Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Salad Days was set to run and run – fittingly until 1960, for no show was, at least on the face of it, more quintessentially of the 1950s. ‘It is winsome, coy, escapist, terminally adolescent, pathetically repressed, and, in its artfully wide-eyed way, exceptionally camp,’ declared a fiercely hostile critic, Alastair Macaulay, about a 1996 revival of what for him was clearly something from a distant, pre-enlightenment world. But Macaulay might also have noted not only that – for all their refined voices – the central characters Jane and Timothy, just down from university, marry secretly and look after the magic piano because she does not want to be married off by her mother to a suitable husband while he cannot face being fixed up with a safe job by one of his influential uncles, but also that the piano’s infectious ability to make people dance is a severe affront to the hypocritical Minister of Pleasure and Pastime. It was, all in all, a thoroughly English piece – though failing, perhaps inevitably, to break the stranglehold of the American musical.6

  A week or so after Jane and Timothy found themselves something to do, George Allen & Unwin published The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Naomi Mitchison, along with Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, had already contributed praise to the dust jacket, and now they wrote appropriately laudatory reviews. ‘Like lightning from a clear sky,’ declared Lewis in Time & Tide, while Mitchison in the New Statesman called it ‘a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and graveness’. Most reviews were positive, though not uncritically so. ‘Whimsical drivel with a message?’ asked J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘It sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level.’ He did, however, note that it had ‘no religious spirit of any kind, and to all intents and purposes no women’. The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Green claimed that the prose style ‘veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy’s Own Paper’, albeit conceding that the novel had ‘an undeniable fascination’. And in Punch, where under Anthony Powell’s literary editorship it received the briefest of reviews, Peter Dickinson frankly stated: ‘I can think of nothing in the book to account for the fact that I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, despite some of the most infuriating fine writing.’ The most heavyweight critique came from a major literary figure, the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir. ‘To read it is to be thrown into astonishment,’ he gladly conceded in the Observer, but insisted that in terms of ‘human discrimination and depth’ there was a fatal shortfall: ‘Mr Tolkien describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil, on which hangs the future of life on earth. But his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immutably evil; and he has no room in his world for a Satan both evil and tragic.’ Commercially, the book flourished, being reprinted after six weeks, ahead of the publication in mid-November of The Two Towers, second in the sequence. It was not yet a cult, though, nor – away from the public prints – was it everyone’s cup of tea. ‘Don’s whimsy’ was the private verdict of Angus Wilson, to whom in his own mind the future belonged.7

  A different sort of saga rolled on at Ambridge. ‘Dan and Doris Archer seem to be universally popular figures, old friends, with familiar but by no means unpleasing idiosyncrasies,’ an internal BBC report on The Archers noted in August. ‘They are a solid, sensible pair, “absolutely real” to listeners.’ Other characters, though, were not wholly above criticism from the 756 listeners, the great majority of them regular followers of the series, who had completed questionnaires. Peggy Archer, ‘in the throes of marital unrest’ with Jack Archer, was seen by a minority as ‘an unsympathetic wife, shallow and shrewish’, while a minority also criticised Jack himself for ‘behaving too queerly and unreasonably for too long’. Even Walter Gabriel, for all his ‘hosts of admirers’, had his critics, with his ‘gravelly tones’ being ‘the source of irritation (and alarm) in certain quarters’. There was also annoyance about the love angle. ‘Phil’s protracted romance with Grace has evidently become too much of a good thing,’ found the report. ‘Listeners do not always want to see the couple married but there is a strong feeling that Grace should return from exile so that the matter can be settled once and for all.’ These, however, were all minority grumbles – and the report’s conclusion did nothing to dent BBC confidence that The Archers had become a permanent fixture of daily life: ‘For 90% of the regular listeners this serial continues to be as interesting as ever.’

