Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (33 page)

No, sorry chum I didn’t.

I listened to half of it, that’s all. I got fed up with it and switched over to the fight . . . I was very disgusted with the result of the fight, the referee must have been ‘colour blind’. Ha! ha! ha! It wasn’t at all fair – & everyone else seems to think the same thing as well.

The fight in question was the British Empire featherweight champion ship, at the Royal Albert Hall. Al Phillips of Aldgate won on points against Cliff Anderson from British Guyana – ‘an extremely unconvincing decision’, reported
The Times
, producing ‘a very mixed reception’.
¹³

It is debatable, though, how much the government’s standing was fundamentally affected by the big freeze. Polling figures by Gallup indicated a sharp short-term rise in dissatisfaction with Attlee and his ministers that was almost wiped out by May. Rather, the events of early 1947 should surely be seen as part of a longer-term continuum, in which
existing
weariness with life in post-war Britain merely deepened – a weariness that in itself did not automatically assume a concrete political form. By the end of March, one of the top hit tunes around, in the dance halls and elsewhere, was ‘Open the Door, Richard’, a recent number one in the US. ‘Wanting a thrill?’ asked one of
Melody Maker
’s columnists. ‘Get a load of Jack White . . . and see the jam-packed floor crowds lapping up the Astoria maestro’s sock version of “Richard”, with Sonny Rose at the burlesque end.’ Over the next few months, ‘Open the Door, Richard’ became a great catch-phrase, applicable to almost any kind of restriction in everyday life; Attlee was even advised to ‘Open the door, Richard’ and replace some of his less thrilling elderly ministers.
¹⁴
The political prize was there, in other words, for whoever could find the door’s key, real or rhetorical.

‘But the same owners and managers are still in charge of collieries, and they are doing the same things’ was the answer frequently given to Zweig that summer and autumn as he toured the coalfields and asked what difference the new dispensation had made. ‘We see hardly any difference in their behaviour.’ Those miners who were members of the new, much-trumpeted Colliery Consultative Committees tended to be particularly disenchanted: ‘We have no access to the books; the co-operation on the part of the managers is not genuine . . . Our suggestions are completely disregarded and little encouraged . . . We have as little to say about the colliery as before.’ A further problem was the excessive centralisation. ‘Before, we knew where we stood,’ a Derbyshire miner explained. ‘When we had a grievance the manager could settle it in five minutes, if not on his own responsibility, after a short conversation on the telephone with the Agent. Now we cannot settle anything with the manager. When we come to the manager, he always shifts everything on to the back of the NCB. “I can’t do anything without the NCB,” he says. But we don’t know the NCB . . .’ Inasmuch as miners did know the NCB, Zweig found, ‘irritation and indignation are expressed against the high salaries of officials who have no special qualification’. Furthermore, ‘One often hears a certain irritation expressed when the miner is told he is now a partner. “Since the Government took over the mines,” a miner said to me, “the popular saying of the managers is, ‘It’s your pit now,’ but it is a mockery, because to most of us it does not matter, or benefit us, whether the mine pays or not.” If you mention to the miner that he is a partner, he can be very bitter about it.’ All in all, Zweig concluded, ‘there can be no denial that at present the miners are disillusioned about the outcome of nationalisation’.

The fact that there were more strikes in the year after nationalisation than in the year before – including a long, high-profile dispute at Grimethorpe that spread across the Yorkshire coalfield – lends credence to the Zweig ‘disillusioned’ thesis. Yet ultimately it is a thesis predicated on the shaky assumption that most miners had ‘illusions’ in the first place about a fundamental reordering of social and industrial relations. Moreover, if in reality their aspirations for nationalisation were mainly more modest – focusing in the best ‘labourist’ tradition on solid, unglamorous, incremental improvements – then it is at least arguable that in the course of 1947/8 these pragmatic hopes started to be realised. ‘Working conditions improved markedly almost from the beginning,’ Roy Mason, a Yorkshire miner who later became a Labour minister, recalled. ‘Training was introduced for newcomers before ever they went down to the coalface. A ban was introduced on young boys going underground before they were sixteen. We had a national safety scheme, with proper standards at every colliery. And for the first time, pithead baths became a standard facility.’
¹⁵
There were also improved wages and, despite ministerial and NCB mis givings, the introduction of the five-day week.

