Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Far more controversial, though, was Nigel Kneale’s powerful television adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, including a particularly disturbing brainwashing scene. It went out live (including a live orchestra) on the evening of Sunday, 12 December, immediately after What’s My Line?, and starred Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Although ‘put on with many a caution toward the kiddies and old and susceptible’ (in Philip Hope-Wallace’s caustic words), the protesting phone calls flooded in almost from the start, followed over the next few days by press outrage and Commons motions accusing the BBC of needlessly frightening its viewers. ‘Many said it should not have been broadcast on a Sunday – the evening of “family viewing”,’ was a common opinion among the BBC’s Viewing Panel (giving a Reaction Index of only 39), while ‘ “it should not have been broadcast at all, because it wasn’t entertainment” was a frequent statement’. Among those also watching was the writer Sid Chaplin. ‘Bad, I thought, in several ways,’ he told a friend. ‘Reaction of many shocked people was I think a true instinct – human beings have proved themselves bigger than the diabolical torturers pictured. The end was just disgusting.’ He did add, though, that it was ‘good that 1 mill – perhaps more – should see this exposure of social engineering’. On Thursday the 16th a second performance, this time straight after Sportsview, won the biggest television audience since the Coronation. It was, predictably, a talking point on next evening’s Any Questions?. ‘I like to see the BBC showing a bit of courage,’ declared Anthony Wedgwood Benn from the County Secondary Modern School at Ilminster, ‘and if there was public protest about this I think it was quite right in view of the nature of the play for the BBC to go ahead with it. (A little applause.) I’m glad anyway one person in the audience agrees with me.’

  ‘Two hours of absorbing horror comic for the delectation of millions,’ was Hollowood’s verdict on the adaptation, and amid a renewed storm of public outrage about American horror comics the allusion was deliberately topical. ‘A bit of Christmas shopping (I am getting on very early with it, this year),’ noted Madge Martin in mid-November, ‘then to an exhibition, held in the N.U.T. [National Union of Teachers] headquarters near St Pancras, of “comics” for children. It was to show how dreadful the “horror” comics are, and a campaign is being launched, successfully, to ban them. They certainly are revolting.’ Soon afterwards, Peter Mauger in Picture Post reiterated his call of two years earlier, declaring that ‘either we can protect the “freedom” of a few unscrupulous publishers to make money by degrading the minds of our young people – or we can protect our children’s freedom to develop normally, free from this dangerous drug’. But given that the sales of such comics were in fact far lower than those of British comics, was legislation to ban them really the answer? ‘A sample number of copies were produced and handed round by the Home Secretary,’ a flippant Harold Macmillan recorded after a Cabinet discussion in early 1955. ‘There were not quite enough copies for us all – so cries were heard “come on, now, David, let’s have a look” or “I say: Fred, you might give a chap a chance” and so on . . .’ Eventually, bowing to public opinion and resisting Roy Jenkins’s stirring parliamentary defence of freedom of expression, the government did go ahead and legislate.9

  Freedom of artistic expression was probably not Gladys Langford’s credo either. ‘I shall go to no more modern art shows unless they are free for I get no pleasure out of contemplating modern art,’ she reflected in October after inspecting an exhibition of ‘British Painting & Sculpture 1954’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She had wisely (from her point of view) skipped the solo show by the 26-year-old John Bratby. ‘Bratby does his vehement damnedest to extract the last ounce of desperate passion from the spectre-eyed ladies and the higgle-piggle of objects crowded on the kitchen table that are his subject matter,’ reckoned the Spectator’s M. H. Middleton. ‘On goes the paint, trowel-thick, in great linear strips that follow the form like livid weals.’ And overall, ‘the result too often suggests rather a desperate desire for intensity than a desperate intensity’. Other critics, though, were much more receptive: John Russell in the Sunday Times asserted that Bratby’s rendition of a cornflakes packet edged Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus; Studio Magazine ranked him with Rembrandt and Goya; and in the New Statesman the young, very left-wing John Berger declared that Bratby had created a style entirely his own: ‘To enter the Beaux Arts Gallery is to enter Bratby’s home. This is partly because his subjects are his wife, his sister-in-law, his kitchen table, his dog, his groceries: but far more profoundly because you are compelled to share his most intense and personal emotions. His personality is a desperate one and you are held by his glittering eye.’ Indeed, asserted Berger, he paints ‘as though he sensed that he only had one more day to live’, and ‘a packet of corn-flakes on a littered kitchen table as though it were part of a last supper’.