  The summer holidays were drawing to an end when on the last Monday of August (not yet a Bank Holiday), Judy Haines in Chingford, her two daughters and her friend Phyllis took a trip to the Tower of London:

  We arrived dead on time – 10.30, having bought a film for camera at Liverpool Street, which we reached by trolleybus. After seeing the shipping from London Bridge we went to Lyons for coffee and orangeade. Then we saw the Tower. Armour very interesting. Picnicked in the grounds. It’s getting very warm and I’m in a muddle with the lunch – hard boiled eggs, cut loaf, butter, tomatoes, jelly and swiss roll. I have three little buttons off my green coat, which I am unhappy about. Lunch over & I’m just as cluttered up with my one long and two short frig. boxes. After buying jumping beans we went aboard Thames boat to Westminster Pier. Phyllis suggested Battersea Park from there. We waited ages for bus & then it was a dickens of a way. We ‘did’ the fun fair in Park – girls wanted everything. (I’m hard up and hadn’t bargained for this.) Called a halt after train ride, ride on Muffin [ie the Mule] and horse respectively, ride on swan round Fairyland, ice cream and candy floss. Came out of F.F. and sat in Park – too long! Mistook time by 1 hour. Arrived home par-boiled and exhausted at 6.45 pm!

  Most of the holidays had been spent without an increasingly ubiquitous parental aid. ‘Television comes home after being away about 4 weeks!’ she noted a few days later. ‘New transformer.’8

  By now the new football season was under way, including in Scotland. ‘Woodburn ran the soles off his boots trying to cover up the mistakes of everybody around him,’ ran the Sunday Post report of Rangers losing 3–1 at home to Clyde on 21 August. The praise was typical: the 35-year-old Willie Woodburn had been at the heart of the usually formidable Rangers defence (the ‘Iron Curtain’) for many years. ‘Always a fiercely uncompromising tackler,’ in an obituary’s words, ‘the worst of his fouls were committed in retaliation’ – none worse than at Ibrox a week later, with Rangers two up against Stirling Albion:

  In the very last minute [reported the Sunday Post] Woodburn became involved with young Patterson in the game’s only nasty incident, and was ordered off. Mr Young [the referee, from Aberdeen] seemed to hesitate before sending the pivot indoors.

  Query, just how biased can a football crowd get? They loudly booed the referee for this decision. The poor fellow had no option.

  Woodburn had been suspended for violent conduct several times before, but this was something else – a punch (admittedly in retaliation after a foul) on a 19-year-old debutant who, ironically, had idolised Woodburn. Over the next few days, nursing a burst lip and three dislodged teeth, a disenchanted Alec Patterson needed much persuasion from his manager before he agreed to go on playing senior football.

  Then on 14 September came ‘The Woodburn Bombshell’, as the Referee Committee of the Scottish FA decided – by the chairman’s casting vote – to suspend Woodburn sine die. The news was instantly a national talking point, and the Sunday Post took some vox pop:

  He’s a quick-tempered player, not a deliberately dirty one. His punishment is too harsh. (Alec Sprul, 82 Bellrock St, Cranhill, Glasgow – a Clyde supporter)

  There’s only one man to blame and that’s Willie Woodburn himself. He’s the guilty man and now he should take his punishment . . . I’ve seen youngsters hero-worship Woodburn. For their sakes, he should accept his punishments for his indiscretions. (John Fox, Maltbarns St, Glasgow)

  This sentence is far too drastic. I’ve never seen Woodburn play a dirty game. (Thomas Henderson, 13 Minto St, Edinburgh – a Hear
ts supporter)

  Most people seem to have agreed that the punishment was unduly severe, but by the time the SFA revoked the ban, three years later, Woodburn was too old to resume his career. Roy Race, by contrast, would prove ageless. In early September, while Woodburn waited to hear his fate, the boys’ comic Tiger – billed as ‘The Sport and Adventure Picture Story Weekly’ – made its bow, featuring Roy of the Rovers on an all-colour, all-action front page. ‘Only two minutes to go in the local Cup-Tie . . . And the score 0–0! With all his pals of the Milston Youth Club F.C. played to a standstill, centre-forward Roy Race was the one member of the team still tireless and on his toes. Could he score before the final whistle blew?’ The outcome was never in doubt, but, unknown to Roy, watching on the touchline was the pipe-smoking, green-felt-hatted Alf Leeds, talent-spotter for mighty Melchester Rovers. ‘He’s got talent,’ he sagely remarked to a spectator, as Roy and his teammates celebrated in the background, ‘but he’ll have to work hard and take knocks to become a pro.’

