It was probably an unhappy weekend for Edward (E. P.) Thompson in Halifax. ‘This long, tendentious volume,’ the anonymous reviewer (in fact, the writer James Pope-Hennessy) in the latest TLS called his first major book, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. ‘Heavily biased by Marxian thought, his book is also splenetic in tone. It is perhaps a remarkable feat that he manages to sustain a mood of ill-temper through a volume of 900 pages.’ After asserting that Thompson’s study ‘merely serves to emphasise aspects of Morris which are better left forgotten’, the review finished: ‘Mr Thompson is too shrill to be persuasive – and when he declares that Morris’s A Factory as it Might Be is not an unpractical poet’s dream but has been already “fulfilled” in the Soviet Union, readers of common sense will part company with him for good.’ Thompson himself, in a 1976 postscript to a revised edition, subsequently conceded some ground – ‘It is true that in 1955 I allowed some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text’ – but at the same time emphasised the larger context, namely that ‘the book was published at the height of the Cold War’ and ‘intellectual McCarthyism was not confined to the United States’.
He might also have mentioned the deep rut which history itself was in by the mid-1950s. John Drummond went up to Cambridge in October 1955 to read the subject and was intensely disappointed: not only were the dons remote, but the history they taught was ‘both fractured and partial’, with ‘no sense of a whole society’, while ‘the very phrase “social history” was disallowed’. That last point was not quite true, but what G. M. Trevelyan, doyen of social history, meant by the term was something essentially Whiggish and patrician, rather than concerned with the lives and struggles of ordinary people. For Drummond, the sterile, top-down approach in Cambridge was epitomised by Geoffrey (G. R.) Elton (whose hugely studied England under the Tudors appeared in 1955): excellent on government and pipe rolls, much less so on music, literature and architecture. Thompson himself, a Cambridge graduate, consciously preferred to stay outside the academy, instead teaching adult-education classes in West Yorkshire. The two men were of the same generation – Elton born in 1921, Thompson in 1924 – and over almost four decades would battle it out for Clio’s soul.2
At Aintree on the 17th, the Sunday of this July weekend, Stirling Moss became the first British driver to win the British Grand Prix, albeit driving a Mercedes and possibly because the world champion, Juan Manuel Fangio, was happy to let Moss triumph on home soil. Next day, Ford unveiled its latest Anglia, a small two-door, four-seater family model. ‘From every aspect the Anglia is a good-looking, well-proportioned car,’ acclaimed The Times, ‘yet the comfort and convenience of the passengers have not been sacrificed for the sake of appearance,’ adding that ‘the close view of the road surface ahead should be of great benefit when driving in fog’, a tacit reference to the continuing frequency of smogs. The age of the all-dominant car was dawning fast, not least in Birmingham, where on Friday the 22nd the Minister of Transport, John Boyd-Carpenter, formally opened the road-widening scheme at Digbeth, converting a bottleneck into a dual carriageway, with some stirring words: ‘This scheme in this great city, the heart and centre of the industrial Midlands, will contribute directly towards providing an efficient transport system to serve the industry of this country, by which every man, woman and child in this country lives.’ One dissenter, viewing the motoring phenomenon as part of a wider, disagreeable pattern, was Philip Larkin. ‘The pubs here are nightmares of neo-Falstaffianism, coughing laughter well soused with phlegm,’ he grumbled from Cottingham, just outside Hull, to a friend on the 28th. ‘The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish. And everywhere creep the new cars with L on the front, Auntie Cis and co. learning to drive i.e. clog up the roads some more & further endanger my life.’
