Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (34 page)

Reading (whether of books, papers or magazines) played second fiddle to the wireless in most homes. A survey of domestic evening activities in almost 2,000 households over a wide range of urban dwellings across the country, completed in the spring of 1947, found that whereas the percentage of people reading for half an hour or more was never more than 15 per cent in any two-hour period, there were for equivalent half-hour periods never less than 20 per cent of households with the radio switched on and often more than 30 per cent. The radio was on in no less than 40 per cent of households where school homework was in progress, while the other three most frequent pairs of conflicting activities taking place in the same physical space were radio and reading, radio and conversation, and ‘radio and resting’. Given all these and other conflicting activities (including ‘between children playing and other people resting’ and ‘between visitors and meals’), it might be expected that bedrooms were utilised for activities other than sleeping and dressing, but in practice, no doubt partly because of lack of heating, less than 10 per cent were.

Besides, to go upstairs might mean missing
Dick Barton – Special
Agent
(15 million listeners a night, a cliffhanger at the end of every episode), or
Twenty Questions
(featuring Richard Dimbleby), or
Down
Your Way
(Dimbleby again), or
Variety Bandbox
(making an instant star of Frankie Howerd) or even Benny Hill, who made his radio debut later in 1947. Startlingly, a survey done in June that year of more than 3,000 of the adult listening public found that 77 per cent usually listened while eating each of the three main meals of the day – including eight out of ten for the evening meal, which for two-thirds had taken place by 6.30. Not that these habitual listeners heard much in the way of vigorous airing of the issues of the day, with the BBC in 1947 formally issuing a self-denying ordinance which forbade discussion of any matters either currently being debated in parliament or due in the next fortnight to be debated there. Known as the ‘fourteen day rule’ or ‘fourteen day gag’, it was all too typical of an organisation (starting to be known as ‘Auntie’) that, in the acerbic but just words of one historian, ‘shunned controversy and censored itself’.
^5.

Similarly symptomatic of the BBC’s lack of a hard journalistic edge was the continuing unwillingness to provide regular news bulletins on television. A first generation of television personalities was emerging, including Richard Hearne (aka Mr Pastry) and the bearded cook Philip Harben, famous for using his actual family rations on screen, though programmes could be received only within an expanding but limited radius of about 50 miles from Alexandra Palace, sets were still expensive and difficult to get, and by 1948 a mere 4.3 per cent of the adult population had one in their homes. Even within the BBC, there was little faith in the new medium. In June 1947 R.J.E. Silvey, in charge of audience research and a professed Home Service rather than Light Programme listener, gave three reasons, in addition to ‘the extremely high standard of sound broadcasting’, why he would not buy a set on his own account if he did not already have a staff set:

The picture itself still seems very primitive. Once the miraculous aspect of television has faded, as it inevitably does, the picture tends to be compared with that of the cinema. The comparison is least odious in respect of television studio productions, but in respect of O.B.s [outside broadcasts] the deficiencies of television are very obtrusive . . . Watching television for as much as an hour is, in our experience, liable to give one the same kind of headache as going to the early cinema did.

For ‘people like us’ the programmes themselves contain much which is of very little appeal. For example, we just aren’t Variety-minded. An occasional little revue is the most in this field which we should ask for from television. In practice, once a fortnight would be the upper limit of our demands for this kind of thing . . . Magazine programmes such as
Kaleidoscope
and
Picture Page
seem to us amusing enough if one wishes to demonstrate television to a friend but never of sufficient appeal to warrant switching the set on specially . . .

Finally, by no means the least potent factor militating against television in my kind of home is the sheer palaver involved in having to watch it. It means putting the light out, moving the furniture around and settling down to give the programme undivided attention.