So much depends on how one sees the miners – specifically, whether one buys into the somewhat romantic view, prevalent in the 1970s, that they were natural militants who wanted workers’ control and had been cruelly betrayed by the stodgy, bureaucratic form that public ownership took. But a rather different narrative starts to emerge if one accepts that the miners, for all their class solidarity and physical courage, were real – and therefore flawed – people: conservative (including about such matters as Polish labour and new forms of mechanisation), usually money-minded, sometimes bloody-minded, always deeply mistrustful.
¹⁶
In about June 1948 Mass-Observation surveyed 50 miners and 50 miners’ wives in the Doncaster area about their attitudes to nationalisation. Just over three in five expressed ‘unqualified approval’, mainly on the grounds of the improved wages; just over one in ten expressed ‘disapproval’, predominantly because ‘the old owners of the mines still wielded considerable power’; and among the others, approval was qualified by ‘much vocal criticism’ about ‘the organisation of specific jobs, the alleged increase of officials, and the growth of impersonality in organisation generally’. There were the familiar complaints, echoing Zweig’s findings, about remote, overpaid, high-handed ‘top hats’, but there was no sense of the strong wish to see more consultation of the ‘man on the spot’ being translated into a desire for the miners to assume strategic control of the industry.

Three pieces of testimony were especially suggestive. The first was by a packer maddened by the impractical
specifics
of nationalisation:

Oh, I don’t know what goes on at the Coal Board. I expect it’s even worse than down here at the pit. But down here there’s far too many non-producers. I can’t see the necessity for an ‘over-man’, a ‘deputy’, and a ‘shot firer’ for each district. That’s what we’ve got now in the pit. Before nationalisation we only had one deputy for the same district and we got on all right. They seem to have plenty of money to throw about. They could produce cheaper coal if they got rid of the wasters.

A scientist at one of the pits, himself the son of a miner who had been killed at that pit during the war, presented an unflattering but convincing snapshot: ‘The other day I was underground taking samples, and I happened to come to a face where the men didn’t know me and they definitely treated me as a spiv – they said so . . . A lot of the miners think if you are not producing coal then you are a spiv . . . The be all and end all is the wage packet and anything likely to affect that is taboo. I am sure they think that my wages are coming out of their pay packet.’ The third slice of testimony was by a rank-and-file miner, reflecting what the report found to be a widespread suspicion of the union leaders: ‘They’re all piss and wind . . . Talk, talk, but when it comes down to doing anything, that’s another matter . . . The trouble is especially with the Welsh bastards, they all think in the past and not the present.’
¹⁷
With coal in high demand, and with apparently no significant rival source of energy on the horizon, it was a present and immediate future that was looking surprisingly good.

9

Our Prestige at Stake

‘How do you feel about unmarried people living together?’ was the question that Mass-Observation put to various Londoners in March 1947. ‘I think it’s perfectly terrible,’ replied one middle-class woman in her 50s, ‘because the woman always gets the worst of it and it’s the beginning of heartbreak.’ By contrast, the working-class response was notably non-judgemental:

I wouldn’t do it myself, but I’ve an open mind on it, and circumstances may have a lot to do with it.

I suppose it’s up to those people themselves – it’s up to them entirely.

I mind my business and I don’t care what others do – that’s theirs.

I don’t feel nothing.

Don’t know, never thought about it.

If you love one another, it’s all right I suppose.

I’m not a prude by nature, it’s their affair.

Significantly, this unenthusiastic but ultimately pragmatic reaction to sex before marriage was partly repeated – but only partly – when it came to the accompanying question, ‘How do you feel about divorce?’

It depends on the people. If either is to blame they should have a divorce.

Well, I mean to say, it’s a good thing if the couple are unhappy.

No. A man takes a wife for better or worse, doesn’t he?

I wouldn’t grant divorce, they should get on with it.

I feel very sorry for the kiddies. It’s very hard on them but if Mother and Father can’t agree it only makes the children suffer worse – they suffer inwardly.

I think it’s an awful thing to happen to anyone – everybody turns away from a divorced woman.

Better to divorce than live unhappily.

I don’t like the idea of a divorce – all the publicity and scandal.

