Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (28 page)

Nor were these immediate post-war planners as brutally unforgiving of the past as has sometimes been assumed. Thomas Sharp’s declaration in 1946 that ‘the watchword for the future should be – not restoration, but renewal’ ran directly counter to the
Advisory Handbook for the
Redevelopment of Central Areas
issued by Silkin’s ministry the following year. This emphasised the importance of new buildings not swamping the old and pushed for retention of the ‘existing main street pattern’. Moreover, as Peter Larkham has shown in a detailed study of urban-reconstruction plans up to the early 1950s, conservation played a surprisingly prominent role in them. Sharp himself, in his plans for Exeter, Oxford and Salisbury, was not entirely insensitive to their special architectural qualities, while plans for Edinburgh, Norwich, Warwick and Worcester all had a reasonably conservationist element, though in places only implicitly.
¹⁹

Where there was virtually no call for conservationism was in the plans made for industrial cities and towns: there, the notion that the nineteenth-century industrial heritage might be worth preserving for aesthetic reasons did not feature. ‘The city’s buildings, with few exceptions, are undistinguished,’ stated the plan for Manchester. ‘Moreover, our few noteworthy buildings [identified as non-industrial] are obscured by the dense development surrounding them.’ It was different, though, in the other great Victorian economic powerhouse. ‘It would not be wise to adopt a new aesthetic and a new scale for building for the City of London until the old one has been definitely lost or outmoded,’ asserted the architect Charles Holden and the town planner William Holford, the City Corporation’s consultants for its rebuilding programme. ‘The seventeenth-century scale should be preserved and St Paul’s Cathedral – the noblest in the City – should remain architecturally, as in other ways, its chief building.’

Yet despite all their relative moderation, the planners in these years found it desperately slow going when it came to trying to put their plans into practice. Most obviously, they and their local sponsors faced a series of trying economic constraints, including patchy financial support from central government and the severe rationing of building materials – constraints which invariably led to delay and sometimes to abandonment. Nor could they assume, however much they may have tried to, that the popular will was always behind them. In Bristol, for example, a poll organised in early 1947 by the local Retail Traders’ Federation found that only 400 people wanted the proposed new Broadmead shopping centre, as against some 13,000 wishing to see the old shopping centre reinstated. The planners, for their part, simply ignored this unfortunate result.
²⁰

Regrettably, no comparable poll was taken in Coventry, where it would have been fascinating to test empirically the generally prevailing assumption that Gibson’s plan was welcomed by the majority of Coventrians. Admittedly an impressive 57,000 people attended the Coventry of the Future exhibition held for a fortnight at the city’s Drill Hall in October 1945, but the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
’s assertion on the third day that ‘the public reaction appears to be that the schemes outlined are on the lines along which they would like to see the city developed’ was somewhat belied by a letter it printed from Herbert E. Edwards, who had visited the exhibition ‘along with a party of others’:

We were unanimous in our strong criticism of the central area lay-out as shown in the large model.

The general feeling was that the hard, rigid lines of those monstrous buildings would utterly spoil Coventry’s unique city centre, with its fine old churches, etc. The treatment seemed to us entirely foreign and out of touch with the traditional setting – which demands real harmony in its surroundings.

The City Fathers must be blind indeed if they suppose this massed barracks-like ensemble could possibly appeal to citizens with a grain of artistic feeling.

Over the next week, other critical letters appeared. ‘The general concept of the scheme is not in keeping with the characteristics of the Coventry people, who would not feel at home in it,’ wrote C.S.P. ‘They all say, “Give us Coventry back as we knew it”. What is wanted is the old Coventry, restored with a new Sunday dress, but old Coventry nevertheless.’ Other letters dissented (‘We have,’ affirmed one, ‘a wonderful opportunity to rebuild a city in accordance with the spirit of our age’), but certainly the overall balance of the correspondence was not in favour of the plan.

