Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  And after them, hand in hand, danced a long ring of happy children, who had always accepted rationing as part of the natural order of things, and had gradually seen one control after another removed.

  A 14-year-old lad, Colin Saunders, was chosen to light the bonfire . . .

  After the procession had circled the flames, but before everyone in the crowd threw their ration books on to the bonfire, there came the dramatic high point. Mr R. D. Sparkes, an official from Eastbourne Food Office, was present, and suddenly he was ‘seized, shoulders and feet, and hoisted into the air (still clutching his briefcase and rolled umbrella) and swung heartily towards, but not quite over, the flames, three times, before being set on his feet again’. This was done by pre-arrangement, and Sparkes remained calm throughout, but for the spectators it was a glorious, avenging, Ealing-film-like moment.

  The weekend had a last twist. On Sunday afternoon in Berne, West Germany beat the hot favourites Hungary and won the World Cup. ‘As usual with Continental teams,’ disapprovingly noted an English paper, ‘the referee (Mr W. Ling of Cambridge) came in for some criticism from the losers.’19 The German economic miracle was already under way, and this outcome was richly symbolic, especially after the recent British football humiliations. As yet, however, there was only the barest perception in the old country that we had won the war, but – for all the material easement – were losing the peace.

  3

  The Right Type of Fellow

  ‘We have attacked these furry salad killers with everything we’ve got,’ declared the Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ (the fiery columnist William Connor) on 20 July 1954. ‘Including that unpronounceable, unspellable, unspeakable disease myxomatosis.’ He went on:

  This revolting plague which we have spread all over the land has now been reported in half of the fifty-two counties of England and Wales. Thousands of dead and dying rabbits can now be seen in the infected areas. Brer Rabbit himself has been seen on the side of a barn as he longs to die and escape from this horrible torment . . .

  Brer Rabbit can’t write, can’t spell and hasn’t even written to The Times! And no protest meeting has taken place in Trafalgar Square because rabbits are not allowed in Trafalgar Square – by Order of the Westminster City Council.

  ‘So die you damned diseased bunnies,’ he concluded bleakly. ‘Die. Die. Die.’

  The drastic, rabbit-destroying disease had arrived in Kent the previous autumn and then spread, including to the Flintshire village of Hanmer. ‘The whole countryside stank for weeks of decomposing rabbit flesh, sweet and foul, and unforgettably disgusting,’ recalled Lorna Sage. ‘And everywhere on the roads and paths rabbits staggered about dying by inches, blind, their heads swollen and fly-blown, so that it was a kindness to kill them quickly.’ Tellingly, she added that ‘local people didn’t know (or didn’t say) that myxomatosis had been introduced deliberately to destroy the rabbit population and save millions and the crops they plundered’. But if the farmers, deliberately propagating the virus, were on one, unsentimental side of the question, Cassandra’s deliberately emotive column, following even more widespread infection, made clear that not everyone agreed – notwithstanding that the destruction of rabbits was long-established government policy. Over the next few months, a Labour backbencher, Dr Horace King, compared myxomatosis to ‘the Nazi crimes at Auschwitz’; the Dean of Winchester called it a ‘diabolical evil’; and polls conducted by local papers found overwhelming majorities hostile to extermination. It was an opposition based on a variable mix of motives – including a distinctly non-ethical concern about the potential loss of a favourite cheap meat, romantic notions about the countryside, an instinctive pity for the suffering of rabbits, and deep distrust for anything that savoured of Nazi-style genocide – but it was not enough to persuade the government to criminalise intentional transmission of the disease. In the event, of course, the indomitable little breeder survived. ‘The rabbit has won the day,’ wanly noted The Times by 1956. ‘It will never be completely exterminated.’1

