Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  It was a quite different, much less optimistic take that John Laird offered. A New Zealander who had taught at five London secondary moderns – none of them in ‘bad’ or ‘slummy’ areas – in the previous two years, he delivered in the News Chronicle in September a devastating three-part exposé. ‘What seems to have happened,’ he asserted, ‘is that the tradition of respect for the teacher and all that he represents has broken down. Consequently the young teacher has to fight his battle alone, unaided by any accepted background of discipline.’ The title of one piece was ‘Jungle in the Classroom’, and Laird emphasised the futility of hoping for any parental support: ‘London parents of secondary modern children apparently do not regard education as very important. They take little interest in school unless they suspect that their children are being maltreated.’ Laird reckoned that ‘about 30 per cent leave school semi-literate’, stated that ‘very few pupils read books as distinct from comics’, and concluded bleakly that ‘we are still turning out from our State schools a very large number of children who in speech and writing recognisably belong to a “lower order” ’. Unsurprisingly, many middle-class parents were loath to leave matters to chance when it came to the eleven-plus, and a few days after Laird’s articles Judy Haines in Chingford noted that several neighbouring girls were having ‘private coaching in sums’.10

  Just as the autumn term was starting, Wolverhampton was hit by an overtime ban on the buses. The reason was familiar – a protest against the employment of too many (ie more than 5 per cent) non-white workers – and there was the usual disclaimer by the white busmen that they were racially motivated. The local Express and Star printed some passenger overheards, including on the Dudley-to-Fighting Cocks trolley route:

  Well, these foreigners can come willy-nilly into the country – and they’ve got to work somewhere!

  I don’t see why the black men shouldn’t be on the buses. They’re nearly always polite to me, and often help me off the platform.

  Well, I think the unions have to draw a line somewhere with this coloured problem. The trouble is that the coloured men can just drift into the country, without any special training.

  ‘The Wolverhampton bus dispute has brought to a head a great deal of racial bitterness,’ reflected the paper on 10 September. ‘Human nature is such that it fears what is strange. A colour problem exists in the Midlands and it is no use to pretend that it does not.’ Yet for one West Indian, recently arrived in London, there was unbridled hope and excitement about the future. ‘Boy, London is a confusing place, a complication of traffic and geography,’ Sylvan Pollard wrote in August to his wife in British Guiana:

  You just have to see London to believe it. Immense, giddy. There’s going to be a good life for you and our children here. Opportunities keep knocking all the time and there’s no barrier to success if a man works hard and invests in the future.

  I’ve been admitted into the printers’ union since last Monday. I do printing like I did at the Chronicle, but what a difference. Work starts at 8 am, but nothing is done before 8.30 except reading newspapers and some smoking and talking. Stop at 10 for tea and cakes. Lunch hour from 12.30. I go sight-seeing every day and catch a snack outside. I knock off at 5 pm don’t work Saturday nor Sunday. On top of all this they pay me £9 10s. Sounds good eh. Well it is way above what the average Englishman earns but it is not enough for this worker. I can save more than half my salary per week.

  Thanks for sending a parcel, but don’t – save it for yourself and the girls.

  An ocean of love and a kiss on every wave . . .11

  ‘I would not care to say categorically that this was the most nauseating programme I have ever seen on TV, for I have been pretty appalled in my time by Ask Pickles,’ declared the New Statesman’s television critic William Salter, who went on to refer to ‘endless tins of treacle’ and to how ‘it is the inflation and debasement of feelings that should be private that one abhors’. The programme in question was This Is Your Life, the creation of Ralph Edwards (an American who had popularised it in the States) and launched here by the BBC on 29 July 1955. ‘We can assure our readers that the secret of the victim’s identity is being well kept,’ Radio Times had promised, and in the event the first outing, fronted by Edwards himself, had the well-known radio and television personality Eamonn Andrews as its subject. Thereafter, it was he who became the compère, as he also did from 14 September of another new television series, Crackerjack. This featured comedians, speciality acts and participatory games such as ‘Double or Drop’, with a Crackerjack pencil for all who took part, and in an accompanying Radio Times article its originator and producer, Johnny Downes, explained that ‘all our guests must be over twelve years of age and able to reach the Television Theatre by five o’clock without missing any of their school day’. The same month, there were a couple of other BBC television developments: from the 4th, the faces as well as the voices of newsreaders, with Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall the first to be seen, though at this stage without the vulgarity of their identities actually being revealed; and from the 19th, the reinvention of Panorama (hitherto a rather scrappy affair) as the Corporation’s current-affairs flagship, offering a weekly ‘Window on the World’ presented by the trusted, authoritative figure of Richard Dimbleby.12

  By this point the BBC was bracing itself for an imminent, potentially dangerous challenge: the coming of commercial television, due to start on Thursday, 22 September. Programmes at first would be available only to viewers in London and its surrounds – from Hitchin in the north to Horsham in the south, from Wallingford in the west to Burnham-on-Crouch in the east – while even in that restricted area only a minority of sets had yet been converted to take ITV. Nevertheless, almost everyone realised that this was the start of a new, more competitive era in British television. ‘I am prepared to stick my chin out a yard and make a prophecy here and now,’ declared Godfrey Winn in Picture Post. ‘Independent TV, once its growing pains (which may well last a year) are over, is going to settle down into a wow of a success.’ He went on to claim that this could only be good for the BBC, ‘cossetted in the cotton wool of a cosy monopolist atmosphere for years’, and that at last the viewer would be sovereign: ‘The referee of the fight, and the final decider of the contest, will be the public themselves. Always before, “They” have been in a position to give the public what, in their Olympian way, they considered was “good” for it. But, starting with D-Day, the public will have the big guns . . .’ In the same issue, Kenneth Adam, a former Controller of the BBC Light Programme, expressed caution about the television phenomenon as a whole. He accused the BBC of already moving downmarket (‘lowering its sights in order to meet the threat of competition’), argued that the ideal schedule, in terms of quality control, was only three hours of programming each evening, and called on everyone involved, on both sides of the television divide, ‘to use this new force of incomparable, even frightening, potency in the best possible way for the enrichment rather than the impoverishment of our family life’.

  The BBC did have one card up its sleeve on the fateful Thursday evening. At 6.45, just half an hour before commercial television was due to go on air, some 25 per cent of the adult population tuned in to the usual Light Programme broadcast of The Archers – and, to their almost uniform dismay, listened to its most sensational episode yet: a fire breaking out in the stables at Grey Gables Country Club, the newly married, pregnant Grace Archer dashing in to save her horse Midnight, a beam crashing down and Grace dying in Phil Archer’s arms (‘Phil . . . I love you, Phil . . .’) on the way to hospital. ‘I am terribly upset,’ one typically devastated listener, Mrs Mary Holmes of Edgbaston, Birmingham, told a journalist. ‘It’s like losing one of the family.’ Nor were the cast best pleased. ‘This is the third death,’ one complained amid huge publicity over the next few days. ‘At this rate we shall all be out of work in no time.’ But the scriptwriter, Edward J. Mason, was adamant: ‘We must mirror life or The Archers will turn into a drawing-room ex
ercise. We shall now see how the Archers react to tragedy.’ Only the Manchester Guardian, with some verse by Mary Crozier, dared a little humour:

  She was well loved, and millions know

  That Grace has ceased to be.

  Now she is in her grave, but oh,

  She’s scooped the ITV.

