Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (51 page)

Crosland’s liberalism contrasted sharply with the social conservatism of most Labour politicians, especially those from a trade-union background. Indeed, it was at about this time that Young (with whom Crosland was becoming friendly) commissioned a group of Labour-supporting lawyers to produce a report on law reform, with a view to including some of its proposals in the manifesto he was working on for the election due in 1950. ‘The report when it arrived contained a large number of well-reasoned proposals for reform, such as abolishing the “crime” of homosexuality, modernising the divorce laws, removing censorship of plays and films, and abolishing capital punishment,’ Young recalled a decade later. ‘The members of the [Policy] Committee were acutely embarrassed. Far from considering the proposals on their merits, they showed concern only that no word should ever get out that such a dangerous report had been received.’
¹⁸

Of the two intellectuals, Young at least would come in time to appreciate through first-hand experience the deeply entrenched world view of the party’s core supporters. But perhaps not even he ever quite took on board the full force and significance of the findings, applicable to both sexes, of a gifted (and now almost completely forgotten) sociologist, Pearl Jephcott. After working incognito for several months in a light engineering factory on a London bypass, she reported in September 1948 on the virtually non-existent interest of her fellow-employees in current affairs:

The girls’ talk hardly ranges beyond two themes, personal appearance and personal relations. The latter means fellows – mine, yours, hers. Even among the older women the only public event in the last three months which has fished folk out of the sea of personal and domestic affairs has been the Derby.

‘What we need,’ she concluded, ‘is some mental stimulant connected with our working life.’
¹⁹

3

Jolly Good as a Whole

Two of 1949’s innovations were Longleat and launderettes. On 1 April the sixth Marquess of Bath, wearing a pair of baggy old corduroys, stood with his wife on the front steps of one of the great Elizabethan houses and welcomed the first coach of visitors, each paying half a crown. A guidebook written by the marchioness, picture postcards and tubs of ice cream were all on sale, while her young children acted as tour guides or car-park attendants. The visitors poured in, up to 135,000 in the first year. ‘Of course,’ Lord Bath explained some months after his pioneering move, ‘the only way now is to run one’s house as a business, then it’s subject to the same taxation as other businesses. Like this it’s possible to keep things going.’ But for the landowning aristocracy as a whole, faced by unprecedentedly stiff peacetime taxation (including death duties of 75 per cent on estates of more than £1 million), the outlook seemed terminally grim. ‘A house such as Rowcester Abbey in these days is not an asset, sir, it is a liability,’ P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves authoritatively explained a few years later to an American visitor. ‘Socialistic legislation has sadly depleted the resources of England’s hereditary aristocracy.’ Ironically, it was the system of agricultural subsidies introduced by the Labour government that would, at least as much as charabancs, save many of the stately homes of England and their ungrateful inhabitants.

Britain’s first self-service, coin-operated launderette opened, for a six-month trial, at 184 Queensway in Bayswater on 10 May. ‘All that housewives have to do is bring the washing, put it in the machine and come back 30 minutes later (charge 2s 6d for 9lbs),’ explained the local paper. After the film star Jean Kent had done the ceremonial honours, first through the doors was 14-year-old Ryan Hyde of Woodfield Road, Paddington, carrying a large white linen bag. ‘Mum’s doing the cooking,’ he told the reporter. ‘This is going to save my big sister a lot of work.’ The experiment proved a success, and gradually other Bendix branches spread across London and elsewhere. When one opened in Fulham Broadway, the working-class mother of Janet Bull (later Street-Porter) ‘decided to forgo the cheap bagwash (only a shilling a week, and our clothes went in a sack with those of our upstairs tenants) at the Sunlight Laundry around the corner’. For the four-year-old Janet it was a thrilling experience – ‘as we didn’t have a television, I found the hour or so spent watching our sheets and towels being washed in a machine every week totally mesmeric’.

