Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (60 page)

One of the closest, most spirited contests was in Plymouth Devon-port between Michael Foot and Winston Churchill’s talented but bombastic son Randolph. ‘The reason I haven’t talked about Plymouth housing is that I don’t know much about it,’ the latter foolishly admitted with ten days to go; thereafter it was easy for Foot convincingly to depict his opponent as having ‘as much knowledge of the real political and economic issues facing the British nation as the man in the moon’. The two men were already well-established public figures, but it was different for a clutch of young – and ambitious – Tory hopefuls, among whom there were four men fighting eminently winnable seats and one woman who was not. ‘It’s the future that matters’ was the simple but effective (and also revealing) slogan of Maudling in Barnet; another moderniser, Iain Macleod in Enfield West, did not harm his cause by declaring that it was in the field of social services that ‘my deepest political interests lie’; in Wolverhampton South-West Enoch Powell conducted a short, intensive, military-style campaign that made much of how ‘we have watched our country’s strength and reputation in the world going to pieces in these years immediately after victory’; there was a similar briskness and efficiency about Edward Heath’s campaign in Bexley, despite an embarrassing moment when his claim that the housing situation would have improved if Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee had had to live with their in-laws was met by a heckler’s decisive intervention, ‘They do!’; and in Dartford, a neighbouring seat, Margaret Roberts (the future Margaret Thatcher) insisted, in more or less blatant disregard of her party’s accommodation with the post-war settlement, that Labour’s policies for universal welfare were ‘pernicious and nibble into our national character far further than one would be aware at first glance’. For Labour hopefuls, the high tide of opportunity had obviously been 1945, but Anthony Crosland was optimistic enough in South Gloucestershire. ‘A really crowded meeting at Staple Hill – very enthusiastic – I’m really becoming quite a popular figure!’ he noted in his campaign diary on 3 February, before adding: ‘A letter from a woman with a dropped stomach, demanding that I should get her a truss. This is too much.’ The following week he was in a village called Dyrham: ‘Member of squirearchy asked interminable questions about dental fees, & why he had to wait 3 months for an appointment: they
do
ask silly questions.’
²²

Naturally all candidates had their awkward encounters with voters. Headlam, fighting his last election in Newcastle North, spoke in a school off Elswick Road and recorded with satisfaction the failure of a bunch of ‘men hecklers’ to break up his meeting. Another Tory, Dr Charles Hill (famous during the war as the ‘Radio Doctor’), held three lunchtime meetings in the large canteen at Vauxhall Motors – on one occasion being disconcerted by ‘four men ostentatiously seated in the front’ who ‘ignored me completely’ and stayed ‘deep in concentration in their game of solo’; on another, being photographed for the local press, revealing that, ‘while I was in full flood, a serious-looking young man seated at the back was engrossed in
Forever Amber
’. And over in South Bucks, the freelance broadcaster Bruce Belfrage, standing for the Liberals, had a bad time of it among the atavistic ‘hard core of the Tory supporters’ living in Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross. ‘Grim and determined characters whose political knowledge was in most cases non-existent,’ he wrote soon afterwards, ‘they were inspired by an implacable loathing of the Socialist Government and all its works . . . They were not open to argument or persuasion, and my wife and I, together with all Liberals, were, in their eyes, traitors, renegades, fellow-travellers and foul splitters of the anti-Socialist vote.’ Judy Haines in Chingford would have sympathised. ‘As we have Conservative notices either side and all round us, got a trilly delight out of putting “Labour” notice in our window,’ she noted just over a week before polling day. ‘Will I be sent to Coventry tomorrow?’
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Was the overall rather tame campaign a sign of democratic progress? Harold Macmillan thought so, claiming subsequently that ‘the high poll (at 84 per cent) showed that the lack of rowdyism and excitement was due not to the apathy of the electors but rather to a serious approach to their responsibilities.’ Evidence on the ground suggested a less sanguine conclusion. In his Greenwich survey, involving interviews with 914 people in that constituency, Mark Benney found that ahead of the election barely half could name even the party of their local MP and only a quarter the MP’s name; that during the campaign only 7 per cent went to an election meeting; that ‘those who had not made up their minds how they were going to vote bothered least of all about reading the campaign hand-outs’; and that although the parties were ‘reasonably successful’ in their efforts ‘to hammer home the names of their candidates’, the overwhelming indications were that ‘neither the candidates nor their electioneering activities aroused much enthusiasm.’

It was pretty much the same with Mass-Observations’s survey shortly before polling day of 600 voters in six London constituencies. Not only had 86 per cent not been to any meeting, but 44 per cent had not even read an election leaflet (in an election where probably well over 30 million were distributed). Nor, among the 56 per cent who had picked one up, were there many signs of serious scrutiny. ‘Looked at the man’s face on it’ was how an accountant’s wife put it, while another woman replied, ‘I have glanced through them but I think they are a waste of paper.’ Touring East Ham on the Saturday before polling day, a Panel member noted: ‘In the afternoon I could not discover a single remark with any bearing on the election – on the streets, outside shops, in cafés – the people were shopping and that’s all.’ Or take the vox pop culled three days later from potential voters in Islington East. One 40-year-old working-class woman, a baker’s shophanger in Canonbury, based her voting intentions on the twin premises that ‘you’ve got to have money before you can do anything’ and that ‘there isn’t a single gentleman in the Labour Party – with the exception of Mr Attlee, and he’s too much of a gentleman to manage that crowd’. Another working-class woman, the 27-year-old wife of an asphalter in Aberdeen Park, had not got quite that far in her analysis: ‘To tell the truth I haven’t thought about this voting business. I want a house. I live with a relative, and I think she wants it for her daughter so my main concern is to find a place.’
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Where the electorate were most engaged was through listening to election broadcasts. During the fortnight from 4 February, the proportion of the adult population tuning in ranged from 31 per cent to 51 per cent (for Churchill) and averaged 38.1 per cent – a bit of a drop on 1945 but still pretty impressive, albeit that in Greenwich (and presumably elsewhere) ‘many of those who listened did so with half an ear, for no more than an average of 26 per cent claimed to have heard the whole broadcast’. Research immediately after the election found that the broadcasts by Attlee and Churchill had changed the minds of less than 1 per cent of the electorate – Churchill, after his 1945 radio fiasco, was perhaps grateful for that – and of course there were many households that did not tune in at all. These seem to have included Nella Last’s in Barrow. ‘We listened to Music Hall,’ she reluctantly noted on the 4th. ‘I wanted badly to listen to the political broadcast [by Morrison] but “controversy” of any kind upsets my husband.’

One broadcast did make a difference. ‘It isn’t as the Radio Doctor that I’m speaking tonight,’ began Charles Hill on Tuesday the 14th. ‘And it isn’t about aches and pains or babies and backaches. It’s politics. I shall say what I honestly think – speaking not for others, not for the doctors, but for myself – one of the many candidates.’ Over the next 20 minutes he argued forcibly but not fanatically that the miseries of the past had been grossly exaggerated by Labour politicians (whom he like most Tories invariably referred to as ‘the socialists’); that the welfare state had essentially bipartisan foundations; that the recent devaluation of the pound (announced by Cripps ‘with that touch of unction all his own’) had signalled an economy in serious trouble; and that the fundamental choice facing the electorate was whether ‘we really want a world in which the state’s the universal boss’. A particular passage entered electoral folklore:

Why are the socialists trying to fill us up with ghost stories about the inter-war years? Well, not all of us, because many of us can remember what they were like. But there are many voters who can’t. I am not surprised that the socialists gave up that ‘Ask your Dad’ campaign. I suppose Dad was beginning to give the answers! And did you hear that great writer of fiction, J.B. Priestley [who had given a party political broadcast for Labour a month earlier], super-tax payer and good luck to him – did you hear him tell us that last Christmas was the best ever? Oh, chuck it, Priestley. Anybody would think that we had no memories . . .

It was a formidable target – as Hill himself would recall, Priestley ‘in his rich, Yorkshire homespun voice had given the impression of an honest-to-God chap who was having a fireside chat with blokes as puzzled and eager for the truth as he was’ – but that one, seemingly spontaneous phrase, ‘chuck it, Priestley’, brilliantly did the job and would long be remembered.