But for the less favoured, including Judy Haines in Chingford a few weeks later, the acquisition of a set was exciting enough:

26
July (Saturday)
. Escott’s could get Pye television by Monday!

9
August
. Abbé off and put his name down for television. Missed recent good opportunity to buy.

11
September
. Had Pye Television Set delivered.

13
September
. Abbé had televised cricket while I took Ione to park.

16
September
. Television aerial fixed. It took from lunch until nearly 7 o’c.

4
October
. Mum and Dad H. came for television variety.

Over in even leafier Ealing, Erica Ford’s family got their set early in 1948:

9
February (Monday)
. It is a Murphy. In the evening we saw television music hall & winter sports. Very good.

10
February
. In afternoon looked at television film about Mounties – quite good.

12
February
. We saw play ‘Gaslight’ which was very interesting & so of course knitting remained undone.

29
February
. Saw ‘Muffin the Mule’, a marionette – very good.

1
March
. Spent evening looking in & then went off to bed in bit better time [ie than after the previous evening’s viewing].

15
March
. More knitting & saw television
Dancing Club
. I listened to play in kitchen, while rest of family saw more television.

That summer, some 900 viewers, predominantly ‘suburban, middle class and middle aged’, returned a BBC questionnaire asking about their television-watching habits. It transpired that an evening rarely passed in which the owner of a set did not switch on, with no fewer than 91 per cent saying that it was their habit to watch from 8.30 p.m. (or earlier) to close-down. Some 16 per cent said they had to make ‘frequent’ adjustments to the set, and 58 per cent ‘occasional’ adjustments, in order to get a better picture. As for programme content, the tone of the replies reflected, according to the BBC’s analysis, ‘plenty of enthusiasm for plays – but not “morbid” plays – plenty of prejudice against dance music, and so on’.
^6.
All in all, television was hardly yet the people’s medium, but it was clearly starting to be somewhat addictive for those who had it.

An older addiction was well served on both mediums. Fred Streeter (former head gardener at Petworth House and almost instantly celebrated for his Sussex burr) emerged as the first regular television gardener in 1947, the same year that
Country Questions
began (in April) on the radio at Sunday lunchtime. A direct forerunner of
Gardeners’ Question Time
, it fielded listeners’ queries ‘about the countryside’, with the celebrated farmer-journalist A. G. Street in the chair and a panel that featured the West Country’s quasi-professional – and deeply reactionary – countryman Ralph Wightman, the voice from Piddletrenthide on VE night. The programme’s regular listeners may have included the 400 members of the Bethnal Green Allotments and Gardens Association. ‘Curiously enough they won’t go in for competitions,’ the group’s middle-class-sounding secretary observed in August 1947 to an investigator into voluntary activities and groups. ‘They won’t believe they’re good enough.’ The investigator observed that the members did not seem to have much contact among themselves:

Yes, that’s true. We have no meeting place and it is largely an individual affair and the Association helps with tools and advice . . . There was a scheme: we got some waste ground on the Wellington Estate: there were 40 gardening members there who thought it was a grand idea to start a sort of cultural centre and they’re doing very well I think: there’s a Mr H. who lives there and is very keen on it . . . I tried to start the same scheme in three other estates but it did not work. I’ve come to the conclusion that you must have the leadership from among the people themselves, it’s no good otherwise.

Elsewhere, the gardening signals were mixed. Contemporary illustrations of suburban back gardens suggest a new premium being put on order, often taking the form of a rectangular lawn, a single tree positioned in the middle, regularly placed square paving stones, and each plant surrounded by a large amount of soil. But for the many thousands of married women now staying at home, willingly or otherwise, there was the inspiriting Constance Spry, who started her flower-arranging school in 1946, wrote prolifically in magazines and, in Jenny Uglow’s words, ‘liked boldness, old roses, unexpected wild flowers, flashes of lime-green – just what was needed after wartime gloom’.
^7.
Although the future ultimately belonged to colourful display and dense planting-cum-foliage, there remained a stubborn puritanical streak in the British gardening psyche.