About the same time as Bayswater’s launderette opened, a national survey of housewives found that less than half used laundries, with most either doing their own washing or (for the better off) having a washerwoman come in to do it for them. To possess a washing machine was still rare; almost everyone had a scrubbing board or hand-turned mangle. But there had already been a significant moment in October 1948 when Hoover, hitherto best known for its vacuum cleaner, officially opened a factory for the manufacture of its new electric washing machine near Merthyr Tydfil. Initially almost all the machines were for export only, though that did not stop Hoover’s chairman and managing director, Charles Colston, from indulging in some pardonable rhetoric (probably written for him by a young Muriel Spark):

The introduction of this machine, I believe, is going to be welcomed by countless housewives throughout the country. During the War they carried a tremendous responsibility, and since the end of the War conditions have been none too easy for them and to relieve the housewives of much of the laborious work which they have to do is, I believe, one of the most effective ways in which we can raise their general well-being. Our Electric Washing Machine should be most valuable to mothers of babies and young children.

‘It is not an expensive model intended for the few,’ he emphasised. ‘It has been built with the intention that it shall be for the million.’
^1.

The National Health Service, by this time turning into a robust if greedy infant, was undeniably for the million. Right from the Appointed Day there was huge demand for its services, far from confined to elderly ladies wanting their varicose veins done. ‘I certainly found when the Health Service started on the 5th July ’48,’ Dr Alistair Clark, an ordinary GP, recalled half a century later, ‘that for the next six months I had as many as twenty or thirty ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions – I mean, of that twenty or thirty, there would be at least ten who had complete prolapse of their womb, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.’

Overall, though, the three great, almost feverish rushes were for drugs, spectacles and false teeth. As the drugs bill spiralled in two years from £13 million to £41 million, even Aneurin Bevan, the NHS’s architect and still Minister of Health, was heard to complain about the ‘cascades of medicine pouring down British throats – and they’re not even bringing the bottles back’. As for the lure of free spectacles, some eight million pairs were provided in the first year, double the anticipated total. ‘Officials in the Service,’ reported Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘say that this is partly because of the hundreds of thousands of citizens – mostly among the poor – who have been fumbling around all their lives in glasses bought at the five-and-ten [traditionally a lucky (or unlucky) dip counter at Woolworths], the only kind they could afford.’ There were two NHS frames to choose from: the 422 Panto Round Oval (anticipating the glasses immortalised by John Lennon in the 1960s, though in the NHS case with unsightly, pinkish plastic) and, far more popular, the 524 Contour (as worn years later by Elvis Costello). In the case of teeth, it could be a question of finding a dentist. ‘Colonel Whiter explained that dentists are under no legal obligation to treat anybody as a Health Service patient,’ officials of the John Hilton Bureau (in effect a citizens’ advisory organisation subsidised by the
News of the World
) found in December 1948 when they went to see the Ministry of Health’s Deputy Senior Dental Officer. ‘They can, if they wish, in urgent cases say “I will treat you as a private patient but not as a Health Service patient.” He is aware that dentists are doing this all over the country. He agrees that it is against the whole spirit of the Health Service Scheme.’ The same issue of the bureau’s
Journal
that related this encounter also included a pithy anecdote in a reader’s letter: ‘The dentist froze my jaw and said “I will not take your tooth out under the Health Service. It will cost you 5/-.” What could I do?’ Altogether, there were many stories of abuse circulating during the NHS’s first year, not a few involving dentists succumbing to the obvious financial temptation posed of being paid by the filling.

Nevertheless, Panter-Downes was surely right when in January 1949 she noted the existence of ‘a feeling that the Service is not working out as chaotically as was expected by its critics’ and that ‘the bitter blood between the Minister of Health and the medical men has diminished’. If there were storm clouds, they had to do with costs, almost from day one revealing that Sir William Beveridge’s confident expectation earlier in the decade – that a national health service would make the nation healthier and thus reduce health costs – was diametrically wrong. As early as December 1948, Bevan was warning his colleagues that the original estimate of £176 million for the NHS’s first nine months was going to be overshot by almost £50 million, and when two months later he came to the Commons for that extra money, or what Sir Cuthbert Headlam privately termed ‘Mr Bevan’s monstrous Supplementary Estimates for the national health business’, he had to see off attacks on his profligate stewardship. ‘Pale and miserable lot,’ Bevan called the Tories, ‘instead of welcoming every increase in the health of the nation . . . they groan at it. They hate it because they think it spells electoral defeat.’
^2.