  The Last Night of the Proms on the 18th – four days after the Third Programme’s live broadcast from Venice of Benjamin Britten’s new opera The Turn of the Screw, with David Hemmings as Miles – as usual signalled the end of summer. The second half saw two traditions instantly created: live television coverage (introduced by Alvar Lidell) and a running order of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the ‘Sea Songs’ (in truncated form), ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘Jerusalem’. There was nothing contemporary included even in the first half, and Sir Malcolm Sargent in his annual ‘farewell speech’ asked living composers to bear in mind that the great works of art had always sprung from the heart and the affections, adding that ‘if your music be the food of love, play on’, but otherwise ‘shut up’. ‘Flash’ Sargent’s populism was unabashed – ‘if people can get as enthusiastic about music as about football,’ he also remarked, ‘that is all to the good’ – and over the years he would have no problems about the coming of the cameras encouraging the already raucous Promenaders to, in David Cannadine’s words, ‘wear ever more outlandish clothes, and to bring their union flags and streamers and bunting and umbrellas and funny hats’.9 But Melchester Rovers, in the end, always had the numbers.

  On 15 September 1954, having passed his eleven-plus, Mike (as he still was) Jagger had his first day at Dartford Grammar School – and started to drift apart from his old schoolfriend, the much less middle-class Keith Richards, who went to the technical school in ill-favoured north Dartford. Not so far away that same week, between Blackheath and Eltham, there opened London’s first purpose-built comprehensive, Kidbrooke School. In a sense it was not yet truly a comprehensive – a mixture of ministerial and parental pressure had prevented it from incorporating Eltham Hill School, a girls’ grammar – but both physically and symbolically it made a considerable impact.

  Kidbrooke ‘is a huge triangle of buildings of brick and glass and cedar-wood, with a low copper-covered hall in the middle of it, big enough to hold all two thousand girls at prayers every morning’, wrote Anthony Sampson some years later. ‘Inside there are rows of glassy, brightly painted classrooms, including a room of typing girls, a room of dressmakers, a row of model kitchens, a pottery, a model flat, laboratories, libraries and three gymnasia. It certainly has some of the appearance of mass-production . . .’ At the time, the News Chronicle called it ‘Britain’s new palace of educational varieties, a blaze of colour – crimson, yellow and blue’, while there was much focus on the headmistress, the tall, firm, humane Mary Green, who had run a grammar school in Bristol until becoming disenchanted by the arbitrary finality of the eleven-plus selection system. ‘Each “stream” will follow the same syllabus,’ she told the sceptical but not unfriendly local paper before the gates opened for the first time, reassuringly adding that ‘how much of any course each group takes and the way in which it is interpreted will depend on the girls’ aptitude and ability’. Moreover, the first year’s 15 forms would each be ‘of roughly equal ability’, based on Green’s own assessments and former heads’ reports. On Friday the 17th the Bishop of Woolwich held a service in the vast hall to launch Kidbrooke. Not once during his address, according to the local paper’s mole, did he mention the school itself, but instead ‘he urged the girls to build their lives on sound Christian principles and to pay attention to spiritual matters’.10