Among the 42 per cent listening were Kenneth Preston in Keighley and Vere Hodgson in west London, both admittedly Tory supporters. ‘He was very effective and must have done a great deal of damage to the Socialist cause’ was Preston’s instant verdict, while Hodgson reckoned that he ‘wiped the floor with Mr Priestley’ and added: ‘The broadcast is to be on gramophone records by Monday . . . It would touch every home, as he has a homely manner.’ Nicholas in his election study agreed about Hill’s effectiveness. ‘Here was expressed, in popular phraseology, in an occasional pungent phrase and in a continuously “folksy” delivery, the politics of the unpolitical, the plain man’s grouse’ – or, put another way, a ‘narrative of the adventures of
l’homme moyen sensuel
in Queue-topia’ (the term recently coined by Churchill) that was ‘winged straight at the discontents and prejudices of the lower middle class, full of the changeless wisdom of common-sense and constructed according to the most sophisticated formulas of applied psychology’.
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Even so, the 1930s ‘myth’ remained a potent weapon in Labour’s hands. One of its national posters featured marchers with a ‘Jarrow Crusade’ poster and the accompanying caption ‘Unemployment – don’t give the Tories another chance’. And although for the Tories there was, as Hill showed, some mileage in challenging the myth, the leadership and candidates broadly preferred to follow the
Spectator
’s advice to ‘make it abundantly clear that as a party they have learned much from the years of travail, and that the Tories of 1950 are not the Tories of 1935’. Churchill in particular stayed more or less on-message, though naturally he could not resist the temptation to play the world statesman. In a speech in Edinburgh on the 14th – a speech reported by all the world’s radio services except those of the UK and the USSR – he spoke of how, if restored to power, he would seek to convene ‘a parley at the summit’ with the Soviet leaders, so that ‘the two worlds’ could ‘live their life, if not in friendship at least without the hatreds of the cold war’. Churchill’s proposal coined the diplomatic term ‘summit’, but Ernest Bevin immediately labelled it a stunt, while Harold Nicolson agreed that it was ‘unworthy of him’: ‘To suggest talks with Stalin on the highest level inevitably makes people think, “Winston could talk to Stalin on more or less the same level. But if Attlee goes, it would be like a mouse addressing a tiger. Therefore vote for Winston.”’ There was also soon after this speech a whispering campaign to the effect that Churchill was dead; a robust denial quickly put an end to it.

As for Attlee, driven around the country by his wife in a Humber (having traded up from a Hillman), he was happy enough to exude reassurance and for the most part stick to the largely domestic agenda that concerned the electorate. According to Mass-Observation’s London survey, asking its sample to name the election issues they thought most important, housing came easily top, followed by shortages, wages and taxation, nationalisation and cost of living. To Attlee fell the final broadcast, on Saturday the 18th and listened to by 44 per cent:

The choice before you is clear. During these difficult years Britain by its example has done a great service to democracy and freedom. We have shown that orderly planning and freedom are not incompatible. We have confirmed faith in democracy by the example of a Government that has carried out its promises. It is utterly untrue to say that our prestige has been diminished. On the contrary, it stands higher than ever, for we have added to the triumphs of war the victories of peace.

‘I do not suggest that all our problems have been solved,’ he conceded, ‘but I do say that great progress has been made, that if we continue with the same steadiness, cheerfulness and hard work that have been displayed during these years I am convinced that we can solve them.’ Though as he added with an honesty that may only arguably have been advisable, ‘I am not going to make promises of quick solutions. I am not going to offer you any easement unless I am certain that it can be done.’
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As during any election, there was plenty else going on. On Friday the 3rd, the day of the old parliament’s dissolution, probably the most popular British comedian, Sid Field, collapsed and died at the age of 45, after a short life of heavy drinking. Evocatively described by one historian of comedy, Graham McCann, as ‘ranging freely from coarse, back-throated cockney, through the nasal, drooping rhythms of his native Brummie, to the tight-necked, tongue-tip precision of a metropolitan toff’, Field was the special hero of another son of Birmingham, the aspiring comedian Tony Hancock, and on hearing the news, Hancock wept – the only time his agent saw him in tears. On the same day as Field’s death, the German-born nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had fled Germany in the 1930s and had been working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire, was charged with passing information to Russian agents about how to construct a plutonium bomb. Apparently disenchanted with Communism, the previous week he had made a full confessional statement at the War Office that included a remarkable passage: