Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Eight days later came a more ‘1956’ event with the opening of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Indeed, J. G. Ballard in 2008 would recall this ‘wonderful exhibition’ as the defining event of the year, especially Richard Hamilton’s painting Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? and an installation by Peter and Alison Smithson imagining what someone would need in order to survive after a nuclear war. ‘I thought: here is a fiction for the present day,’ reflected Ballard. ‘I wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that. Forget it. I was interested in the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here.’ At the time, it was the Hamilton collage – also on the exhibition’s poster – that stole the show, a pioneering piece of Pop Art shown as part of an eye-catching installation that among other things included a juke-box, an outsize bottle of Guinness and the 16-foot-long Robbie the Robot, previously seen in the film Forbidden Planet. Significantly, Ballard further identified the exhibition as the moment that marked the usurping of the respectable avant-garde, embodied by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Graham Sutherland, all of them ‘artists in favour with the Arts Council and the British Council’. The young architect Jim Stirling was also part of the exhibition, in what was supposed to be a collaboration with sculptors, but the experience was sufficiently unsatisfactory to ensure that henceforth he would work with neither artists nor sculptors – thereby ‘confirming’, according to the cultural historian Martin Harrison, ‘a megalomania in architects that has undermined most collaborations of this kind’.10

  This Is Tomorrow was still showing at the Whitechapel when, in the last week of August, the Rock Around the Clock ‘riots’ began. Jiving in the gangway, ripping up seats, occasional actual or threatened violence – this was the teenage (especially teddy-boy) reaction, night after night, in West London cinemas like the Prince of Wales in Harrow Road and the Gaumont in Shepherd’s Bush to the cheaply made ‘U’ film starring Bill Haley. ‘This rhythm is the real razzle-dazzle,’ 15-year-old Alfred Harper of Latimer Road told a reporter. ‘It gets you, man. I’ve been here three times this week. And I’m coming again.’ A cinema manager was also quoted: ‘It’s a great rhythm. I’ve even danced it with the wife in the kitchen. But that’s no reason why it should make people into hooligans.’ By early September, as the movie began to be released across the country, it was becoming a major controversy. ‘A cinema, sir, is a place where people go to enjoy films and not a centre for tribal dancing or the relief of sexual neuroses or inhibitions,’ R. D. Cole of Sidcup Road, SE9 wrote to the News Chronicle. Sheila and Jennifer Baxter of Sanderstead, Surrey agreed: ‘As normal teenagers we are disgusted at repeated reports of the riots following the showing of the film “Rock Around the Clock”. Do the film selectors require even further proof that this film should be banned?’

  In fact, during the middle weeks of the month, it was banned in many places, including Bristol, Ipswich, all of Gloucestershire, Blackburn, Birmingham, Brighton, Gateshead and Bradford. ‘In London, more than a quarter of a million young people find Beethoven as exciting as roll and rock,’ proudly declared the ever-mischievous Sir Malcolm Sargent at the Last Night of the Proms, while in a radio discussion a 27-year-old aspiring Liberal politician, Jeremy Thorpe, observed that ‘what worries me is that a fourth-rate film with fifth-rate music can pierce the thin shell of civilisation and turn people into wild dervishes’. Undoubtedly the film – where it was shown – did generate some significant law-and-order problems, including a large-scale riot in Manchester after nearly 2,000 youths had blocked a main street, but the fact was that, according to the relevant Home Office file, there were complaints about behaviour at only 25 of the 400 cinemas that showed it. Some of the 375 were probably in Liverpool. ‘I went to see Rock Around the Clock,’ claimed John Lennon subsequently. ‘Nobody was singing and nobody was dancing. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.’11

  Also in September, Panorama featured a hard-hitting report by Christopher Chataway (recently lured from ITN by the BBC) on the colour bar at British Railways. ‘Well, there is a general reluctance by men to work with these coloured chaps,’ the goods agent at the Smithfield depot told him, while there was also a revealing exchange between Chataway and an NUR representative. Question: ‘But now, not every coloured man surely is much slower than every Englishman; you can’t judge a whole race like that?’ Answer: ‘No, I’m talking now of the majority of the particular type of coloured man that I’ve contacted . . .’ About this time, Michael Banton was finishing a survey drawn from six localities (Ipswich, Coventry, Alcester, Leeds, Hawick and Leith). From it, he concluded that ‘colour prejudice is not widespread in Great Britain’, with for example 52 per cent thinking it was wrong for landladies to show racial discrimination in their letting policies, but that ‘the evidence of discrimination is undeniable’, with for instance 23 per cent either doubtful or outright negative about the prospect of working with ‘a coloured man’. Banton’s broadly sanguine findings were markedly at variance with a 1956 survey of a thousand people in Birmingham, many living in ‘immigrant areas’. In answer to the question, ‘Would you have a coloured person in your house as a lodger?’, only 15 – a mere 1.5 per cent – replied ‘Yes’, while almost two-thirds of the sample expressed the view that coloured people were intrinsically less intelligent than white people. Among the black immigrants themselves, a telling change occurred this summer. Up to this point there had been a tradition of free parties – invitations for which were ‘not infrequently’, recalled Donald Hinds, ‘extended to the unknown coloured man who shared the same compartment on the train, or to those who complained about the weather on the bus’, with the parties themselves ‘an important social gathering’ where ‘a man could spread the word around that he was about to take over the vacant possession of a house, or that his employers had vacancies’, as well as being ‘a place to meet the women’. Now, however, it became obligatory to bring a ‘bottle of something’, and soon afterwards there came what Hinds (who had himself arrived from Jamaica in 1955) called ‘the hideous commercial parties’, with ‘pounding, toneless music’ and no place for those ‘shy immigrants anxious to make the right impression on the neighbours’.12

  The second issue of the Reasoner, received at the LSE library on 11 September, was still an all-white affair. It appeared about a fortnight after Thompson and Saville had been summoned to King Street to appear before a specially convened Political Committee. ‘Edward and I made separate statements,’ recalled Saville, ‘and one of the striking things about the general discussion which followed was that no member of the Committee talked about the social and political structures within the Soviet Union and why it was so important for the whole membership to appreciate how the crimes described by Khrushchev could occur in a society that called itself socialist. We were talking into very thin air and nothing we said would have any impact or relevance.’ The two historians explained that the second issue was already on its way, and in due course it was made clear to them that a third issue would mean expulsion.

  The September issue itself included a long letter from Doris Lessing, who expressed concern that the journal, despite its ‘admirable’ motive of ‘trying to restore intellectual conflict’, could ‘easily be interpreted as an attack against the party leadership’, and she defended the long silence of British party members about the realities of Stalinism:

  The facts are that, up to the 20th Congress, if those of us who knew what was going on – and it was perfectly possible to know if one kept one’s mind open and read the plentiful evidence available – if we had said what we thought, in the only place open to us, the capitalist press, we would have been cast out by the party and branded as traitors, and inevitably isolated by bitterness and recrimination from a world movement in which we
believed, and of which we wished to remain a part.

  That is why we kept silent. We believed that Communism had a vitality and a moral vigour that would triumph over the brutality and intellectual dishonesty that had undermined it. We were right to think so.

  ‘We have all,’ she concluded, ‘been part of the terrible, magnificent, bloody, contradictory process, the establishing of the first Communist regime in the world – which has made possible our present freedom to say what we think, and to think again creatively.’ If Lessing was emotionally still very much holding on to the party, Lawrence Daly had already made the break. In the same issue, his letter from West Fife had a notable passage:

  However inadequate and hypocritical British capitalist democracy may be, the average worker does feel that he has the right, more or less, to express his own opinion freely on political and other affairs, worship freely in his own way, get a fair trial if he is arrested, listen to different points of view and make up his own mind, travel almost where he likes (if he can afford it) and so on.

  Workers cherish these rights, however restricted, and have refused to give any substantial political support to the C.P. largely because they feared that many of these rights would disappear if it came to power.

  It would now appear that their fears were justified.

  ‘There is room for hope,’ he ended, ‘but only if the C.P. begins to show the workers by deeds that a genuine change has been made. Can the leadership respond to the challenge? My opinion is that it cannot, but I hope it will yet prove me wrong.’13

  Moving some further degrees to the right, British social democrats in early October at last had their bible with the publication of Anthony Crosland’s compendious and elegantly, but also robustly, written The Future of Socialism. In many ways a fleshing out of the themes he had adumbrated four years earlier in New Fabian Essays, it advanced six key concepts: the taming by now of the worst excesses of laissez-faire capitalism, though this time Crosland shied away from the term statism to describe the existing state of affairs; the urgent need for revisionism – based on current circumstances – within socialist thinking, notwithstanding that ‘many working-class militants, and still more some middle-class people who have espoused the workers’ cause, feel their whole status and psychological security to depend on preserving a traditional, proletarian philosophy of class-struggle’; the continuing need for a high level of social expenditure, with Crosland wanting ‘a generous, imaginative, long-term programme’ that would ‘make our state schools and hospitals, and all the services that go with them, the equal in quality of the best which private wealth can buy’; the pursuit of greater equality (of outcome as well as of opportunity), involving (among other things) a significant redistribution of wealth through the fiscal system, the integration of private and grammar schools into a single ‘comprehensive’ state secondary system, and a version of industrial democracy that severely reduced existing status inequalities at the workplace; further attempts to broaden public ownership to be on a case-by-case, non-dogmatic basis (‘we cannot go bull-headed at nationalisation without regard to the economic consequences’); and finally, less puritanism and more social liberalism, with Crosland declaring with some exasperation that ‘socialists cannot go on indefinitely professing to be concerned with human happiness and the removal of injustice, and then, when the programmes are decided, committing the National Executive, out of fear of certain vocal pressure-groups, to become more orthodox than the bench of bishops’. The book’s last sentence was similarly heartfelt: ‘We do not want to enter the age of abundance, only to find that we have lost the values which might teach us how to enjoy it.’14

  Reaction from the Labour left proved predictably hostile, with Will Camp’s review in Tribune appearing under the headline, ‘Socialism? How Dare He Use the Word!’. Camp himself was uniformly negative, among other things accusing Crosland of a mixture of ‘optimism about the achievement of “welfare capitalism” and pessimism about the traditional objectives of Socialism’. He ended:

  Heaven help the Labour Party if Crosland’s ‘realism’ ever takes a hold on its leaders. The silent coalition between Right wing Labour and ‘progressive’ Tory which has ruled the country, with a few off moments, ever since the majority Labour Government fell in 1950 will then continue indefinitely. The voters will cease to bother which of the two parties is nominally in power. And as for the Labour rank-and-file, they will lose their faith in Socialism.

  Crosland’s treatise had a deservedly long shelf life and in 2006 was republished with a foreword by Gordon Brown. ‘His breakthrough fifty years ago was telling the Labour Party how a market economy could be made to work in the public interest,’ noted Brown, who implicitly identified in Crosland the seeds of the New Labour project, above all through the way he had spelled out the challenge to be ‘both radical and credible’. For Crosland himself in 1956, no longer an MP, it was at the age of 38 a huge ambition fulfilled – to have become, in Roy Hattersley’s felicitous phrase, ‘the political philosopher of the libertarian left’.15

  At a less platonic level, plenty else was happening during September and October. Plans to drown the Welsh-speaking Tryweryn Valley in Merionethshire, in order to supply water to Liverpool, provided a popular cause for Welsh nationalists, with Plaid Cymru holding in September a Save Tryweryn rally in Bala. Nationalism had been quiescent in the Principality for a long time, but this marked the start of a new, more powerful sense of grievance. Elsewhere, ‘squealing women . . . weeping women . . . screaming women . . . fainting women’ greeted the arrival of the flamboyant pianist Liberace at Waterloo station on the 25th, according to the Daily Mirror, whose ‘Cassandra’ next day launched a vicious, implicitly homophobic attack on ‘the biggest sentimental vomit of all time’ – the attack appearing in the same issue as the first of a three-part series by Keith Waterhouse on ‘The Royal Circle’, which he accused of being ‘as aristocratic, as insular and – there is no more suitable word – as toffee-nosed as it has ever been’. The dons were returning, and in the Forest of Dean the working-class Dennis Potter left home to go up to New College, Oxford. Everyone wished him luck at his ‘farewell’ drink with his parents at the Berry Hill Working Men’s Club, ‘but, to my shame, I realized that more than anything I wanted to get away from it all, more than ever before that I was glad to be going, glad to be taking this heaven-sent passport to the world of . . . what? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was a world where I should be happier, a world where my books were not muddles, where I wasn’t on the defensive when putting forward my opinions and value-judgements’. Cultural divides were not only about class, and in the New Statesman dated Saturday, 6 October – the day that Bobby Charlton made his Manchester United debut, scoring twice in a 4–2 home win against Charlton Athletic – there was a first outing for C. P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’, ie literary and scientific, with Snow making a cogent case for their bridging. The following week the Tories were at Llandudno for their conference, where Eden made a strong speech that, according to Henry Fairlie, left him safe at No. 10 until the next election in 1960.16

  The diarists, meanwhile, had mixed fortunes. ‘We had coffee at the “Whimpy” in Lyons Corner House,’ noted a discontented Madge Martin after a day wandering round Regent Street and Bond Street. ‘London is too full of these crowded, meretricious “stand-up” coffee bars. Where are the old days of sitting quietly to elevenses, in a serene, old-fashioned café?’ Poor Gladys Langford, who had had a stroke the previous winter and only quite recently resumed her diary, found herself one rainy Monday unable to cross ‘a whirling stream pouring across the path’ in Highbury Fields. Happily, ‘two passing “Teddy-boys” came to my rescue and lifted me over the torrent’. There was a similar experience for Judy Haines, out shopping with her mother in Highams Park: ‘We had a good lunch at the A.B.C. (downstairs) and then made our way home. A teddy boy was very kind assisting mum on the moving stairs.’ Frank Lewis, now living in Barry but working in Cardiff, was stood up one Tuesd
ay evening by a girl called Julie. ‘I seem to be doomed at the Capitol [cinema],’ he glumly recorded. ‘That’s a second time a girl hasn’t turned up there . . . And after me bloody well rushing to get there . . .’ He then went ‘looking for talent’, but as usual to little avail.17

  That was on 16 October, the same evening that the BBC showed a 25-minute extract (introduced by Lord Harewood) from Look Back in Anger, a huge shot in the arm to the Royal Court box office and attracting there a wholly new type of audience, recalled by the stage manager, Michael Halifax, as ‘young people gazing around wondering where to go and what the rules were’. As if to prove that John Osborne had not overnight transformed the London theatre, there was a new play at the Duchess, Plaintiff in a Pretty Hat by Hugh and Margaret Williams (parents of poet Hugo, actor Simon), which, described by The Times as the ‘lightest of light comedies’ about ‘an urbane Welsh peer’ trying to get his son out of a breach of promise action, could not have been more polar opposite. Still, the new kept on coming, and on 27 October, the same day that Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’ reached number 2 in the Top 20, there was a first appearance in the charts for Tommy Steele, performing ‘Rock with the Caveman’, part-written by Lionel Bart. For a fresh-faced Bermondsey boy, discovered at the already renowned 2i’s coffee bar in Soho, this topical ditty about the discovery of a Piltdown man’s skull made him Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll star.18