Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  ‘General Election: the futility of politics,’ John Fowles bleakly reflected, not so far away in Hampstead, in a diary entry covering both polling day and the next day, Friday the 27th. ‘The helplessness of the self before the vast mass of blind public opinion. In this election, too, the apathy is significant and healthy; people are no longer interested in politics . . .’ Judy Haines, unusually for her, did not even mention the election. ‘I was very keen to see Alistair Sim & Joyce Grenfell in “The Belles of St Trinians” at Highams Park, Regal,’ she noted on the Thursday. ‘Decided, therefore, to miss Keep Fit and take girls [whose school was being used for voting]. Very disappointed, and I dropped off to sleep here and there.’ Three other diarists – unlike her, all Conservative-supporting – were more engaged. ‘I would have loved to stay up till 12 o’clock, but my husband said the wireless would disturb him, so I’ll have to be patient,’ recorded Nella Last. Florence Turtle, a 58-year-old buyer for British Home Stores, who lived with her two brothers in Wimbledon Park, had not only no husband to make a fuss but also a television to watch:

  Thursday night: At 9.30 pm Richard Dimbleby started to broadcast the Election results. Cheltenham was the first to come through with a 2 per cent swing to Conservatives – the same trend was notable at Salford East & West . . . I retired to bed at 3.0 am as we could keep awake no longer. We got rather excited when first Watford & then Central Wandsworth fell to the Conservative & celebrated accordingly.

  Friday: Well the Country is saved from bankruptcy for a bit. One thing the Conservatives are more efficient than the others & also for the good of the whole nation . . .

  That Friday in Barrow, Last had a chat ‘over the fence’ with ‘the two old women next door’ (presumably not the Mrs Atkinson side): ‘Poor old dears. “It had made us real poorly last night after watching T.V. We were sure that Labour were going to win, & oh dear if that nasty fat Bevan had got any power, it would have been really dreadful.” ’ Or, as Anthony Heap in London concisely put it a few hours later, ‘Hap-hap-happy day.’9

  The Tories had won a very comfortable overall majority of 58 (including a majority of seats in Scotland), with Labour having lost sixteen seats, the Liberals staying on six seats, and seventeen unsuccessful Communist candidates managing only 33,000 votes between them. Turnout was down from 82 to 76 per cent, with Labour having lost a million and a half votes, the Tories half a million. Among the individual outcomes, neither Arlott nor Catlin were close to winning; the voters of Borehamwood failed to come out for Labour and thereby ensured an easy win for Maudling; Barbara Castle just squeaked home in Blackburn; Michael Foot lost his seat at Plymouth Devonport; Anthony Crosland also lost (at Southampton Test, having at almost the last minute ditched South Gloucestershire because of redistribution worries); and Willie Whitelaw was the new MP for the safe Tory seat of Penrith and the Border, despite a heated scene at the count when William Brownrigg, a Carlisle farmer standing for Cumbrian Home Rule, accused Whitelaw of filching ‘bundles and bundles’ of his votes. Particularly telling were the results in prosperous, emblematic Coventry: all three seats stayed Labour, but in each there was a disconcertingly large drop in the majority. ‘The factory gate meetings were moderately attended,’ one Coventry MP, Richard Crossman, wrote soon afterwards about his campaign, ‘but with very small collections and no sign of enthusiasm and for the first time since ’45 we had workers returning from the factories turning thumbs down when they saw a socialist car.’10

  Some 17 months after the youngish Labour MP Roy Jenkins had remarked to Crossman that ‘the electorate is extremely Conservative-minded and we can never win except with the kind of attitude represented by the right-wing leadership’ – by which he meant Gaitskell and followers like Crosland and himself, all united in opposition to Bevan – Labour’s decisive defeat in May 1955 inevitably provoked internal analysis. None of that analysis quite got to grips with the clear evidence of a continuing gender gap (ie with the Conservatives now far better than Labour at tapping into the concerns of women in general and housewives in particular), but three early contributions made important, valid points.

  ‘Since 1951 the Tories have had good luck with the economic climate, people are generally better off and the end of most shortages has enabled rationing to be ended on everything but coal,’ privately reflected an even younger Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, in June. ‘There has been no unemployment. A family in a council house with a TV set and a car or motorcycle-combination on hire purchase had few reasons for a change of government.’ Soon afterwards, a leading article on ‘Equality with Quality’ in Socialist Commentary, the magazine of the right wing of the party that was edited by Rita Hinden, argued that what was needed in society (and therefore in Labour policy) was a levelling up, not down:

  Despite the rise in material standards and welfare, this is still a squalid country and all too many people are still compelled to lead squalid lives. Look at the ugly towns, at the mean streets, the cramped and shoddy houses. Look at the crowded classrooms, the scarcity of teachers and the wretched playgrounds. Look at the amenities for community life offered to most of our people. Then ask how near we have come to building Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

  Even so, the editorial insisted on limits to any future Labour revisionism, despite the clear evidence of lack of public enthusiasm for nationalisation: ‘Equality with quality can only be won through increased public ownership, public enterprise and public expenditure. This must remain the crux of any socialist programme.’