  The BBC itself stoutly denied that the timing of Grace’s death had been a deliberate spoiler. But as Rooney Pelletier, controller of the Light Programme, had privately reflected in May: ‘The more I think about it, the more I believe that a death of a violent kind in The Archers timed if possible to diminish interest in the opening of commercial television in London is a good idea.’13

  Undeterred, ITV’s special evening began at Guildhall, London, with the televising of the official inaugural ceremony. After some opening words from Leslie Mitchell (whose voice had launched BBC Television 19 years earlier), John Connell described the guests as they arrived; the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli (recently appointed musical adviser to Associated-Rediffusion, the company responsible for weekday programmes in London and the home counties) played Elgar’s Cockaigne overture followed by the national anthem; and there were uplifting speeches from the Lord Mayor, the Postmaster-General (Dr Charles Hill) and the chairman of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), Sir Kenneth Clark. Clark’s role was in effect to lend cultural respectability to the new channel, but afterwards he confessed privately that the ceremony had left him feeling as if he had constructed a handsome building that was being lived in by barbarians. Then, from 8.00, with Muriel Young as announcer, came the programmes themselves. They included a variety show compèred by Jack Jackson, a trio of brief drama sequences (including Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell), professional boxing from Shoreditch Town Hall, and the news read fluently by Christopher Chataway. But inevitably, the real novelty lay in the advertisements. ‘And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for,’ declared Jackson at 8.12, ‘it’s time for the commercial break.’ The evening’s advertisers had drawn lots for which should have the privilege of the first slot, and the winner was – ‘It’s tingling fresh, it’s fresh as ice, it’s Gibbs SR toothpaste’. Or, as Bernard Levin put it in his Manchester Guardian review of the evening’s entertainment, ‘a charming young lady brushed her teeth, while a charming young gentleman told us of the benefits of the toothpaste with which she was doing it’. Next up were Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate and Summer County margarine. As for overall viewer reaction, fewer than 200,000 sets tuned in, but among those who did watch, Gallup found that only one in ten was critical, while two in three thought the new venture had got off to a good start.14

  Over the next few days a handful of future favourites made their bows. Dragnet and I Love Lucy were both American imports – respectively, a realistic police series (significantly tougher-edged than Dixon) and television’s pioneer sitcom, starring the zany Lucille Ball, her real-life husband Desi Arnaz and, in due course, ‘Little Ricky’. The Adventures of Robin Hood was a hit from the start, filmed at Walton-on-Thames and starring Richard Greene as the hero and Bernadette O’Farrell as Maid Marion. Blessed with an infectious theme tune, it employed not only quality directors like the young Lindsay Anderson but also blacklisted American writers using pseudonyms. Arguably most quintessential of the new channel, though, were the two big quiz games, marking a clear break from the BBC’s no-prizes policy. Take Your Pick was a vehicle for the New Zealander Michael Miles, with the stentorian voice of Bob Danvers-Walker announcing the prizes – ranging from the seriously valuable to the booby, depending which of 13 numbered boxes the contestants picked. ‘The green lights of envy,’ reckoned an acerbic Bernard Hollowood in Punch, ‘came up from the audience like traces.’ The other well-rewarded game was Double Your Money, introduced by the egregious, sincerity-challenged, canny Hughie Green and featuring, for contestants who got past the early stages, the ‘Treasure Trail’ to an ultimate prize of £1,024.

  First contestant on the first programme was Alan Hardy, an Arsenal-supporting clerk from New Southgate with heavy spectacles, jacket and tie. He agreed to be called ‘Alan’ by Green, who, after each correct answer – to fairly simple questions, such as naming three European capitals – would give the audience a complicit look of mock astonishment followed by the inevitable ‘Let’s give him a big hand’. At one point a member of the audience shouted out an answer, earning this reproof from Green: ‘Please don’t try to help any of the contestants . . . We do try to play the game.’ After the commercial break, the contestants were two married couples. The first, elderly and working-class from Balls Pond Road, mainly answered questions about the music hall and were given a characteristic Green send-off: ‘You’ve been such darned good sports here tonight that we’re going to give you £6.’ The other couple, newly married and lower middle-class, answered questions on the RAF, with the wife saying, ‘If he says so’ and Green quickly interjecting, ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ At the end of the half-hour, he finished with words directly to the viewer: ‘Thank you for allowing us to come into your homes. Good night.’15

