Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (59 page)

It was a picture – of social conservatism in attitude and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in behaviour – broadly confirmed by Geoffrey Gorer’s much more extensive 1950/51
People
survey. ‘Not counting marriage, have you ever had a real love affair?’ he asked. Out of the 11,000 or so questionnaires returned, 43 per cent admitted to having had one (which Gorer understood to mean in the vast majority of cases a sexual relationship) and 47 per cent ‘gave an uncompromising No’. It was the latter figure that struck Gorer most forcibly in terms of ‘the sexual morality of the English’:

I should like to emphasise that half the married population of England, men and women alike, state that they have had no relationship, either before or after marriage, with any person other than their spouse, and that the numbers are even greater in the working classes. My personal impression is that this is a very close approximation to the truth; and although there are no extensive figures available comparable to these [with Gorer footnoting that the Kinsey sample was ‘in no way comparable’] I very much doubt whether the study of any other urban population would produce comparable figures of chastity and fidelity.

He also asked the
People
’s readers whether in their view young men and women should have some sexual experience before getting married:

I can only answer this. It was a joy on my wedding night to know this was my first experience. (
Working-class Man,
42
, Sutton-in-Ashfield
)

I had no sexual experience before my marriage and I’d never want to experience my wedding night again. (
Divorced working-class man,
31
, Greenwich
)

Not knowing much about the facts of life before marriage, it came as rather a shock to my nervous system. (
Working-class married woman,
42
, Bradford
)

A girl should not, because I did – with my husband and I’ve often wished we’d waited. Neither of us ever refers to it and we are very happy in our marriage even so. (
Working-class married woman, Yorkshire
)

I would rather have my husband know what he is doing, but for a girl I do not consider this necessary as she takes more risks. (
Unmarried
working-class woman,
25
, Southampton
)

Anyone who tackles a big job should be trained for it. Marriage and sex life is a big job, and for women my answer obviously has to be the same, but I suggest the woman does not obtain her training from too many teachers. (
Married working-class man,
33
, Lincoln
)

In all, 52 per cent were opposed to pre-marital sexual experience for young men and 63 per cent for young women. Gorer made three main accompanying points: that ‘whether pre-marital experience is advocated or reprobated, the effect on the future marriage is the preponderating consideration’; that ‘the high valuation put on virginity for both sexes is remarkable and, I should suspect, specifically English’; and that the view, common in some other societies, connecting ‘sexual activity with physical and mental health’ had in England ‘apparently achieved very little currency’.
¹⁷
It was still, a year after the publication of Nancy Mitford’s novel, a case of love in a cold climate.

One type of sexual activity – little studied in either survey – dared not speak its name: homosexual intercourse. Unsurprisingly, the moral panic of the late 1940s and early 1950s generated a sustained campaign to stamp out such wicked congress, with indictable offences (mainly for sodomy and bestiality, indecent assault and ‘gross indecency’) rising sharply. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, was a zealous homophobe; successive Home Secretaries were disinclined to restrain either him or the police; and the men in blue now started using agents provocateurs to catch homosexuals, as often as not ‘cottaging’ in public lavatories. Predictably, there is no evidence that this campaign was out of step with public opinion.

To take people’s minds off such upsetting matters, there was the emergence by 1950 of a blessedly heterosexual film star. In the weeks and months after
The Blue Lamp
’s release, Dirk Bogarde (‘all Brylcreem and liquid eyes’) was assiduously groomed and publicised by Rank to become the great British male heart-throb of the new decade – a process typified by his open letter to
Woman’s Own
about the qualities he demanded in ‘The girl that I marry’. From a formidable list, they included:

Do not smoke in public.

Do not wear high heels with slacks.

Wear a little skilful make-up.

Never draw attention to yourself in public places by loud laughter, conversation, or clothing.

NEVER try to order a meal from a menu when I am with you.

Never laugh at me in front of my friends.

Never welcome me back in the evening with a smutty face, the smell of cooking in your hair, broken nails, and a whine about the day’s trials and difficulties.

From one reader, Evelyn S. Kerr of Gidea Park, Essex, there came a memorable riposte: ‘After reading Dirk Bogarde’s article, I find that I am his ideal woman. The only snag is, I breathe. Do you think it matters?’
¹⁸

The electorate’s hour was at hand – an electorate that, Mark Abrams found in a July 1949 survey, was a distinctly polarised one. ‘Among all electors, except Conservative supporters, substantial minorities were convinced that a Conservative victory in the next general election would mean mass unemployment, the dismantlement of the Welfare State, more industrial disputes, and an abrupt extension of private enterprise’; at the same time, ‘all but Labour supporters feared that another Labour victory would lead to a much wider application of nationalisation, the neglect of national material prosperity, and excessive class-oriented legislation’, with a third of all Conservatives asserting that ‘in its four years of power the Labour government had done nothing that was worthy of approval’. Much would depend on whether Labour could hold on to the significant degree of non-working-class support that it had attracted in 1945. One of Mass-Observation’s panel, a clearly well-off 37-year-old housewife, explained in August 1949 why she felt she could no longer vote Labour:

Like many ‘upper class’ socialists, I thought with security of employment and adequate pay, as well as a Government of their own, workers would act as we should act in similar circumstances, i.e. work with a will, and enjoy doing so. In the event, it seems that we have been wrong and that removing the threats of unemployment, starvation, etc has only made the workers more discontented, which also seems to apply to nationalisation which certainly is a failure up till now. I think it will be possible to make it work in the case of railways, etc (it had better be) but I do not think that this is the time for more similar experiments . . .

The other reason is more intangible, it is a matter of atmosphere. Somehow, a Labour Government has managed to take a lot of the joy and the interest out of the atmosphere. I feel that it is not so much ‘austerity’ – I can eat like a king if I have the money, and now also dress well, so it wouldn’t be that – but the general discontent, the lack of eagerness to serve among the people accompanied by a lack of eagerness to play, to have any social life, to do anything at all.

‘The atmosphere is one of lassitude,’ she concluded. ‘Perhaps by taking so much of the fight out of life, it gets less interesting, less worth while.’
¹⁹

Let Us Win Through Together
was the unexceptionable title of Labour’s deliberately low-key election manifesto. Apart from a rather shapeless-looking ‘shopping list’ of industries (including water supply, cement, meat distribution and sugar refining) for which some form of public ownership was proposed, the main thrust was on the horrors of the past – above all dole queues, means tests and inadequate social services – and how these had been banished by the post-war Labour government, often against Tory opposition. ‘Clearly Herbert [Morrison] & Co are trusting to do nothing except to frighten the electors about what the wicked Tories will do if they are given a chance’ was the realistic appraisal of the Conservative backbencher Cuthbert Headlam, ‘and a reminder of the terrible times between the wars.’ A rare exception to the almost palpable intellectual exhaustion was the inclusion of a commitment to introduce a consumer-advisory service – on the face of it, an important shift by the producers’ party. The reality was rather different. ‘Since I was writing the election programme,’ Michael Young recalled years later, ‘I slipped it in and no one on the National Executive Committee made anything of it.’

As for the main opposition’s response, one supporter, Florence Speed in Brixton, summed it up on 25 January:

The Conservative manifesto published this morning. A fighting one, with freedom the keynote.

Freedom of labour to choose its own job; freedom to build houses, freedom for private enterprise. No more state buying. Food off ration as quickly as possible. Freedom for doctors to practise where they like. Good strong stuff – and yet? The young of the world have had Socialism drilled into them from the cradle.

In reality,
This Is The Road
was a pretty skilful document. It gave plenty of reassuring emphasis as to how a Tory government would build on rather than undermine the foundations of the newly constructed welfare state, declaring outright that ‘suggestions that we wish to cut the social services are a lie’, but it also included three strongly worded sections (‘Reduce Taxation’, ‘Limit Controls’, ‘Stop Nationalisation’) that together made it unambiguously clear that the party stood for ‘the encouragement of enterprise and initiative’. The manifesto got a generally good press. ‘Even
The Times
appears to approve of it,’ noted Headlam, ‘and admits that it is a far better thing than the Socialist manifesto.’ Typically, he added, ‘Of course 20 years ago one would have taken it for a Socialist pamphlet – but times have changed.’
²⁰

A general election in the early 1950s was still a predominantly local affair, with more than half the electors personally canvassed by one or more of the parties – testimony to the armies of unpaid activists the two main ones could rely on (Reginald Maudling, standing for the Tories in Barnet, had no fewer than 12,000 members at his disposal). As for the playing out of the 1950 election at a national level, there was of course the press (overwhelmingly anti-Labour), but apart from allowing the main politicians to make party political broadcasts – which they decided to do only on radio, not yet trusting television – the BBC ‘kept as aloof from the election as if it had been occurring on another planet’, as a somewhat exasperated Herbert Nicholas put it in his authoritative Nuffield study of the election. ‘Every programme was scrutinised in search of any item, jocular or serious, which might give aid or comfort to any of the contestants, and after February the 3rd virtually all mention of election politics disappeared from the British air.’ Indeed it did, with R.J.F. Howgill (Controller, Entertainment) having explicitly warned ‘all producers, announcers, commentators and other users of the microphone’ against ‘making political allusions, cracking political jokes, and using the microphone in any way that might influence the electors’, with ‘special care’ needing to be taken ‘over O.B.s [outside broadcasts] from music halls’. Even so, Nicholas’s overall verdict was telling: ‘Undoubtedly in view of the enormous power wielded by such a monopolistic instrument the decision to carry neutrality to the lengths of castration was the only right one.’

Perhaps for this reason among others, it was not an election that ever really caught fire. ‘All along,’ Mollie Panter-Downes reckoned just over a week before polling day, it ‘has had a curious, fuzzy aura of unreality about it’, with the ‘subnormal’ election temperature not helped by ‘torrents of icy rain and gales of wind rampaging over the country’; while after it was all over, she called the campaign ‘as thrilling as a church bazaar’.
²¹
Still, a quickfire tour of the constituencies suggests it had a bit more life to it.