Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (13 page)

An impressed visitor was André Gide’s translator, Dorothy Bussy. ‘Everyone,’ she wrote to him from London on 16 July, ‘is extraordinarily kind and attentive and unselfish – bus conductors, the travellers in buses and trains and tubes, policemen of course, but food officials too.’ She was also struck by ‘London’s ruins’, which were ‘now a garden of grass and wild flowers, green & pink and yellow, springing of their own accord in the wastes’. The following evening, some 27,000 kind and attentive Londoners packed into the Spurs ground at White Hart Lane to see Doncaster’s Bruce Woodcock win the British and Empire heavyweight titles with a sixth-round knockout. ‘For Jack Solomons, the promoter, the fight was a triumph,’ the local Tottenham paper noted. ‘The crowd paid from 5/- to 10 guineas to see it. About 5,000 came by cars which lined each side of 30 side streets around the ground.’
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On the radio, clashing with a transmission of
Peter Grimes
, Raymond Glendenning’s plummy, excitable commentary was complemented by the magisterial inter-round summaries of W. Barrington Dalby.

Nothing mattered more, though, than a roof over the head. ‘In the country something stirs,’ the Independent MP W. J. Brown observed in his diary on 12 July. ‘A bunch of people at Brighton, calling themselves the Vigilantes, have set about solving the housing problem in their own way, by commandeering any house that is empty and installing in it a family in need of accommodation.’ It was not a well-documented campaign, but later that month Frederic Osborn noted how in the past few weeks there had been ‘organised squatting in empty mansions, with enough public approval to force the Government and the authorities into more active requisitioning’.

For those with a home or aspiring to one, there was the
Daily
Herald
Post-war Homes Exhibition at Dorland Hall in London’s Regent Street. ‘They could just give me
any
of it, and I should think it wonder-ful,’ a young middle-class married woman told Mass-Observation. ‘Honestly I liked it
all
. I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. I can’t criticise or judge it at all – four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition.’ M-O found pessimism on the part of some of the working-class wives at the exhibition. ‘I feel it’s pretty hopeless,’ one said. ‘I’ll never be able to afford to buy the fitments to modernise our kitchen. It would cost an awful lot to convert.’ Asked what they liked best, more than three-quarters of those interviewed nominated the demonstration kitchens. ‘The lovely kitchens, so fresh and clean,’ said one woman. ‘The kitchens, everything tucked away and all flush and it saves so much stooping,’ replied another, and a third was yet more expansive: ‘It was the kitchenette. I think that’s what interests most women, all the cupboard room. It’s a lovely idea, covered in under the sink. I’ve wanted that for years and we’ve never had it.’
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The members of the London Stock Exchange probably had no strong views either way about kitchenettes. What really mattered to those stockbrokers and jobbers, atavistically Tory almost to a man, was the outcome of the election. Their unofficial spokesman and bell-wether was a cheery, birdlike, veteran member called Walter Landells. Under the name ‘Autolycus’ – a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles – he had for years contributed a daily column to the City’s pink bible, the
Financial
Times
. ‘That Mr Churchill and his party will be returned is practically taken for granted,’ Autolycus declared on Thursday, 19 July; ‘the point of uncertainty is the sum of the majority.’ He was just as confident by the following Tuesday (‘No sign exists in the Stock Exchange of apprehension’), while the paper’s front-page headlines were similarly optimistic: ‘Cheerful Market Tone Maintained’ that same day, ‘Market Steadiness Well Maintained’ on the Wednesday, and ‘Firm and Confident Tone of Markets’ on the Thursday itself, the 26th. That, though, was merely the public face of the Stock Exchange. Were its habitués – widely if fallaciously assumed to have an unparalleled insight into the future – truly so certain there would not be a dreadful upset? Perhaps they were, but it is worth recording the remark to Mass-Observation by the manager of a London bookshop: ‘Well, what’s going to be the result on Thursday? I was told last week that the betting on the London Stock Exchange was 6 to 4 on Labour getting in.’
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It is unlikely that Landells was part of the clever money and giving a deliberately misleading steer, but one never knows.

The Foreign Office, and Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart’s pen, provide as good a vantage point as any for the crucial hours of a day of destiny: ‘The election results began to come in as soon as I reached the office at about 10 a.m. The first returns showed Labour gains, but as they came from the industrial north no one was very excited. But as the morning approached midday, it was already clear that the tide was running strongly in favour of the Left. Early on, there were casualties among the ministers, Harold Macmillan being one of the first to fall.’ All over the country, that morning and into the afternoon as the weather in many places turned wet, individual fates were determined. Durbin won comfortably in Edmonton; Castle was returned in Blackburn, Foot in Plymouth Devonport; Healey lost in Pudsey and Otley, Jenkins in Solihull; a promising young Tory, Flight-Lieutenant Reginald Maudling, went down in Heston and Isleworth. In Cardiff South exuberant Labour supporters carried the winning candidate, Lieutenant James Callaghan, shoulder high from the city hall; in Coventry there was only a sparse gathering to applaud the two winning Labour candidates, one of them the gifted intellectual Richard Crossman. In Abertillery (Labour majority over 24,000) a vengeful Labour agent insisted on a recount in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the Tory lose his deposit; in Kettering, as it became clear that Naomi Mitchison’s husband had won, ‘Profumo himself was being very decent,’ though later he ‘made the gesture which was not really very tactful of giving Dick a sheet of House of Commons note paper’.

Bruce Lockhart, meanwhile, lunched at the Dorchester with the flour miller and film magnate J. Arthur Rank: ‘There was a huge board (with results) in the hall. Many people were watching it, mostly with glum faces. Already Labour had gained over a hundred seats. When I came down from Rank’s room, the faces round the board were even glummer. Labour had now over 300 seats with over 150 more results to come. A complete majority over
all
other parties was therefore certain.’ The atmosphere was still gloomier at an election luncheon given by the press magnate’s wife Lady Rothermere. ‘Although the champagne was exiguous and the vodka watery, the spectacle of consternation as details of the massacre spread was a strong intoxicant,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote home about a party ‘full of chums dressed up to the nines and down in the dumps’. For Graham Greene, then literary editor of the
Spectator
, there was a purely private emotion involved. The writer Walter Allen met him for lunch at Rules, where as they sat down Greene’s eye was caught by the dramatic
Evening Standard
headline ‘SOCIALISTS IN’. ‘Damn!’ exclaimed Greene. ‘Don’t you approve, Graham?’ asked Allen. Greene replied that he didn’t care one way or the other, indeed hadn’t even bothered to vote, but that on the assumption the Tories would win had been planning to make a telephone call at 3.00. ‘There won’t,’ he added, ‘be any point in doing so now.’ It transpired that Greene had been intending to ring the Reform Club, where his magazine’s editor Wilson Harris – a Churchill-supporting MP and detested by Greene – lunched every day. The message to be left was that Harris was to call at 10 Downing Street at 3.30.14 Labour’s first overall majority in its history had inconsiderately thwarted the practical joke.

Towards the end of the afternoon, after a family tea at the Great Western Hotel, the imperturbable Attlee arrived at Transport House in Smith Square. Among an excited crowd of Labour activists and others waiting to greet him was the 20-year-old Anthony Wedgwood Benn. A BBC man pressed a microphone in front of his face and asked, ‘Will you shout, “Three cheers for the Prime Minister”?’ but he was too shy and the honour passed elsewhere. At about 7.15p.m., having with Bevin’s help thwarted an ignoble, last-ditch attempt by Herbert Morrison to wrest the party leadership, Attlee set out for Buckingham Palace, where Churchill was in the process of resigning. He travelled, as he had done throughout the election campaign, in a Hillman Minx family saloon, with his wife Vi driving. ‘I’ve won the election,’ he told the King, in a rather strained conversation between two decidedly non-loquacious men. ‘I know,’ was the reply. ‘I heard it on the six o’clock news.’ Vi then drove the new Prime Minister to Central Hall, Westminster. There were many other Labour celebrations that evening – including one at the Assembly Hall in Luton, where Warbey and his supporters celebrated a spanking majority of more than 7,000 – but this victory rally was the epicentre. The big words flowed freely. ‘This great victory for socialism will bring a message of hope to every democracy all over the world,’ Laski (mockingly calling himself ‘the temporary head of the socialist Gestapo’) told the faithful. Bevin promised that the new government would ‘speak as a common man to the common man in other lands’. And Attlee himself announced, ‘This is the first time in the history of the country that a labour movement with a socialist policy has received the approval of the electorate.’ He then went on to the balcony to address briefly the crowd of cheering and chanting supporters outside. The rally ended with a rendition of ‘The Red Flag’, and as Attlee and his wife fought their way out, he told reporters, ‘We are on the eve of a great advance in the human race.’
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If so, it was not an advance that many in the West End that evening looked forward to with much relish. Beaverbrook, whose
Daily Express
had led the demonisation of Laski and his colleagues, was in the unhappy position of having arranged to host a large party at Claridge’s. ‘This occasion was intended as a victory feast,’ he stood up and announced to the assembled company. ‘In the circumstances it now becomes a last supper.’ At another of Churchill’s favourite hotels, the Savoy, one lady diner was heard to say, ‘But this is terrible –
they’ve
elected a Labour government, and
the country
will never stand for that.’ The food turned even more to ashes in the mouth for the theatre critic James Agate, despite his best efforts after hearing the appalling news:

