Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (11 page)

3

Oh Wonderful People of Britain!

‘Seventeen days since V.E. Day, and never have I seen a nation change so quickly from a war mentality to a peace mentality,’ observed the diplomat-turned-writer Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart near the end of May 1945. ‘The war [ie that was continuing in the Far East and was expected to last well into 1946] has disappeared from the news . . . Sport and the election now fill the front pages.’ Sport included what was still the national game, and on 22 May the First ‘Victory’ Test ended at Lord’s with Australia pummelling an ageing England attack to win by six wickets. For Gladys Langford there was a rare treat that day, in the company of Mr Burchell, a fellow-resident at her hotel: ‘He took me first to the Saviours’ Arms at Westminster where we had a substantial lunch – then we tried to get into a cinema but there were queues everywhere. We finally went to the Polytechnic after which, queues being in evidence, everywhere, we had fish & chips in a Soho “dive” where coloured men [probably American servicemen] were much in evidence. To be taken out at 55 is quite a triumph.’ Anyone who had imagined that life would suddenly become easier in that first summer of peace was swiftly disabused. Judy Haines, however, took it all in her stride:

16
May
. Mother and Dad H. came to tea. Abbé [her husband, whose real name was Alfred] made the jelly and blancmange. Mother played and I sang – for 2 hours. The husbands seemed very happy about it. Then we became engrossed in KANUGO [a card game], till nearly 11 o’clock. Very satisfactory evening.

19
May
. As usual at holiday time [the Whit weekend], queues everywhere in Chingford . . . The bread queue was the longest I have ever seen, and think many were disappointed. We had just about sufficient, and I have always Ryvita to help out.

26
May
. Cleared out tallboy. Listened to
Pride & Prejudice
. The ration this week, of chops, contained some suet. Good! Chopped it and wrapped it in flour for future suet pudding.

For Henry St John, working a few days later in Midsomer Norton, there was as ever only frustration – ‘I tried in vain to buy some Ovaltine, this being the 11th successive shop at which I failed to get it, although it continues to be widely advertised’ – but there was some compensation when, on the train back to Bristol, an American soldier gave him a Camel cigarette. The American influence, and indeed anything that smacked of the modern, did not play well with Ernest Loftus in Essex. ‘Mrs Williams [the French mistress] and I are taking joint action to stop our scholars attending Youth Clubs or, as I call them, Child Night Clubs,’ noted Barking Abbey School’s head in early June. ‘So far as our type of school is concerned they are a menace. The world is sex-mad & they are the outcome of the sex-urge + the war + the cinema + evil books + a debased art & music + an uneducated parentage.’
^1.

For one American, the writer Edmund Wilson, the experience of arriving in London later in June and putting up at the Green Park Hotel in Half Moon Street proved a salutary revelation of the Old World’s post-bellum bleakness:

I was given a little room with yellow walls rubbed by greasy heads above the bed – little daybed with horrible brown cover that seemed to be impregnated with dirt – wooden washstand with no towel – brown carpet with rhomboidal pattern, stained and full of dust – piles of dirt in plain sight in corners – small shit-colored coal grate with dismal gas logs in corner. The dining room, with slovenly wretched waitresses – stains of soup, eggs, and jam on the table that seemed never to have been wiped off.

None of this, though, pierced Wilson’s heart. But for Surrey’s scholar-naturalist Eric Parker, driving through ‘the Fold Country’ (between Blackdown and Godalming) on the last day of May to see what had happened to his county’s favourite corner since he had last been there in 1940, it was very different. ‘The Fold Country was an aerodrome,’ he found. ‘Oak woods had been uprooted, engines of steel had torn out by the roots cottages and fields of corn.’ Getting out of his car and wandering down a favourite lane, he suddenly found himself on a plain he had never seen before: ‘The woods had gone. The lane had come to an end. Instead, in front of me stretched a vast flat space, a mile-wide level with a mile-deep highway broadening out to where I stood . . . There in the mid-distance were the huge noses of steel machines lifting into the sky, monstrous waiting insects.’ Consolation came only when he reached Dunsfold and ‘its green with the old black-smith’s shop, and the Bricklayers’ Arms, and a cottage on the green covered with white roses, and another cottage with scarlet geraniums climbing to the windows – all as it used to be, years ago, in the Fold Country’.

Even in May 1945 there appeared two books that in time would fuel a nostalgia industry: Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
(early reviews dominated by perceptions of the novel’s snobbishness) and the Rev. W. Awdry’s
The Three Railway Engines
. The latter was published by Edmund Ward, a fine-art printer in Leicester who was, as Awdry later put it, ‘appalled at the lack of good quality literature for children available in the shops’. The irresistible size and format were almost certainly chosen with the aim of saving paper, and in ‘The Sad Story of Henry’ there featured the Fat Director (‘My doctor has forbidden me to pull’). The first performance of Benjamin Britten’s
Peter Grimes
, at Sadler’s Wells on 7 June, struck an altogether more pioneering note, as the National Opera Company returned home from a war spent touring. ‘After each curtain call,’ a member of the audience recalled, ‘people turned to one another excitedly while continuing to applaud; it was as if they wanted not simply to express their enthusiasm but to share it with their neighbours.’ Grimes himself, a rough-hewn fisherman, was a rounded, ultimately tragic figure, far removed from the usual dramatic depiction of the lower classes as little more than buffoons. ‘It looks as if the old spell on British opera may be broken at last!’ Britten wrote soon afterwards in response to an appreciative letter.
^2.

