Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (14 page)

Perhaps the most interesting response, however, came from the popular, ultra-patriotic historian Arthur Bryant. One might have expected indignation or anxiety to be the dominant note, but a letter that he wrote during August was very different in tone:

We can’t return, even if we wanted to, to the social and economic framework of 1939, for it no longer exists, and the task of our rulers now is to create a new framework without causing social chaos in the meantime or saddling us with a totalitarian system. Without holding any exaggerated belief in the wisdom of Socialists, I believe the latter are more capable at the moment of doing this than the Conservatives, who are under the domination not only of vested interests but of something a great deal worse – vested ideas! And unlike the Conservatives, the Socialists do understand the discomfort and inhuman conditions under which so many people today are living and working.

It was a flexible, pragmatic reaction echoed by that of an underwriter at Lloyd’s in the City of London. ‘To my astonishment,’ the future journalist John Gale would recall about returning to England after the election, ‘I found that my father welcomed the Labour victory. “There might have been trouble if they hadn’t got in,” he said. I never asked how he voted.’ But arguably, in terms of prophecy, the palm went to an old trouper. ‘It may not be a bad idea for the Labour boys to hold the baby,’ Noël Coward, no friend to the people’s party, reflected. ‘I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable during the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty that it will be so.’
¹⁸

Why had it happened? Only two days after becoming Prime Minister, Attlee found himself at Potsdam being verbally strong-armed by Stalin, that electoral innocent, to account for Churchill’s inexplicable defeat. ‘One should distinguish between Mr Churchill the leader of the nation in the war and Mr Churchill the Conservative Party leader,’ he answered. ‘Many people looked upon the Conservatives as a reactionary party which would not carry out a policy answering to peace requirements.’ For Beaverbrook, as for many contemporary analysts of the election, the current leader was not to blame. ‘The unpopularity of the party,’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘proved too strong for the greatness of Churchill and the affection in which he is held by the people.’ Fortunately there were some, including one young reform-minded Tory, Cub Alport, who were able in their post-mortems to transcend the Churchill question. ‘I think the election is a vote for the people who are least likely to involve us in foreign adventures, or bring us up against Russia,’ he told Rab Butler. ‘It is a vote for domestic security.’ For a few intellectuals, that sort of interpretation was altogether too tame. ‘It was not a vote about queues or housing,’ declared Cyril Connolly in the September issue of
Horizon
, ‘but a vote of censure on Munich and Spain and Abyssinia . . . The Election result is a blow struck against the religion of money.’ As usual, the views of his friend from prep school and Eton were more pertinent. ‘No one, I think, expects the next few years to be easy ones,’ Orwell wrote at about the same time, ‘but on the whole people did vote Labour because of the belief that a Left government means family allowances, higher old age pensions, houses with bathrooms, etc., rather than from any internationalist consideration. They look to a Labour government to make them more secure and, after a few years, more comfortable.’
¹⁹

Of course, there were plenty of other causal factors adduced then and subsequently.
²⁰
The widespread belief that a Labour government would ensure a speedier demobilisation; the unusually even balance of political allegiance on the part of the press; the absence during the war of the familiar drip, drip of anti-Labour propaganda on the part of the fourth estate; the way in which that war had turned leading Labour politicians into familiar and trusted figures as senior ministers; the party’s high degree of unity; above all, the general feeling that the number one immediate issue of housing could best be met by Labour’s energetic message of can-do fairness: all these things contributed to the outcome. A significant minority of the usually Conservative-voting middle class switched to Labour and probably just as many abstained, often to decisive effect; for once, Disraeli’s ‘angels in marble’, the working-class Conservatives, failed their betters; and across the classes, the young voted Labour in large numbers.

What about Churchill? In the eyes of a nation still hugely grateful for what he had done to help win the war, he was almost certainly still an electoral asset. But at the same time there can be no evading his prime culpability, as Tory leader from 1940, in the party’s failure to develop and start to propagate realistic policies in response to people’s understandable domestic concerns, above all in relation to housing and unemployment. ‘Before the Election,’ one Tory MP would recall, ‘the Post-War Problems Committee’s numerous reports, the “Signpost” booklets, the various pamphlets of the Tory Reform Committee, were all good, but they were not authoritative. They did not bear the
imprimatur
of the Prime Minister. There was no evidence that he had read them.’
²¹
Yet it is arguable that so powerful and pervasive was the mythology that had developed about the bleakness and inhumanity of the inter-war years – years dominated by Tory politicians and Tory policies – that no amount of domestic engagement by Churchill would have made much difference. Labour, after all, did not manage a decisive victory
during
those years, and indeed suffered three crushing defeats, culminating in 1935. Ten years and one arduous conflict later, a conflict which for an insular people had required an insular purpose, there was a strong desire not to return to the ‘bad old days’ – even though that desire paradoxically co-existed with a near-universal longing in other respects (above all the rhythms of everyday life) to get back to how it had been ‘before the war’.

