This particular Friday was also the final day of the Messina Conference, a gathering of the six member states of the European Coal and Steel Community that led directly to the creation of the European Economic Community in 1958. Britain deigned to send an observer, but by this time he had already departed for home, reputedly with the words: ‘I leave Messina happy because even if you continue meeting you will not agree; even if you agree, nothing will result; and even if something results, it will be a disaster.’ Eden, the Foreign Office, the Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture were all dead set against British participation in the new organisation. The Commonwealth weakened, free trade undermined, further European integration (even a federation) on the cards, industry exposed to increased competition – such was the Cabinet’s assessment, with only one policy outcome possible. Moreover, even if it had been accepted by the political elite, the very concept of a pooling of sovereignty would at this stage have been almost impossible to sell to the British people. Not long afterwards, English football’s new league champions, Chelsea, encountered a pure Little Englander in action when the autocratic secretary of the Football League, Alan Hardaker, bullied the club into agreeing not to take part in the first European Cup (forerunner of the Champions’ League). A dyed-in-the-wool northerner, he subsequently confessed, with a little grin, to the football writer Brian Glanville why he preferred not to get involved with football on the Continent: ‘Too many wogs and dagos.’5
One European now doing business in England was the 32-year-old bouncing Czech Robert Maxwell, who on 15 June endured un mauvais quart d’heure in Winchester House, Old Broad Street, as almost two hundred publishers and their advisers listened to the official receiver’s report on the collapse of the book-wholesaler Simpkin Marshall, some four years after Maxwell had taken control of it, promising the Bookseller as he did so that ‘this will prove to be a long and successful chapter’ and that ‘nothing will be spared to promote the completeness and efficiency of this service in every way’. Also on the 15th, at Lord’s, the young England amateur batsman Colin Cowdrey scored 47 on his first appearance of the season, looking, reported the Evening Standard, ‘assured and immensely powerful, with no hint of any difficulty regarding footwork’. He had recently been discharged from National Service in the RAF on the grounds of ‘a long history of foot trouble’, thereby provoking a storm of hate mail and public attacks (including from Nabarro, who in the Commons accused him of dodging the column), but by early July he was back in the England team, playing under its new amateur captain, Surrey’s Peter May.
This same summer, the 18-year-old Paul Bailey more deliberately evaded National Service through a virtuoso performance at the medical: a confession to bed-wetting did the trick, even before he mentioned possible homosexual tendencies. ‘ “I’m ashamed of you,” said my mother. “Whatever will people think?” “Which people, Mum?” “Everybody. The whole street. They’ll think there’s something wrong with you.” ’ Bailey only found out later that the evening before his medical she had paid a rare visit to the local parish church in Battersea in order to pray for his acceptance by the army. Dennis Potter, 20 years old and from the Forest of Dean, was meanwhile reluctantly sticking out his National Service, having been transferred to the War Office in London on account of his knowledge of Russian. ‘God! those long afternoons in summer when you could hear the clock on Horse Guards Parade strike every quarter-hour, and it would be stiflingly hot and all those nerds would have their tightly furled umbrellas and their bowler hats on,’ he recalled almost 40 years later. ‘And having to go through that ridiculous “permission to speak – Sah!” routine every time you opened your mouth. That little phrase seemed to me to sum up the whole of English life at that time.’ He was hoping to go up to Oxford in the autumn, but failed his Latin responsions and had to wait another year.6
Five days after Cowdrey’s cameo, the trial began at the Old Bailey of the 28-year-old Ruth Ellis, accused of murdering her lover, an unsuccessful racing driver and two-timing socialite called David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead on Easter Sunday – a week or so after he had hit her so hard in the stomach that she had suffered a miscarriage. Ellis herself, daughter of an abusive professional cellist who had made her older sister Muriel pregnant, was a club hostess, sometime prostitute, occasional model and single mother of two. ‘Ruth Ellis: I Shot To Kill Him’, ‘Model Weeps: I Was a Jealous Woman’ and ‘Model Smiles at Murder Verdict’ were three of the Daily Mail’s headlines during the two-day trial, and generally there was a censorious tone to much of the press coverage, with great emphasis laid on Ellis’s platinum-blonde hair and smart black suit with astrakhan collar and cuffs, as well as her unwomanly lack of emotion on hearing the guilty verdict. As for the trial itself, the judge, Sir Cecil Havers, refused to allow her counsel, Melford Stevenson, to argue provocation as a defence, while the jury reached its unanimous verdict in less than half an hour.
