Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (16 page)

The election, the atom bomb, the end of the world war: all within a matter of weeks. It was a moment, inevitably, for taking stock. Frederic Osborn, starting on the 14th a long letter to the great American urban prophet Lewis Mumford, pondered the political upheaval:

What has happened is a very big step in the British revolution – a shift of power to meet new conditions and new ideas. Britain will not willingly go far towards Communism; it will remain at heart a free-enterprise nation . . . It does not accept the state-monopoly solution, despite Laski and Aneurin Bevan; and sooner or later it will revolt against the facile solution of state ownership and be driven to expedients of entirely new kinds, which Labour philosophy at present scornfully scouts.

Next day, amid the happy junketings, he turned to his obsession:

I don’t think philanthropic housing people anywhere realise the irresistible strength of the impulse towards the family house and garden as prosperity increases; they think the suburban trend can be reversed by large-scale multi-storey buildings in the down-town districts, which is not merely a pernicious belief from the human point of view, but a delusion. Many of our ‘practical’ people, including our Mr Silkin [Lewis Silkin, the new Minister of Town and Country Planning], share the delusion . . . I am inclined to think the multi-storey technique will have to have its run . . . It is a pity we can’t go straight for the right policy. But it takes a long time for an idea, accepted theoretically, to soak through the whole of an administration; and the conflicting idea of good multi-storey development has enough enthusiasts to claim a trial in some cities on a fairly large scale. Damage will be done to society by the trial; but probably all I can do is hasten the date of disillusion. If I have underestimated the complacency of the urban masses, the damage may amount to a disaster.

Few of any persuasion imagined that the end of the war meant the end of Britain’s problems. ‘We have a lot in front of us in reconstruction,’ Grantham’s Mayor-elect, Alderman Alfred Roberts, explained on VJ +1 to the local paper. ‘When you have won the war you have to heal the wounds of war, and that is our next job.’
³¹

PART TWO

4

We’re So Short of Everything

The sporting highlight of the first autumn of peace was a far from peaceful British tour by the Russian football champions Moscow Dynamo. Amid much mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, four matches were played – draws against Chelsea and Glasgow Rangers, a narrow win over Arsenal and a 10–1 demolition of Cardiff City. The ill feeling that characterised at least two of the matches provoked George Orwell, writing just before Christmas in the left-wing magazine
Tribune
, to launch a full-frontal attack on professional football and its followers: ‘People want to see one side on top and the other humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless.’ In short, ‘serious sport . . . is war minus the shooting’. This was too much for E. S. Fayers of Harrow, Middlesex. ‘George Orwell is always interesting,’ began his riposte. ‘But he does write some bilge.’ And after defending football as a game to play, he went on:

As to the spectators, with the greatest possible diffidence, I suggest that George is in danger of falling into the error of intellectual contempt for the ‘mob’. These football crowds, if only he got among them, he would find are not great ignorant mobs of sadistic morons. They are a pretty good mixture of just ordinary men. A little puzzled, a little anxious, steady, sceptical, humorous, knowledgeable, having a little fun, hoping for a bit of excitement, and definitely getting quite a lot of enjoyment out of that glorious king of games – football.

The good-natured rebuke finished unanswerably: ‘I’m sorry for George. He’s missed a lot of fun in life.’
^1.

There was no resumption of the Football League proper until the 1946–7 season, but happily for ‘ordinary men’ the FA Cup did take place in 1945–6, on a two-leg basis. Less than glamorous Accrington Stanley found themselves pitted in the third round against Manchester United, with the first leg at Peel Park. Two down at half-time, Stanley then, ‘in as plucky a come-back as I have ever seen’ (in the words of the local reporter ‘Jason’), ‘drew level with two minutes to go to the accompaniment of an almost hysterical roar of triumph from the crowd’. Predictably, United won the return 5–1 – but ‘the game might have taken on a different aspect if two cruel pieces of ill-fortune had not come Stanley’s way.’ Three rounds later, at the Bolton Wanderers versus Stoke City match, there was disaster when 33 of the Burnden Park crowd were crushed to death. It could have been worse. ‘I think I had a pretty narrow escape and it was because of the kindness of the men,’ Audrey Nicholls recalled years later. ‘That was typical of the spirit of the times that they were concerned for me, a girl, and they just lifted me up and off I went down. They were marvellous.’ On 27 April 1946 the first post-war Cup Final, featuring Charlton Athletic versus Derby County, took place in front of almost 100,000 at Wembley’s Empire Stadium. As an occasion it had everything: an intensely emotional singing of ‘Abide with Me’; the appearance of King George VI in a grey overcoat (‘Blimey, he’s been demobbed too,’ shouted a spectator through the cheering); Bert Turner managing within a minute to score for both sides; a burst ball (reflecting the prevailing leather shortage); three goals for Derby in extra time as they ran out 4–1 winners; and, in the absence of champagne, ginger beer celebrations in the victorious dressing room.