One articulate doctor was disinclined to call a truce with the minister. ‘I am firmly convinced that at the present rate of expenditure it will involve us in national ruin,’ Ffrangcon Roberts (from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge) declared in the
British Medical Journal
about the cost of the NHS, before going on:

Our duty as a profession is clear. We must teach our students and the lay public that the fight against disease is part of the struggle for existence; that medicine is not above economic law but strictly subject to it; that the claims of health, so far from being absolute, are relative to national well-being; that the country will get not the finest Health Service in the world but the Health Service which it deserves.

By May an unabashed Bevan was telling the Cabinet that there would have to be another ‘supplementary’, for the financial year 1949/50. But he was adamant that the introduction of prescription charges would ‘greatly reduce the prestige of the Service’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the first phase of the NHS coincided with a period of considerable economic stringency, a survey soon afterwards found that ‘there exists among a substantial proportion of the population an exaggerated idea of the cost of the Health Service in relation to other items which tends to be associated with belief that the Government is spending more than it should be on the service’.

In April 1949 a Mass-Observation series of interviews across England asked people what they thought of ‘the new scheme as a whole’. There was as ever a range of responses:

As a whole it’s been all right, but like everything else it’s getting abused. People are using any excuse to go to the doctor when they never would have gone before. (
Married woman,
58
, Kentish Town
)

It’s pretty good. It’s what is needed. (
Carpenter and joiner,
49
, Selsdon,
Surrey
)

It’s not as good as it was. The doctor isn’t so friendly as he was, now it’s nationalised they’re just like the rest of the civil servants and they don’t want to have you more than they have to. When I took him the card he wasn’t very pleased about it. I’ve always paid for what I had from him and now he’s got to take everybody at so much a year. You can’t expect to get the same service. (
Tobacconist,
58
,
Croydon
)

A very good idea. Necessary to international interests. (
Village postmaster,
33
, Danbury, Essex
)

I think it’s good because I used to have to pay 4/- every time he came when we were sick. (
Wife of crane driver,
34
, Liverpool
)

Jolly good as a whole – it may be the members themselves spoil it by abuse. (
Librarian,
36
, Ferndown, Dorset
)

I’ve had no advantages myself yet. (
Civil servant,
56
, Kensington
) Well, myself, I think it’s good. But I think there’s a lot of extravagance on the part of the doctors. (
Housewife,
24
, Kimberley, Notts
)

It’s a waste of money, and I’m sure the poor could be helped without it. I don’t feel we have a family doctor any more. The surgeries are crowded and there is too much waste of time while we wait. (
Housewife,
60
, Birtley, Co. Durham
)

It could be a good idea if people didn’t take advantage of it – as it is, no. My husband hurt his back playing rugger and he caught a cold and it went to his back. He had to go to the doctor and he waited goodness knows how long. He had to go again, and each time he went he more or less saw the same people, and the doctor more or less reckoned half of them had nothing wrong with them – just went for the sake of going. (
Policeman’s wife,
32
, Marylebone
)

The English may have been a people with a disposition to grumble, but overall, M-O reported on its survey, ‘unqualified approval was nearly twice as common as approval hedged in with reservations’. The ‘main thing’ liked about the scheme was ‘the obvious point of cheapness, and the fact that it put everyone on a basis of medical equality’. Against that, ‘the commonest criticism concerned the time wasted in the doctor’s waiting room, followed by less frequent charges of abuses and malingering amongst some patients, and a feeling of increased regimentation’. The report added that ‘only a very few were able to venture any idea of the cost of the service.’ Among the ingrates was an aspiring young actor. ‘Went to Doctor about warts on my left hand,’ Kenneth Williams confided to his diary in April, the same month as the M-O survey. ‘They are becoming unsightly. Have to go to University College Hosp. to see Skin Doctor on May 5th! – ghastly business this National Health Scheme! – one might be dead by then!’
^3.