Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (22 page)

The same meaning is conveyed by answers like this: ‘I take life as it comes,’ or ‘I try to make the best of it’ . . .

The other view which is most common is to regard life as flux, and reality as a system of change. What is today is not decisive, and might change tomorrow. Tomorrow the lucky hour might strike or the conditions might improve.

But the worker does not think about the future in the way of making provisions for it or worrying about what will happen next.

Zweig also found ‘no class hatred or envy or jealousy’; an attitude to money defined in terms of ‘beer, smokes and food’; and a far greater interest in sport than politics. ‘What the working man dislikes most is preaching, moralising and edification,’ he discovered. ‘He has “no time for that”, as he would say.’

The book includes a rich array of case histories. There is the blacksmith in a transport-maintenance shop whose wife is still suffering mentally from the Blitz and who knows, despite working incredibly long hours, that ‘he has a bad time in front of him and needs all his will-power to get through’; the small-time decorator, divorced and living alone in a furnished suburban room, who goes each evening to the pub (‘drinking six or seven pints’) for want of anywhere else, chain-smokes and ‘has no set purpose in life – he just drifts along’; the Irish building labourer who ‘dislikes responsibility’ and has stayed unmarried, ‘goes in for football pools and lays out 5s or 7s 6d a week but has never won anything’, and is happiest playing darts in the pub; the paper-picker-up in one of London’s public parks who is paid so little that he tells Zweig frankly, ‘I wish I were dead, because I have nothing to live for – I have no recreation, and can’t even afford a glass of beer – you have no friends if you have no money’; the ‘under-nourished’ sandwich-board man who makes ‘half an ounce of tobacco for cigarettes last him about four days’; the road-sweeper who has only been on holiday once in his life and insists, ‘If a working man can’t have a smoke and a drink, he might as well be dead’; the Red Line bus conductor who rolls his own cigarettes, who is fond of gardening and whose main complaint is that since the war ‘the speed of the buses is greater, with greater stress on the body, so that you require more rest’; and so on.

Altogether, the seven months of intensive fieldwork proved (as he explained in his introduction) a transforming, deeply educative experience for Zweig. It was a lesson that he for one would try not to forget:

I approached the inquiry in the spirit of the traditional economist who knows everything about everything, who has neatly classified all things and put them into separate pigeon-holes. But I came to realise how little is really known about life itself. We can only catch a glimpse from time to time of real life with its constant changes, unexpected turns, enormous variety and richness, but how often do we content ourselves with outworn models, textbook patterns and artifice clumsily put together for certain analytical purposes which are taken as real. The renovation of economics and sociology can come only from the source of all being – i.e. from minute, conscientious and truthful observation of real life.
²⁷

5

Constructively Revolutionary

‘Are you still a socialist?’ the historian Raymond Carr asked his friend Iris Murdoch the first time they dined together after the war. She turned on him savagely: ‘Yes. Aren’t you?’ That brusque Oxford exchange probably postdated the Fabian Society’s away-weekend in September 1945 in the city of dreaming spires. A notable line-up assembled to discuss ‘The Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism’, and presciently the most prestigious think-tank of the newly elected Labour Party was at least as much concerned with exploring how society at large might become ‘socialist’ as it was with analysing ‘socialism’ itself. Unlike their party leaders, most of the speakers did not assume that party and people were automatically in harmony.

The psychiatrist John Bowlby set the tone. ‘In our enthusiasm for achieving long-sought social aims,’ he argued, ‘we should not overlook the private concerns of the masses, their predilections in sport or entertainments, their desire to have a home or garden of their own in which they can do what they like and which they do not frequently have to move, their preference in seaside resorts or Sunday newspapers.’ Given the undeniable fact of these ‘private goals’, each of which had not only ‘the attraction of being immediately and simply achieved’ but also ‘the sanction of tradition behind them’, Bowlby asked how it would be possible to ensure ‘the understanding and acceptance of the need for the inevitable controls required for the attainment of group goals such as, for instance, full employment, a maximising of production by reorganisation and increase of machinery, or a maximising of personal efficiency through longer and more arduous education and other social measures’. His solution was a mixture of democracy and psychology: ‘The hope for the future lies in a far more profound understanding of the nature of the emotional forces involved and the development of scientific social techniques for modifying them.’ In response, Britain’s most venerated ethical socialist, R. H. Tawney, was relatively sanguine about the possibility of subsuming the private and pursuing group goals – ‘the common people had enormous resources of initiative and ability that were hardly used at all’ – but Bowlby’s friend Evan Durbin, leading Labour thinker and now an MP, was deeply sceptical. ‘People were far more wicked, i.e. mentally ill, than was commonly supposed,’ he insisted, adding that ‘as a whole we were all very sick and very stupid’. As for a solution, ‘selective breeding was probably the answer’.

