Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2 page)

Preface

Austerity Britain
comprises
A World to Build
and
Smoke in the Valley
– the first two books of
Tales of a New Jerusalem
, a projected sequence about Britain between 1945 and 1979.

These dates are justly iconic. Within weeks of VE Day in May 1945, the general election produced a Labour landslide and then the implementation over the next three years of a broadly socialist, egalitarian programme of reforms, epitomised by the creation of the National Health Service and extensive nationalisation. The building blocks of the new Britain were in place. But barely three decades later, in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power with a fierce determination to apply the precepts of market-based individualism and dismantle much of the post-war settlement. In the early twenty-first century, it is clear that her arrival in Downing Street marks the defining line in the sand of contemporary British history, and that therefore the years 1945 to 1979 have become a period – a story – in their own right.

It is this story that
Tales of a New Jerusalem
is intended to tell: a story of ordinary citizens as well as ministers and mandarins, of consumers as well as producers, of the provinces as well as London, of the everyday as well as the seismic, of the mute and inarticulate as well as the all too fluent opinion-formers, of the Singing Postman as well as John Lennon. It is a history that does not pursue the chimera of being ‘definitive’; it does try to offer an intimate, multilayered, multivoiced, unsentimental portrait of a society that evolved in such a way during these 34 years as to make it possible for the certainties of ‘1945’ to become the counter-certainties of ‘1979’.

Many of us grew up and were formed during that evolution. We live – and our children will continue to live – with the consequences.

‘Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.’

Thomas Hardy

Preface to
Poems of the Past and Present

1901

A WORLD TO BUILD

This book is dedicated to Lucy

PART ONE

1

Waiting for Something to Happen

Eleven a.m. on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, overheard by a Mass-Observation investigator at a newsagent’s somewhere in central London:

First woman
: They played us a dirty trick – a proper dirty trick.

First man
: A muddle it was. Just a muddle.

Second woman
: People waiting and waiting and nothing happening. No church bells or nothing.

Second man
: Yes – what ’appened to them church bells, I’d like to know.

Third man
: (ironically) Heard that thunderstorm in the night? God’s wrath that was!

Fourth man
: Telling us over and over the church bells would be the signal. And then there was
no
signal. Just hanging around.

Second man
: Well, I’m sick and tired – browned off of them I am. The way they’ve behaved – why, it was an insult to the British people. Stood up to all wot we’ve stood up to, and then afraid to tell us it was peace, just as if we was a lot of kids. Just as if we couldn’t be trusted to be’ave ourselves.

Third man
: Do ’em no good in the general election – the way they’ve gone on over this. People won’t forget it. Insult’s just what it was. No more and no less.

Third woman
: (placatingly) Oh, well, I expect people will get excited enough later in the day.

Second man
: It’s not the same. It should of been yesterday. When you think of it – peace signed at 2.40 in the morning, and then people wait and wait all day, and then nothing but it would be VE Day tomorrow. No bells, no All Clear, nothing to start people off.

First woman
: That’s just what they were afraid of, I reckon.
^1.

Over a week after Hitler’s death, and following the tardy radio announcement at 7.40 the previous evening, two days of celebration and good cheer were at last under way.

It took a while for things to warm up. Many people, not having heard the news, had arrived for work only to be turned back; quite a few stockbrokers, who naturally had heard the news, journeyed to the City anyway, just to make sure that the Stock Exchange really was closed; outside food shops the inevitable queues were even worse than usual; and in the north of England it rained steadily until lunchtime. Anthony Heap, a middle-aged local-government officer from St Pancras, found himself (with his wife Marjorie) in Piccadilly. ‘Had some lunch at the Kardomah Café followed by ice cream at a Milk Bar in Leicester Square.’ They did themselves better in Liverpool, where Beryl Bainbridge’s parents took her to a celebratory businessmen’s luncheon: ‘The man who earned his living by having boulders broken on his chest in Williamson Square was standing outside the restaurant belting out the song “It’s a lovely day tomorrow/ Tomorrow is a lovely day”. My Dad gave him a shilling and shook his hand . . . like they were equals. My mother made him go instantly to the Gents, to wash off the germs.’

