Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  6.20 pm. The first course is over. Dad has left two boiled potatoes on his plate, a small gesture to signal that he had been given more than enough and is satisfied – a pointless gesture that annoys Mum.

  6.21 pm. Mum, who has hardly touched her food, brings in the second course, which is rhubarb crumble, made with rhubarb from the garden – and Bird’s custard. Mum apologises again for the poor quality and the predictability of this pudding idea, and doesn’t have any herself. We all enjoy it.

  6.30 pm. The males finish their rhubarb crumble. Mum goes out to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. Dad says something about the weather. Mum returns with teacups and saucers, a milk jug and a sugar bowl. She goes back out again, to the pantry this time, returning with a brown loaf, butter in a butter dish and a slab of red Cheshire on a plate, with a small cheese knife. Dad gets up and stretches his arms, then stands surveying the garden, swaying gently at anchor. Mum, who has gone out to the kitchen yet again, comes back in with a large metal teapot.

  6.35 pm. The atmosphere is suddenly more relaxed. Dad and Mum share a joke, then Dad picks up his cup of tea and the Daily Telegraph and wanders through to the front room to read, chewing a Rennie’s digestion tablet. We all chat as Mum butters thin slices of bread and we all help ourselves to slivers of moist, red cheese. This is the food Mum likes best. The tea in my cup is strong and brown and has thick Jersey milk in it, with two teaspoonfuls of sugar.

  7.00 pm. Mum washes up.

  Blakemore adds that generally, in terms of the domestic economy, there were ‘two big flies in the ointment’ for his mother. The first was the increasingly inadequate housekeeping money. ‘Dad left a certain amount of money on top of the bureau in the kitchen, every week. He seemed to assume that Mum would discover it, with a little cry of pleasure and surprise, as she went about her dusting. The actual amount that was needed to cover the cost of the week’s groceries, coal and milk was never discussed. On Planet Dad, it seemed that a full catering and fuel supply service could be obtained by leaving a modest amount of cash like this under an old butter dish.’ The other problem was boredom. ‘She had been left with all the responsibility of what to make for tea, but basically she had gone off the idea.’ And Blakemore quotes her remark to him in the 1970s, after Wilfrid had died: ‘At last! No more cooking. I can eat what I really like – sandwiches!’55

  PART THREE

  10

  Less Donnie Lonegan

  The winter of 1955–6 was a chilly affair, especially February. The 1st was the coldest day since 1895, and later that month Richard Ingrams arrived in ‘incredibly cold and very primitive’ Aldershot to begin his National Service. So too, as ever, in Cambridge. ‘I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and still I can’t stop my teeth chattering,’ Sylvia Plath (there on a Fulbright scholarship) wrote home on the 24th. ‘The gas fire eats up the shillings and scalds one side and the other freezes like the other half of the moon.’

  Yet it was also the winter that popular music at last began to generate some real heat. Initially down as ‘a foxtrot’ in the Decca catalogue, ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets hit the charts on the back of being featured in Blackboard Jungle, recalled by Ray Gosling as ‘a cheap film about a high school in America where the teenagers beat up the teachers . . . a jolly good boo, clap and foot-stamping film’. It entered the Top 20 on 15 October, supplanted Jimmy Young’s ‘The Man from Laramie’ to go number 1 on 12 November, and stayed there for seven further weeks, fending off Mitch Miller’s ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’, the Four Aces’ ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’ and Dickie Valentine’s ‘Christmas Alphabet’, before finally (on 14 January) giving way to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Sixteen Tons’. Selling a million copies in the UK – the first record to do so – this achievement effectively marked the advent in Britain of rock ’n’ roll. Moreover, hard on the heels of the all-American Haley was an East Ender of Irish ancestry. He was Lonnie Donegan, whose ‘Rock Island Line’, a Leadbelly song with a hard-driving narrative (sung by George Melly at the Royal Festival Hall in 1951), peaked at number 6 on 11 February and altogether was in the Top 20 for 19 weeks. For the 16-year-old John Ravenscroft (later Peel), growing up in Cheshire, but going to Shrewsbury School, the performance had ‘a sense of space and freedom, a kind of take-it-or-leave-it spirit that made everything that had gone before sound overcooked and claustrophobic’ when he heard it on a radio request programme, probably either Housewives’ Choice or Two-Way Family Favourites.

  ‘Rock Island Line’ almost overnight started a teenage craze – skiffle. The keynote was do-it-yourself. ‘The double-bass, a broomstick implanted in a tea-chest, and the washboard plus a few thimbles to extract the obligatory rasping sound from it, could be acquired by rummaging through grandma’s (if not mother’s) junk room,’ fondly recalled a Donegan obituarist. ‘For the rest, a simple acoustic guitar (or banjo) could be acquired for a tenner. And no great mastery of that instrument’s potential was required. Three chords played in a few different keys enabled many a canny practitioner to strut the stage without his musicianship being called into question.’ Over the next year or so, skiffle groups mushroomed around the land, including in Liverpool the Quarrymen with John Lennon on a cheap little mail-order guitar, at first mainly playing at church halls and suchlike. Ravenscroft, meanwhile, began to perfect the role of embattled believer. ‘Lolly Dolligan’ was his businessman father’s invariable wind-up, while at the end of the Easter term his report urged, with owlish schoolmasterly humour, ‘less Donnie Lonegan and more of the constructive effort’.1

  Another popular new phenomenon was also the object of condescension. ‘Watched commercial television for the first time,’ noted John Fowles in January 1956. After referring to ‘the dreadful obsequiousness of the compères and performers’ he went on:

  The drinkers in the pub sat in silence, watching, not drinking. Transfixed by the shimmering screen; like the first cavemen to make fire. Agape. And such rubbish . . . Desecration of most sacred themes – death, birth; American voices and manners; and the viewers all sad, bored, when the publican turned the lights on again; a deprivation of opium that forced them to drink again.

  There was no doubt which channel viewers preferred if they had the choice: in December 1955, three months into the new television era, 57 per cent told Gallup that ITV was better than BBC whereas only 16 per cent expressed a positive preference for BBC – a humiliating result for the Corporation.

  Instead, the pressing problem facing commercial television was building up sufficient critical mass, especially before the Midlands and the North came on stream, which they did in February and May respectively. Accordingly, the sense of crisis in late 1955 and early 1956 was palpable – and the brutality of the solution all too predictable. ‘Although prepared to cater for minorities who appreciate more serious programmes,’ announced a spokesman not long before Christmas, ‘we have decided to put on such programmes outside peak viewing hours. Programmes like the Hallé Orchestra, documentaries and discussion features just aren’t popular with the public. As a commercial organisation we have to give the public what it wants.’ Unsurprisingly, there ensued considerable controversy about independent television’s ‘retreat from culture’, but ATV’s Richard Meyer frankly informed ITA’s director-general, Sir Robert Fraser, in February that ‘the lot of the pioneer programme contractor is not a very happy one financially and we do feel that we must use every possible endeavour to obtain maximum audiences in the initial stages of the development of the medium so that we can be certain of getting worthwhile sales of advertising space’. Or, as one of Meyer’s colleagues rather more crisply told a Birmingham paper shortly before ATV’s opening, ‘I think the public want good light entertainment and that is what we shall try to give them.’2

  As usual this winter, the cultural pageant continued. ‘It seems that what listeners like about the series is not its breadth or its occasional excitements, but rather its stable conti
nuity and the absence of any harrowing tragedies,’ observed Radio Times, marking the 2,000th episode on 14 November of Mrs Dale’s Diary. Later that month, ‘few listeners had a good word to say’ about a dramatisation of Lucky Jim. ‘Many were baffled and to others who were not, the play was ugly and vulgar in tone’, their dissatisfaction not allayed by ‘the sound effect (dustbin lid) used to herald Jim’s soliloquies’. Altogether it earned a Reaction Index of 47, 30 less than a recent radio production of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. In December the arrival of The Woodentops (joined in their ‘little house in the country’ by Sam, Mrs Scrubbit and of course Spotty Dog) completed the Watch with Mother portfolio, while The Ladykillers was in retrospect the last major Ealing comedy, if criticised at the time by the New Statesman’s William Whitebait as ‘stylish but just a bit of a bore’. The by now ritualised ‘Books of the Year’ saw a warm mention in The Times for Philip Larkin’s hitherto ignored new collection The Less Deceived, the first in which he revealed his authentic voice, though the reading public as a whole voted for Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, Paul Brickhill’s Reach for the Sky and Alistair MacLean’s HMS Ulysses as the best they had read in 1955.

  There was a short-lived literary storm after Somerset Maugham on Christmas Day had launched a full-scale attack in the Sunday Times on the boorishness of Kingsley Amis’s young male characters, calling them ‘scum’ and much else besides, but for the really young in the early part of 1956 the two words invariably on their lips were ‘Davy Crockett’, as a hit song and an avalanche of merchandise (Davy Crockett buckskin outfits, Davy Crockett bows and arrows, Davy Crockett ‘Whistling Pipes of Peace’, above all Davy Crockett raccoon-skin hats (ten million sold at 12s 6d each)) relentlessly sharpened appetites for the Disney film Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, to be released in early April – or, as Iona and Peter Opie put it not long afterwards, ‘the most ambitious adult-organised assault on the juvenile imagination since before the war’. Elsewhere, the Great Drawing Room of the Arts Council’s headquarters in St James’s Square was the scene on 9 January of Britain’s most uncompromisingly modern concert yet (featuring Harrison Birtwistle as well as Peter Maxwell Davies, and scornfully attacked by the Daily Mail), while exactly a month later, at the National Film Theatre, there were long queues for the first Free Cinema showing of documentary shorts, mainly about working-class life (still an unusual subject) and including Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland. A working-class girl made good by this time was Blackpool’s 19-year-old Norma Sykes, better known as Sabrina. ‘What Sabrina has “got” is no mystery,’ declared Picture Post’s Robert Muller. ‘With her forty-inch bust and very blonde hair, she has become the Teddy Boy’s symbol for opulent sex. Incessant Sabrina propaganda had turned Norma Sykes into a national tonic, a seaside postcard brought to life, sex for the unimaginative, inflated into absurdity.’ For another blonde, two days after her cri de froid, 26 February was a date with destiny, as Sylvia Plath (dressed in red and black, with thick crimson lipstick) met Ted Hughes for the first time, at a noisy, drunken party at the Cambridge Women’s Union – an electrifying encounter that ended with blood running down Hughes’s bitten cheek. ‘This man is terrific . . . He is the best of the best,’ was, however, a BBC viewer’s reaction to the end on 3 March of the first series of The Dave King Show, showcasing a comedian with a relaxed, engaging, mildly subversive style. ‘We shall miss him sadly,’ said another. ‘A great favourite in this house.’3

  In the immediate wake of the Ruth Ellis case, a Gallup poll had found that only 50 per cent agreed with the death penalty, compared to 37 per cent wanting abolition and 13 per cent don’t knows. By November 1955 a major abolitionist campaign was under way, including a mass rally at Central Hall, Westminster, with speeches from Gilbert Harding, J. B. Priestley and Lord Pakenham (the future Lord Longford), though when Kingsley Amis attended a demonstration in Swansea, he was struck by how it comprised largely ‘the professions, the middle-class intelligentsia and the young’. Opinion, moreover, was shifting back, with Gallup in late November finding that the abolitionists were down to 25 per cent and then, in early February, to 21 per cent. Even so, a free vote in the Commons on 16 February produced an unexpected majority of 31 for experimental suspension of the death penalty, with most of the 37 Tories who swung the vote having only been elected the previous May. If this was indeed ‘the sign of a genuine liberalisation of public opinion’, as Richard Crossman hoped after the vote, no one had told Anthony Heap. ‘Emotionalism scored its greatest and most deplorable triumph over reason,’ he snorted next day, with the ‘37 Tory idiots’ making him especially indignant: ‘They ought to be shot.’ He need not have worried, because five months later the Lords, spearheaded by Lord Goddard (still Lord Chief Justice), repeated their 1948 action and rejected any form of abolition by 238 to 95.

  A nationwide survey undertaken by Mass-Observation in December 1955 fleshes out the bald narrative. This broke down attitudes to the notion of a five-year trial suspension, finding among other things that 34 per cent approved (well over double the 1948 figure in a similar survey); that 48 per cent of men disapproved, compared to 42 per cent of women; that women had been ‘particularly influenced towards disapproval of capital punishment by the emotional influence of the case of Ruth Ellis’; that younger people were more inclined to favour a trial suspension; that members of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland were least likely; and that – perhaps surprisingly – differences in social class were ‘insignificant’. The vox pop had their usual pungent, M-O flavour:

  Oh no, don’t please. They’d murder us all. (LCC female nursery helper, Kentish Town, 46)

  If they’ve done a murder they should be punished. They should be tortured. (Engine driver’s wife, Crewe, 55)

  There was the case of Craig and Bentley. I think the wrong person got the string, and that’s what makes me feel the whole system wants changing. (Parcel packer, Shoreditch, 25)

  You hear about these Teddy boys – we saw some at Blackpool, and one had a razor in his lapel. These teenagers need a firm hand. I know, I’ve got a daughter, she’s a good girl, but we have to pull the rope tight. The things she comes back from the Youth Club and tells me! (Housewife, married to grocer’s assistant, Sheffield, 39)

  I think it was dreadful to hang Ruth Ellis. I was ill all the time the trial was on. I could not believe they could hang her, especially a woman. She loved him and did not mean to kill him, it was done on the spur of the moment. I would stop this horrible death penalty. (Housewife, married to fitter, Greenock, 40)

  I think Ruth Ellis deserved to swing. Women can be as vicious as men. More so in some cases. (Cinema odd-job man, Birmingham, 21)

  It seems a bit medieval to hang people. (Male teacher, Romney Marsh, 23)

  Death penalty should be kept. I don’t think they should have done away with the cat. It might have helped to curb these Teddy boys. I think they’re too lenient in schools these days. I’m old-fashioned and I believe in the cane. (Middle-class widow, Chesterfield, 65)

  There’d be a few wives slaughtered lying about. It would be cheaper than divorce. (Male taxi proprietor, Hereford, 25)

  I just know that if it was someone belonging to me I’d help put the rope on myself. (Male film coater, Brentwood, 55)

  I am a Catholic, but God forgive me I do believe in a life for a life. To think of the MPs voting for no hanging is absolutely disgraceful. (Female lavatory attendant, Tottenham, 44)

  There were also a couple of nice linguistic manglings. ‘No, I think it had better stay as a detergent,’ stated a 47-year-old cashier’s wife, while the other was unattributed: ‘It’s hanging I don’t like. They should have elocution, as in America.’4

  Race and class, meanwhile, continued to provoke deep fault lines.

  On 3 January 1956 – exactly two months after the Cabinet had decided, under threat of resignation from the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, not to back the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, in his wish to intr
oduce legislation to control immigration from the New Commonwealth – the 12-year-old Mike Phillips arrived in London from British Guyana. Living with his parents in the De Beauvoir Town area between Islington and Dalston, at the top of a crowded three-storey Victorian house with a clothing factory in the basement, he slowly adjusted to school life with working-class London boys: bollock-grabbing before the teacher came in, spitting on the ceiling of the bicycle shed, frequent fights, and always the regular, repetitive use of ‘words like fuck, piss, shit, cunt, bastard and bloody’, which he had never heard before ‘used in such a casual and vacuous manner’. He was not especially victimised, as he and the other ‘foreign’ boys sat apart in a corner of the classroom and were also taught how to box, but outside, ‘I’d bump into a man or a woman in the street, or trip over someone’s bag, and if it wasn’t the first thing they said, it might be the last thing: the inevitable question, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”’ The writer Colin MacInnes, picking up on how London was starting to change rapidly with large-scale black immigration, assembled in March ‘A Short Guide for Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)’, whose Q&As included:

  What is a Jumble? – You are, and I, if we are white. The word’s a corruption of ‘John Bull’, and is used by West Africans of Englishmen in a spirit of tolerant disdain.

  Do Africans not like us, then? – Not very much, because our outstanding characteristics of reliability and calm don’t touch them, and we lack the spontaneity and sociability they prize.

  Is there a colour bar in England? – I’ve not yet met an African or West Indian who thinks there isn’t. The colour of the English bar, they say, is grey. Few of us love them, few of us hate them, but almost everybody wishes they weren’t here and shows it by that correct, aloof indifference of which only the English know the secret.