Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  I’ve never written to a newspaper before, and I have no political affiliations, though I voted Tory last time, but I can remember the horror of the last war. There must be some way of stopping Eden. (Mrs E.H., Windsor)

  Thank heaven at last this country is going to stop being pushed around by all and sundry. Old Eighth Army ‘rats’ welcome the news that we are landing to protect the Suez – despite the cowardly bleats of the Socialists. (J.M., Barnet, Herts)

  Between noon and 3.00 p.m. there was in the Commons what Richard Crossman called ‘another bear-garden’, including ‘boos and catcalls’ for the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, before the focus switched to Eden’s television and radio broadcast that evening. ‘All my life I have been a man of peace,’ he almost pleadingly insisted, but he was adamant that ‘chaos in the Middle East could permanently lower the standard of life in this country and in Europe, as well as in many poorer countries in the world’, and he continued to call the Anglo-French intervention no more than a ‘police action’. The diarists privately gave their verdicts:

  A dishonest but able performance. (Nicolson)

  An odious performance to me but effective. (Benn)

  One of the most plangent appeals I have ever heard to the soapy floating voter and the liberal conscience. (Crossman)

  Sounded tired, understandably, & I thought it could be better. (Marian Raynham)

  Sounded a very tired man. (Preston)

  Not everyone tuned in. ‘It was no use planning to stay up till 10 o’clock to listen to Eden’s speech,’ ruefully noted Last, ‘it would have destroyed any chance of sleep for both of us. . .’ Fairlie, back from the West Country, also almost certainly missed it. ‘Now, of course, things have been diversified by the arrest of Henry for not appearing before the bankruptcy courts,’ related a not entirely displeased Amis next day to Larkin, adding that ‘he spent last night in Brixton’.6

  On Sunday morning the most celebrated – and execrated – editorial of the Suez Crisis appeared. The action against Egypt, asserted the Observer, ‘endangered the American alliance and Nato, split the Commonwealth, flouted the United Nations, shocked the overwhelming majority of world opinion and dishonoured the name of Britain’, while an accompanying piece on the same page accused Eden’s government of ‘crookedness’ as well as ‘folly’. This made an appropriate appetiser to the main event of the day: a mass ‘Stop the War’ rally in Trafalgar Square, attended by at least 10,000, with many holding aloft ‘LAW NOT WAR!’ banners. The main speaker was Aneurin Bevan, whose beautifully delivered putdown would be a clip deservedly played again and again over the years: ‘If Sir Anthony is sincere in what he says – and he may be – then he is too stupid to be Prime Minister.’ After the demo, in the early evening, several thousand surged down Whitehall and headed for ungated Downing Street (where an apprehensive Cabinet was in session), only to be blocked by mounted police. Gaitskell, meanwhile, was rehearsing his 10.00 p.m. broadcast reply to Eden. ‘What he had to say was so compelling,’ noted an admiring Benn in the wings, ‘that all the technicians stood completely silently and listened to every word. What a contrast to their usual lulling and whispering and hurried glances at the sports news from the evening papers.’ In the broadcast itself, Gaitskell stressed the international aspect: ‘We are doing all this alone, except for France: opposed by the world, in defiance of the world. It is not a police action; there is no law behind it. We have taken the law into our own hands.’ Near the end, ill-advisedly, he called on potential Tory rebels to come out and force Eden’s resignation – a call that, with just a few exceptions, served to reinforce Tory tribalism. It also stuck in many people’s gullets that he was adopting such a critical tone only hours before British forces were due to go into battle on enemy territory, not least in the gullets of the troops themselves. ‘Such expressions of fury and disgust and revulsion as I have rarely seen among grown men’ was how Anthony Howard, on one of the troopships steaming towards Port Said, recalled their reaction.7

  Over the weekend there had been another, heartbreaking international dimension. ‘SOVIET TANKS CRUSH RESISTANCE’ was the Manchester Guardian’s bleak headline on Monday morning, as it became brutally clear that the Russians had taken advantage of the Suez situation to exercise their military might over the Budapest rebels. ‘One feels guilty at one’s impotence – & our folly has distracted the attention of the world from this tragedy,’ bitterly reflected Violet Bonham Carter on the Sunday. ‘I cannot forgive it.’ Next day, the Mirror had no compunction about making the link. ‘Once British bombs fell on Egypt the fate of Hungary was sealed,’ asserted its leader. ‘The last chance of exerting moral pressure on Russia was lost when Eden defied the United Nations over Suez.’ Almost certainly Khrushchev would have acted as he did anyway, sooner rather than later, but undeniably Suez provided opportune cover. For Edward Thompson and John Saville, putting the final touches to the new issue of the Reasoner, there was just time on the Sunday to write an editorial taking account of ‘the tragic news of the attack’:

  The intervention of Soviet troops in Hungary must be condemned by all Communists. The working people and students of Budapest were demonstrating against an oppressive regime which gave them no adequate democratic channels for expressing the popular will. The fact that former fascists and those working for the restoration of Capitalism joined the revolutionaries does not alter this central issue. The criminal blunder of unleashing Security Police and Soviet forces against these crowds provoked the mass of the people to take up arms, in the name of independence, liberty and justice, against an oppression that was operated in the name of Communism.

  This evening the British Communist Party ran true to form, its executive committee issuing a statement that ‘the Soviet Union, in responding to the appeal made to them to help defend Socialism in Hungary, is also helping to defend peace and the interests of the world working class’. And next morning the Daily Worker’s main headline, ‘NEW HUNGARIAN ANTI-FASCIST GOVT IN ACTION’, was matched only by its blithe sub-head: ‘Soviet troops called in to stop White Terror’.8

  Elsewhere in the press, on this Monday the 5th that saw British paratroopers landing on Egyptian soil, there was the now usual daily barrage of correspondence, including from Leslie Meek of Wembley. ‘I am firmly convinced,’ he declared in the Daily Mail, ‘that before long the majority of people in this country will be saying “Thank God for Eden” – just as we said “Thank God for Churchill” during the last war.’ Eva Faithfull of Reading disagreed. After explaining in the News Chronicle how as an Austrian she had ‘lived in Vienna during the whole Nazi regime’ and felt a ‘sense of acute shame at the actions of my own country’, and how she had then moved to England after the war and felt ‘happy and secure’, Marianne’s mother went on: ‘Now, as a grown woman, I am experiencing at the present time the same sense of helpless shame at the actions of our Government’. During the day, Raynham spotted Surbiton graffiti (‘Gaitskell is a Traitor’ scrawled just outside her gate and ‘We want Eden’ across the road), while Kenneth Williams passed a time of rare harmony with Tony Hancock: ‘We talked of Suez – the action of Eden in Egypt – we deplored it.’ This afternoon in the Commons featured the by now customary acrimonious scenes. ‘Has the Prime Minister exchanged congratulations with Mr Khrushchev?’ Healey asked Eden, to loud cheers from Labour MPs, and Bevan, ‘red-faced and bursting with fury’ according to the Mirror, ‘banged the despatch box and shouted, “Will the Government stop lying to the House of Commons?”’.9

  In the West End, the shock news came through at about four o’clock that, in view of the international situation, Buckingham Palace had requested the cancellation of this evening’s Royal Command Variety show. ‘I just cannot believe it’s true,’ declared a distraught Sabrina, who had been due to sing ‘Temptation’, backed by the Nitwits. ‘And there was I insisting that they made the neck higher so that no one should protest about my appearance. It’s . . . oh, I don’t know what to say.’ Still, quite apart from bonfires
and fireworks, there were plenty of alternative attractions this evening. Madge Martin in Oxford saw another MM (‘certainly an enchanting creature’) in Bus Stop; Tommy Steele gave his first major live performance, at the Sunderland Empire; on the box there was the debut of Granada’s What The Papers Say; and in Gravesend, Benn addressed three protest meetings, though the poor turn-out ‘rather confirmed what I had suspected: that ordinary people are not yet moved on this issue’. A better-attended protest meeting was at Colchester Town Hall, where the speaker was the pro-Soviet Labour MP Konni Zilliacus. ‘He had quivering, fat jowls,’ recalled John Sutherland, and ‘in his Finnish accent he asked rhetorically: “What must a British soldier feel, as he drives his tanks against Egyptian women and children?” “Make the buggers run!” shouted back a member of the Young Conservative claque, who had taken over several of the front rows. Uproar ensued.’10

  The main political news on Tuesday morning, offsetting the successful landing at dawn of the main invasion force, was a Gallup poll – conducted late the previous week – showing that only 40 per cent agreed with Eden’s Middle East policy, whereas 46 per cent disagreed and 14 per cent were don’t knows. Among the letters to the papers, probably the pick was Peter Ustinov’s to the Manchester Guardian, attacking the ‘odious hypocrisy’ of the government’s claim to have been conducting no more than a ‘police action’. Another letter was from C. P. Snow to his brother Philip. ‘I don’t think a total war is likely,’ he cautiously predicted, ‘but one can’t be sure that it’s impossible & perhaps we ought to make emergency plans.’

  The crucial information Snow did not have was that during the morning’s Cabinet, Macmillan as Chancellor had outlined the severe pressure that Britain’s financial reserves were now under and the unwillingness of the Americans to come to the rescue by offering dollar loans, with Macmillan concluding that in economic terms there was no alternative but to end the military action. Accordingly, a consensus emerged that a ceasefire would be announced later in the day. Eden duly did so in the Commons in the late afternoon, to resounding cheers from the Tories behind him. ‘One of them said aloud, “What exactly are we cheering?”,’ recorded Benn on the basis of information emanating from Bob Boothby. ‘Gerald Nabarro, who was beside him, exclaimed in a stage whisper, “We are cheering the last chance to save our political bacon, old boy. That’s what we’re cheering and make no mistake about it.”’ According to Crossman, ‘the general Labour view’ as members left the Chamber was that ‘this was the greatest climb-down in history and that Eden couldn’t survive’. In the short term, they reckoned without the BBC, which had been Eden-friendly almost throughout the crisis and now treated the ceasefire news as, in the words of the historian Tony Shaw, ‘a vindication of the government’s daring action rather than what it actually was, an enforced and humiliating halt’. Among the diarists there seems to have been a prevailing sense of relief – ‘shameful relief’ in Nicolson’s case (as he told his wife), while for Last, despite this good news, ‘the waste, destruction & chaos makes me shudder’.11

  ‘“Bloody Yanks,” muttered my father, without looking up from his Daily Mail,’ remembered Anton Rippon about the Suez aspect of his Derby childhood. ‘“They’ve always been the bloody same.”’ A similar reaction around the country meant that during the week or so after Eden had announced the ceasefire, there was a perceptible shift of sentiment towards the government – that, in fact, Nabarro had called it right. The cumulative evidence was striking. A poll of 550 people in ten different London districts ‘immediately after the ceasefire’ found that 272 broadly approved of the government’s intervention, 166 disapproved, and 112 had no firm opinion either way; letters sent to the Yorkshire Post were starting by the 8th to run strongly in the government’s favour, while across the Pennines the voluminous daily postbags arriving at the Manchester Guardian showed a steadily declining majority against the action; a Gallup poll taken on the 10th and 11th revealed 53 per cent approving of the government’s action and only 32 per cent disapproving; the composer William Walton, who at the start of the month had been equating Eden to Mussolini, was by the 13th fearing that if the Russians ‘get Suez they’ve fairly got us by the balls (or testicles if you will) & they can cut (or bite) them off at any time they please’; and at a by-election at Chester on the 15th, the Tory vote held up sufficiently well to make it clear that, at a time of national crisis, the middle-class revolt against the party had run out of steam. John Fowles saw things differently. ‘The Tory Party are fundamentally wrong in their action over Egypt,’ began his letter to the New Statesman that appeared on the 10th, ‘and it seems pretty certain that they have handicapped themselves out of the race in the next election.’12

  The reverberations of Budapest, meanwhile, were only just starting. The Daily Worker on the 9th published a letter from Eric Hobsbawm, who as his alter ego of New Statesman jazz critic Francis Newton had recently described Elvis Presley as ‘a peculiarly unappealing Texan lad . . . with a line in suggestive belly-dancing’. Here, he called ‘the suppression of a popular movement, however wrong-headed, by a foreign army’ as ‘at best a tragic necessity’, though at the same time stated that he was ‘approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary’. Then in the paper exactly a week later, in the same issue in which a group of docker-members of the party (including Jack Dash) stated that ‘we regard as fully justified the calling in, at a late hour, of the Red Army to safeguard the working class of Hungary’, there was an important piece by Peter Fryer, who in October had gone to Budapest as the paper’s correspondent and had now resigned after his reports had not been used. In it he insisted that the Soviet troops who had entered the city on 4 November were not fighting fascists, but instead ‘they fought workers, soldiers and students’, and ‘could find no Hungarians to fight alongside them’. The following week he elaborated in the New Statesman. ‘From start to finish the Daily Worker – or rather the Stalinists who control it – has lied, lied, lied about Hungary,’ Fryer wrote. ‘Shame on a newspaper which can spit on a nation’s anguish and grief. Shame on party leaders who can justify with smooth clichés and lies the massacre and martyrdom of a proud and indomitable people.’

  Other Daily Worker journalists also left the paper and the party – including Llew Gardner (future television reporter) and Leon Griffiths (future creator of Minder) – during these often difficult, even agonising times for many Communists, not just journalists. ‘We are both in an awful dilemma,’ wrote one Nottinghamshire couple on the 13th to a friend in Leeds who was also a CP member, in his case in the process of leaving. ‘When one has devoted a number of years, and sacrificed one’s family life, for something we firmly believed would benefit mankind, then one doesn’t give up easily . . .’ But the fact was that ‘we are both terribly disgusted with events in Hungary as we feel sure many comrades are’. Altogether, over the coming days and months, some 7,000 individual Communists did leave the party, representing around one-fifth of the membership. Those who stayed loyal included Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill and many trade unionists, though not Les Cannon of the Electrical Trades Union; those who went included Thompson, Saville, Doris Lessing and the youthful historian Raphael Samuel, as well as the Daily Worker journalists. ‘It wasn’t easy psychologically for me to leave the Party, even with the events of 1956 as my solid reason,’ recalled Jean McCrindle over half a century later. ‘I had heard my father [a CP member who stayed] say often that people who left the Party were weak and neurotic bourgeois individualists who usually “ended up” needing Freudian psycho-analysis – another bête noire to communists of that generation. I seem to remember Doris Lessing being put in this category after she left. Everything was political. Personal private life was of no consequence compared to the collective comradeship of the fight for the future world revolution.’13

  Back on the Suez front, there were mixed post-ceasefire fortunes for those parts of the fourth estate that had spoken out against Eden. The Manchester Guardian lost readers in th
e north, but gained many more in the south; the Mirror and News Chronicle took significant circulation hits, of 80,000 and 25,000 respectively; and the Observer’s circulation – contrary to subsequent mythology – did not fall (despite Margaret and Denis Thatcher cancelling their subscription), but there was a serious loss of advertising, the start of a long commercial decline for the paper. For the Spectator’s Ian Gilmour, these were personally fraught times. ‘Eden is indeed unspeakable,’ he wrote on 19 November to Hugh Trevor-Roper in Oxford. ‘In the present semi-fascist atmosphere up here it is considered treacherous to whisper a word of criticism. When I go into my club [White’s], I feel as if I had been cheating at cards or something vile like that! Still we go plugging on even though our readers leave us in shoals.’14

  Nor were these easy times for many other people. On the 20th – three days before Eden left for three weeks’ much-criticised recuperation in Jamaica – it was announced that petrol rationing (a weekly maximum of 200 miles for private motorists) would start in mid-December, a development that led directly to BMC’s Leonard Lord inviting back Alec Issigonis, designer of the Morris Minor, to create a new, fuel-efficient car: the Mini. Then on 3 December there were two further announcements: that the British forces would be withdrawing from Egypt and the tax on petrol would rise by 40 per cent. ‘Newswise it’s altogether a wretched Wednesday morn – petrol up to 6/- a gallon, bread going up, dollar reserves down a wump, a promise of increased income tax,’ gloomily reported Virginia Graham on the 5th to Joyce Grenfell. ‘It really does seem to have been a disastrous enterprise, & even Tony, who has been staunchly pro-Eden, is beginning to feel it wasn’t quite the most brilliant idea he ever had.’ Eden himself returned to the Commons on the 17th and was greeted, according to Panter-Downes, by ‘a decent amount of friendly cheering by some, but noticeably not all, of the Tories, and decibels of ringing silence from the Labour and Liberal benches’. Three days later in the Chamber, he explicitly denied collusion: ‘I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt – there was not.’15 The politics of Suez were not yet played out.