  In fact, Bratby was part of a loose quartet of young, broadly social-realist painters from the Royal College of Art who had all recently exhibited at the Beaux Arts – Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith being the others – and in December probably the most influential art critic of the day, David Sylvester, grouped them together in an Encounter article, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, that gave the name to a movement for which the everyday was paramount. ‘If there is life and exultation in Bratby’s work,’ Sylvester noted in a largely hostile piece, ‘there is also the drawback that in expressing the disorder of reality it is itself disordered.’ Bratby himself the previous year had married the talented painter Jean Cooke (after first locking her in his room in case she escaped), and over the years, as his own fortunes dwindled, he would treat her appallingly, permitting her to paint for only three hours in the morning, slashing her pictures if he disapproved of them and painting over them if he had run out of canvas. ‘A tiny woman,’ noted an admiring obituarist in 2008, ‘she had an indomitable spirit, and was affectionately celebrated for always having her say at Royal Academy meetings.’10

  Sylvester’s ‘Kitchen Sink’ article was just about to appear when on 30 November, to mark Churchill’s 80th birthday that day, there took place in Westminster Hall a ceremony that Macmillan called ‘dignified, restrained and noble’. Apart from speeches by Attlee and Churchill himself, its main elements were Parliament’s two presents: an illuminated book signed by almost every MP and a portrait of Churchill painted by Graham Sutherland. ‘He is a magnanimous man & a great one,’ reflected Marian Raynham after listening to the ceremony on the radio. ‘Some did not sign in the book of names presented. To him that meant, I don’t know how to put it, freedom & the right of the people to make decisions.’ There was less magnanimity about the portrait, which Churchill had first seen a fortnight earlier and immediately loathed, partly because it made him look as if he was straining on the lavatory. ‘One painful moment when the curtain concealing Sutherland portrait was drawn back,’ recorded Clarissa Eden (wife of Anthony) in her account of the ceremony, ‘and Winston turned to look at it with loathing, and he then said, “This is a remarkable example of modern art,” whereupon the blimpish Tories let out a yell of laughter & Sutherland blushed.’ Attlee privately sympathised. ‘I don’t like Graham Sutherland’s stuff,’ he wrote to his brother soon afterwards. ‘I tell people that it’s lucky that he did not depict the Old Man in plus-fours with loud checks with one foot in a grave. That’s his usual style.’ The painting was never displayed in public, and after a year or so Clemmie Churchill had it secretly cut up and burned. As for Churchill himself, all the birthday fuss had, despite the disagreeable portrait, a rejuvenating effect. ‘He now has a firm reputation – for the first time in his life – as a reliable and far-seeing statesman in peace,’ Henry Fairlie observed a few days later in his first political commentary for the Spectator, arguing there was no reason why Churchill should not lead the Tories into the next election.