The nation’s supreme demotic moment in 1947 came soon after the debut of Street, Wightman et al. On Saturday, 10 May, at the huge terraced bowl that was Hampden Park in Glasgow, 134,000 (out of the 500,000 who had applied for tickets) watched Great Britain versus The Rest of Europe. ‘Britain Must Beat Europe: Our Prestige At Stake’ was that morning’s
Daily Express
headline about what had, the paper’s Frank Butler declared, ‘become known as the Match of the Century’. Butler was adamant that even a draw ‘would be regarded as a moral victory by the Continentals and leave us the laughing stock of Europe’; among the opposition, he singled out the ‘sinister figure’ of Parola, ‘the sallow-skinned and dark curly-haired Italian centre half, who is said to be a master stopper’. Moreover, he warned about The Rest of Europe team as a whole: ‘They cleverly avoided revealing any of their talents to the British reporters who watched them yesterday. All they showed was some mighty fine acrobatics and high kicking.’

He need not have worried. Stanley Matthews of Stoke City enjoyed on the right wing an afternoon of mazy dribbles, Chelsea’s Tommy Lawton and Middlesbrough’s Wilf Mannion each scored twice, and despite the best efforts of Parola (wearing ‘the briefest of briefs’) the home team ran out comfortable 6–1 winners. ‘Europe is now convinced that the British are bosses of Soccer,’ Butler duly wrote, and that evening, in a Glasgow hotel, Matthews signed for Blackpool for £11,500 and a deceptively hedonistic bottle of champagne. By this time the football season was going into overtime because of the many postponements caused by the big freeze, and the first post-war Division 1 championship was not settled until mid-June. In a tight finish it went to Liverpool, whose decisive goal in the last match at Wolves was scored by their red-haired centre forward Albert Stubbins. Established that day as a Liverpool icon, he would feature (with a broad grin) almost exactly 20 years later on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band
.

In the 1940s there were still several professional sportsmen who combined soccer with cricket – among them the gifted, charismatic Denis Compton, who in 1947 experienced a true annus mirabilis. It was not just that he broke all batting records for England and Middlesex, scoring an astonishing 18 hundreds in the course of the season, but the spontaneous, life-affirming way in which he played at such a drab and depressing time. Neville Cardus, finest of English cricket writers, was among those cheering:

Never have I been so deeply touched on a cricket ground as I was in this heavenly summer, when I went to Lord’s to see a pale-faced crowd, existing on rations, the rocket bomb still in the ears of most folk – see this worn, dowdy crowd watching Compton. The strain of long years of anxiety and affliction passed from all hearts and shoulders at the sight of Compton in full sail, sending the ball here, there and everywhere, each stroke a flick of delight, a propulsion of happy sane healthy life. There were no rations in an innings by Compton . . .

Quite early in the season, on 11 June, in the first Test against South Africa at Nottingham, Compton made a match-saving 163. That same day, from the hills above Florence, Dylan Thomas wrote to one of the BBC commentators, ‘I hear your voice every day from Trent Bridge . . . You’re not only the best cricket commentator – far and away that; but the best sports commentator I’ve heard, ever; exact, enthusiastic, prejudiced, amazingly visual, authoritative, and friendly.’ The recipient was John Arlott, who, in two remarkable years since the war, had stopped being a Southampton policeman and become first a poetry producer at the BBC (working closely with Thomas) and then a cricket commentator and writer. During the 1947 season, he emerged as a nationally known voice and name, his Hampshire burr (what the Head of Outside Broadcasts called ‘a vulgar voice’) in striking contrast to the conventional, upper-middle-class tones of E. W. Swanton and Rex Alston. For Arlott, at best a mediocre cricketer himself, these immediate post-war years were like a dream; he fell more than half in love with professional cricket as a way of life and with those who played it. ‘On a sane and economic level no argument can be adduced for a man becoming a county cricketer,’ he wrote soon after the season ended, in a sober assessment of the professional cricketer’s many uncertainties and lack of material rewards. ‘He is valuable to the student of social history only as an example of the incurable romantic – but it is difficult indeed to deny him sympathy, perhaps even envy.’
^8.