By early afternoon, huge crowds were gathering in all the main city centres, especially London. Gladys Langford, a middle-aged schoolteacher, caught a bus from Islington to Knightsbridge: ‘Piccadilly was already a seething mass of people. The hoarding around Eros was overcrowded with young people of both sexes, mostly of the Forces. About 1/3 of the people were wearing paper-hats, many of them of very attractive design. People were everywhere – on shop-fronts, up lamp-standards, singing and shouting.’ Harold Nicolson, walking through Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall after his lunch at the Beefsteak, was less enamoured of what he called ‘paper caps’ – ‘horrible, being of the comic variety’ – and regretfully observed ‘three Guardsmen in full uniform wearing such hats’. At 2.20 a bus managed to get through Whitehall – ‘HITLER MISSED THIS BUS’ chalked across it – and soon afterwards, down at the jam-packed Parliament Square end, three middle-aged women were overheard uttering their thoughts: ‘I bet Churchill’s pleased with himself.’ ‘So he should. He’s done a grand job of work for a man his age – never sparing himself.’ ‘Pity Roosevelt’s dead.’ A 50-year-old man butted in: ‘It was just like this after the last war and twelve months later we was standing in dole queues.’ But after cries of ‘Shut up’, another middle-aged woman had, for the moment, the final word: ‘Nobody’s going to make me miserable today. I’ve been waiting for it too long.’
^2.

At 3.00 the flags stopped waving, the bells stopped ringing, and the tumult briefly died down as everyone paused to hear Winston Churchill’s short speech, delivered from 10 Downing Street and heard across the land not only on radios but from innumerable loudspeakers, including in Whitehall itself. He announced that the war in Europe would formally end just after midnight but that hostilities had in effect ceased; declared with a characteristic flourish that ‘the evil-doers now lie prostrate before us’ (a gasp from the Whitehall crowds); and near the end almost barked out the words ‘Advance Britannia!’ ‘There followed,’ Nicolson recorded, ‘the Last Post and
God Save the King
which we all sang very loud indeed. And then cheer upon cheer.’ Gladys Langford, sitting on a chair just inside Green Park and hearing the speech ‘broadcast thro’ loudspeakers in the trees’, was unsure whether it was the King or Churchill speaking, but few others had doubts. A notably unenthusiastic member of the dense throng around Westminster was Vera Brittain, a pacifist throughout the war and now returning to the spot where she had been on Armistice Day, 1918. She generally found the mood of the afternoon ‘all so formal and “arranged”’ in comparison with the ‘spontaneity’ 27 years earlier – but it was Churchill specifically whom she could not bear. She felt his appeal to crude nationalism all too ‘typical’; condemned him for having in his speech ‘introduced no phrase of constructive hope for a better society which renounces war’; and even ‘caught a glimpse of him standing in his car as he went from Downing St. to the H. of Commons surrounded by cheering crowds, waving his hat, with the usual cigar & self-satisfied expression’.

As soon as his speech was over, the Heaps, who had joined the multitude in Parliament Square, managed to beat a temporary retreat home (a top-floor flat at Rashleigh House, near Judd Street) for ‘a much needed wash and cool off’ on what was becoming ‘a sweltering hot day’. But for Langford, who had no intention of returning to the fray, escape was far more difficult:

Queued for a bus but none came – contingents of marchers – officers, men, girls, lads in rough marching order. Walked back to Piccadilly but couldn’t negotiate the Circus. Solid mass of people (St John’s Ambulance men and nurses behind Swan and Edgar’s). A policeman advised me to work my way along by the wall – but I couldn’t get near the wall. Followed a tall American soldier and made my way to Wardour St. but Leicester Sq. was impassable. Dodged thro’ Soho side streets and finally reached Tottenham Court Rd – a 19 bus and home.

Between 3.20 and 4.00, about a third of the adult population was tuned in to
Bells and Victory Celebrations
. Happily for BBC Audience Research, the ‘great majority’ of its listeners’ panel ‘found this broadcast exactly fitted their mood and taste – it was vivid, noisy and inspiring; it brought invalids, and those who lived in remote corners of the country, in touch with the spirit of festivity in the capital and other cities visited’. Even so, ‘some wished that the noises – of merrymaking, bells and sirens – had been left to speak for themselves, without the constant flow of “patter”’ – and ‘the commentator at Cardiff who spoke through the Hallelujah Chorus was thought particularly tiresome.’ Frank Lewis, a young man from Barry, might well have been in Cardiff that afternoon but in fact was in Manchester, where he had been studying at the university and had just started a job in a warehouse. At 3.15, having listened to the Prime Minister’s address, he left his suburban lodgings and caught a tram to the city centre: ‘Town was full of people, all lounging about doing nothing . . . I went in Lyons, by the Oxford cinema (where there was a queue) and got a cup of tea.’ Lewis, definitely a glass-half-empty diarist, then went to the crowded Albert Square: ‘Everybody seemed to be waiting for something to happen. I stayed for only 10 minutes, then came home; there was nothing doing. These so-called celebrations seem so useless, – people hanging about “doing nought”.’
^3.