  There was also Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which on the 25th made an inauspicious start. According to the News Chronicle’s James Thomas, the bill-topping Gracie Fields gave ‘a brief and rather uninspired performance’, the US-exported Beat the Clock interlude (in which married couples, often honeymooners, played quickfire silly games in order to win prizes) was ‘a rather dreary parlour game’, and all in all the whole thing ‘turned out to be just another TV variety show’. But soon – under the watchful eyes of the impresario Val Parnell and ATV’s Lew Grade – it became the new channel’s consistently most popular programme, helped each week by the front-man skills of the sardonic comedian Tommy Trinder (‘You lucky people’) as well as an early appearance from Norman Wisdom. It is impossible to be sure, but the very fact that this glamorous show, live from the heart of London’s West End, was transmitted on a Sunday evening perhaps gave an extra, irresistible frisson. More improbably, a certain frisson was also attached to commercial television’s news coverage. Masterminded by Aidan Crawley, a former Labour MP and now the first editor-in-chief of Independent Television News (ITN), it deliberately sought to be less deferential, and generally have a more personal touch, than the still almost parodically stilted BBC version. In addition to Chataway, already well known for his achievements as an athlete, the other early star was a youngish, bow-tied Robin Day, who soon developed the art of the tough, even aggressive political interview – never before seen on British television. ‘He puts his blunt, loaded questions with the air of a prosecuting counsel at a murder trial,’ was how by 1956 one television critic was describing Day in action. ‘As he swings back to face the cameras, metaphorically blowing on his knuckles, one detects the muffled disturbance as his shaken victim is led away.’16

  Inevitably the new channel got a mixed critical reception in its early weeks. ‘We expected the I.T.A. to borrow ideas, programmes and films from American television,’ Hollowood wrote in Punch. ‘We knew that the advertising agencies would fashion their “spots” on the American plan. What we didn’t bargain for was an entire service geared to the American way of life.’ By contrast, Isabel Quigly in the Spectator praised the ITA for having ‘managed to shed a good deal of that frowstiness, that mincing intellectual gentility that was rampant and ruining so much that was good on the BBC’, and she gave a particularly high mark to Chataway for his ‘refreshing vigour’ on the news, so different from the BBC’s ‘elegant but often baffling understatement’. Moreover, the advertisements had ‘turned out to be quite inoffensive’, if ‘mostly mediocre’. Against that, she identified an unattractive streak of vulgarity, epitomised by People Are Funny, ‘where unfortunate (though idiotic) members of an audience are called up on the stage and subjected to various indignities and then consoled with a washing machine or a wireless or a bunch of pound notes’. This Saturday-night programme was compèred by Derek Roy – ‘a silky, suave operator’, according to Pict
ure Post – and amid widespread condemnation of it as tasteless and exploitative was eventually dropped by the ITA.

  The viewers themselves seem to have been mainly positive about the new channel. When Gallup in early October interviewed those with access to both services, it found that twice as many thought ITV better than BBC as the other way round. An increasing number of sets, moreover, began to be converted, up to almost half a million by early November. Mass-Observation’s Panel was predominantly middle-class, and thus not wholly representative, but this autumn a quartet of members gave their views:

  I can & do receive ITV on my set & except for Professional Boxing & a more lively news service the programmes seem to be inferior copies of BBC ones or moronic public quizzes or filmed series – mostly American. (Though I admit to being a Robin Hood serial fan!) (Married man, 36, insurance clerk)

  The advertisements are not nearly as obnoxious as I feared – in fact they don’t bother me at all although I hate advertising in general. I just don’t want all their sports and fights, nor their games and knockabouts, but have had – oh quantities of programmes I have enjoyed very greatly (not least the Shell/Betjeman adv. features). But SO difficult now to remember which were BBC and which features were Commercial. I switch continually. Some really excellent plays. (Widow, 50+, secretary)