  English football, after a rocky time, was returning to Churchillian form – and although the national team beat West Germany 3–1 in a W
embley friendly the day after his birthday, the principal flag-bearers were the pacey, muscular, long-passing Wolverhampton Wanderers, under the authoritarian management of Stan Cullis. Floodlit friendlies against prestigious international opposition were a considerable novelty, but in late 1954 there were two at Molineux, in both cases the second half being televised. ‘RUSSIANS FEAR WRIGHT’ was a confident headline on 16 November before that evening a crowd of 55,184 saw Billy Wright’s team thrash Spartak 4–0, making (in Geoffrey Green’s euphoric words in The Times) ‘the sort of history that has been awaited by Englishmen chafing under the yoke of Continental dominance in the whole wide field of football’. On 13 December the visitors were Honved, six of whose team (including Puskas) had played in Hungary’s historic 6–3 victory against England just over a year earlier. Honved were two up at half-time, but then the nation cheered as it watched, to words by Kenneth Wolstenholme, Wolves turn it round on a quagmire of a pitch and win 3–2. Hailing ‘another decisive blow for British football’, Charles Buchan in the News Chronicle claimed that Wolves in the second half ‘not only got on top, but rubbed the noses of the Honved players in the Molineux mud’. And he explained how they did it: ‘By close marking and quick tackling, they cut all the rhythm out of the Honved team and then sledge-hammered a way past their defenders. It was British football at its best.’

  Christmas was approaching, the first one since the end of rationing. ‘We went out early by car this morning to get the last of the shopping for the holiday,’ Phyllis Willmott recorded in Bethnal Green on Christmas Eve, a Friday:

  We went to Roman Road. It was not crowded, but there were people about. The women were out with their big, flat bags. And the husbands were out with packets in their hands, looking as if they were really enjoying this day off work.

  At the end of the road we parked for a moment, and I watched the world go by. We were outside a butcher’s. A big, well-made woman pushing a pram stopped outside. She was shabbily dressed. Two children were walking with her – a boy of about nine or ten, in long trousers; a girl of about six with thin, white legs, cotton socks, and a coat with the hem let down badly. She had her hands in her pockets and looked cold in the sharp wind. ‘You stay outside,’ said the mother to her. The girl stayed, holding the pram, while the boy followed his mother into the shop. At first, I thought there were two children in the pram. Another look showed that there were three: a boy of about four, a girl of three (with a dummy in her mouth and a rosy, bonny face) and a baby under the hood of perhaps a year or fifteen months. The girl standing holding the pram stared in at us; she didn’t smile. I felt how unfair life is. More so now, perhaps, than ever. They are becoming such a minority group, the large ‘poor’ families.

  It was, on the whole, an easier life in Chingford. ‘Abbé has today off, too,’ noted a contented Judy Haines four days later. ‘How I do love to have him at home. He took us to see Glynis Johns in “Mad about Men”. All about a mermaid. We all thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am resolved to wear lighter colours and step up the glamour a bit. Resolution No 1 for 1955.’11

  5

  A Fair Crack at the Whip

  Modernisation was in the air in early 1955. On Monday, 24 January – hours after 17 had been killed when a diverted York–Bristol express jumped the points at Sutton Coldfield – the British Transport Commission’s chairman, General Sir Brian Robertson, unveiled a £1,240 million Plan for the Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways that aimed by 1970 to electrify the main lines and many of the major suburban lines, make increasing use of diesel, and phase out steam trains. Against a background of rising coal prices, the strategy made obvious sense, whatever the undoubted widespread emotional attachment to steam, for all its dirtiness. Press reaction was generally positive, if somewhat sceptical of the ability of the ossified BTC to deliver change. Moreover, as the Economist fairly pointed out, ‘the measures that are proposed will, after fifteen years, put this country’s railway system no further ahead than, say, the Dutch railways today’. There was also the continuing here and now of a badly rundown, poorly performing network. ‘In 1962 the train now standing at Platform 6 will be air-conditioned, radar-equipped and faster than sound,’ announced a station loudspeaker in an Osbert Lancaster pocket cartoon a few days after the plan, ‘but tonight it will be running a leetle behind time!’