Almost everyone, it seemed, was hungry for escapism. ‘The biggest entertainments boom ever known is now in full swing,’ Anthony Heap noted in October 1945 against a background in the shops of an almost completely inadequate supply of goods for people’s disposable incomes. ‘Anything goes – good, bad or indifferent. Every theatre in the West End is packed out every night and to get reserved seats, one has to book weeks ahead.’ A patriotic hit that autumn was
Merrie England
, enjoyed by a thoroughly sensible, suburban, church-going young woman, Erica Ford:

I put on scarlet & black jacket, black skirt, shoes & hat & bag. Went to N. Ealing Station & met Dumbo [an older man, called Harry Bywaters] 5.35. Went to Piccadilly & walked right up Shaftesbury Ave to Prince’s Theatre . . . Had two stalls. Very bright show & lovely music. Heddle Nash as Raleigh sang ‘The English Rose’ superbly . . .

Went to Princes Restaurant 10.0 & had 4/6 dinner. Soup, plaice &chips & pears. Very nice. Bussed to Piccadilly & train to N. Ealing. Walked up Hanger Lane. Lovely night.

Elsewhere during these immediate post-war months, the dance halls were heaving (cementing the star status of band leaders like Ted Heath and Joe Loss); the country’s 4,709 cinemas were almost invariably packed out (attracting in 1946 an all-time peak of 1,635 million admissions); and favourite programmes on the radio continued to draw huge listening figures, above all
ITMA
, the surreal yet warm Tommy Handley comedy vehicle which successfully relocated in peacetime to Tomtopia, a Utopia with Tommy as Governor. Colonel Chinstrap (‘I don’t mind if I do!’) was still going strong, while new characters included Nurse Riff-Rafferty, Big Chief Bigga Banga and his daughter Banjoleo, according to Tommy a ‘smashing portion of passion fruit, well worth a second helping’.

Not everyone appreciated these radio days. Mary King, impeccably middle-class but servantless in her Birmingham suburb, grappled one Monday in April 1946 with a particularly big wash load: ‘Miss Newton, a young woman about 30 years of age living apart from her husband, had her wireless on in her bedroom with windows wide open (next door) from 9.30 to 2 p.m. All the jazz & what nots – a continual stream. It did not go in rhythm with my mangle, or aching arms . . . I heard her mother ask her to shut it off – and her answer made me feel I should like to throw several of my buckets of suds right over her wireless. What a day!!!!’ The disapproval, though, could go the other way. The middle-class cinema-going public may have lapped up
Brief
Encounter
, but shortly before its official premiere in November 1945 its director, David Lean, had tried it out on a distinctly working-class audience in Rochester, where he was filming
Great Expectations
. The cinema, as Lean soon discovered, was full of sailors from the nearby Chatham dockyards. ‘At the first love scene one woman down in the front started to laugh. I’ll never forget it. And the second love scene it got worse. And then the audience caught on and waited for her to laugh and they all joined in and it ended in an absolute shambles. They were rolling in the aisles.’
^2.

The high cultural mood, accurately reflecting the prevailing sense of fatigue even amid the pleasure-seeking, was one of isolation and retrenchment. A symptomatic episode was the enforced departure in October 1945 of William Glock as music critic of the
Observer
on account of his excessive enthusiasm for the difficult moderns, culminating in an obituary of Bartók which declared that ‘no great composer has ever cared how “pleasant” his music sounded’. Two months later an exhibition at the V&A of Picasso and Matisse achieved notoriety. An outraged visitor threatening the paintings with his umbrella had to be forcibly removed; the elderly daughter of William Holman Hunt clapped her hands for silence and announced that the pictures were rubbish; Evelyn Waugh informed
The Times
that Picasso had as little artistic merit as an American crooner; and a columnist on the art magazine
Apollo
not only confessed that ‘for me this stuff means precisely nothing’ but compared Picasso and Matisse as artistic leaders to ‘the more enterprising of the Gadarene Swine’.

