Religious broadcasting was still hugely important to the BBC, whose Gallup survey in 1954 found over two-thirds of the sample listening frequently (37 per cent) or occasionally (31 per cent) to such programmes. Generational tensions surfaced that year when the BBC objected to Don Cornell’s chart-topping ‘Hold My Hand’, on the grounds of the profanity of the line ‘This is the kingdom of heaven’. An amended line (‘This is the wonder of heaven’) was overdubbed for purposes of airplay, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, still publicly criticised the song when Cornell came to Britain on tour. The American balladeer expressed his annoyance – breaking some furniture in front of the press – and everywhere the audiences loyally shouted out, ‘Sing your banned song, Donny boy!’6
Sundays remained special – and, for most younger people anyway, specially awful. The boredom, the sense of nothing happening or ever likely to happen again, seemingly affected everything:
The streets of Carlisle would be totally empty as if a bomb had gone off – no shops, no pubs, no life, no everything. My father would not even allow me to ride my bike on a Sunday, let alone play football in the street, read the Dandy or Beano or do anything much that smacked of pleasure and enjoyment. Not that he was religious or went to church . . . (Hunter Davies)
Sunday lunch: family favourites, mum scraping veg, he [father] carving the lamb. I always tried to be out before Billy Cotton’s Bandstand [in fact Band Show]. Wakey wahhhkey. (Ossie Clark, Warrington)
Cinemas opened, but only briefly, and no God-fearing person would be seen going to the pictures on a Sunday. So after the Light Programme’s lunchtime diet of Two-Way Family Favourites, The Billy Cotton Band Show and Educating Archie, it was either a game of Ludo or a good stiff walk. The weather had to be particularly bad for my father not to suggest the latter option. (Anton Rippon, Derby)
On fine days, we went out as a family for long walks or rode our bikes past hatted church-goers (which we weren’t) in stilled villages. Apart from the occasional newsagent, no shops were open, nor cinemas, nor pubs. Small railway stations closed and the signals on many lines stood all day disappointingly at red. Neighbours chatted over the hedge as they dug their gardens, church bells sometimes tolled. Otherwise, a great external quietness meant to encourage reflection in our internal souls. (Ian Jack, Fife)
In 1953 a Labour MP, John Parker, introduced a Sunday Observance Bill seeking to repeal the existing legislation and allow a greater range of Sunday entertainments. This was not only voted down by 281 to 57, with Churchill refusing to allow a royal commission on the subject of Sunday observance, but a Gallup poll found that most people were opposed to professional sport, let alone horse racing, on a Sunday.7
Two developments in September 1955 signalled a degree of change in the air. The first concerned the Duke of Edinburgh’s penchant for playing polo or cricket on Sundays, behaviour strongly attacked by the Free Church of Scotland in its monthly magazine. The Daily Mirror, in a characteristic leader on ‘The Duke’s Sunday’, returned fire:
Who in Britain thinks it is a crime to play cricket on Sundays?
Who in Britain thinks it is a crime to play polo on the Sabbath?
VERY FEW PEOPLE.
People whose ideas are as out of date as the penny-farthing bicycle.
A few days later a reproachful Archbishop Fisher wrote to Prince Philip, in effect accusing him of giving ‘great encouragement’ to ‘all who now are constantly seeking to invade the domesticity of Sunday rest and recreations, and who when the time comes will press very hard for legislation to remove all restrictions upon the full secularisation and commercialisation of Sunday’. Philip’s shortish, rather breezy reply – ‘I don’t think there is any need to be apprehensive about Sunday observance . . .’ – yielded nothing. Later that month arrived commercial television and Sunday Night at the London Palladium, decisively supplanting radio’s more decorous Jean Pougnet and the Palm Court Orchestra, coming from the Grand Hotel. ‘The most daring Sunday programme yet,’ asserted Picture Post’s Denzil Batchelor, who wondered what was going to happen to ‘the English Sunday as we know it’ if, driven by the very commercial dictates of the new channel, ‘the most exciting cricket, the top boxing and athletics, find their way to the TV screens’:
I think the coming of competitive TV will see the end of the British Sunday as a day of rest, church-going and good works – and nothing more. Whether, as a result of this, church-going itself will fall off – whether, in fact, in some cases it could fall off – I would not care to prophesy. It is possible that it may increase, when people know that the rest of their holy day is to be regarded as a holiday – as it was in the glorious past when Britain was a Christian Country.8
Deference, respectability, conformity, restraint, trust – these were probably all more important than piety in underpinning ‘the 1950s’.