  Sage in her memoir of Hanmer correctly identified myxomatosis, ‘this act of viral warfare’, as ‘all part of the drive towards efficiency’ – a drive typified by the increasingly intensive use of pesticides and fertilisers as well as by the rapid proliferation during the 1950s of tractors (by the end of the decade outnumbering horses on British farms by two to one), combine harvesters (superseding the inter-war reaper-binder) and milking machines (virtually replacing milking by hand). Together with falling real wages and often primitive living conditions in tied cottages, this highly mechanised second agricultural revolution was responsible for a relentless drift away from the land, running at some 60 farm workers in England and Wales every working day between 1947 and 1955. ‘A few years ago, you see, they used to have all their enjoyment here, a sing-song, three or four times a week,’ the publican in the semi-deserted Oxfordshire village of Sibford Gower told Panorama in 1956. ‘And of course all that’s dying out now you see through their going to these factories in Banbury to work. Of course they get more money than they did on the farm . . .’ That same year, in a small north Buckinghamshire village, the rector spoke eloquently at his harvest festival. ‘The drift from the land will only be stopped when the whole of society begins to realise that the farm labourer is not a clod-hopper, but a highly skilled craftsman, and the foundation stone of civilisation,’ insisted the Rev. J. Franklin Cheyne, against a backdrop of the mill gone, the blacksmith’s shop now a bus shelter and the school closed, with the children having to travel to nearby Newport Pagnell. ‘To the true countryman,’ he went on, ‘work is not something you do between pay days; it is his life. There is a satisfaction and contentment which the machine-minder in the factory, mass-producing a part for a part of another machine, can never experience. Perhaps that is why he gets a higher wage – to make up for the lack of satisfaction in his job.’2 The name of the village was Milton Keynes.

  ‘Although food rationing ended at midnight on the night of July 3rd–4th,’ lamented the solipsistic civil servant Henry St John on Monday, 5 July 1954, ‘there was no improvement in the canteen menu, on which rissoles were featured, and the only carcase meat was the inevitable beef.’ Soon, though, there was more choice at the butcher’s, while meat prices after an immediate spike started to return to more normal levels. ‘We want in modern Britain to have an understanding between the producer and the housewife,’ declared the Chancellor, Rab Butler, in a well-publicised speech on the 10th at a Conservative rally at Kingsholm Rugby Ground, Gloucester. ‘We want her to be as “choosey” and independent as she likes and we want the producer to produce more of what the public wants. We want the consumer to decide and not the man in Whitehall.’ Some three weeks later, buying meat in Barrow market, Nella Last found herself behind a distinctly choosy consumer:

  She surveyed all the cuts of sirloin, rib & ‘round’, & pointing to a particularly good piece of the latter, asked for it to be weighed. I wondered if she felt as startled as I did, when the butcher said ‘18/6’. She said a bit breathlessly ‘oh no, it’s far too much for me,’ & the pleasant young fellow serving her said ‘I’ll cut you a smaller piece’ – but it was 9/3 & the woman again shook her head. As cheerful as if it was a pleasure, he said ‘I’ll cut another piece’ & this time it was 7/8 & she took it. I felt I’d not have had the courage! – realising what a lot of ‘confidence’ housewives have lost.

  Last herself retained an open-minded thriftiness. ‘Such a dear way to buy cheese, in round boxes of segments in silver paper,’ she reflected shortly before about Kraft cheese, ‘but cheaper, in that I can keep it longer than “bulk” variety, without it going stale.’

  A new shopping era was now dawning, but it was not one that Kenneth Preston, a high-minded English teacher at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School, necessarily welcomed. ‘Re-emerging from the [cathedral] close we felt to be stepping into a different world – and how much inferior!’ he declared in Peterborough towards the end of July in the course of a cycl
ing tour with his wife Kath. ‘We wandered round and looked at the shops until 7 pm. Shops now are becoming woefully alike so that when you have gone round one town’s shops you have gone round all . . .’ By this time, Phyllis Willmott had moved, together with her husband Peter and two small children, into an attic flat in the handsome house in Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, that was about to be the permanent base of the Institute of Community Studies. Shrewd and keen-eyed, with a natural flair as a diarist, she began a ‘Bethnal Green Journal’. ‘Shopping is an occupation to be enjoyed in most of Bethnal Green,’ she noted among her early impressions around the end of July:

  The women seem to like to shop every day. Yet refrigerators are becoming a sign of status and success. What will the mothers do with them? If families were still as large as they used to be, the ‘fridge’ would be full, no doubt, with each day’s shopping. But with today’s smaller families will the fridge stay half-empty, or will the wife stay away from the shops? In Roman Road all the customers seem to know the shop people personally. They stand about and joke and chat. They enjoy shopping and are in no hurry, and it’s little use anyone else being!

  ‘East Enders are fussy about their bread,’ she added. ‘Good bread is hot new bread.’ And: ‘Bethnal Greeners do not like to seem niggly in their shopping. They like to be buying plenty. In a district that has known poverty this is easily understood. Hospitality means plenty of food. Refinement in the cooking is unimportant. It is probably possible to attribute other food habits to this poverty line of the past. A half-penny bun to fill up a hungry tummy. A bag of chips at any hour of the day . . .’