Subsequent oral testimony similarly suggests mixed feelings. ‘It showed the raised ring road, all where the Cathedral was and all the rest of it,’ recalled one visitor, Basil Whitham, more than half a century later. ‘And we thought that this was fascinating . . . we were all into spaceships, you know . . . Buck Rogers and so forth.’ That, though, was a young person’s perspective; among older people the rather jaundiced recollection of Celia Grew was probably more representative. ‘Whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding, you sort of went along with it in a sort of zombie-like fashion, at least I did,’ she explained. ‘’Cause you see I had got things happening in my own life with my husband getting wounded and being brought to Bromsgrove Hospital and me going over there to see him and all that kind of stuff.’ While as for those who
did
take an interest, the experience of Dorrie Glass, a council employee who one day saw in Gibson’s department a model of the new Coventry, was illuminating: ‘It was a proper model really. You were sort of looking down, you know, like an aerial view. But they were all buildings, it wasn’t a picture it was models, you know. We went and had a look at that. You couldn’t sort of visualise it really.’
²¹

The relative lack of interest on the part of architects, planners and others in popular taste was neatly encapsulated by a snatch from a 1946 round table (convened by
Building
magazine) of some leading architects. ‘The public generally have no knowledge of what they want,’ declared one. ‘The public generally are only concerned with their own house,’ responded another. ‘It is questionable if they have any views at all.’ Unsurprisingly, the next year’s Town and Country Planning Act had no mechanism for getting the public involved in the planning process, apart from the right to object to the development plan after publication. In practice, according to Alison Ravetz, ‘probably most people were quite unaware of this right, and . . . the Minister was not obliged to hold a public enquiry.’

The aspect of Silkin’s measure that caused most controversy was the 100 per cent development levy on appreciating land values. It was a provision never destined to have a long-term life, being (again in Ravetz’s words) ‘universally blamed for putting a stop to development’. But the Act as a whole was a stayer. Above all, it enshrined the principle that all development was to be subject to planning controls – or, as a delighted Frederic Osborn put it, ‘it gives effect to the supremacy of public control of land use, without abolishing private ownership’. A further plus in his and many other well-meaning, progressive, middle-class eyes was that the act did much to protect the countryside from the threat of creeping, unplanned suburbia, the dreaded ‘bungaloid growth’. Agricultural land, it insisted, was to be for agricultural use, but there was silence about the high-rise implication of high urban densities as the population grew. This was an implication that would have particular resonance given that the act also sanctified the idea of ‘comprehensive’ redevelopment of the inner city, which would follow compulsory purchase of (again in the words of the act) ‘any areas which in the opinion of the planning authority suffered from extensive war damage, conditions of bad layout, obsolete development, or were in need of the relocation of population or industry’. Thus were born Comprehensive Development Areas (CDAs), though an economic upturn would be required for them to take major effect. Quite what that effect might be, no one at this stage could realistically envisage.

For one Tory backbencher, Sir Cuthbert Headlam, it was a case of seeing through a dark glass very darkly. ‘I don’t profess to have read one word of this most important measure,’ he reflected on the evening in May 1947 when the bill was guillotined in the Commons, ‘but can only hope that it may not be as devastating in its effects as some people say that it will be. I have an instinctive distrust of planners and always feel that “planning” merely makes confusion worse confounded – but then I am out of date and prefer things to grow up in their own way.’
The Times
, however, was sanguine, reflecting much of middle opinion. ‘The British people,’ it declared on the day in 1948 that the act came into force, ‘almost without knowing it, are embarking upon one of the greatest experiments in the social control of their environment ever attempted by a free society. In the process they are also putting old individual liberties in trust for the common good.’
²²

The Town and Country Planning Act was in many ways complemented by the Agriculture Act, also 1947. While the former was designed to protect agricultural land and the rural character of the countryside, the latter specifically addressed what was to done on that land, with the threefold aim – entirely understandable in the immediate context – of feeding the population, keeping down food imports and maximising production. The solution adopted by Tom Williams, a former Yorkshire miner who now found himself Minister of Agriculture, was to give the farmers guaranteed prices and assured markets for most of their produce, as well as grants for modernisation and ready access to a government-run scientific advisory service. Back in 1937, Attlee had declared that ‘the Labour Party stands for the national ownership of the land’, but that was now off the agenda. Instead, for many farmers it was jackpot time. The National Farmers’ Union would play a pivotal role each February in the annual price review; Williams himself became known as ‘the Farmer’s Friend’; and on eventually leaving office, he was given a small dinner party at Claridges, organised by the Duke of Norfolk.