In some cases, yes. Marriage is a gamble anyway.

The divorce rate may have been rising – inevitable in the immediate aftermath of war – but across society the stigma remained. Sir Francis Meynell, creator and editor of the long-running, best-selling annual anthology
The Week-End Book
, was from 1946 no longer welcome at royal garden parties on account of his divorce that year, nor from 1947 were two judges who had been discovered by the Lord Chamberlain to have neglected to mention their divorces in their
Who’s Who
entries. Divorce law itself had been liberalised in 1937, to the extent that cruelty and desertion had joined adultery as legitimate grounds, but this was still a long way from divorce by mutual consent. ‘Would you approve or disapprove if it were made possible to get a divorce simply by agreement between the two parties?’ asked Gallup in April 1948. Tellingly, only 27 per cent replied positively, with a bias towards the young and the middle class.
^1.

For those visiting the first post-war
Daily Mail
Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in March 1947 (‘Queues in all directions,’ noted a hungry Vere Hodgson. ‘We never got a bite.’), the publicity brochure of the furniture-makers James Broderick & Co. left little doubt about woman’s place in the overall scheme of things. ‘What every newlywed should know’ included a ‘Day-to-Day Plan’ for new brides:

Monday
. Is not essentially a day for laundry. Scour the kitchen after week-end catering activities, check up on rations and shop for vegetables, canned foods and breakfast cereals for a few days ahead.

Tuesday
. Manage the light personal laundry, leaving the sheets and bath towels. Get all items dried and ironed during the day whenever possible.

Wednesday
. Clean thoroughly bedrooms and bathrooms and use early afternoon for silver cleaning.

Thursday
. Change bedlinen, launder ‘heavies’. While they dry, clean the lounge. Iron early afternoon.

Friday
. Plan meals for week-end, making provision for Monday ‘left-overs’. Shop. Give dining room or dining alcove a thorough clean and polish.

Saturday
. Keep this free for the family as far as possible. Prepare vegetables for Sunday and manage some cooking in the morning. Then relax.

Sunday
. Belongs to you and those who share the home with you. Confine all essential cooking to early part of morning.

‘What you wear in the house for the working hours is important,’ added a section on appearance. ‘Crisp, easily removed gay overalls, smocks, nylon or spongeable plastic aprons look attractive. Wear your hair as you would do for the man-of-the-house’s homecoming.’

At this point only about a quarter of married women were in the labour force, and during much of 1947 and 1948, as in 1946, there was considerable pressure from the Ministry of Labour on young married women to return to work. If there was a representative woman’s voice in the face of nothing less than a propaganda bombardment, it was surely that of Mary Grieve, editor of the top-selling women’s magazine,
Woman
. ‘“But surely you don’t think they will call up women!” said my friend in tones of horror in the middle of our discussion on Britain’s dire shortage of manpower,’ she reported in February 1947. ‘Looking at her shocked face I hardly knew what to say.’ Over the ensuing months, Grieve and her columnist Joan Lambert stressed how exhausted the housewife at home already was and called on husbands, industry and government to offer practical help to make it more realistic for married women, particularly if they were mothers, to return to the workplace. In short, ‘appeals to women’s patriotism are not enough.’ And, daringly, ‘perhaps what we need is a Mothers’ Union affiliated to the TUC!’
^2.
The suggestion was half tongue-in-cheek, but only half.

It remained clear what most men thought. A snatch of saloon-bar conversation at the Travellers Rest in Aston was overheard in June 1947. Said one man: ‘It’s all very well asking women to come back into industry but there are plenty of men out of work. It beats me.’ His fellow-drinker of mild agreed: ‘A woman’s got a day’s work in the house anyway . . .’ As for women themselves, a survey of almost 3,000 of them soon afterwards found that ‘apart from small percentages who were either positively in favour of women working or positively against it, the majority thought that women should go out to work only if they can carry out their duties to their homes and families’ – that, in other words, ‘a woman’s first duty is to her home’. Strikingly, less than a third of ‘the occupied women’ in the survey ‘thought that in general women should go out to work’; among ‘unoccupied’ women, the proportion was less than a fifth.