  Even before Kidbrooke (starting at the same time as the first comprehensives in Bristol and Coventry), the debate was gathering momentum. ‘The battle for the survival of the grammar school is, in its implications, the most crucial political struggle that modern Britain has known,’ declared the historian Max Beloff in June at the end of an Encounter article arguing that ‘British democracy has been as successful as it has, largely because it has succeeded in being so undemocratic’, and stressing the dangers of egalitarianism to the survival of this uniquely effective formula. On the whole, though, the wind was starting by 1954 to blow the other way. In August an article in Education highlighted the parental predicament that summer in Nottingham, where 447 grammar places had been available, competed for by 2,716 out of the more than 4,400 children coming up for secondary school. Other telling signs were the Central Advisory Council for Education’s Early Leaving report, revealing the relatively poor academic performance – and high drop-out rate – among working-class children at grammars; P. E. Vernon in the TES publishing work that threw further doubt on the reliability of intelligence testing; and the academic impact of David Glass’s Social Mobility in Britain collection, finding a generally low level of mobility, with the young sociologist A. H. Halsey concluding that ‘the comprehensive school would provide an educational environment which, while catering for the variety of education needed in a technological society, might contribute also towards a greater social unity’. Most striking of all was a Picture Post article (‘A Hope for Every Child – Comprehensive Schools’) in December, in which Trevor Philpott went to inspect the Anglesey experience (going back to 1949) and concluded that it was the way ahead, the only alternative to a system in which children were ‘robbed savagely’ of their ‘opportunities’ before their 12th birthday. Earlier in the year, however, there had been an instructive Scottish experience for the Labour politician Richard Crossman. ‘His little girl Margaret is at Glasgow High School, where she pays £7 a term plus books and uniform in the Junior and will pay much more in the main school,’ he recorded after staying with the ‘keen, hard, absolutely materialistic, loyal, nice, dull’ Chief Convenor of the Albion motor-car works. ‘Blackwood is a Councillor, and I said how did this square with Comprehensive schools? He told me that other Councillors were very angry with him, but his little Margaret was going to have the best.’11

  The human aspect of the eleven-plus system was undeniably cruel – and perhaps increasingly so, given its controversial nature. The following summer, a New Statesman piece by M. Lehmann described the overwrought girls in a junior school listening to their teacher (Lehmann herself?) read out the names of those who had passed. Bettie’s was not among them:

  Bettie, of whom everyone had been so sure, whom her parents had called the brainy one of the family (having apparently little faith in the talents of their other three daughters), Bettie who was one of the best in the form. Bettie did not cry; she produced a smile on her white little face. Then Doris, always such a proud girl, began to sob, and Mary, too, disconsolately, because her parents had had her coached for six months and she knew how much it had cost them. And then Rachel began because her elder sister had managed to pass two years ago . . .

  Then teacher said something comforting to the effect that what they had learnt was not wasted, that they would always be able to use it when they were grown-up. But they knew it was not true. Why and how should they ever be asked again to work out in exactly 24 seconds (not one more) how far it is round a square field whose side is three furlongs? And anyhow, now they had to go home, what would their parents think and say, or – most dreaded thing of all – the neighbours? That they were f
ailures. Failures, ten years old, some ‘already’ eleven. And it all happened in the Year of Our Lord 1955.

  The social hurt could cut the other way, as Kaye Winterbottom, brought up in Rochdale’s working-class Spotland district, found in 1954 after passing her eleven-plus and winning a place at Bury Grammar School for Girls:

  I suddenly found that the children I knew and had been friends with all my life refused to play with me and said I was a snob. I was really upset and thought it was an injustice. A woman who lived nearby knocked at our front door and told my mother she’d come to let her know it was a waste of time sending girls to grammar schools . . . When I went to Bury I found it very difficult to adapt. When I started fighting the other girls just turned away as if in disgust. I found it very difficult to understand them. No one admired me for the things I was good at – fighting, rampaging, being wild. I broke a bottle of calamine lotion over a girl’s head and was threatened with expulsion. I was forever in trouble for one thing or another. They told me I was a disgrace. Girls from Prestwich and Whitefield were from a different culture from girls from Rochdale, and we were the minority.