Next day, Madge Martin arrived in Scarborough for her annual holiday there, noting that the Spa ‘thank goodness is fully restored to its former dignity and beauty’, while Judy Haines took her two girls to the Odeon to see Mr Pastry (aka Richard Hearne) in The Happiest Days of His Life and Walt Disney’s The Vanishing Prairie: ‘Both very good. Pamela regretted Mr Pastry’s film was not in colour.’ Saturday the 30th saw the start of the Bank Holiday weekend, with the forecast good and the holiday rush starting early. Liverpool was typical. From 7.00 in the morning, buses to the city centre were full of ‘bucket-and-spade laden families and haversack-carrying teenagers’; city shops were ‘crowded by families making last-minute purchases before going on holiday’, with a particular rush for cheap seaside shoes, ‘sun dresses’ and men’s socks; packed trains were leaving Lime Street station, with ‘many people going to North Wales standing in the corridors or crowded in the guard’s van’, while from Exchange ‘trains to Blackpool and Morecambe were full long before they were due to leave’; motor coaches were also fully booked; and there were long queues for the three steamers going to the Isle of Man, though an official was adamant, ‘There is no danger of anyone being left behind.’ Sunday morning was spent by an appreciative Martin ‘listening to an orchestra on the Spa with the well-dressed audience, which is still, in a minor way, the custom’, and then on Bank Holiday Monday the Haines family treated itself to a car outing to Chelmsford (with a picnic stop on the way), where they watched Essex play Worcestershire. ‘Instead of lining up for cup of tea, at my insistence we had 2/6d set tea,’ wrote Judy. ‘It was delicious. Dainty sandwiches, bread and jam, delicious cakes, two pots of tea instead of watering down first lot. Girls charged half. A lovely sunny day and we stayed till end of match – 7 pm. Bought fish and chips at Epping, so no cooking on arrival home. Opened tin of peaches. What a lovely day!’3
Two days later, on Wednesday, 3 August, the first English production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened at the small Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street. Directed by the 24-year-old Peter Hall, it proved a fraught evening. Hall would recall how ‘on the line, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful”, a very English voice said loudly: “Hear! hear!” ’, while the line ‘I have had better entertainment elsewhere’ provoked ironical laughter, and when a character yawned, so too, loudly and pointedly, did someone in the stalls. A sizeable part of the audience left at the interval, and at the end, remembered Peter Bull (who played Pozzo), ‘the curtain fell to mild applause, we took a scant three calls and a depression and sense of anti-climax descended on us all’. The reviews over the next day or two did not help. Not all the critics were as outrightly hostile as the Daily Mail’s Cecil Wilson – his piece adorned by the headline ‘THE LEFT BANK CAN KEEP IT’ – but Derek Granger’s mildly amused condescension in the Financial Times was fairly typical, calling it ‘a cast-iron copper-bottomed, rubber-lined, water-proof, high-brow’s delight with knobs on’ and adding that ‘even its “great thoughts” seem just the kind that we ourselves might have fathered given moody enough circumstances and a dull day’.
The turning point came at the weekend, as Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times and Kenneth Tynan in the Observer both wrote in very positive terms about the play’s uniqueness, and from that moment the size of the audiences quickly picked up and its London future was assured, not least as a talking point. In due course it fell to The Critics on the Home Service to offer their assessment. ‘Tremendously funny, deeply sad,’ thought J. W. Lambert. ‘Could have gone on listening to it for ever,’ declared Colin MacInnes. ‘A play of profound religious symbolism,’ asserted G. S. Fraser. Upon which the fourth critic, the humorist Stephen Potter, announced that, although he had disliked the play when he had seen it, ‘for the first time on record my opinion has been somewhat changed by the opinions of the other critics’, and he went on to praise it as ‘a masterpiece of production – beautifully acted . . . a very refreshing change from the average West-End play’. Potter slipped up, however, by further remarking that while watching it ‘I thought the play had no real centre – it’s exactly like Peer Gynt’s onion’. To which Lambert scornfully riposted
, ‘That seems to me practically the whole point of it.’4
Eight days after Godot, on a Thursday morning in Soho, there took place the so-called ‘Battle of Frith Street’. London’s two dominant gangsters of the era were undoubtedly Jack Spot (real name Jack Comer) and Billy Hill, and this was a knife-fight between Spot and one of Hill’s sidekicks, Albert Dines. It ended in a greengrocers, where a large fruiterer, Bertha Hyams, finished proceedings by hitting Spot with a brass weighing-pan. Spot duly found himself at the Old Bailey, were he was charged with affray and successfully defended by Rose Heilbron. ‘Thank you very much,’ the East Ender yelled to the jury. ‘I have suffered enough.’ Which earned a sharp rebuke from Sir Gerald Dodson, Recorder of London: ‘Behave yourself!’ It soon transpired that key evidence – including from an octogenarian Anglican clergyman badly in debt to his bookmakers – had been rigged and bought, provoking John Gordon to ask bitterly in the Sunday Express: ‘Are the JACK SPOTS above the law?’ In fact the best days for both Spot and Hill were past them, but the Krays were still just limbering up, with Reg perfecting his celebrated ‘cigarette punch’, offering a cigarette with one hand and breaking the jaw with the other. For most people, though, the persistent fear was less of criminal godfathers than of teddy boys. One evening that summer, a Ted sat on a bus next to a friend of Gladys Langford and ‘pinched her legs & stroked her bosom and she was afraid to complain to the conductor lest she was razor-slashed – so she left the ’bus & got on one following’.5
On Saturday the 13th, two days after the Soho fracas, Philip Larkin made the memorable journey, on a slow, stopping train from Hull to London, that he eventually transmuted into ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.6 The return trip involved different emotions. ‘I had a hellish journey back, on a filthy train,’ he wrote to the friends he had stayed with, ‘next to a young couple with a slobbering chocolatey baby – apart from a few splashes of milk nothing happened to me, but the strain of feeling it might was a great one . . .’ Soon afterwards, reviews starting appearing of Kingsley Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, which were generally favourable and, as with Lucky Jim, viewed him as offering something different from most other contemporary novelists. ‘He is brashly, vulgarly, aggressively unsensitive, and the world his characters inhabit is the world that has succeeded the posh,’ declared V. S. Pritchett (under the pseudonym Richard Lister) in the New Statesman. ‘It is the world of the Welfare State in all its crudity, and Mr Amis is a literary Teddy boy.’ Pritchett elaborated on this ‘new world’ – one of ‘sitters-in [ie babysitters], and nappies and half-washed tea-cups, and multiple stores and mass-producing tailors’ – and reckoned that Amis depicted it ‘with a mixture of two parts disgust and three parts farcical comedy’. Amis himself reflected that ‘the reviewers have been very decent on the whole, but all this “vulgar” stuff makes me wonder where they live and where they go on their free evenings’. August also saw the publication of the first Guinness Book of Records, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter after the Irish brewery had turned to the statistically minded twins to compile a reference book that would settle pub arguments. It would become the best-selling work of non-fiction after the Bible.7
Larkin’s thank-you letter of the 17th included a scribbled addition – ‘Am going to buy some 6d postal orders tomorrow, for Football Pools’ – and three days later the football season began. For the first time, Saturday-evening television was able to show in a programme called Sports Special some highlights of the afternoon’s action, though up to a total maximum, insisted the Football League, of only 15 minutes each week. On the opening day itself, the most heartwarming scene was at Southend United, who entertained Norwich City in Third Division South for the opening of the new Roots Hall ground, entirely financed by supporters (who apparently never thought of trying to achieve ownership). Before the kick-off, there was music by the band of the United Supporters Club, a service of dedication by the vicar of Prittlewell and everyone standing to sing ‘Abide with Me’. On a baking-hard surface on a hot afternoon, Southend ran out 3–1 winners in front of a 17,000 crowd, which after the final whistle swarmed over the pitch. The new season also featured Roy Race and Blackie Gray making their first-team debuts in Tiger for Melchester Rovers, at home to Elbury Wanderers. ‘The pals struck their best form right from the kick-off. Then the crowd roared as Blackie snapped up the ball, and sent a perfect through pass to Roy. Roy flicked the ball past an Elbury back, followed up and shot first time. “Goal!” “Good old Roy! Up the Rovers!” “By thunder! That new lad Race can certainly shoot!” ’ The match finished three apiece, with a brace for the blond-haired Roy of the Rovers, a centre forward with a long, turbulent career ahead of him.8
On the same day that Southend was en fête, John Fowles and his girlfriend opted for a different coastal destination, going to Littlehampton for a week’s holiday and staying ‘with a Mrs Sopp in an archetypal seaside lodging-house’:
A great lump of a groaning, creaking, aging, double-bed; to make love on it was like driving a lorry of old iron down a bumpy lane. A religious text lord of the mantelpiece, guarded by two drab China Alsatian dogs. Three faded pictures. ‘The Letter’, ‘The Ride’, ‘The Important Message’. A faded chromotint of men herding sheep in Australia. The enamel wash stand with basin, jug and soapdish – quite redundant, with a modern bathroom next door, but kept, one felt, for the essential artistic effect.
