Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  In the midst of all this, on 17 October, Calder Hall at Windscale in Cumberland was officially opened by the Queen and became the world’s first nuclear reactor to feed power into a national grid. ‘One thing which no one can doubt,’ asserted the Financial Times on the morning of the ceremony, ‘is that from now on the nuclear power programme will be pressed ahead to the limits of the national resources and of technical possibility.’ In the News Chronicle, ‘The Atom Goes to Work for the Housewife’ was the title for a bullish article by the leading science writer Ritchie Calder, who called the opening ‘a historic and symbolic act – Britain’s entry, in the forefront of all the nations, into the Atomic Age, with the atom tamed for domestic and industrial purposes’. At the ceremony itself, the Queen ringingly pronounced that ‘all of us here know that we are present at the making of history’, a cue for The Times’s correspondent to let himself go a little:

  Today, with a boisterous wind to display the flags – and nearly wreck the marquees – the colourful and almost Wellsian-looking installation deeply stirs the imagination. Nothing like it exists elsewhere. Truly it has been described as a ‘courageous enterprise’; for Calder Hall represents the inauguration of a comprehensive programme of atomic power stations which, in time, will provide Britain with an ample supply of electricity without the use of coal or oil. Therein lies its magic.

  Not just magic but, according to Anthony Wedgwood Benn, socialist magic. ‘We’re told we should be proud of it and we should,’ he declared on Any Questions? two days later, ‘and it is public enterprise both in the Atomic Energy Authority and in the British Electricity Authority which distributes it, and I’m sure Ted Leather [the Tory MP on the panel] in boasting rightly of the achievement of Calder Hall will remember that when the nation as a nation gets down to the job it’s capable of leading the world, and I as a Socialist am very proud of that too.’ Nor in global terms was he inclined to minimise the achievement itself: ‘We’ve talked since 1945 of the atomic age presenting alternatives of utter obliteration or great hopes for rising standards and up until now we’ve had a bit too much of the utter obliteration brought before us and not enough of the hope and the possibility for rising standards, and Calder Hall shows what can be done and we’re very delighted to see it.’19

  An innovation a fortnight later was not quite such a cause of national pride. ‘The G.P.O. was packed – five queues for Pensions,’ recorded Nella Last on Wednesday, 1 November. ‘By the time I got to the counter, I felt as if I could just push my book, through the little “grill”. I said “I’ve never seen such a crowd” and was told “it’s been like this since 9 o’clock – it’s these Premium Bonds!”.’ They had attracted some flak on their announcement by Macmillan in his April Budget – a ‘squalid raffle’ (Harold Wilson), a ‘cold, solitary, mechanical, uncompanionable, inhuman activity’ (the Archbishop of Canterbury) – but Gallup soon afterwards had found that 54 per cent approved of a government-sponsored lottery and only 31 per cent disapproved.20 Now on the first day of purchase, the queues in Barrow told their own story. With a top prize of £1,000, it only remained for Ernie next summer to do the honours.

  13

  Brisk Buying and Selling

  ‘The bright bricks of new homes, hedged with well-tended gardens, sprouted the dubious joys of a TV age,’ wrote Geoffrey Goodman after a visit to a council estate in Barnsley. ‘Children, happy and healthy, played around the garden fences. A new pub had been built, with a drive-in, chromium and glass saloon bars and plush leather upholstery; there was a dimpled blonde behind the bar, and even in the “public lounge” there were waitresses.’ That was in the New Statesman dated 26 May 1956, and the same day Harold Macmillan visited his former constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, which had suffered so much during the slump of the 1930s. ‘We drove round some of the parts which we knew very well and have been much altered by slum clearance etc,’ he noted. ‘The wealth and prosperity of the town is incredible. . .’ A week or two later, a special feature in Encounter on ‘This New England’ led with an even more emblematic northern town. ‘On Saturday afternoons the market-place, which in Orwell’s days was full of angry speakers and hungry listeners, is full of brisk buying and selling,’ observed Wayland Young in ‘Return to Wigan Pier’. And overall, he reckoned that since the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, Wigan had ‘changed from barefoot malnutrition to nylon and television, from hollow idleness to flush contentment’.1 Barnsley, Stockton, Wigan: the inescapable conclusion was that there was, relatively speaking, a new affluence afoot, a fundamentally different condition.

  Another resonant symbol of this changing state of affairs was the declining demand for allotments. ‘For the first time in years there is no queue for allotment sites in East Ham,’ reported the Star in January 1956, quoting a dismayed official from the local Allotment Association: ‘What has happened to them all? A few years ago all available ground in the borough was taken up. Today, with fewer sites, we find a great many of our plots are vacant and still more members are giving up this coming season.’ But of course it was not just vegetables that were being bought as a mixture of full employment, rising real wages, generally easier credit facilities – including in the flourishing mail-order sector – and few remaining constraints on supply pushed Britain into becoming by the mid-1950s, if not quite yet a fully fledged consumerist society, at least a proto-consumerist one. Indisputably in the vanguard was ‘the teenage consumer’, as he or she would soon be called. ‘Before the war many young workers handed over their earnings to “Mum” and received back an austere allowance of a few shillings to cover fares, snacks, and pocket money,’ whereas ‘in the post-war world the roles tend to be reversed’, noted Mark Abrams, the closest, most alert observer of the phenomenon, in May 1956. Now, he went on, ‘“Mum” is given £1 or £2 as a contribution to the family’s household expenditure and the young earner holds onto the rest’, so that in comparison with the generation earlier ‘the working boys or girls of today are magnificently well off, and their spending is one of the mainstays of many flourishing markets’. All this was predicated upon a labour market in which unskilled and semi-skilled youth labour was heavily in demand, resulting in the real earnings of teenagers being 50 per cent higher by 1957 than they had been in 1938. ‘There was plenty of work,’ a teenager in the Brighton area would recall. ‘There was no trouble getting work. . . Once you got to the age of sixteen you could go to any builders or garage or anywhere and get a job. . .’2

  It is impossible to know to what extent advertising fuelled this proto-consumerism, but certainly advertising itself was on the increase – its total expenditure up from 0.77 per cent of GNP in 1952 to 0.93 per cent by 1956, and this despite continuing newsprint rationing until 1956. Women’s magazines benefited particularly, with for instance Woman’s advertising revenue almost quintupling between 1951 and 1958. Another favourite target for advertising agencies was a fairly upmarket but still nuts-and-bolts magazine like Homes and Gardens, whose February 1954 issue, page 1, was typically devoted to the actress and singer Florence Desmond extolling the virtues of the Kenwood Chef – ‘saves hours of work, and makes a whole range of new exciting dishes possible’. So too Picture Post, which regularly in the mid-1950s included a lengthy ‘advertising feature’ on ‘The Modern Kitchen’, with the one in February 1956 insisting that ‘first-rate kitchen ware is something you will never regret possessing’. By contrast with the print format, television advertising from September 1955 took a while to find its feet, with many of the early commercials being too long and too clunky, remembered unfondly by Ronnie Kirkwood of the Colman Prentis & Varley agency as ‘loud-mouthed salesmen who confused shouting with communicating, and bullying with persuading’. Still, there were some palpable hits during the first 15 months or so, including an animated ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’ for Rice Krispies and the introduction of subsequently impermissible ‘pester power’ as a short-trousered boy implored, ‘Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum’. Gallup polled view
ers throughout the first year of commercial television, and despite high marks for Shell’s carefully produced miniature travelogues and for Mackesons with their comic animated stout bottles, easily the favourite was the jingling, catchy cartoon for Murraymints. ‘Viewers,’ noted the News Chronicle, ‘are amused by the lazy guardsman who refuses to obey orders until he’s finished his too-good-to-hurry-mint.’3

  ‘We queued up to see the incredible “house of the future” – and decided – no,’ recorded Madge Martin after visiting the Ideal Home Exhibition in March 1956, and she was almost certainly not alone in giving a shudder when she saw the Smithsons’ vision. Even so, in the here and now, most new homes in the 1950s were being built along self-consciously ‘modern’ lines, with the emphasis on informality, flexibility of purpose, the creation of as much space as possible, and the kitchen as an integral part of family life. This particularly applied to private housing, with the builders Taylor Woodrow in 1956 setting out their stall for a £2,195 bargain that was ‘the house every woman has dreamed about’:

  Design is based on the open-planning idea – a bold step indeed from the orthodox type of house of the 1930s for the whole ground floor is intercommunicated. Entering the house, with its attractive reeded glass door screen and shelves by the front door, is the lounge hall – a spacious, elegant room, 18½ feet long and 12 feet wide. Along the whole facing wall are built-in shelves, to hold, perhaps, a few cherished books, a choice ornament, treasured knick-knacks, or one of those delicate, trailing indoor plants. These are centred by an electric fitted log fire. The lounge sweeps through to the dining area, nearly 11 feet square with its low, wide picture-frame window. It leads to a dream of a kitchen, which again follows the wide-open look. A feature of this is the bright stainless steel, double-sided sink unit with built-in cupboards above and below. Another wall has more long built-in cupboards, and there are yet others to ceiling height, while still more are built around the most up-to-date of refrigerators, which is set at eye-level. Perhaps the most unique of all is a specially made breakfast-table fitment covered with scarlet Formica at working-top height with a cascade of drawers – one green baize lined for cutlery – and a space for the washing machine. Yes – this too is included in the price, and believe it or not, so is the electric clock on the wall.

  Nevertheless, there persisted significant working-class resistance to the open-plan revolution, or anything even faintly resembling it, especially if the traditional front-room parlour ‘for best’ was threatened. ‘Come and take a look at what they’ve done inside,’ the Borough Engineer for Harlow New Town said to Tosco Fyvel, researching a ‘This New England’ piece about a development comprising almost entirely young working-class families. ‘It’s worth it if you’re interested. In my first ten houses I put in a kitchen dining-alcove and a big living room. Not a family liked it. They all want a downstairs front and back, even if the rooms are poky.’

  It was much the same with furniture, with modern styles such as Robin Day’s (imbued with the Festival of Britain ethos) or Ercol (using natural materials) tending to be embraced with much more enthusiasm by the upper middle-class than by either the lower middle or the working class. Even G-Plan furniture, launched in 1953 by E. Gomme of High Wycombe and seeking, as one of their advertisements put it, to ‘combine the best in contemporary styling with sound construction and the finest finish – all at a moderate cost’, probably failed to penetrate below a certain point in the socio-economic scale. The commercial limits of Scandinavian-style ‘soft’ Modernism were pointed up by an exhibition, Register Your Choice, held at Charing Cross station in 1952 and subsequently analysed by Mass-Observation. The choice in question was between on the one hand a traditionally furnished room with dark woods and a three-piece suite, on the other a much more modern room with a light colour scheme and non-suite furniture. ‘It seems evident that as yet many people – probably most – judge furniture in terms of its apparent comfort and solidity, and distrust the capacity of contemporary styles to provide these advantages too,’ noted M-O in a tone of clear regret about a misguided preference largely coming from the working-class visitors to the exhibition. ‘There is much failure even to appreciate the aesthetic attraction of contemporary styles, much emotional resistance to this unfamiliar manner, much tendency to withdraw into the security of the familiar. . .’ Fyvel, inspecting the interiors in Harlow New Town in 1956, would have sympathised with M-O’s disappointment. ‘The houses seemed filled with bicycles, budgerigars, perambulators, and television sets,’ he rather sourly noted. ‘The rooms certainly struck one as small, perhaps because they were stuffed with unsuitable furniture. Oversize three-piece suites and clumsy sideboards hit the eye. Cheap mass-produced china ornaments stood on the chimney-piece or in the front window: haphazard coloured reproductions hung on the walls. The effect was uniformly ugly.’ In fact, he concluded: ‘In all the rooms I did not see one single piece of furniture or decoration of even moderately good taste.’4

  But whether tastes were acceptable or unacceptable, by the mid-1950s the age of DIY was dawning. Importantly, it was a supply as well as a demand revolution, including the emergence of emulsion paint and the paint roller as well as the selling of wallpaper through retail outlets. ICI was quickly on the case, with Dulux on sale by 1953, and in general optimistic white paint was starting to replace dirt-concealing brown as most amateur decorators’ colour of choice. So too Black & Decker, which in 1954 decided to enter the domestic market, developing for its electric drill such accessories as a lathe, saw attachment and bench stands – prelude to a major advertising campaign that autumn which resulted in a spectacular increase in sales. There were other landmarks. Bon Marché in Liverpool had by this time already opened its ‘Household Boutique’, aimed at women as much as men, and other department stores such as Heelas in Reading followed in 1955. DIY’s bespoke magazine, Practical Householder, was launched in October 1955, while in September 1956 there was the first of the annual Do-It-Yourself exhibitions at Olympia. A glance at the December 1956 issue of Practical Householder gives the prevailing flavour, with articles such as ‘Disguising that old Fireplace’, ‘A Contemporary Table Lamp: Made from a Darning Stool and Knitting Needles’, and ‘Modernising an Old Type Sewing Machine: To Include Built-in Shelves, Drawers, Cotton Wells and Stool’. Elsewhere, a large ad pictured a middle-aged man showing his son and daughter-in-law how to do it. ‘It’s quite an easy job to re-surface your kitchen table with FORMICA Laminated Plastic, and surprisingly economical,’ ran the text. ‘Half an hour’s pleasant work, and hey presto! you have a table with a top that will never stain, chip or crack, resists heat up to 310°F – a joy for years to come.’ The special delight of the magazine was its covers: invariably in bright colours, they almost always depicted a recently married husband and wife working happily together as a team on some ingenious, challenging, but ultimately do-able DIY project.5

  ‘Cannon Raises the Level of Cooking – With the Exclusive Foldaway Eye Level Grill’, ‘Bendix Automatically Makes Washing a Leisure – You Just Set It and Forget It’, ‘Swirlux – This Is The Way to Wash Your Clothes’ – consumer durables, above all washing machines, were starting in the 1950s to transform the everyday lives of millions of housewives. Market leader for washing machines was, by a long way, Hoover, which had moved into the field in 1948 (with its new factory near Merthyr Tydfil) and by 1955 was selling its Mark III Power Wringer, with its boffins still working on the twin-tub concept, while fridge manufacturers included Prescold, Electrolux, Coldrator (an Ambridge favourite), English Electric and Frigidaire. It is easy, though, to exaggerate at this stage the penetration of these so-called ‘white goods’. Vacuum cleaners may by 1955 have been in a majority of households, but washing machines were in only 18 per cent and refrigerators in a mere 8 per cent. In Wales, as late as 1960, there were fridges in just 5 per cent of households. On washday, the typical housewife was not the ecstatic figure of the washing-machine ads, nor indeed the duly grateful Judy Haines in Chingford, bu
t rather David Blunkett’s mother in a council house in Sheffield, ‘pummelling the clothes in the “dolly tub”’. Among those housewives fortunate enough to have labour-saving appliances, a survey was conducted in 1953 in order to guide manufacturers about female criteria for new appliances. Overwhelmingly the main consideration, found the survey, was durability; but it was soon a message wholly ignored, as built-in obsolescence became a deliberate manufacturing ploy, allied to marketing that increasingly emphasised fashion and novelty.6

  In the kitchen, the possibilities for innovative cooking steadily broadened – Kenneth Lo’s Cooking the Chinese Way sold 10,000 copies in hardback on its publication in 1954, while the following year, in her preface to the Penguin edition of her A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David noted that ‘so startlingly different is the food situation now (from two years previously) that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country’ – but more important for most people was the increasing availability of convenience foods. New additions in the mid-1950s included Colman’s ‘Instant Desserts’, Birds Eye frozen chicken pie and, most popular of all, Birds Eye Fish Fingers, introduced a fortnight before the start of commercial television and reputedly only saved by a last-minute name change from being called cod pieces. Even so, for all their time-saving advantage, there was often an innate resistance, essentially a social conservatism, that new foods had to break down. ‘I’m too old for these modern ideas,’ a 64-year-old labourer told Mass-Observation in 1953 about frozen foods (which anyway depended to a large extent on would-be consumers having refrigerators), while an advertisement in 1956 for Batchelors ‘Soup Mixes’ made much of how ‘if you pride yourself on serving freshly cooked food, warming up just isn’t good enough’, whereas in this case bringing the contents of the packet to the boil and simmering for 20 minutes meant that ‘you actually COOK the soup yourself’ and ‘you serve it freshly made’. As for drinks, tea-bags had yet to make their commercial appearance, but by 1954 Nescafé instant coffee had doubled its sales since the war and Maxwell House (‘America’s favourite coffee’) was poised to offer real competition. On the alcoholic front, the sales of canned beer for home drinking started to take off from 1956, and that Christmas off-licences reported a sharp rise, compared to previous Christmases, in the sale of wine. In this whole area of eating and drinking, though, there was one particularly emblematic food. ‘Collected 15/- Sainsbury chicken,’ noted Judy Haines on the first Friday of August 1956. ‘My! It was good!’ It may well have been a chicken produced by John Eastwood, Nottinghamshire pioneer of factory farming methods that in time transformed chicken from one of the most expensive to one of the most affordable dishes; and it may also have been about the time that when I was having Sunday lunch at my uncle and aunt’s Shropshire farm, my little cousin piped up as the trolley was wheeled in, ‘Oh no, not another bloody chicken!’ My mother, living in Grove Park in south-east London, where chicken was still a special treat, could not get over it.7