repairs of Stamford Hill, N16, positively reeked of make-do-and-mend, or at least make-do-and-mend-by-somebody-else: ‘Don’t discard that damaged handbag when it can be relined & renovated . . . Crocodile handbags renovated as new from 60s. Every type of repair by experts . . . Thousands of delighted customers.’17
For the thrifty and less thrifty alike, this first weekend of July 1954 was memorable enough. It began on Friday afternoon, the 2nd, when the bespectacled, slightly portly Czech exile Jaroslav Drobny won the Wimbledon men’s singles title at his 11th attempt, beating the 19-year-old Australian prodigy Ken Rosewall. ‘Good tennis and good sportsmanship,’ noted an appreciative Judy Haines in Chingford, adding that ‘Wimbledon has kept me going this week’, while according to the Daily Telegraph’s Lance Tingay, ‘the warmth of Drobny’s reception as champion could not have been greater had he been a genial Englishman’. For several years it had been a joke in a long-running West End comedy – ‘Anyone for tennis? I fancy old Drob’s got a real chance at Wimbers this year’ – and now at last this modest accountant had done it. That evening, while Marian Raynham ‘listened on radio to the Piltdown man skull & why it is a fraud, or hoax’, the Minister of Housing and his wife were at Petworth House, stately home of his friend John Wyndham. ‘We stayed till 3am,’ recorded Harold Macmillan. ‘The ball was a tremendous success and seemed like a return (for a few hours) almost to the pre-1914 world. Many old friends – from all over England; all the jewels out of the banks (or out of pawn), champagne; two bands (dancing indoors and out) and the glorious pictures, statues, furniture – all looking superb.’
There was more Wimbers on Saturday afternoon. ‘Very sorry Louise Brough didn’t beat that cockey little Maureen Connolly in the Women’s Singles,’ commented Haines after the 19-year-old ‘Little Mo’ took her third successive title. It was not a contest that registered with Iris Murdoch, torn between two (or possibly three) men. She met one of them, the young literary critic and academic John Bayley, at Victoria station, and that afternoon, after a feverish conversation beside the lions in Trafalgar Square and a scratch lunch in St Martin’s Lane, they retreated to the London Library in St James’s Square in search of privacy: ‘I followed J. upstairs. It was fantastic. We walked up & down the long dark alleys of books. Always there was here & there a reader, hidden. We kept climbing up more & more iron stairways. At last we found a floor where there was no one. We leaned against the shelves in the half darkness & clung to each other. J. wept. After a long time we went out, & I came with him in the taxi to Paddington . . . What will come of all this?’18
Saturday’s great event was still ahead – namely, at midnight the end of meat rationing, so that henceforth only mothers with children entitled to free milk had to keep their ration books. Generally, this end of rationing after 14 long years was marked with surprisingly little fanfare. ‘All the celebrations we promised ourselves seem to be a bit pointless now,’ a Leeds housewife explained to a paper. ‘I suppose it is because we expected all rationi
ng would end at the same time. We certainly never thought it would be nine years after the war ended.’ Nevertheless, this evening there was a ceremonial tearing up of ration books in Trafalgar Square, and in the Sussex town of Heathfield an even more ritualised procession and bonfire.
The procession, reported the Sussex Express & County Herald, was headed by an undertaker ‘in official garb’ and ‘behind him, two by two, came local representatives of those who had been most involved in rationing’:
There were housewives (Mrs R. W. Pink and Mrs Behennah), a draper (Mrs Jermyn), grocers (Mr N. Farley and Mr M. Barrow), dairy farmers (Mrs Anne Mortlock and Mr E. Richardson), baker and confectioners (Mr D. Phillips, Mr W. Flower and Mrs Hackett), general store-keepers (Mr F. Godley and Mr J. McKay), millers (Mr W. Ashby and Mr W. Bucking), a poultry farmer (Mrs J. Collins), farmers (Mr E. Seymour and Mr Penfold), and, finally, as being the last to be released, two butchers (Mr E. Haffenden and Mr E. J. Hamper).
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 47