  All traditional enough, but an important marker for the consumer-durables future was the Board of Trade’s removal on 14 July – barely a week after the end of rationing – of restrictions on hire-purchase agreements for such items as radios, television sets, gramophones, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, motor cars and motorcycles. ‘The export problem now is to sell different goods, not to produce them,’ reflected sanguinely enough The Times’s City editor. ‘Metals and other materials are abundant, while defence claims have eased.’ Noting that hire purchase was no longer called ‘the never-never’, the paper argued soon afterwards that whereas in the 1930s ‘hire purchase was a working-class device (house buying apart) for obtaining, not luxuries or even semi-luxuries, but such necessaries as furniture’, now the post-war middle class, highly taxed and with little capital, was widely using HP, so that ‘the class tincture of being a hire purchaser has vanished altogether’. It was not overnight all free and easy – there was still a £50,000 limit of new capital in any one year for hire-purchase finance firms – but the trend was unmistakable.3

  There was an undeniable class tincture to the question of who should captain England’s coming cricket tour of Australia, with two realistic candidates: the incumbent, Len Hutton, a seasoned Yorkshire professional, and the far from seasoned Sherborne-educated Cambridge graduate David Sheppard, an amateur playing for Sussex. The cricket writer likely to have the most influence over the MCC, who had to make the decision, was the pontifical E. W. Swanton. ‘There is no better fellow than the average modern cricketer,’ he reassured his Telegraph readers on 12 July. ‘But he does want looking after, and he will react for better or for worse according to how he is handled.’ In short, it was quality of leadership – in fact, of man management – that should be the decisive criterion. There followed some sharp words on Hutton’s captaincy: ‘It is fair to say, that his own strong accent on defence has apparently repressed the younger English batsman . . . As in batting, so in tactics, choosing the bolder of two courses does not come easily to his nature.’ Sheppard, by contrast, was ‘a young cricketer of strong character and much determination to whom leadership comes naturally’. Swanton did not formally plump for either man, but it was obvious which he wanted.

  This was too much for the Daily Mirror’s Ross Hall. ‘Let’s be able to cheer the rout of the hypocrites,’ he declared two days later, insisting that Hutton be speedily named captain. ‘Only the woollen-headed snobs, who have played havoc with English Test cricket abroad in the past [an entirely justified barb at the selection policy for the previous tour of Australia], turn blind eyes to the fact that golden boy David Sheppard is still a learner compared with Hutton.’ And he claimed that ‘at Lord’s and its surrounds’, Sheppard’s ‘amateur claims’ were ‘supported by an influential majority’. That same day there started the annual Gentlemen (amateurs) versus Players (professionals) match at Lord’s, with Sheppard not helping his cause by scoring 4 and 0 as well as being guilty of, in Hall’s perhaps not entirely objective appraisal, ‘poor handling of the bowling’. In the event, the MCC stuck with Pudsey’s finest – unanimously according to Hutton’s biographer, Gerald Howat, by one vote according to Swanton’s great rival, John Arlott. ‘I’m relieved to know that the MCC selectors have thought I’m the right type of fellow to take the England team to Australia,’ was Hutton’s characteristically dry response to the announcement on the 19th. Next day in The Times, John Woodcock was broadly supportive of Hutton – ‘at once the most completely equipped batsman in the world and a shrewd tactician’ – but could not forbear from referring a little wistfully to Sheppard’s ‘infectious enthusiasm’.4

  Enthusiasm of any kind was thin on the ground on the evening of Saturday the 24th, when Richard Crossman, visiting his Coventry constituency, held an open-air meeting outside the Wyken Pippin pub:

  We’ve never failed to get a good meeting since we put the loud-speaker at the bus-stop, facing across to the pub, which has a huge garden outside, and they come out with their mugs of beer, sit on a little wall and ask questions. I had all three Councillors, and the Coventry Evening Telegraph had had the whole front page announcing that the Home Secretary had appointed three Civil Commissioners to take over Coventry’s civil defence, so heaven knows there were enough things to talk about. We talked for an hour and a half, and there were never more than five people listening.