The farm labourers fared less well. Although the act gave them improved security of tenure and a wages board, the system of tied cottages remained widespread and the farm worker was still very poorly paid (roughly two-thirds of average earnings in manufacturing industries) for often punishingly long hours. For the consumer, there was a new, longlasting era of cheap food; for the government, the heavy subsidies to be paid were amply justified by the spectacular success story to be told as farm productivity increased by leaps and bounds, with output as early as 1950 reaching 146 per cent of the pre-war level. And for the environment? The remorseless goal, shared equally by farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture, of maximising production had serious consequences for wildlife and landscape; but in the immediate post-war climate, with the food-producing farmer still almost a hero after his efforts during the war, organisations like the Soil Association, set up at its end and pushing for what would later be called organic farming, were completely marginalised. A golden future for industrialised farming lay, in every sense, wide open.

The illusion at the heart of the 1947 acts, taken together, was that agricultural Britain could be modernised without this fundamentally affecting the character of rural Britain. Even as the acts were coming into force, John Moore was completing his ‘Brensham’ trilogy of novels, lovingly detailing a Cotswolds way of life (intimate, domestic, with a benign, semi-feudal social hierarchy) that he believed to be under threat from a mixture of bureaucracy and technology.
²³
Yet from another, arguably less sentimental point of view, it was the very insistence of government planners that agriculture be the only activity allowed on agricultural land that, together with the attempted prevention of suburban encroachment, had serious employment implications once agricultural modernisation had begun to reduce sharply the number of farm labourers required. Simultaneously romanticising and destroying the existing way of life, the urban activators did to the countryside what they would soon do to the – real or imagined – communities in their midst.

7

Glad to Sit at Home

All new governments enjoy something of a honeymoon, in this case prompting Raymond Streat to reflect in December 1945 that there had been ‘extraordinarily little fuss or resistance’ to ‘the first moves in a comprehensive revolution within the economic and political life of Britain’. But as early as the spring of 1946, against a background of painful austerity, whatever honeymoon there had been with the middle class was more or less over.

‘We are the masters at the moment – and not only for the moment, but for a very long time to come,’ the Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross unwisely pronounced on 2 April – words soon truncated to the notorious catchphrase ‘We are the masters now.’ On 16 April, inspecting Kenwood House for National Trust purposes, James Lees-Milne was ‘surprised a little’ by the secretary there ‘saying that she considered any infringement of a law passed by this Government was justifiable’; two days later, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen told the diarist that ‘we must all fight against being state-ridden’; and in early May the architect Professor Albert Richardson insisted to Lees-Milne that ‘without aristocracy of the higher and lower grades there could be no beauty’ and that ‘consequently it was our duty to oppose this Government at every turn’. About this time, the young J. G. Ballard arrived in Southampton, having spent most of the war in a Japanese civilian camp, and travelled via London to relatives in Birmingham.

‘Everyone looked small and tired and white-faced and badly nourished,’ he recalled many years later. But what most struck him was the prevailing mindset:

All these middle-class people, my parents, friends and relations and the like, were seething with a sort of repressed rage at the world around them. And what they were raging against was the post-war Labour government. It was impossible to have any kind of dialogue about the rights and wrongs of the National Health Service, which was about to come in, they talked as if this Labour government was an occupying power, that the Bolsheviks had arrived and were to strip them of everything they owned.

That kind of atavistic loathing, vividly caught in Angela Thirkell’s ‘Barsetshire’ novels, was perhaps at its most intense in the City of London. When the young Colin Knock, straight from school, attended an interview at the jobbers Prior & Williams, he made the mistake of wearing a red tie. ‘Does that have any political implications?’ he was asked by a partner. None at all, he replied, and thereby got the position of office boy. At another Stock Exchange firm, the brokers Panmure Gordon, the senior partner Richard Hart-Davis insisted that the Prime Minister was Chinese and invariably referred to him as A. T. Lee. At Midland Bank, the newly knighted and unashamedly pro-Labour chief executive Sir Clarence Sadd came under severe internal pressure and was eventually forced out in 1948. Nor was a virulent animosity absent from the Palace of Westminster, once the Tories had regrouped and begun to recover their nerve. ‘I have not forgotten,’ a junior minister, John Freeman, recalled in the late 1950s, ‘the tension of rising to answer questions or conduct a debate under the cold, implacable eyes of that row of well-tailored tycoons, who hated the Labour Government with a passion and fear which made them dedicated men in their determination to get it out of office and to limit the damage it could do to the world which they saw as theirs by right.’
^1.
All in all, though we cannot recover those lost conversations in saloon bars or at 19th holes or local Rotaries, it is pretty clear that a strong, almost tribal middle-class backlash was well under way within a year of Labour taking power.