This was all too much for Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford: ‘He failed to understand how virtue was to be promoted by psychologists, who, great as their therapeutic services had been, had as yet given little help in political matters. The conception of wickedness was very important and must be retained; our goal should be a race of
good
people.’ Another rising star, Michael Young, principal author of Labour’s victorious manifesto, agreed that he had not ‘obtained much direct guidance from the psychologists’. Instead, ‘his mental picture of the future was one of more planning at the top and more democracy at the bottom’, and he explained what he meant by the latter:

As the result of the election, the idea of a ten-year plan had been accepted, but was not really understood by the bulk of people; the work of carrying it out must be publicised and dramatised, and progress must be clearly shown – even symbolic progress. It was dangerous to wait and hope for the best. Herein individual members of the Party must themselves get going and assist the process. He envisaged a whole host of local Advisory Committees in all subjects connected with the social programme of the new Government, for running health centres, for example; and, if the result of setting them up was to raise the minority of the population which actually took part in the work of government by 100% – from 5% to 10% of the total – it would be a great democratic step forward.

In the conference’s final session, a characteristic contribution came from one of Labour’s acknowledged intellectual giants, G.D.H. Cole. He ‘did not agree with Mr Durbin that most people were either wicked or stupid’. Furthermore, he ‘disliked the sharp separation which had been made by some speakers between leaders and led’. And as for what the aim should be, he posited a society in which ‘a large proportion would participate in leadership in some field’ – a fine aspiration which clearly not everyone present thought plausible.

Different people, different visions. For a couple of particularly articulate workers, both of them miners, contrasting political futures were soon unfolding. ‘What strange patient enduring brutes men are!’ Sid Chaplin wrote in February 1946 to his friend John Bate. ‘You can shepherd them to your will, but in their secret way they know and wait. And they are really brilliant at times, astonishingly awkward, but mostly devilishly stupid.’ Chaplin, born in 1916 the son of a Durham pitman, had himself been in the mines since the age of 15, first as a blacksmith and then as an underground mechanic; he was now reflecting on his recent work (‘taking in contributions, negotiating about ½ pensions and hunting out details of compensation’) for the Durham Colliery Mechanics’ Association. ‘You get rid of all fancy illusions and ideals,’ he went on. ‘No, Jean Jacques R., man is not everywhere born free, he is born in harness, and you get so close in this work that you can see his nose twitch, the saliva dribble as he strains for the carrot that is always just beyond reach of his champing jaws.’ Chaplin was also (though not for much longer) a Methodist lay preacher, and four months later he wrote again to Bate: ‘I believe in God and I believe in human beings. I believe that human beings can make socialism work, eventually, as they have made other forms of society. But socialism as a panacea I take with a pinch of salt.’
The Leaping Lad
, Chaplin’s first collection of stories, appeared in December 1946 and won warm reviews in the national press for its sympathetic, realistic, unforced depiction of life on the South-West Durham coalfield. ‘Ferryhill Miner as Story Teller’ was the local paper’s front-page headline, and it quoted appreciatively from one of the stories, ‘Big Little Hab’: ‘He lived close to all living and growing things. He was the most fascinating of companions although he was the most inarticulate of men.’
^2.
For Chaplin himself, who would never dream of voting anything other than Labour but no longer believed in a paradise on earth, the book’s success stimulated him to try to become a full-time writer.