Despite the egalitarian effects of the war, deference still ran deep in British society, whether towards traditional institutions, or senior people in hierarchical organisations, or prominent local figures (the teacher, the bank manager, the JP, the GP), or older people generally, or the better educated, or that increasingly influential phenomenon, the somewhat stern but more or less benign expert, for example in childcare. Hard empirical evidence for this deference is surprisingly elusive, but three brief vignettes are evocative. First, in that ultra-hierarchical, status-conscious, age-respecting, largely male preserve, the City of London, where in most offices it was still ‘Mr this’ and ‘Mr that’, with no ready assumption of first-name terms. ‘You may call me Ernest,’ the merchant banker Thalmann (of Warburgs) announced towards the end of the decade to a recent recruit, Peter Spira, and the proverbial pin was heard to drop when the young man eventually mustered the courage to do so. Or take the response in August 1954 after the Sunday Pictorial had dared to speculate on what sort of school the almost six-year-old Prince Charles would be going to and had printed an accompanying coupon asking readers to send in their views. ‘1-in-4 say M.Y.O.B. [ie Mind Your Own Business],’ rather ruefully noted the following week’s headline, a view typified by G. A. Septon of Glebe Gardens, New Malden: ‘If half the parents in the country were as good and conscientious as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh there would be little cause for concern anywhere. Trust the Queen and Prince Philip.’ A few months later, Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford) was at Hearsall, on the outskirts of Coventry, addressing a Parent-Teachers’ Association about the city’s comprehensive experiment. ‘Rather ominously,’ he recorded afterwards, ‘in the vote of thanks one parent said that it was so nice to have the thing explained by somebody who talked English properly, unlike some Councillors, who had tried to teach parents how education had been organised but obviously were not educated themselves.’9
It was hard to avoid – or evade – the culture of respectability. ‘I found it quite easy to alter all the Boot’s things, and of course I perfectly well understand the reason for it all,’ Kingsley Amis wrote in February 1955 to his editor at Gollancz after concern had been voiced about some expressions in That Uncertain Feeling that might lead to the novel being banned by Boots Circulating Library and possibly other libraries also. ‘ “Balls” and “a quick in and out” were very easy, and I found the best treatment for the “buggers” was to alter each one on its merits rather than trying to devise an equivalent for the word.’ Few patrolled the boundaries of respectability more assiduously than Winifred ‘Biddy’ Johnson, all-powerful editor of the mass-circulation Woman’s Weekly, first port of call for most Mills & Boon serialisations. Doctor–nurse romances were her preferred genre; the doctors themselves had to be unimpeachable, and neither the language nor the drink were permitted to be strong. ‘Do Johnson women go to pubs?’ an exasperated author asked Alan Boon as his hero Bruce was about to take Trudi out for a drink. ‘I always think “country inn” sounds so ingenuous, especially if they go for supper, even if it’s bread and cheese and a gallon of wallop . . . Anyhow I shall write it that way for the bo
ok, and we can always make it a milk bar or something when we approach Johnson.’
An intrinsic part of respectability was what the film critic Penelope Houston called ‘that celebrated English custom of ignoring a disagreeable fact, on the assumption that if left alone it may quietly go away’, and she complained with justifiable bitterness about how this meant that ‘many areas of experience are closed off to the British film-maker’, or at least a film-maker who wanted any degree of commercial success. The BBC did not help. ‘I want you to see yourself as – well – as having become an officer in a rather good regiment’ was how the new recruit Robin Day was welcomed to the Radio Talks department in 1954. It was in general a slow-moving, highly bureaucratic organisation with precious little appetite for taking risks or giving offence. News bulletins remained, in David Hendy’s words, ‘pillars of grammatical rectitude’; for most of the decade there was, to Peter O’Sullevan’s considerable irritation, a complete ban on any betting information in horse-racing broadcasts; and, down with flu in December 1954, John Fowles noted how ‘everyone on the BBC talks as if they are a little bit older and cleverer than anybody else, but they’re doing their damndest to conceal it’.10
‘We were never encouraged to think that we were better than anybody else,’ Alan Titchmarsh reflected in 2006 about his Ilkley childhood, as a plumber’s son. ‘If anything, we were taught that we were just the same. The most important thing in life seemed to be to blend in and get on with everybody, and I suppose that’s what I’ve spent the rest of my life doing. Blending in.’ The conformist ethos in the 1950s was much the same in Stockton-on-Tees. ‘It was certainly not a place, in those days, for much deviation from a pretty dour norm, let alone for anything in the nature of artistic affectation,’ recalled the novelist Barry Unsworth. ‘To carry an umbrella or ask for wine in a pub was to put your virility in question. Suede shoes were for “lounge-lizards”. Beards were out of the question.’
Dress, indisputably, was the crucial shibboleth, however uncomfortable it might be to wear. ‘There are many branches,’ noted the Westminster Bank’s house magazine, ‘where the putting on of a soft collar instead of a stiff white one will mark a man down as unambitious and unworthy of the higher reaches of his profession,’ while on the Stock Exchange the insistence on sartorial uniformity was even more exacting. As well as the regulation bowler hat and rolled umbrella, remembered the stockbroker Dundas Hamilton, ‘I came to work in a short black jacket and striped trousers, and we all wore white shirts and stiff white collars. We also had a ban on the soft shirt or the coloured shirt, and if I’d worn a striped shirt and a soft collar people in my office would have said to me, “Why haven’t you got out of your pyjamas yet?” ’ Dirty looks greeted the young Brian Thompson when he wore a green thornproof suit and Hush Puppies on the Central Line, and another writer, Derek Robinson, recalled how, growing up in Bristol, men’s clothing ‘boiled down to sports-jacket-and-flannels or single-breasted suit’, though ‘you could get away with a sweater in the countryside’. Suits tended to be from Burton’s, and for much of the decade being measured for a first suit at one of its many shops remained a classic male rite of passage for the ‘trainee adults’ (in Thompson’s resonant phrase) that mainly comprised British youth. Still, by the mid-1950s, there were signs of change, for women as well as men. The image projected by Burton’s in its advertising started to have a less regimented feel, while in London a young Mary Quant, just out of art college, was looking with dismay at what most women wore. ‘What I loathed was the unsexiness, the lack of gaiety, the formal stuffiness of the look that was said to be fashion,’ she recalled. ‘I wanted clothes that were much more for life – much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in.’11
Not much, apart from the Monday washing, was yet being hung out. ‘Life in London, even in the most crowded streets, seemed like a film of pre-talkie days,’ recorded the Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri about his visit to England in 1955. ‘I had an uncanny sensation when I saw unending streams of people going along Oxford Street, and heard no sound. As they moved into the Underground stations they looked like long lines of ants going into their hole.’ He met ‘the same silence’ in pubs, restaurants and buses – a silence, a ‘dreariness of public behaviour’, utterly different from what he was used to in India. The English were no less reserved, he found, when they did speak, with ‘their habit of tacitness, which they call understatement’.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that Britain in the 1950s was invariably a land of self-restraint and a carefully calibrated politeness. Philip Larkin’s Scottish holiday in July 1953 was significantly spoiled, he grumbled to friends, by first ‘the drunk man in the train from Shotts, Lanarkshire, with no teeth & very few fingers, who engaged me in incomprehensible bawdy jesting’, and then ‘two drunk men in my sleeping compartment, Glasgow–Birmingham, who smashed a bottle, threatened me with a niblick, sang, & had me swallowing tea & White Horse at 6 the next morning’. Or take the emotive issues of litter and bus queues. ‘It took me five minutes to find a litter basket in London’s big Victoria Station,’ a reader from Herne Bay complained to the Daily Mirror in August 1955, the same year as the formation (owing much to Elizabeth Brunner, chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes) of the Keep Britain Tidy pressure group. ‘Good job I wasn’t in a hurry to catch a train,’ continued Mrs I. S., ‘or I might have been tempted to add my junk to the awful mess on the floor.’ As for bus queues, it seems there was a particular problem in the capital. ‘There is some order until a bus arrives at a stop, but that little goes then,’ a Burnley clergyman informed The Times the previous autumn. ‘If two arrive together, the situation is worse. It is true there is no violence, but a lot of people sidle on the buses out of their turn with great skill and an appearance of disinterestedness. It would not come off in these parts.’ A letter to the Sunday Express almost exactly a year later took up the charge. ‘What has happened to the shape of the bus queues?’ asked Morris Aza of 8J Hyde Park Mansions, N1. ‘I recall their neat and orderly double-file formation during the war. Today they straggle and lack not only their former parade-ground precision but also bonhomie.’12
Helped by informally policed public spaces – by bus conductors, by park-keepers, by lavatory attendants – and by a police force that was largely admired, this was for the most part an era of trust. ‘I liked my half-hour’s walk through the quiet suburban streets,’ Jacqueline Wilson recalls about being a six-year-old in Kingston-upon-Thames, adding that ‘it wasn’t that unusual to let young children walk to school by themselves in those days’. Ken Blakemore, who grew up in a large Cheshire village, remembers not only the front door of his home being left unlocked, but bikes generally being left untouched or unchained at the bus stop or the railway station. This even applied to motorbikes, for, according to John Humbach, it was not until about 1957 that British motorcycles were fitted with locks or keys of any kind. Humbach himself had a Triumph 500cc bike. ‘It had no locks and I never had a chain and padlock (and never knew anyone who had),’ he wrote in 1996. ‘Yet this bike remained parked every night outside my house in a street which was then pretty slummy (Stadium Street, London SW10). The bike was never stolen and I was never worried that it might be.’
It would be easy to exaggerate levels of honesty – Rowntree and Lavers in their 1951 survey English Life and Leisure reported quite widespread minor dishonesty – but the fundamental fact was that, following the quite sharp upward spike in the immediate post-war years, crime declined markedly during the first half of the 1950s, before starting to move up again from 1955. The figures for 1957, the end of the ‘high’ fifties, are striking, indeed startling, compared with 40 years later. Notifiable offences recorded by the police: a little over half a million in 1957, almost 4.5 million in 1997. Violent crimes against the person: under 11,000 in 1957, a quarter of a million in 1997. It was, in short, a different world – a world, at its trusting best, evoked by S. Hickson, a Prudential agent (‘The Man fro
m the Pru’) servicing the market gardeners and bulb growers of Spalding in Lincolnshire during the 1950s:
Although at first, when I used a push-bike, I could not get home to lunch, there was never any need to take sandwiches. There was always a place set for me and I can still see those heaped plates of steamed apple puddings, followed by an equally generous plate of meat, often home-cured bacon, and vegetables. Invariably they served the pudding first. How many cups of tea I swallowed on a cold day rather than refuse the hospitality so generously given! . . . Later, when I acquired a bright yellow Austin Seven of very ancient vintage – which the local folk referred to as ‘the flying bedstead’ – it sometimes resembled a greengrocer’s cart when I arrived home from my day’s collecting. Then there were the places I used to get the key: in the spout over the kitchen window; under a piece of brick near the side door; on a nail in the shed; and then I would let myself into the house and find the books and premiums which had been left in some convenient place. All this was to save me a back call when the housewife was working in the fields. Many times I would find also a hastily scribbled note: ‘Please take an extra sixpence and post these letters’ . . . ‘Fill in this form’ . . . ‘Tell the doctor Johnnie is not so well’ . . . ‘Tell my mother I cannot get home this week’ . . . ‘Leave this parcel at Mrs Brown’s’ and many others of like sort.13
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 65