Certainly the well-to-do believed they had been soaked (James Lansdale Hodson wondered in January 1947 whether the Cabinet was ‘aware of the bitterness and cynicism expressed in clubs and the mood that it’s no use making money because you won’t be allowed to keep it’), but what was the reality? Under Hugh Dalton’s fiscal stewardship (until November 1947), both surtax and death duties were increased quite sharply, but the temptation to introduce either a capital-gains tax or a one-off capital levy was resisted, and in general the City of London, for all its grumbling, survived quite comfortably. Nevertheless, it does seem that the cumulative effect of war and the Labour government was for the middle class to lose out quite significantly relative to the working class: at the end of the 1940s, the Inland Revenue estimated that whereas salaries (after tax) had declined in real terms by 16 per cent between 1938 and 1949, wages had risen by 21 per cent. Yet the angst of the middle class might have been alleviated if there had been greater awareness of the extent to which it stood to gain from the Labour government’s proudest achievement – the welfare state. Not only was there its underlying (though not total) universalism – including such attractive benefits in kind as free secondary education and a free health service – but, in Kenneth Morgan’s words, summarising a mountain of research, ‘the very extent and cost of the welfare state after 1945 meant that many of the new social reforms were financed by transfers of income within lower-income groups themselves, rather than by transfers from the rich to the poor’.
^2.
It was not, amid the clink of G&Ts, a point much made.

What about the much-vaunted, much-predicted, much-feared social revolution? ‘The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten’ was how George Orwell, in his celebrated 1941 essay
The Lion and
the Unicorn
, had keenly looked ahead to the post-war socialist future. If by the end of the war he was significantly less optimistic, he hoped at least for an assault on that symbol of social privilege seen everywhere on the railways – ‘the First Class nonsense should be scrapped once and for all,’ he thundered in October 1944. But by the spring of 1946, some eight months into the Labour government, he was frankly conceding that there would be no social revolution:

In the social set-up there is no symptom by which one could infer that we are not living under a Conservative government. No move has been made against the House of Lords, for example, there has been no talk of disestablishing the Church, there has been very little replacement of Tory ambassadors, service chiefs or other high officials, and if any effort is really being made to democratize education, it has borne no fruit as yet. Allowing for the general impoverishment, the upper classes are still living their accustomed life.

Orwell was surely right. The House of Lords did eventually have its power to delay legislation halved from two years to one, but any prospect of more fundamental reform, let alone abolition, was explicitly squashed by Herbert Morrison, who in 1947 told the Liberal leader Clement Davies that ‘we should not set up something new and different from the past’. The public schools, of course, remained out of radical bounds, as did the privileges of Oxbridge. Other key areas where there was no government appetite for real change included company-law reform and gender equality. In the former, where the real possibility existed of deep-seated reform along German lines, tepid political willpower proved no match for City and Whitehall opposition allied to trade union leaders who saw workers’ representation as jeopardising free collective bargaining; in the latter, the Labour leadership simply ignored an overwhelming card vote at its 1947 party conference in favour of equal pay.

Irrespective of government policy, moreover, society at large remained riddled by petty snobbery and infinite gradations of class. ‘Among both the upper and middle classes,’ Frederic Osborn reflected in October 1945, ‘the word “garden city” stands for a working-class housing estate, with perhaps just a touch of philanthropy. It has therefore been something to approve but on no account to live in.’ The following year, faced by rising costs, the traditionally select North Hants Golf Club elected 30 new members. Unfortunately, three of them were, as various letters of complaint to the committee put it, ‘engaged in trade in Fleet’. The storm died down only when the committee pointed out that all three had played on the course regularly during the war and that no permanent ‘change of policy’ was envisaged.
^3.