The other miner, Lawrence Daly, did believe in a heaven on earth – Soviet-style. He was born in 1924, the eldest of seven children of a miner who was an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. With his father being blacklisted by the coal owners and finding work hard to get, he had a tough Scottish upbringing before leaving school at 14 and going down the pit at Glencraig in Fife. Soon afterwards, abandoning his Roman Catholic faith, he joined the Young Communist League, and after two years the CP itself. ‘The Communists were to the forefront in seeking to improve the low wages and terrible working conditions in the coal mine,’ he recalled, ‘and also in seeking to overcome the appalling social conditions in which we lived.’ Daly was also through his teens a vigorous autodidact, taking correspondence courses (through the National Council of Labour Colleges) in economics, trade unionism, English and social history. Determined to expand his horizons, in November 1945 he attended the World Youth Conference in London, representing Young Miners of Great Britain; two months later, he was one of a British party (comprising parliamentary and non-parliamentary delegates) that visited Russia for several weeks. From Leningrad he wrote home describing the ballet at the Kirov Hall and its appreciative audience: ‘It is only one of the many incidents I have seen which make an absolute mockery of the phrase “menace to Western civilisation”. Here culture flourishes in its highest & finest form because it is used to elevate the whole people to the highest possible physical and moral plane.’ Back at Glencraig, Daly became a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) part-time lodge official and an increasingly active, committed member of the CP. Early in 1947, an episode involving a fellow-miner led to Daly being strongly criticised by some party members. Typically, in a long letter to the local area committee, he came out fighting: ‘I have been taught by the C.P. to study
all
the factors in a situation taken together & in their movement. I knew
all
the local & personal circumstances – far better than Comrade McArthur did – & I believe that when the comrades consider these circumstances, as I have stated them, they will agree that my action was consistently Marxist.’ Daly’s mother may have once used her husband’s copy of
Das Kapital
to kindle the fire, but the old man, who in letters to young Lawrence signed himself ‘Comrade Pop’, surely approved.
^3.

In the country at large, there was still a considerable amount of understandable pro-Russia sentiment by the end of the war, and although in the 1945 election only two Communist MPs were elected (one of them in Fife), the British Communist Party’s membership had tripled during the war to about 50,000 (including Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis). As for attitudes to Britain’s other main wartime ally, the picture was distinctly mixed. There was an element of gratitude, certainly, and many personal entanglements, together with a largely frustrated longing for American material goods, but at the same time resentment of a newly risen superpower that seemed unpleasantly inclined to throw its weight around. ‘Personally I’m sick of the sight of Yanks over here and will be mighty glad to see the back of them’ was how Anthony Heap put it in September 1945.

Among the political class, on both right and left, these feelings were intensified by first the abrupt end of Lend-Lease and then the harsh terms, almost certainly reflecting distaste for the Labour government’s nationalisation programme, of the proposed $3.75 billion American Loan. ‘What is your alternative?’ asked the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, in the critical Commons debate in December 1945; he invoked the unappetising prospect of a dollarless Britain in which ‘all those hopes of better times, to follow in the wake of victory, would be dissipated in despair and disillusion’. In effect there was no alternative but to accept the loan. ‘It was extraordinarily unreal, even absurd, and shabby,’ reflected Malcolm Muggeridge after two long days in the press gallery. ‘Speakers took up their position, but the only reality was the fear which none of them dared to express – the fear of the consequences if cigarettes and films and spam were not available from America.’

Nevertheless, the 23 Labour MPs who voted against included not only predictable left-wing figures like Barbara Castle and Michael Foot (soon afterwards warning that American capitalism was ‘arrogant, self-confident, merciless and convinced of its capacity to dictate the destinies of the world’) but that future epitome of pragmatism and moderation, James Callaghan, who condemned ‘economic aggression by the United States’. Callaghan and the others may have had good grounds for complaint – the American insistence on immediate multilateral trade was to prove as economically damaging to Britain as the other stipulation, that Britain by 15 July 1947 must allow convertibility, ie of sterling into dollars – but the bottom line, fairly or unfairly, was that beggars could not be choosers. A strong sense of grievance would persist on the part of the British left. ‘It is clear,’ complained the
New
Statesman
in November 1946, ‘that on the matters that most affect Britain today, the United States is nearly as hostile to the aspirations of Socialist Britain as to the Soviet Union.’
^4.

None of which cut much ice with Ernest Bevin – creator between the wars of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), a crucial figure during the war as Minister of Labour, and now Foreign Secretary. ‘His heavy, bullish frame, his rough and uncouth English, his blunt style of speech all combined to make a very powerful performance’ – was how W. J. Brown admiringly described him in February 1946; more recently, one historian has made the bold, counter-Churchillian claim that ‘this bullying, capricious, sasquatch of a politician, was also the most effective democratic statesman that this country produced in the twentieth century’. For Bevin, who had distrusted both Communists and the Soviet Union for more than 20 years, the fundamental premise of British policy towards Moscow had to be one of suspicion, or at best watchfulness. As for the alternative idea, broadly favoured by the Labour left, that Britain might pursue an even-handed path between the Russian and American power blocs, neither Bevin nor Clement Attlee saw it as a realistic possibility. It has been argued that the real instigators of a post-1945 anti-Russian policy, even before the Russians had unambiguously shown aggressive intent, were the mandarins in the Foreign Office. But that is surely to underestimate Bevin’s considerable capacity for independent thought as well as his unrivalled force of character.