Yet if there existed – as clearly there did, especially among many women who had worked during the war – a profound desire to get back to (and then stay put in) homemaking normality in familiar surroundings, that was not the exclusive sentiment. ‘It’s ridiculous to be forced to live like a schoolgirl at the age of twenty-four,’ Phyllis Noble wrote in her diary in May 1947. ‘The war pulled me out of Lee [a mixed Victorian suburb in south-east London], and now I must make my own road. There is no doubt in my mind that I must get “a room of my own”.’ She had recently been demobbed from the WAAF, and like many young women – and young men – she had every intention after the war of continuing to broaden her horizons. Later that summer, waiting to start a course to train as a hospital social worker, she went one day to Westminster Abbey in the hope of seeing the Battle of Britain Memorial. ‘A long, unpleasant queue put me off,’ she noted. ‘Odd to see many women (including self) hatless. Such a revolution in so short a time!’ Did this sudden hatless-ness presage a new sense of female independence? The emergence by 1947 of Christine Norden (daughter of a Sunderland bus driver and reputedly spotted in an Edgware Road cinema queue) as Britain’s first post-war blonde, busty film star only arguably supports the thesis. Either way, the harsh home and/or work dilemma remained, as implacably expounded in the brilliant 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film
The Red Shoes
. Moira Shearer, playing a talented young dancer, is compelled by her lover to choose between giving up her career and giving up her would-be husband. It is a choice she is unable to make, and, in the absence of a third way, she dies.
^3.

How did the nation’s home-dwellers, whether homemakers or not, spend their free time? Not on the whole in reading, let alone self-improving reading. A Mass-Observation survey in the summer of 1947, carried out among almost a thousand Tottenham residents, revealed that ‘“reading” was given as the favourite hobby by three in ten of the middle class, by two in ten of the skilled working class, and by one in ten of the unskilled’. Almost half the sample said they never read books at all, but only one in ten went without reading a daily paper (the
Daily Mirror
, the
News Chronicle
, the
Daily Herald
and the
Daily
Express
being the most popular), and a mere one in 20 did not read a Sunday paper (with three out of five favouring the
News of the World
). As for magazines, they were preponderantly read by the middle class. Non-readers of books, a group far more working-class than middle-class in composition, were asked to explain their lack of interest:

None of them subjects is interesting to me. All I like is gangster stories, though there’s precious much chance of reading here. Three rooms we got and three kids knocking around. No convenience, no nothing except water. I’m glad to get out of the house I can tell you.

Cos I ain’t got no interest in them – they all apparently lead up to the same thing.

I’m not very good at reading, I never was. I’ve never liked it some’ow.

Too long. I like to get straight into a story. I have started books and I have to read through the first pages two or three times. I like to get stuck straight into a story – there’s too much preliminary if you see what I mean.

Less than a quarter of the sample belonged to Tottenham Public Library. ‘I don’t want to bother’ was one explanation; ‘I ain’t never even thought on it, never mind a reason’ another.

Among readers, five preferred fiction to every one favouring nonfiction (in which the two most favoured topics were sport and health). ‘I like something I can relax in,’ reflected an elderly man. ‘Don’t like anything that gets me worried and wondering.’ Crime and mystery stories were almost twice as popular as any other subject. ‘There’s nothing to beat a good detective story,’ declared a young manual worker. ‘Keeps you interested all the way through. When I get into a good murder story I don’t hear any of the noise what’s going on in the house or anything.’ Working-class female readers had, predictably, a penchant for romance:

My friend is very keen on love stories and when she gets a real good one she brings it in. Some of them are very good and I enjoy a real good cry when I read them . . .

My friend lives two doors away and I get books for her too. She likes the same kind of stories as well. It’s nice to read about that sort of love and better class people, for you don’t notice things as much then. It’s a real pleasure to read Ruby M. Ayres’ books and I often cry over them.

Ayres was one of Tottenham’s six most popular authors – behind Edgar Wallace, Charles Dickens and Ethel M. Dell (a rival purveyor of the old-fashioned love story), ahead of Naomi Jacob (who wrote family rather than love stories) and Agatha Christie.
^4.
A list of only patchy quality admittedly, but not out-and-out rubbish either, its inclusion of Dickens reminding one that this was a world nearer to the Victorian era than to the early twenty-first century.