There was also, as ever, the uncanny ability of ‘The Thing’ (as William Cobbett called the British establishment) to reinvent itself. Perhaps the prime example in these years was the National Trust, almost entirely run by Old Etonians. Historically, the Trust’s prime purpose had been to preserve actually or potentially threatened tracts of countryside, but that now changed to the acquisition and upkeep of country houses which would otherwise probably have been demolished. Public access to the nation’s new treasures was in some instances fixed at no more than 50 days in the year and at hours which were, as the Trust freely admitted in 1947, ‘settled as far as possible to suit the donor’s convenience’. In October 1946 the Trust’s relevant committee, including Sir Robert (‘Bertie’) Abdy, met at Montacute House in Somerset to discuss arrangements there. ‘Meeting quite a success,’ noted Lees-Milne, ‘in spite of Bertie’s sole comment which electrified the others. He remarked that the public could not of course be admitted to the house because they smelt. There was two minutes dead silence . . .’ Still, perhaps the point of the story
was
the stunned silence; maybe things were changing after all.

Either way, what mattered to much of the progressive intelligentsia was not so much redistribution of wealth or social egalitarianism, planning or welfare as cultural renewal – the spreading to the mass of the population of what Matthew Arnold had famously termed ‘sweetness and light’. The enemy was easy enough to identify. ‘Refuse with scorn the great dope-dreams of the economic emperors and their sorcerers and Hollywood sirens,’ J. B. Priestley implored in his
Letter
to a Returning Serviceman
, published in late 1945. ‘Don’t allow them to inject you with Glamour, Sport, Sensational News, and all the Deluxe nonsense, as if they were filling you with an anaesthetic.’ There was so much to deplore. Labour Party memos in 1946/7 on the need for a ‘Socialist policy for leisure’ lamented the ‘failure of the majority of Britain’s citizens to enjoy a full life through their leisure pursuits’; labelled the cinema and gambling as two prime examples of regrettably ‘passive’ and superficial leisure pursuits; and drew the rather defeatist conclusion that ‘all forms of escapist entertainment or recreation are encouraged by the drabness, insecurity and hopelessness of daily life’.
^4.
All the more cause, then, to attempt to inject a large and improving dose of cultural uplift. But unfortunately for the uplifters, as three examples all too graphically showed, the mass of the population was simply not interested.

The first example was the Arts Council, direct successor to the wartime state-sponsored organisation CEMA, which had brought high culture (especially in the form of drama and music) to thousands of captive audiences, whether in army camps or air-raid shelters or factory canteens. The new body’s first chairman was John Maynard Keynes, who in July 1945 declared his intention of making ‘the theatre and the concert hall and the art gallery . . . a living element in everyone’s upbringing’. The initial strategy was to continue to take culture to the people, but in practice at least 80 per cent of the former wartime audience, now no longer captive, voted negatively with their feet. Activists, reported one regional office in 1947, were ‘desperately worried’ by ‘their failure to establish contact with the ordinary folk in their towns’. Likewise, in a confidential report the same year, the Council concluded that its activities ‘do not . . . touch the mass of the working-class, even to the extent they did during the war’. By the late 1940s a full-scale retreat was under way from regional outreach, and soon afterwards the Council’s ambitious motto, ‘The Best for the Most’, was replaced by the more circumspect ‘Few But Roses’. A similar lack of broad appeal proved the Achilles heel of the adult-education movement. The vaunted if overestimated wartime impact of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs prompted in peace a big increase in government funding, especially for the Workers’ Education Association, but in the immediate post-war period the WEA was only able to attract fewer then 20,000 manual workers to its classes across England and Wales each year, barely a fifth of its students as a whole.
^5.

Finally, almost notoriously, there was the Third Programme, the BBC’s high-culture radio channel that began broadcasting on Sunday, 29 September 1946. ‘Its whole content will be directed to an audience that is not of one class but that is perceptive and intelligent,’ promised the director-general Sir William Haley – whose private goal was that in time so many listeners would migrate to it from the Light Programme and the Home Service that the two older channels would no longer be required. A glance, though, at the
Radio Times
for the first evening suggested that it would be a long route-march from
ITMA, Variety
Bandbox
and
Grand Hotel
on the Light to such offerings as ‘Reflections on World Affairs’ by Field-Marshal Smuts, the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult and gramophone records of madrigals by Monteverdi. Quarterly figures soon revealed the average programme on the Third to be securing only a meagre share of the BBC’s overall listening audience: 2.2 per cent in October–December 1946, and down to 0.9 per cent by July–September 1947, with one listener in three not even having made an attempt to tune in. Another 1947 audience-research report found that whereas 30 per cent of the upper-middle class had given a ‘warm welcome’ to the Third, only 4 per cent of the working class had.