  A large part of the problem facing the railways by 1955 was increasingly intense road competition, especially in freight, and on 2 February the Transport Minister, John Boyd-Carpenter, announced a major programme of expenditure on roads over the next four years. This would include the start of construction of London–Yorkshire and Preston–Birmingham ‘motor roads’ (ie motorways), a crossing of the Firth of Forth, the Dartford–Purfleet tunnel and the rebuilding of London’s Albert Bridge. ‘Throughout its length it will have two carriageways,’ helpfully explained The Times about the London-to-Yorkshire project. ‘The motor road will be carried over or under all existing roads and at important junctions there will be fly-overs or under-passes.’ Against a background of the number of motor vehicles having nearly doubled since 1938, Britain’s roads were, by common consent, inadequate and dangerous – epitomised by the A1, or Great North Road, condemned by Picture Post later in 1955 as ‘the bloodiest country lane in Britain’ – so, as with the rail plan, there was little opposition. However, the town planner Colin Buchanan offered a word of caution. ‘The road improvements will be, in the main, open-country schemes, and they will benefit the motorists, industry, and indeed the country,’ he wrote in early 1956. ‘But in the towns, where journeys begin and end, the extra motor vehicles may come to be regarded as a very mixed blessing.’1

  Less than a fortnight after Boyd-Carpenter’s announcement, it was the turn of Geoffrey Lloyd, Minister of Fuel and Power, to flourish a ten-year plan. ‘This is a historic day for Britain,’ he declared. ‘It offers the possibility of a continuing increase in the standard of living of our country . . . Here is new scope for our traditional genius – the mixing of a small proportion of imported materials with a large amount of skill and ingenuity.’ Lloyd was announcing the building of 12 nuclear power stations, a programme ahead of anywhere else in the world. The new stations (known in time as the Magnox stations, after the special alloy of magnesium in which the uranium fuel rods were clad) were to be built by private enterprise but operated by the Central Electricity Authority, reconstituted in 1957 as the Central Electricity Generating Board. That body’s first chairman would be Sir Christopher Hinton, who in 1955 itself was, as a key figure at the Atomic Energy Authority, the public face of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. His arguments were compelling and seldom criticised: not only was the demand for conventional fuels growing rapidly, but the more easily worked coal deposits were becoming depleted, the price of coal was inexorably increasing, and there were continuing recruitment problems in the mines. Moreover, construction work at Calder Hall in Cumberland, intended to be the first station to generate large quantities of electrical power from atomic energy, was progressing satisfactorily, while in the north of Scotland, work was under way at Dounreay to build a ‘breeder reactor’. In March, Marian Raynham in Surbiton heard Hinton give a typically authoritative talk on ‘Atomic Energy in Industry’ on the Home Service. ‘I loved to hear it all just roll off his tongue about the Calder reactor & uranium & gases & power & fission material etc,’ she recorded. ‘All so easy it sounded.’2

  Inevitably, the question began to be asked, especially in relation to the nationalised sector: would modernisation work without higher productivity and improved industrial relations? The railways were now temporarily replacing the coal mines as the focus of most attention, especially in the wake of a threatened national strike in the second week of 1955 that had, as was becoming a familiar pattern, been averted only by the deft ministerial use of a tame Court of Inquiry. The Cabinet was divided about its recommendations, but most knew that public opinion (74 per cent according to Gallup) was firmly on the side of the low-paid railw
aymen. Churchill had no appetite for an industrial fight, and, as Macmillan put it in his diary to justify acceptance of significant pay rises for little or nothing in return, ‘we are enjoying the greatest boom in history’, so ‘how can 700,000 industrial workers be asked to forego their share?’ The Economist as usual fulminated – ‘There is no substitute for competition . . . One of the dreams that finally died last week was the dream that industries could be planned or rationalised or co-ordinated into efficiency’ – while Enoch Powell warned in a speech in his Wolverhampton constituency that without greater financial realism ‘we shall get into the nightmare situation of everybody subsidising everybody else’s wages’, but as yet there was zero political traction for the concept of extensive denationalisation. Instead, Tory hopes were pinned on the leaders of organised labour doing their honourable bit as they saw the fruits of the government’s capital investment coming through. ‘There is really a great opportunity here of doing a big thing,’ Macmillan privately reflected shortly before the announcement of the rail plan. ‘We must – at all costs – get the Unions on our side from the start, if we are to get the benefit of modernisation.’