Lewis was no doubt more curmudgeonly than most participants, or indeed non-participants. But it is clear from the findings of the pioneering sociological-cum-anthropological organisation Mass-Observation – which had begun in 1937 and relied largely on volunteer diarists and observers – that riotous abandon was the exception rather than the rule:

Mostly, the crowds are concentrated in the few focal points of Central London. Away from these, people are restrained and orderly; the excitement seems to be almost entirely a result of the stimulus of crowds and group feeling . . . There was little gaiety in Central London away from the thickest of the crowds, and correspondingly little in the suburbs. People had put great efforts into decorating their houses, but seemed to anticipate little further in the way of celebrations . . . Bonfires, street tea-parties and fireworks, activities meant in the first place for children, were the chief features of provincial celebrations.

Adeline Vaughan Williams (the composer’s first wife) was struck by how ‘very sedate’ Dorking in Surrey was, while Cecil Beaton found Kensington ‘as quiet as a Sunday’. And he added, ‘There is no general feeling of rejoicing. Victory does not bring with it a sense of triumph – rather a dull numbness of relief that the blood-letting is over.’ Even young people could find it hard to celebrate with a full heart – ‘I felt most depressed which I felt was very naughty considering how long we have worked and fought for this’ was the downbeat diary entry of Joan Waley, who after school and a year’s domestic-science course had joined the WRNS and worked near Bletchley on the Enigma code-breaking machines – while for those who had lost loved ones, a heavy tinge of sadness was inevitable.

Nevertheless, the probability is that
most
people were neither depressed nor ecstatic. Rather, they took the two days in their stride, reflected upon them to a greater or lesser extent, and above all tried to have a good time while enjoying the spectacle. ‘
V.E. Day
,’ noted Alice (known to all as Judy) Haines, a youngish married woman living in Chingford, with a firm underlining in her diary, ‘and we are due to go to the Westminster Theatre, Buckingham Gate (!) to see Cedric Hardwicke in “Yellow Sands”. Decided to chance it by 38, which indicated “Victoria” as the destination anyway. Yes, but we dodged Piccadilly, travelling via Oxford St.’ The exclamation mark was a nod to Buckingham Palace, where from soon after Churchill’s speech the Royal Family had started to make a series of balcony appearances to the delight of the massed subjects below. But Haines’s main concern, especially as she was accompanying her husband to the show, was to look the part on this special day: ‘I wore my blue silk frock with red, white and blue (mountain rose, edelweiss and gentian flowers) brooch and red coat, and felt right in the fashion.’
^4.

Many in the course of the evening went to thanksgiving services. ‘In the quiet of that tiny country church we found the note we really had been seeking,’ the Cotton Board’s Sir Raymond Streat, one of whose sons had died in action the previous autumn, wrote to another son about attending Nether Alderley Church. ‘Manchester business men and Cheshire farm labourers joined in a crowded service. References were made to those whose lives had gone into the purchase of victory. Your lady mother took this stoically.’ Ernest Loftus, headmaster of Barking Abbey School, attended the church in the village near Tilbury where he lived: ‘A full house – largest congregation I’ve seen for years. I read lesson as usual. Villagers had bonfire & social afterwards. We went home & listened to B.B.C.’ He was probably in time to hear the Home Service’s
Tribute to the King
, running from 8.30 to 9.00 and listened to by 36 per cent of the adult population. Representatives from different walks of life were lined up in Studio 8, Broadcasting House to pay their particular live tributes. ‘I speak for the men and women of the British Police,’ an anonymous policeman announced. ‘The war brought us many new tasks: we’ve faced them not only as officers of the law, but as the friends and protectors of your Majesty’s subjects.’ The not yet unmistakable voice belonged to John Arlott, still an acting patrol sergeant based in Southampton but starting to get some radio work.

The royal tribute was the prelude to George VI’s address to his people, broadcast live at 9.00. The King’s stammer made it a somewhat nerve-wracking occasion for all concerned, but in fact his longest-ever broadcast (some 13 minutes) did not go too badly – the ultra-royalist James Lees-Milne even describing it as ‘perfect, well phrased, well delivered in his rich, resonant voice’ and ‘expressed with true feeling’. Just before it began, one of Mass-Observation’s investigators slipped into her local pub in Chelsea, where she joined three young Marxist neighbours (‘two M22B, twin brothers, and F25B’, in other words two 22-year-old middle-class men and a 25-year-old middle-class woman):