  The July issue also included a piece by Gaitskell himself, ‘Understanding the Electorate’, in which he noted that during the campaign he had ‘never known so few people seem to feel themselves really involved’. As to why Labour had lost, the crux – he asserted in italics – was ‘the lack of fear of the Tories derived from the maintenance of full employment, the end of rationing and the general feeling that “things were better” ’. He then tried to explain what lay behind all this:

  I fancy that in the last year or two more and more people are beginning to turn to their own personal affairs and to concentrate on their own material advancement. No doubt it has been stimulated by the end of post-war austerity, TV, new gadgets like refrigerators and washing machines, the glossy magazines with their special appeal to women, and even the flood of new cars on the home markets. Call it if you like a growing Americanization of outlook. I believe it’s there, and it’s no good moaning about it . . .

  Gaitskell, his eyes on 1959 or 1960, ended with a prediction that was also a warning: ‘We certainly cannot assume that the next General Election will be nicely timed to coincide with an economic crisis.’11

  PART TWO

  7

  A Fine Day for a Hanging

  On May Day 1955, as Stirling Moss was becoming the first Englishman to win the Mille Miglia (a thousand miles of open roads in Italy), the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G), Arthur Deakin, collapsed and died while addressing a rally at the Corn Exchange, Leicester. He had been more responsible than anyone for delivering the trade union moderation of the immediate post-war years, and amid an increasingly acrimonious industrial scene it was hard not to see his death as symbolic of the passing of an era. Over the next month, even during an election campaign, the atmosphere continued to deteriorate: in early May an unofficial strike in the Yorkshire coalfield, at one point involving some 115,000 workers at 95 pits, marked the start of a long leftwards journey on the part of the Yorkshire section of the National Union of Mineworkers; on 24 May there began a six-week dock strike, centring on Merseyside, that was essentially another bout of inter-union turf warfare between the T&G and the much smaller National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers; and then from midnight on the 28th, two days after the election, there was a national rail strike, as the footplatemen (ie drivers and footplate staff) who belonged to the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) sought to re-establish their pay differentials over the much more n
umerous, generally less skilled members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). ‘At Ealing Broadway main line station,’ noted Henry St John on Whit Sunday (the 29th), ‘a chalked-up notice stated: “Owing to labour trouble all advertised services are cancelled.” ’

  A hapless victim of the strike was Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, the former royal governess who long after she had become persona non grata on account of her revelations in The Little Princesses continued to write her Woman’s Own column based on the fanciful premise that she was still on the inside track. ‘The bearing and dignity of the Queen at the Trooping of the Colour ceremony at the Horse Guards’ Parade last week,’ she wrote authoritatively in the issue dated 16 June, ‘caused admiration among the spectators’, before going on to describe, with a similar show of intimacy, the scene at Royal Ascot (‘an enthusiasm about it never seen there before’). Unfortunately, the issue had already gone to press before the rail strike – consequent on which, the Trooping of the Colour was cancelled and Royal Ascot postponed. Unmourned by the unforgiving Palace, it was the end of Crawfie the scribe.1

  Although declaring a state of emergency on 31 May, the government’s approach remained essentially non-confrontational. This was especially so in relation to the economically more damaging dock strike, where Sir Walter Monckton (still the Minister of Labour) relied on a mixture of personal mediation and the good offices of the TUC, with the Cabinet apparently not even considering the possibility of bringing in troops. As for the railway strike, Eden did in a radio broadcast insist – at his wife’s urging and against the strong advice of Monckton and senior civil servants – that the railwaymen had to return to work before negotiations could begin, but in the event it ended on 14 June in the familiar manner of Monckton effectively buying it off, on what Macmillan next day privately called ‘satisfactory terms’. Eden himself seems to have gone quietly, perhaps conscious of Cabinet unease (‘it is very dangerous to take up too firm a position in these affairs’, reflected Macmillan on the 13th), but did for a moment look as if he was going to try to do something big about the whole issue of strikes, with compulsory secret ballots the most mooted option. However, when he set up a special ministerial committee, the overwhelming weight of evidence, particularly from Monckton and the British Employers’ Confederation, emphasised the intractable practical and political problems involved in enforcing such legislation, and Eden decided to shelve the matter. Monckton instead, conscious that a full employment environment was always likely to give organised labour the whip hand, pinned his hopes on a more gradual, intangible process, telling colleagues in July that it was ‘desirable to educate public opinion about the problems of industrial relations in contemporary society, and particularly about the limitations of the strike as an industrial weapon’, adding that through discussions on radio and television ‘much could be done’. A well-meaning paternalist to his highly intelligent fingertips, he presumably believed this could really happen.