This summer holidays it was the customary Wales for the Fulham-based Bull family, making the journey in a second-hand van, with no windows in the back. ‘We had all the usual rituals, the 6.30 a.m. start, no breakfast till we reached somewhere called Brownhills north of Birmingham, where Mum put on an apron and cooked a fry-up of bacon and eggs on a primus stove in a lay-by,’ remembered Janet Street-Porter. ‘Oh, how I longed for a meal in a café like other people! The journey up the A5 was as interminable as ever, and my sister was reduced to counting milk churns to pass the hours, while I read till I felt car sick.’ For the 12-year-old Mike (not yet Mick) Jagger, this August was the month not of holidays but of work – a summer job on an American base near Dartford. There he played American football and baseball, drank Coke, and met a black cook, José, who introduced him to rhythm and blues. The newly Americanised Jagger would have to go back to school in September – unlike Mary O’Brien, a 16-year-old who decided this summer, having left St Anne’s convent school in Ealing, that the time had come for a complete makeover. In the privacy of her bedroom, out went the sensible, librarian look, and instead (in her biographer’s words) ‘on went the tall blonde beehive wig, the glamorous French pleated dress and grown-up high heels’, while ‘in a gesture of teenage daring’ she ‘put around her eyes layers of Indian kohl, false eyelashes and heavy black mascara’.9 It was the start of Dusty Springfield.
‘Educational opportunities here should be as good as in any grammar school,’ Mrs H. R. Chetwynd, head of the just opening Woodberry Down comprehensive school in Hackney, told the Hackney Gazette on the first Tuesday in September. ‘We would like people to know that this will be one complete school. Pupils will not be called grammar, central or modern, but will all belong to one school with the same chances.’ The school itself, noted the paper approvingly, was ‘one of the latest and best equipped in the country’, having taken five years to build, and could accommodate 1,250 pupils. There were three four-storey buildings, ‘extensive use of prefabricated construction’, and altogether ‘the whole lay-out is large and impressive’, enabling courses to be ‘planned to meet the needs of children of varying ability’. A handful of other new comprehensives were also opening this term, including Woodlands in Coventry. Amid significant local reservations about the change of educational direction, Alderman S. Stringer was careful to insist at the formal ceremony in October that ‘it was never the intention of the Education Committee that such schools should be competitive with the grammar school type of education’, but rather they should be complementary, giving ‘opportunities that probably would never have been th
ere otherwise’. By contrast, the Lord Mayor, Alderman T. H. Dewis, was entirely unabashed, boasting that with this new comprehensive Coventry was in ‘the exalted position’ of ‘giving a lead to the country’. That was not strictly true, but there was no doubt that the comprehensive experiment was by now starting to take real, tangible shape. And soon afterwards, Margaret Cole expressed the hope in Tribune that people might at last stop assuming automatically, on the basis of no evidence, that ‘a comprehensive school “must be” a perpetual traffic-jam, a universal sausage machine of mediocrity in which the child is a lonely atom and all individuality and all initiative suppressed’.
Meanwhile, the majority of secondary-age children continued to attend secondary moderns. With its ‘118 airy rooms, including laboratories and lecture halls’, a library (with one wall completely made of glass) stocking 3,000 books (half of them non-fiction), laboratories ‘with sinks and gas points to permit a maximum number of individual experiments’, woodwork and metalwork rooms ‘so well equipped that it would be reasonable to describe them as small factories’, blackboards ‘on the roller principle’, floors ‘laid with non-slip plastic bricks’ and corridors into which ‘light streams through transparent plastic domes’ – it was no wonder that the Chorley Guardian was ecstatic about Southlands School, the Lancashire town’s new secondary modern. So too with the new Dick Sheppard School in Tulse Hill, a secondary modern-cum-technical school for 900 pupils. ‘The keynote of the whole school is lightness and brightness with glass walls used wherever possible,’ noted the South London Press, arguing that it ‘cuts at the root the deep-seated prejudice of parents and Londoners that unless a child wins a grammar place in the eleven-plus examination its career is crippled’.
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 60