  ‘True,’ added Crossman, ‘it was the first night of the holiday fortnight and 25,000 people had left Coventry station, but there were probably 180,000 people left in the city . . .’

  Next week, for Madge Martin and her clergyman husband, it was a few not wholly satisfactory days in London in late July before the real holiday began. On one day: ‘We hadn’t time for a leisurely dinner, so I had a revolting sandwich at Fortes . . .’ And on another, on a bus along the Finchley Road, fondly remembered from pre-Blitz days: ‘All the large, romantic houses were shattered, and now just blank spaces, surrounded by dense foliage. I expect the next step will be blocks of horrid flats.’ Still, on Saturday the 31st it was off to Scarborough, as usual staying at the Burghcliffe Hotel. Then came the big disappointment:

  We heard horrid things about the new Spa arrangements, but didn’t dream just how awful the changes were. There is an Ice Show – entirely covering the old space around the open-air band-stand, and enclosed in huge, disgusting striped awning, cutting off the lovely sea-view . . . The Spa has always been our great joy, and we never asked for anything different – and now, to see it so devastated and made so common . . . We could have screamed . . .

  That same Saturday, there were mercifully no flies in the ointment, or clouds in the sky, at Loders Fete. ‘To have got a fine day in this wettest of summers for fifty years was luck superlative,’ recorded the grateful vicar, Oliver Willmott, in his next Parish Notes:

  To match the occasion the organisers presented the best entertainment they have ever concocted. First, the Mayor of Bridport gave a sample of the town crying that has more than once made him champion town crier of England. Then he adjudicated the efforts of eight miserable locals who had been compelled by Miss Randall to dress up, march to a rostrum and imitate the Mayor. They looked like state prisoners going to the block, but the crowd enjoyed it hugely. Green draperies suggestive of the toga and a little cross-gartering had transformed the ample figure of our worthy village butcher into another Nero; acad
emic cap and gown had changed the Vicar’s churchwarden into another Frank Sinatra as he would look in the act of receiving an honorary doctorate of Law at Chicago University; and a greenish bowler hat capping the moustachios of the sporting landlord of The Crown had converted him into Old Bill of the 1914–18 war. Old Bill was an easy winner, and with native generosity he tossed the fruits of victory into the treasurer’s lap for the good of the cause. Then followed a display of dancing typical of various nations by Miss Sally Bryant’s school of dancing. Loders Court [home of Sir Edward and Lady Le Breton] made the perfect background for this, and the dancers delighted the crowd by doing much more than they had promised. A tent-pegging race in which the horses were gentlemen, the chariots wheelbarrows, and the charioteers ladies, leavened the decorous proceedings with spills and thrills. For the aesthetically minded there was a ladies’ ankles competition won by Mrs Rudd junior (who, we hear, always wins, at any fete). In a competition for the knobbliest male knees the Vicar’s churchwarden came into his own . . .

  The profit was a record – more than £160 – and ‘another such fete next year should complete the amount needed for the overhaul of the organ’.5

  During these mostly damp summer weeks there was plenty of theatrical interest – a Home Service run-out for Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (‘some quality in its rather stolid way’, according to the critic J. C. Trewin), with Noel Johnson of Dick Barton fame as Henry VIII; the sad demise of the Bristol Empire as a live theatre, with a last Variety hurrah featuring among others the impressionist Wally Athersych, renowned for his air-raid noises; curtain up at the Whitehall, with Brian Rix as actor-manager, for John Chapman’s hugely successful Dry Rot, a farce about dishonest bookmakers – but no serious competition, among theatre-goers anyway, for the star event. This was the musical Salad Days, principally the work of the 24-year-old, Eton-educated Julian Slade and performed at the Vaudeville by the Bristol Old Vic company. As usual, there on the first night, 5 August, was Anthony Heap. ‘This quaint little musical fantasy’, he called it in his diary, with ‘a plentiful supply of gay little lyrics set to nimble little tunes’, and altogether ‘quite a captivating little frolic’. Even so, the curmudgeon in him added: ‘I don’t know that it called for such an excessively ecstatic reception as the exceedingly well-disposed first night audience saw fit to accord it.’ Just over a fortnight later, passing through London on their way back from Scarborough, the Martins went to it. ‘A most unsophisticated, almost amateurish, but fresh, unusual and charming little musical, which seems to have caught on with sophisticated audiences,’ was her verdict, adding that ‘this one was rapturously enthusiastic’.