But some things never changed, or closed, and less than a week later Henry St John, briefly up in town, was in the fourth row at the Windmill: ‘The first scene included a sideways view of a nude, and a front view of a woman whose breasts were bare. I delayed masturbation until another para-nude appeared seen frontways, with drapery depending between the exposed breasts. Actually the most erotic scene was one featuring Jane Rock with a diaphanous scarf across her bosom, because during her dancing this flimsy covering jerked away to expose the white globes of her breasts and the nipples.’ The Lord Chamberlain’s rules insisted on statuesque poses, but for the diarist it was still enough to make him entitle the top of his page ‘A GLIMPSE OF BEAUTY’. Shortly afterwards, a young would-be writer, working for the Leeds firm J. T. Buckton & Sons, had the thrill of seeing his first article (‘Music Hath Charms’) appear in print, in the July issue of
London
Opinion
, but sadly for its author, Keith Waterhouse, ‘my fellow-clerks were more interested in the tasteful nudes’.

Another young provincial had a rather more shattering experience. Dennis Potter, the ten-year-old son of a Forest of Dean miner, spent most of the summer lodging (with his mother and sister) in his grandfather’s small terraced house in Hammersmith, while they waited for a council house in the Forest. He went to a local school, where he was mercilessly teased because of his accent, and spent many hours in the Hammersmith Gaumont, a huge Art Deco cinema complete with a gleaming white Hammond organ, transparent curtains and a projector that shed ‘blue tobacco smoke’ light. But what affected him most intimately were the attentions of his just-demobilised Uncle Ernie, also lodging at 56 Rednall Terrace and deputed to share a bed with his nephew. Years later, Potter was asked if he had told anyone about the drink-induced abuse that he had suffered during those weeks. ‘I couldn’t talk about it,’ he replied. ‘You don’t know the circumstances, the house, and the sense that I had, that it would be like throwing a bomb into the middle of everything that made me feel secure. So . . .’
^3.

It was also an election summer. Churchill’s strong preference – shared by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, and his most important colleague, Ernest Bevin – was for the wartime coalition to continue until Japan was defeated. But at its party conference in Blackpool on 21 May, Labour’s rank and file almost unanimously endorsed its National Executive’s unwillingness to extend the coalition’s life beyond October, whether or not Japan was defeated by then. Churchill responded by dissolving the coalition, forming a caretaker administration and calling a general election for 5 July. The Blackpool mood was almost rapturously optimistic, with loud and prolonged ovations being given to speakers old and new. ‘It is in no pure Party spirit that we are going into this election,’ the Tredegar firebrand Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan told them. ‘We know that in us, and in us alone, lies the economic salvation of this country and the opportunity of providing a great example to the world.’ He went on, with his matchless, inspiriting, immoderate oratory:

We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders. We enter this campaign not merely to get rid of the Tory majority – that will not be enough for our task. It will not be sufficient to get a parliamentary majority. We want the complete political extinction of the Tory Party, and twenty-five years of Labour Government. We cannot do in five years what requires to be done. It needs a new industrial revolution. We require that modern industrial science be applied to our heavy industry. It can only be done by men with modern minds, by men of a new age. It can only be done by the fine young men and women that we have seen in this Conference this week.

Few finer than Major Denis Healey and Captain Roy Jenkins – both prospective candidates, both in uniform, though Healey in battledress, Jenkins in service dress. Cuffs turned back and all eyes on him, Healey won applause by invoking his own experience of Europe in the past three years, claiming that ‘the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’, and boldly insisting that ‘the crucial principle of our own foreign policy should be to protect, assist, encourage and aid in every way the Socialist revolution wherever it appears’. It was, his friend and rival Jenkins would recall with wryness as much as affection, a ‘macho’ and ‘striking’ performance.
^4.

Churchill could hardly have made a more counterproductive start to his campaign. ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent,’ he rashly declared in his opening radio broadcast on 4 June. ‘They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders.’ The immediate reaction of Judy Haines was almost certainly typical of middle opinion: ‘I thought it was awful. He condemned the socialists and used the word “Gestapo” on their policy of continuing to direct people into jobs until the world is a bit more put-to-rights.’ Twenty-four hours later her reaction to the latest broadcast was very different: ‘Attlee spoke, and after Churchill’s outburst of last evening, I found it pleasant listening. He dealt with Churchill’s accusation, but didn’t counter-accuse.’ Nevertheless, there remained a widespread assumption that Churchill’s indisputably fine record as a war leader would be enough to see the Tories home. ‘I think this election is going to be alright,’ their licensed maverick, Bob Boothby, wrote to the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook on the 8th, ‘and that the P.M. will pull it off. Without him I would not give the Tories two hundred seats.’

Churchill’s three subsequent election broadcasts did improve somewhat – though even so, Vita Sackville-West thought them ‘confused, woolly, unconstructed and so wordy that it is impossible to pick out any concrete impression from them’ – and towards the end of June he undertook a three-day tour of the north and Scotland in which, amid high levels of enthusiasm, he addressed no fewer than 27 meetings. In London, however, his appearances met with a less positive response. In Chelsea, as he drove down Royal Avenue making the inevitable but now anachronistic ‘V’ sign, ‘nobody cheered, and the silence was dire’; in Islington it was the same, reducing the great man to taking off his hat to a passing bus, bowing to it and saying, ‘Good night, bus!’; in Camberwell he was booed, and in Southwark he even had to be rescued by police from a crowd turning ugly. He continued to trust to the tunes he knew best. ‘A glib and specious policy may have unpleasant booby traps attached to it,’ he wrote in the
News of the World
the Sunday before polling. ‘That is my view of nationalisation and socialism. History has shown – and this war has confirmed it – that the genius and greatness of our race lie in the encouragement and development of free enterprise and the spirit of adventure and self reliance which go with it.’ But deep down he perhaps knew that this time around those tunes would not be enough. ‘I’ve tried them with pep and I’ve tried them with pap,’ he confided at one point (reputedly to Attlee of all people), ‘and I still don’t know what they want.’
^5.