After the trial, Ellis refused to appeal, probably because of not wanting to implicate Desmond Cussen, a sugar-daddy accountant who had driven her to the pub and provided the gun, and who now promised to look after her children. On 23 June the execution date was fixed for 13 July at Holloway Prison. ‘I have been tormented for a week at the idea that a highly civilised people should put a rope round the neck of Ruth Ellis and drop her through a trap and break her neck,’ the still visiting Raymond Chandler wrote in the Evening Standard on the last day of June. ‘This was a crime of passion under considerable provocation. No other country in the world would hang this woman.’ And he finished with a reference to ‘the medieval savagery of the law’. But at least as typical, perhaps more typical, was the reaction in Kingston-upon-Thames of Jacqueline Wilson’s mother, Biddy, to a newspaper serialisation of Ellis’s story. ‘I read over Biddy’s shoulder,’ recalled Wilson. ‘She tutted over Ruth’s blonde hair and pencilled eyebrows and dark lips. “She’s obviously just a good-time girl. Look at that peroxide hair! Talk about common!” ’7
Sir Alfred Munnings – past President of the Royal Academy, tormentor of Henry Moore, and scourge of all things modern and Modernist – was probably not an abolitionist. On Monday, 4 July, he performed the annual ceremony, in the Village Hall at Brantham, Suffolk, of ‘Dubbing the Knight’. After the ceremony, and the singing of ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’ and ‘The Maid’s Song’, it was time for Munnings to speak, as reported by the Stowmarket Mercury:
Showing signs of emotion, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose in a large, gaily-coloured handkerchief. ‘These are fine words,’ he said, ‘and they rhyme too. Not like these modern poems.’
He told the children they were lucky to be living in the countryside where they could daily see the miracles of God in every hedgerow and tree top. ‘A thrush can better Sir Malcolm Sargent and all his philharmonic host.’ Parts of Britain were still unspoiled by industry, and they should take advantage of that: they were lucky, too, that they did not have to go to school by bus to some big town to be taught in a huge classroom by ‘urbanised teachers’.
He told the girls: ‘The place of every woman is the home. Learn to cook, and to cook well.’ And to the boys: ‘Marry a good, useful woman, not one of these silly asses who want to go to the pictures every night.’
‘As the meeting ended,’ concluded the report, ‘the children crowded round Sir Alfred waving autograph books.’
Four days later, on Friday the 8th, the Lord Mayor of Coventry officially opened the city’s Upper Precinct, a pedestrianised shopping area with a first-floor level. ‘There is certainly nothing like it in Britain,’ one of the architects involved proudly told a local paper. ‘There may be something as new in Europe, but nothing quite the same.’ Even so, for all its importance as a symbol of Coventry’s pioneering reconstruction, it did not prove a huge success, partly because of the decision – whether on aesthetic or financial grounds is unclear – not to have access ramps, but instead to rely on stairs. ‘The Precinct shops on top floor hardly did any business,�
�� remembered one Coventrian. ‘As quick as they opened, they tended to change or close. I don’t think Coventry people were too keen on climbing up steps and going to shops at different levels. I think everybody had got so used to being on the ground floor.’ There was also for the ruling Labour councillors, viscerally committed to the 1940s concept of the new Coventry, the wider problem of continuing trader-cum-Tory resistance to pedestrian shopping – a resistance sufficiently strong to make it a real possibility that a new motor road was going to drive through the whole pedestrian shopping area. But some three months after the opening of the Upper Precinct (with the Lower one still under construction), the Labour proposal that a new central thoroughfare, Market Street, should become a traffic-free shopping street was carried. ‘We are going to keep our heads in front,’ declared Alderman George Hodgkinson, for many years the dominant local politician behind Coventry’s reconstruction. And he added: ‘This resolution is a test of faith in the adventure we have begun.’8
‘LAST BID TO SAVE RUTH ELLIS’ ran the Daily Mirror’s front-page headline the day after the Upper Precinct opening, with a story about the mass petitions flooding in to the Home Office. But this Saturday, the 9th, her fate was not on the mind of Frederick Sanderson, a 30-year-old Dalston man travelling on a 73 bus along the Essex Road in London. ‘You foreigners come to this country and take away Englishmen’s jobs,’ his wife said, during a row with the non-white conductor, Irvin Obadiah, who had been living for the previous two years in Hackney. To which, by his own account, Obadiah replied, ‘If I was a foreigner I should not be ashamed of being one.’ But by Sanderson’s account he called her ‘an English pig’. In any event, Sanderson bopped him one – leading in due course to a 10s fine (and £2 costs) as well as a rebuke from the Bench at Old Street Magistrates’ Court: ‘Why you want to make all this trouble on a bus and hit a man much smaller than you, I don’t know. He’s got his job to do and it’s a difficult one.’
It was a pity that PC George Dixon was not around to calm things down. Last seen shot dead in The Blue Lamp (1950), he miraculously returned to the screen – but this time the small screen – at 8.45 this Saturday evening for the debut of Dixon of Dock Green, subtitled in Radio Times ‘The stories of a London policeman on his beat’. As before, Jack Warner played Dixon and the writer was Ted Willis, while the part of the sensible daughter, Mary Dixon, went to Billie Whitelaw. Willis would subsequently stress that in the television series he had wanted to convey the reality of a London copper’s day-to-day life – ‘traffic duty, drunks, night-beats, answering questions, handling minor criminals’ – and that ‘Dixon couldn’t be Dixon in a programme which was full of wailing sirens, screeching brakes, gun fights, murderers and crazy mixed-up kids’. The formula worked. ‘So wise, so fatherly, he earns everyone’s respect,’ noted Philip Hope-Wallace in the Listener of Dixon in the opening episode (called ‘P.C. Crawford’s First Pinch’), while after the third episode the Spectator’s John Metcalf wrote of how ‘P.C. Dixon saunters amiably about his beat catching bicycle thieves, reuniting fallen daughters with forgiving fathers, worrying about his day off and dodging the sergeant’, in all of which ‘the true ring of authenticity comes quite often’, adding up to ‘a vast improvement on the routine mechanics of Fabian of the Yard’. So too, on the whole, the members of the BBC Viewing Panel. ‘Pleasant, and suitable for family viewing’ and ‘Setting and action were refreshingly true to life’ were two early reactions, with further praise following at the end of the series: ‘Very fine series – we always have this programme marked as a “must see”.’ And: ‘Very high class and like Oliver Twist, I ask for more.’ More than 360 episodes indeed lay ahead, often starting with Dixon’s genial ‘Evenin’ all’, eventually creating – and reinforcing – a cosy, rose-tinted image of the police that would take a long time to shift.9
The weather was hotting up. ‘Another lovely day,’ recorded Florence Turtle on Sunday the 10th:
Went to Church but Amy was not there. Home & put roast pork in the oven on a very low flame & then went by car with Bernard [her brother] & Dinah to Richmond Park. Bernard brushed out car whilst I threw sticks for Dinah. We then made our way round to the Kings Arms at Roehampton past the Skyscraper Flats which are ruining the whole area & had a drink apiece. Home, cooked vegetables & Roast Pork with sage & onion stuffing, all of which were delicious, plus fresh fruit salad. Rested & then got tea consisting of Tinned Salmon & Salad. Crocheted a bit, then B [her sister Barbara] came on the phone & suggested my meeting her & Fred on the Towing Path, which I did & repaired to the Star & Garter for a very pleasant Session.
‘Brian [her other brother] started to lay linoleum in lavatory at 7 pm,’ ended her entry, ‘& was still at it when I got home at eleven.’
‘ “I’M CONTENT TO DIE” SAYS RUTH ELLIS’ was the Mirror’s front-page headline on Monday morning, with only 48 hours to go before her appointment with Albert Pierrepoint. An announcement was expected this day as to whether there was to be a reprieve from the Home Secretary, and it duly came. ‘Ruth Ellis is NOT to be reprieved,’ recorded Gladys Langford at the end of Monday. ‘She is to hang on Wednesday. How grim the intervening hours must be for her and her parents. Poor unfortunate children too. Thank God I had a good mother. Bad thunderstorm tonight & such clammy weather all day.’ And next day she wrote: ‘There are still agitations to obtain a reprieve for Ruth Ellis. She has been in my mind all day; worthless as she is, it is a grim thought that she is to be hurled into eternity in this golden weather.’ Other diarists this Tuesday concentrated on the weather rather than Ellis. ‘A sweltering day – hottest of year so far’ (Heap in St Pancras). ‘A real heat wave now, with terrific sunshine all day, and most places having thunderstorms which don’t break up the heat’ (Martin in Oxford). ‘Hot enough to keep one perspiring tonight’ (Raynham in Surbiton).10
What to wear during this exceedingly hot spell? ‘I have been wearing a straw boater and a bow tie in London,’ John Betjeman told the readers of his ‘City and Suburban’ column in the Spectator. ‘In Bond Street the glances of the women and men were so contemptuous of this ageing Teddy Boy that I had to take off my hat and expose my bald head to the sun.’ This summer there was all too little male sartorial distinction around, at least according to Cecil Beaton. ‘Young “teddy boys”, with their bright blue or scarlet corduroy pants, seem to show spirit,’ he observed, ‘but generally men still go about in dirty old mackintoshes, shiny, striped City trousers, and greasy bowlers. The English have not recovered from the war, and it shows itself in the torpor of their vestments.’ It was not torpor, though, that bothered E. W. Swanton, a stickler for the maintenance of cricket’s traditions. ‘One was left wondering,’ he grumbled in the Daily Telegraph after the Varsity match at Lord’s in early July. ‘Does the shoddy dress of many of the undergraduate spectators, the shedding by the cricketers of part of their historic uniform [a reference to Cambridge caps and Oxford sweaters], derive from the same basic cause, a weakened sense of personal dignity and good manners? Are the young gentlemen of 1955, outwardly so polite to their seniors, intentionally cocking a snook at the past?’11
There was a late twist to the Ruth Ellis story. On the Monday evening she sent for the solicitor Victor Mishcon, who had handled her divorce, and told him about how much Pernod she had been drinking before she fired the gun and of the role played by Cussen. But despite Mishcon’s best efforts next day, no reprieve was forthcoming. Wednesday dawned fair, the start of another scorcher. ‘It’s a fine day for hay-making,’ declared ‘Cassandra’ (William Connor) on the front page of the Mirror. ‘A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way – and I mourn to say that millions of you do – it’s a fine day for a hanging.’ Outside Holloway Prison, where Ellis was due to be hanged at 9.00 a.m., a large crowd, thousands-strong, surged behind a massive police cordon. And in the playground of a boys’ school in Middlesex, the headmaster came across four pupils, all under the age of 11, standing still. One had a
watch in his hand and was saying, ‘Only four more minutes and she is going to swing. One, two, three, four, she has had it boys.’ Gladys Langford surely had it right when she asserted in her diary later that day: ‘I feel sure that if executions were in public there would be as great crowds today as ever there were. People don’t change.’ For one young writer, the whole thing made a considerable impression. ‘I daresay she was a vulgar little tart with a predilection for wearing crosses round her neck, but to sentence her to die at such and such a time, in that way, is to make her into a dying goddess,’ reflected Frederic Raphael. ‘London shuddered in the heat, and so it should. Executions are unnatural crimes.’
Almost half a century later, in 2003, Ellis’s sister Muriel was at last able to ask the Court of Appeal to quash the murder conviction and instead substitute a verdict of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and/or diminished responsibility. Despite all the eloquence of Michael Mansfield, acting for her, the appeal was rejected, being described as ‘without merit’.12
8
It’s Terribly Sad
‘Whew! The Men Are in Revolt’ exclaimed the Daily Mirror on Saturday, 16 July. It was three days since Ruth Ellis had been hanged – days that had included a sharp controversy in Blackpool over the Chamber of Horrors exhibiting a wax effigy of her, dressed in a low-cut black evening gown with a black tulle stole – and the heat wave was unabated. The male revolt was about not being allowed to wear cooler clothes, and the Mirror quoted the hard-line general manager of a big London store: ‘Whatever the weather our men must dress in a grey suit, collar and tie. The public expects them to look smart. If we allowed them to dress anyhow, the place would look very tatty indeed.’ In the City that week, not far from his Cloth Fair home, John Betjeman’s sartorial eyes were opened. ‘I was walking down Newgate Street with a girl in the hot weather,’ he wrote soon afterwards. ‘She remarked on how unattractive men were. Looking at their clothes, I realised she was right – retired tea-planters bursting out of linen suits; youths with rows of pens and pencils in their pockets, and badges and combs and tubular grey-flannel trousers; businessmen in dark suits minus the waistcoat, with the sweat showing through their shirts.’ On the other hand, Betjeman had nothing but praise for ‘the cheap cotton dresses’ bought from chain stores. And he offered a considered compliment: ‘I cannot believe that English women have ever looked prettier than they have done in the summer weather of this year.’1
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 59