  ‘The public, which to date has had a good deal of sympathy for the seemingly underpaid express-locomotive drivers, is now beginning to feel sick and tired of being caught between the unions’ crossfire at increasingly frequent intervals,’ recorded Mollie Panter-Downes at the start of June. ‘The British are a good-tempered people who lumber toward rage at a majestic rate, but they seem to be on the move.’ A degree of rage was probably felt at the Woodstock Hotel in Highbury Park, north London, where at breakfast on the 3rd a resident held forth to Gladys Langford about how he had been ‘calling at a firm yesterday which had suffered from 3 strikes in one day’, while three days later Langford herself noted, in relation to Eden and the railwaymen: ‘I do hope he succeeds in breaking the strike but I doubt his success.’ Soon afterwards, on the 8th, Judy Haines in Chingford went to the post office with a present to send: ‘Assistant gave me corrugated cardboard & I packed it all up. Too heavy! Parcels over 8 oz cannot be accepted during rail strike! I said, “Oh well, if my troubles are no worse than that . . .” Assistant appreciative of my bright spirit and said most people moaned frightfully, as if it was his fault.’ The novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton was among the moaners. ‘A singularly depressing and, I think, rather muddled, strike,’ was how he described it to his brother on the 10th, adding that it merely confirmed his increasing feeling that the proletariat was ‘as moribund a class as the “aristocracy” ’. Or, as Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park put it about the whole phenomenon when a rail settlement was finally announced, ‘Am fed up to the back teeth with everlasting strike.’2

  Yet the underlying reality was that for most people the natural desire to get back to normal life vastly outweighed any larger considerations. ‘There is a general handing out of compliments and medals, as if some unpopular war had ended,’ rather caustically noted Panter-Downes on the 15th, with cheering in the Commons for the ‘brilliant and popular’ Monckton – for whom congratulations poured in from all quarters, including Miss Riley of 27 The Drive, Wallington, Surrey, ‘and all her friends who travel with her on the 8.30 from Wallington’. Crucially, there was not yet, despite widespread grumbling about the inconvenience of strikes, a stigma attached to the unions as such. ‘Generally speaking, and thinking of Britain as a whole, do you think Trades Unions have been a good thing or a bad thing?’ Gallup asked in August. To which 67 per cent said ‘good’ and only 18 per cent ‘bad’. Gallup also revealed who in the public’s opinion ‘are not paid enough’ (railwaymen, schoolteachers, factory workers and engineers), who ‘are paid too much’ (dock workers, lawyers, miners and civil servants) and who ‘take life too easily’ (civil servants, schoolteachers, builders and dock workers).3

  Another area politically off-limits, beyond a very modest extent, was privatisation. On 3 June, in the middle of the railway strike, the Any Questions? panel – comprising Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the farmer-writer A. G. Street, Gerald Nabarro and James Callaghan – met at a hotel before that evening’s broadcast from a factory in Poole. Nabarro, ‘a very a-typical Conservative’ in Lady Violet’s words, was according to her ‘very proud of being of humble origin & told F.G. [Freddy Grisewood, the chairman] to announce him as having started life as a builder’s labourer & been a private in the Army’. Then came the pre-programme dinner: ‘The conversation was painfully & tediously “class conscious” – one long harp on how many Etonians were in the Cabinet etc., in all of which Nabarro joined “con amore”.’ And in the broadcast itself, there took place ‘a terrific slanging-match between Callaghan & Nabarro on the merits & demerits of nationalization’. It included, in the context of a question about whether workers in nationalised industries should have the freedom to strike, this exchange:

  Nabarro: What is wanted, I think, is a very much greater sense of responsibility in the nationalised industries, as well as in other industries, where strikes have taken place or are pending, and I must add there that it is not without significance in our industrial economy, that the majority of recent strikes seem to have taken place in nationalised industries, where labour relations are generally speaking infinitely poorer than in private industry.

  Callaghan: So what?

  Nabarro: Denationalise them as much as you possibly can. (Applause.)

  Grisewood: Yes Jim, Jim Callaghan.

  Callaghan: Denationalise the coal mines? Come on, let’s have a straight answer.

  Soon afterwards, to more applause, Nabarro reiterated his point that ‘the answer is to try and denationalise as many industries as possible’.

  The programme ended with a question from Sam Holt about why people in the south of England, compared to those in the north, were ‘generally surrounded by a high wall of shy reserve’. This provoked Callaghan into asserting that the answer was ‘quite simply and shortly because people in the South are more snobs than people in the North’, adding that ‘there’s still far too much forelock-touching in the South of England, especially in the County areas, still far too many class distinctions and rigidities’. To which Lady Violet replied, ‘I entirel
y disagree. I would say, with all respect to Mr Callaghan, it takes a snob to see a snob.’ This sally earned, she noted with satisfaction afterwards, ‘thunderous applause’, leaving Callaghan, with no time to come back, ‘distinctly annoyed’. But the most resonant event this Friday took place in a Hammersmith flat, concisely recorded in the pocket diary of a young actor and budding dramatist: ‘Look Back in Anger finished.’ It had taken John Osborne precisely four weeks and a day, including a week’s sojourn in Morecambe to play a small part in the naval comedy Seagulls over Sorrento.4