Relatively few would have demurred, least of all the upper class, uneasily finding its feet after the war and the trauma of the Labour landslide, and now also unwittingly finding its Boswell – albeit a Boswell with a deeply imbued sense of what could be tastefully printed and what could not. On 7 November the
Tatler
introduced a new column, ‘Jennifer Writes Her Social Journal’. ‘Jennifer’ was the redoubtable Betty Kenward, recently divorced by her Hussars husband and left financially high and dry. In her first entry she gave a detailed account of the wedding at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of Lord Kimberley to Miss Diana Legh, daughter of the Master of the Royal Household. ‘The King of the Hellenes was among those present, and Lady Patricia Ramsay was there, as tall and good-looking as ever. Lady Grenfell, who is the bride’s step-sister, was wearing a small cap of green cock’s feathers, and it was amusing to note how popular feathers have become, ostrich being first in the running . . .’ At times it was as if nothing had changed. ‘At the fashionable, carefree Carcano–Ednam wedding reception,’ the Tory MP, assiduous party-goer and cracking diarist Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon noted in early 1946, ‘I remarked to Emerald [Cunard] how quickly London had recovered from the war and how quickly normal life had been resumed. “After all,” I said, pointing to the crowded room, “this is what we have been fighting for.”’
^3.

Life was rather tougher for the men who had done most of the actual fighting. More than four million British servicemen were demobilised (too slowly, according to many) between June 1945 and January 1947, and probably for most the transition from war to peace was far from easy. Advice or support was not always available (partly because of the war in the Far East having ended so precipitately), previous jobs were often no longer open, the returnees were seldom treated as heroes by a deeply war-weary society, and the prosaic realities of peace frequently came to seem less attractive than the relative glamour (and male bonding) of war. ‘Thoughts and plans begin to turn inwards in an unhealthy manner,’ warned the
British Legion Journal
. ‘This can lead to all sorts of pitfalls, not the least of which is self-pity, and should be shunned like early-morning PT.’ The strains on marriages were severe. A couple might not have seen each other for several years; he expected to return to his familiar position as the undisputed head; she had become more independent (often working in a factory as well as running the home) – the possibilities for tension and strife, even when both were emotionally committed to each other, were endless. Inevitably, the number of divorces (in England and Wales) rose sharply: from 12,314 in 1944 (itself almost a doubling of the 1939 figure) to 60,190 by 1947.

Even if a marriage held together, as the great majority did, the experience for the children of a stranger’s return home could be deeply bewildering and even damaging. ‘I did not like this tall, weird, cold man,’ Wendy Reeves remembered about the return of her POW father: ‘After such a close relationship with my lovely warm, kindly grandad and uncle Colin, whom I worshipped, as they adored me. Of course, I did not understand at the time – but it became clearer as I became older – that Dad had become quite mentally unbalanced by his incarceration. He used to sleep in a separate room from Mum, was unkind to me – I received the first smack I had ever known, from him – and I became frightened of him.’ It was little better in the case of

Brenda Bajak’s father, a regimental sergeant major during the war:

He was a total stranger to me and I didn’t like him! He was moody and very demanding. He ordered us about as though he was still in the Army. He and my mother argued a lot and I wasn’t used to grown-ups arguing. He had
no
idea how to behave with daughters. He shouted a lot and insisted things were done immediately. He told us little of his war. His moods were dreadful – he was great when out at work or with other people, but dreadful at home. He never participated in a ‘family’ life. He just worked and slept. My mother did everything for him and was the ‘peacemaker’.
^4.

Many such discordant stories were played out in these immediate postwar years – the malign, destabilising legacy of a just conflict.

Was the woman’s place still, as it had been before the contingencies of war, in the home? A sharp if short-lived anxiety about Britain’s apparently declining population proved a key ‘pro-natalist’ weapon for the home-and-hearthists, even persuading two well-known progressives, Margaret Bondfield and Eva Hubback, to argue publicly in November 1945 that ‘domestic work in a modern home will be a career for educated women’. Coming from a different standpoint, the psychiatrist John Bowlby published in 1946 his first major work,
Forty-four Juvenile Thieves
, which found that the one common denominator in a group of adolescent London criminals was prolonged separation from their mothers. Also in 1946, the eminent paediatrician James Spence gave a well-publicised lecture entitled ‘The Purpose of the Family’ in which he emphasised the welfare of children, argued that the benign family unit had come under unprecedented pressure during the war, and insisted that only through preserving the art of motherhood could the family be saved.