Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (52 page)

It was Bevan’s other responsibility, housing, which remained, in the continuing context of shortages of manpower and materials, the government’s Achilles heel.
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So much so that Gallup in early 1949 registered 61 per cent dissatisfaction with the progress being made. Those who did have somewhere to live did not dare jeopardise losing it. ‘Have you ever wondered why so many old people can be seen roaming the streets of Malden?’ asked a September 1949 charity appeal from the heart of Surrey suburbia. ‘Does it shock you to hear that it is because many of them are only tolerated in their lodgings on condition that they keep “out of the way” during the hours of daylight?’ Young Harry Webb, the future Cliff Richard, was seven when he, his parents and his three sisters left India for England in 1948. ‘At first my grandmother found us a room next to her in Carshalton,’ he recalled. ‘That room was our living room, bedroom, kitchen – the lot.’ After a year, ‘my aunt gave us a room in her home at Waltham Cross in Essex – but it was no bigger and the five of us went on living in each other’s pockets.’ Eventually they got a council house in Cheshunt, but they were still reliant on packing cases to serve as chairs.

In the capital new housing at this stage usually meant flats (for which the Treasury was prepared to subsidise the purchase of expensive land by local authorities), though rarely high-rise flats. In inner London, in the six years after the war, the London County Council (LCC) built 13,072 flats but only 81 houses, while in the boroughs of outer London the respective figures were 13,374 and 2,630. In July 1948 Panter-Downes visited Lambeth, where four-fifths of the housing stock had been damaged or destroyed in the war. There she found ‘excellent new permanent housing’ which, along the lines envisaged by Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s wartime plan for London, involved ‘the population’s expanding vertically rather than horizontally’. Admittedly, she added, ‘the average Londoner wants a little house and a garden,’ but ‘according to the new plans, he’ll have to settle, nine times out of ten, for a flat and a window box’.
Picture
Post
was a less ambiguous cheerleader when, the following January, in an article stridently headed ‘Housing: London Shows How’, it featured the work under way in the heavily blitzed Stepney-Poplar reconstruction area, where two-thirds of the new dwellings were to be flats. Many of these flats contained ‘four rooms, a utility room, a drying balcony, a sun balcony, and a boiler in the kitchen to provide domestic hot water, or else gas or electric water-heaters. All living rooms will have open fires.’ In short: ‘What a contrast to the rooms pictured by Charles Dickens!’
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The houses versus flats issue continued to be debated among activators, generally, but for Donald Gibson, City Architect of Coventry and mastermind of that city’s much-lauded post-war redevelopment, the answer was obvious. In April 1949 the local paper reported his speech on the city’s prospective new estates:

On the question of lay-out, Mr Gibson said: ‘I do not see why there should be any front gardens, for most people do not seem prepared to devote enough time to them. The street is the concern of the whole city, and these gardens destroy its appearance.’ He considered there should be no gates or fences and that central greens should be the responsibility of the Baths and Parks Committee.

The city should go in for flats in a big way and have really high ones, even up to 20 storeys in a block.

The paper’s editorial in the same issue was essentially in agreement, especially on the horticultural aspect: ‘Almost anywhere it can be seen that many people do not want, and do not deserve, their gardens.’

Inevitably, these were bad days for Frederic Osborn. ‘Relatively to the knowledge and aspirations of the times, the wholesale building of multi-storey flats at 40 an acre today in Stepney or Bermondsey is less enlightened than the building there of terrace-houses at much the same density 100 years ago,’ he declared in the spring issue of
Town and
Country Planning
. And by July he was inveighing to Lewis Mumford about how ‘in London just now the authorities are building eight and ten storey flats, intended for families’, though with an average floor area of only 650 square feet, compared to the 1,000 or 1,050 square feet for ‘the current two-storey house’. Yet ‘Royal personages open these wonder-flats, admire the gadgets, the central heating and hot water, the automatic lifts, etc. Mayors wear halos, women’s columns write as if the millennium of the housewife had arrived . . .’ It was a passage that revealed the limitations of even as practical and humanitarian an idealist as Osborn. Most people might indeed prefer houses to flats, but if a flat was the only way to obtain central heating and hot water, let alone ‘gadgets’, that for very many (and not only housewives) was an irresistible lure.

The architects and architectural critics, increasingly cross that the LCC in 1945 had removed housing from the Architect’s Department to the Valuer’s, were also missing the point. Arguably the key figure was J. M. Richards, editor of the
Architectural Review
and for a time the
Architects’ Journal
as well as architectural correspondent for
The
Times
. In February 1949 the LCC held an immensely popular Homes for London exhibition in the entrance foyer of Charing Cross tube station, viewed by more than 120,000 commuters. But for Richards, this was the cue to launch a fierce attack on the iniquity of London’s new public housing being in the hands of non-architects – ‘whether,’ as he told radio listeners at the end of February, ‘you take the grim concrete barracks recently provided for the people of Bethnal Green and Deptford and Islington or the immense scheme now under construction at Woodberry Down, a fine site in North London now being covered with flats of an ineptness in design and crudity of detail that London shouldn’t be expected to put up with in 1949’. In the
Architects’ Journal
an anonymous writer (perhaps Richards himself) predictably agreed with that critique and cited the Valuer’s most recent development, the Flower House Estate at Catford, comprising 15 blocks ‘in monolithic concrete’ of three or four storeys each, as ample justification for it. Yet to read the
Lewisham Journal
’s report of the opening by Herbert Morrison of the first five blocks on 11 March is to sense a proud local occasion and many happy new residents. At one point Morrison presented the key of flat number 4 of Morse House to George Jones, a salesman at Sainsbury’s in Catford. He, his wife and their 18-month-old twin boys had been living in a small room in Eltham, with Mrs Jones in poor health; they were clearly relieved and delighted to be moving to a three-room flat, with kitchenette and bathroom.