It would be both perverse and an error to exaggerate the revisionism. To take ‘1945’ out of 1945 leaves a barren historical landscape indeed. The electorate may well have been voting more negatively against the Tories than positively for Labour, there may well have been relatively little popular enthusiasm for ‘socialism’ as such (as opposed to immediate material improvements), Orwell may well have been right when he asserted soon after the results that ‘the mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even less hopeful, than it was in 1940 or 1942’ – yet at some level most people realised that a rather amazing thing had happened, in effect marking off ‘pre-1945’ politically from ‘post-1945’. ‘My man,’ called out a blazered, straw-hatted 14-year-old public schoolboy, John Rae, as he stood on Bishop’s Stortford station with his trunk that late July. ‘No,’ came the porter’s quiet but firm reply, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’

Even so, if there was such awareness, however inchoate or subterranean it may have been in many cases, it still had to fight for its place in the daily consciousness of the daily human round. Take a wonderfully revealing diary entry for Sunday, 29 July:

Weather has been lovely – such a difference from this time last year when we ran so often to shelter. The streets look so bright at night now, with all the lamps lit. We went to Kilburn & it was so nice to sit & chat & not have to listen for the warning. The election result is still creating talk – I wonder where this Labour Government will lead us to. I heard that Ladies shoes are going to 9 coupons on the new books. I expect it is true. I still don’t believe Hitler is dead – & how much longer before the German war criminals are brought to trial. About time they were all shot else they will get off & start another war.
²²

Rose Uttin – mid-40s, married, living in Wembley, husband Bill in charge of stationery at the Royal Exchange Assurance, daughter Dora a clerical assistant at Harrow Education Office, elderly mother living upstairs in the back bedroom – had, like virtually everyone else, much else on her mind besides electoral earthquakes.

The pleasures of peace returned with a vengeance that weekend, as on the Saturday the trains of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway carried a record 102,889 holiday-makers to Blackpool’s stations. On Sunday the new ‘Light’ Programme superseded the wartime ‘Forces’ Programme, and though Anthony Heap’s immediate reaction was that ‘there is precious little difference in the type of fare provided’, there did take place on Monday afternoon the first episode of
The Robinson Family
, featuring ‘the day-to-day adventures of a London family and their friends’. It is unlikely that there were any listeners among those present that evening at the dinner party given by Hugh Dalton (the new Chancellor) in a private room at the St Ermin’s Hotel. The line-up was more or less the cream of Labour’s up-and-coming talent, including Christopher Mayhew, Woodrow Wyatt and John Freeman, as well as Durbin, Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell. Also present were Harold Wilson, an archetypal grammar-school product who had made his name as an academic high-flyer helping Beveridge and who was already viewed by Harold Nicolson as ‘brilliant’, and the only non-university man, George Brown. Predictably, Wilson ‘made me simply gape as he talked’ (Mayhew wrote home afterwards), while Brown (according to Gaitskell) ‘kept rather quiet’.
²³

Two days later, the new House of Commons met for the first time to elect its Speaker. ‘When Churchill came in for the show he was greeted by the singing of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” by the Tories,’ recorded W. J. Brown (who had got back as an Independent). ‘The Labour masses retorted by singing “The Red Flag” – which I thought was very bad tactics, doing no good and calculated to frighten all the retired Colonels in Cheltenham and Leamington Spa.’ It was reputedly George Griffiths, a miner MP from South Yorkshire and member of the Salvation Army, who had started singing the socialist anthem; that evening Bob Boothby boasted at a London party that he was the sole Tory to have joined in. Strikingly, only 38 per cent of the Labour MPs came from a working-class background – compared with 72 per cent after the 1935 election.
²⁴
Griffiths may have got them singing, but it was the lawyers, teachers, journalists, doctors, managers and technicians who would principally be calling the tune.

Monday the 6th – the day after the Giles cartoon ‘Family’ first appeared in the
Sunday Express
, on their way to the seaside – was the August Bank Holiday. There were large crowds at most seaside resorts (as many as 35 relief trains leaving Liverpool Street station) and the usual cultural preferences expressed at the main attractions (31,440 people at London Zoo, 4,553 at the V&A). At Lord’s, where 10,000 were locked out ten minutes after the start of the Fourth Victory Test, play was interrupted at 1.00 by a terrific storm of hail and thunder – unluckily for listeners who, in an era before ball-by-ball, had been waiting patiently for Rex Alston’s description of ‘the closing overs before lunch’. Over at the White City stadium, some 100,000 tried, but only 52,000 managed, to watch a memorable athletics meeting. The stars were the two great Swedish middle-distance runners Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, the latter taking on Britain’s pre-war record-holder Sydney Wooderson in the one mile and just winning. Wooderson, in the RASC, had reputedly travelled down from Glasgow by train and, not wanting to make a fuss about the fact that he was due to represent his country the next afternoon, had stood in the corridor all night. After the thunderstorm, the weather was cool and unsettled. ‘Obviously no day for Hampstead [ie Heath] or anywhere like that,’ noted Heap. ‘So after an afternoon stroll round Bloomsbury and an early tea hied us round to the Regent to see “National Velvet”.’ He enjoyed it on the whole but despite Elizabeth Taylor’s presence regretted that ‘the essential English atmosphere is missing’.
²⁵

Meanwhile, some 25 per cent of the adult population had, as usual, been listening to the Home Service at 6. 00:

Here is the News.

President Truman has announced a tremendous achievement by Allied scientists. They have produced the atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a Japanese army base. It alone contained as much explosive power as 2,000 of our great ten-tonners. The President has also foreshadowed the enormous peace-time value of this harnessing of atomic energy.

Hiroshima (‘it’s been an army base for many years’) was identified as the target; but even on the nine o’clock bulletin, which included an official account of Britain’s role in the development of the bomb, there was still ‘no news yet of what devastation was caused – reconnaissance aircraft couldn’t see anything hours later because of the tremendous pall of smoke and dust that was still obscuring the city of once over 300,000 inhabitants’.