I rang up the head waiter at one of my favourite restaurants and said, ‘Listen to me carefully, Paul. I am quite willing that in future you address me as “comrade” or “fellow-worker”, and chuck the food at me in the manner of Socialists to their kind. But that doesn’t start until tomorrow morning. Tonight I am bringing two friends with the intention that we may together eat our last meal as gentlemen. There will be a magnum of champagne, and the best food your restaurant can provide. You, Paul, will behave with your wonted obsequiousness. The
sommelier
, the table waiter, and the
commis
waiter will smirk and cringe in the usual way. From tomorrow you will get no more tips. Tonight you will be tipped royally.’ The head waiter said, ‘Bien, m’sieu.’ That was at a quarter-past six. At a quarter-past nine I arrived and was escorted by bowing menials to my table, where I found the magnum standing in its bucket and three plates each containing two small slices of spam!

Perhaps the most revealing detail, though, was Agate’s rhetorical question: ‘Who would have thought a head waiter to have so much wit in him?’
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That day and over the next few days, there were plenty of other reactions to Labour’s stunning overall majority of 146. ‘It’s an amazing piece of ingratitude to Churchill,’ asserted Loftus predictably enough, while once she had got over the ‘severe shock’ Mary King in Erdington declared that such ingratitude ‘fills me with horror’. The diarist Anthony Heap was yet more dismayed, anticipating ‘the indefinite continuance of war-time controls, the incessant fostering of class-hatred, the stamping out of individual enterprise and initiative, the subjugation of everything and everybody to a totalitarian system of state control manipulated by a gigantic army of smug little bureaucrats’. Among Nella Last’s fellow-sewers at the Women’s Voluntary Service centre in Barrow, there was intense consternation as the news of the landslide percolated through: ‘flushed and upset’, Mrs Lord said that she ‘
personally
feared riots and uprising’ before Last calmed her down with ‘two aspirins and a glass of muddy-looking liquid’, purportedly sherry; and Mrs Higham said to Last, ‘Don’t you realise we may be on the brink of revolution?’ Judy Haines’s reaction was quite different – ‘Labour in with a great majority, and I am thrilled!’ – but significantly she added, ‘People generally quiet – though it is the people who have done it.’ One public schoolboy in Sussex, Bernard Levin, was positively ecstatic, hanging a red flag out of his window and braving the consequences. Two Oxford philosophers concurred: Isaiah Berlin danced a jig at hearing the news, while Iris Murdoch wrote with Wordsworthian fervour to a friend abroad, ‘Oh wonderful people of Britain! After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! . . . I can’t help feeling that to be young is very heaven!’ Dylan Thomas was rather more understated. ‘The rain has stopped, thank Jesus,’ he wrote a few days later from a Carmarthenshire valley in his only apparent reference to the election result. ‘Have the Socialists-in-power-now stopped it?’ And soon afterwards, the poet W. S. Graham, Scottish but living near Marazion in Cornwall, was studiously indifferent: ‘Yes I notice we have changed the government. It doesn’t mean much though it’s called Labour. Labour is now quite respectable.’
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