That did not stop the
Architects’ Journal
being filled for several weeks with letters from architects supporting the Richards attack, eventually prompting the LCC to put on another exhibition, at County Hall in May, of its housing work – in turn attracting yet more strident criticism from the architects. ‘If one single building had been able to compare with the clarity of Gropius’s block of flats in Siemensstadt Siedlung, Berlin, built, mind you, 20 years ago, one might have felt that there was some encouragement for the future’ was a fairly typical specimen. Significantly, also on display at County Hall were the designs for what would become the Royal Festival Hall, principally the work of the LCC’s Architect and Deputy Architect, Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin. ‘It shows,’ asserted Richards, ‘every promise of performing that rare feat: combining a frankly modern expression with a monumental character and real refinement of detail.’
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The architects were poised to regain control. But for the punters, who just wanted somewhere to live, it was a squabble that at this stage mattered not a whit.

Coinciding with the displays at County Hall was the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Show, and for the first time since the war the traditional eve-of-show banquet was held, with the speeches going out live on radio. In the chair was the RA’s doughtily reactionary septuagenarian President, Sir Alfred Munnings, whose speciality was very popular (and lucrative) paintings of horses. He was, as heard by a delighted Vere Hodgson, determined to give it to them straight:

What a speech! He entirely forgot he was being broadcast. He could see no ladies present – forgot many of them were listening in – and simply crashed out at Modern Art. I hugged myself as I listened . . . He damned that and damned that . . . Said he has asked Mr Churchill if he saw Picasso walking down Piccadilly would he join him in a bodily assault . . . And Mr Churchill replied – WILLINGLY. So it went on . . .

I could feel the BBC officials were fainting in the background – not knowing whether to switch him off or not. But they did not. Someone tried to tell him he was overstepping his time. He waved them on one side, and said it was the last time he was President and he intended to have his say . . .

Apparently the BBC was bombarded with phone calls as, never before, has an Academy Banquet been so exciting. Artists interrupted the President during his speech. This is unheard of . . .

The provocation was undeniable. Attacking experts ‘who think they know more about art than the men who paint the pictures’, Munnings mentioned by name the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, who had once said in his hearing that Joshua Reynolds was inferior to Picasso. ‘What an extraordinary thing for a man to say!’ declared Munnings. Then, after a swipe at Matisse for his ‘aesthetic juggling’ (leading to cries of ‘beautiful’ and ‘lovely work’), he turned on a recent, well-publicised sculpture by Henry Moore. ‘My horses may be all wrong,’ he added, ‘but I’m damned sure that isn’t right.’

It was a diatribe that certainly made an impact. ‘Much talk at dinner table of Sir Alfred Munnings’ last night broadcast speech,’ noted Gladys Langford in her Highbury hotel. And in her next entry: ‘Very gay breakfast-table, Freddy White on Munnings & The Moderns was very funny.’ Not long afterwards, Munnings was booming away in the Athenaeum when he spotted Britain’s greatest living sculptor and his fellow-modernist friend, J. M. Richards. ‘There’s that fellow Moore,’ exploded Sir Alfred. ‘What’s a bloody charlatan like him doing in this club?’ Moore, perhaps influenced by the worldly-wise Richards, ignored him.

At the Summer Show itself, Munnings’s own paintings found particular favour with the paying public. ‘I think they’re very good, outstanding, somehow,’ a working-class man told Mass-Observation’s investigator. ‘They’re lifelike, not just paint and canvas. They stand out.’ A 65-year-old woman was especially struck by his
Coming Off the Heath at
Newmarket
: ‘It’s very nice, isn’t it? I like the dust coming up from the horses’ feet.’ Almost invariably, the highest value was given to pictorial realism. ‘Now that’s beautiful,’ said a young middle-class woman about a painting called
Generation to Generation
. ‘Every detail is there. The oil lamp and even the spoon in the teacup. It’s one of the best of the views.’ A slightly older middle-class woman liked a portrait of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard: ‘There’s a lot of detail in that. It’s just like a photograph, but that’s just what you want.’ Not all the subjects, however, met with approval. ‘I think that’s dreadful,’ said another middle-class woman about
Mother and Child
, in which the child was suckling. ‘I see nothing beautiful in that. And when the baby grows up he won’t be so pleased either. It’s all right from a medical point of view, but that’s about all.’ A working-class man was similarly dismissive about
Spit and
Polish
, a still-life: ‘There’s far better stuff to paint than old boots like those. I don’t like that.’ Overall, M-O’s report rather reluctantly accepted, ‘the general public are quite clear in their own minds about what they like and what they dislike.’
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Amid architectural and artistic controversy, the annual sporting rhythm did not miss a beat. Russian Hero was the 66–1 winner of the Grand National – tipped, appropriately enough, by the
Daily Worker
– while in the Boat Race the normally imperturbable commentary of John Snagge (his throaty chant of ‘in, out’ timing the strokes) went somewhat awry: ‘Oxford are ahead. No Cambridge are ahead. I don’t know who’s ahead – it’s either Oxford or Cambridge.’ Two days after the Munnings broadside, Wolverhampton Wanderers (captained by Billy Wright) met Leicester City (missing their ‘schemer-in-chief’ Don Revie) in the Cup Final. Valerie Gisborn, growing up in Leicester (where television was not yet available), listened to the match on the radio with her mother, but her father travelled down to Isleworth, where he had an ex-naval friend who had invited him to stay, specifically to watch the match on their set. Although City lost, the womenfolk keenly anticipated the report of his trip: