Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (64 page)

The number of deaths caused by exposure to asbestos (specifically, the inhalation of asbestos fibres) was for a long time appreciably less, yet arguably it was the more shocking story, given that it was not until the 1960s that most of the workers engaged in asbestos-related industries became aware of the danger, which was at least 30 years after they could and should have been made aware. Asbestosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma – all were caused by the insidious dust, which (as victims from Clydeside shipyards and building sites would recall) came ‘down like snow’ on them, whether in the form of dust, asbestos cuttings or dried-out ‘monkey dung’, as asbestos paste was called. Britain’s leading asbestos manufacturer was Turner & Newall, headquartered in Rochdale’s Spodden Valley near Manchester. Its records have been comprehensively studied by Geoffrey Tweedale, who for the mid-decades of the century relates an appalling tale of management indifference to the dangers to which its workforce was exposed, allied to an almost systemic policy of trying to wriggle out of financial liability to the families of those who had died (usually in their mid-50s) as a direct result of those dangers. ‘We have many cases of death obviously caused by the usual diseases to which man is heir,’ privately grumbled the chairman, Sir Samuel Turner, in 1947, ‘but if by any chance a few particles of asbestos happen to be found in the lung, then coroners invariably bring in a verdict which involves a claim.’ Tweedale, however, shows in devastating detail that the odds were heavily weighted against a victim’s family receiving an adequate (let alone an equitable) level of compensation; that Turner & Newall could very well have afforded in the post-war period to adopt a more generous policy; and that human sympathy was conspicuous by its absence. A hardheaded, unpreachy business historian, he is compelled to a class-based conclusion: ‘The majority of sufferers were working-class people – usually manual workers – and their “masters” rarely developed asbestos disease. While hundreds of its workforce perished, Turner & Newall’s higher echelons remained immune.’
^6.

How typical was this cold-hearted exploitation? ‘The neglect of the human side in industry was a frequent theme of my conversations with workers of all grades,’ Zweig noted after some three years of intensive and extensive interviews, mainly in the late 1940s:

‘My employer never looks at me,’ a cotton spinner said to me, ‘he just sees the £ s. d. I represent. For him I am manpower, not a man.’

‘Men are treated here as part of the machinery and everybody knows that they are valuable pieces of machinery,’ a factory engineer told me, ‘but the funny part of it is that they are not studied as the machines are, and kept in good running order. No one is interested in finding out the needs and requirements of men. They are simply taken for granted.’

Zweig also talked to employers, among whom there were ‘many good-natured men’ determined to treat business and morality as separate spheres. ‘You know business isn’t charity or a club,’ an employer in an engineering firm told him. ‘It’s fatal to be sentimental in your work.’
^7.

Even so, for all the intensification of the work process since the late nineteenth century, the cumulative evidence is that there still prevailed in Britain circa 1950 a considerable amount of what over half a century later seems like very old-fashioned paternalism – a paternalism that, in the employer/employee relationship, transcended the cash nexus. The full-employment context of the post-war economy clearly made a difference, in the sense that labour became a far more precious commodity than it had been during much of the inter-war period, but that alone is not sufficient explanation for what were often historically very entrenched attitudes on the part of employers and management.

Take the big high-street clearing banks. The work was often tedious and repetitive, the pay nothing special (at least in middle-class terms), but the sense of security was overwhelmingly reassuring. ‘You had a job for life, you got paid a little more each year, and the bank looked after you in all sorts of ways, through its concern for your well-being, your family, your finances and your social position,’ notes the historian of that ritualised, self-enclosed world. ‘Each employee was docked 2½ per cent of his salary for the widows and orphans fund. The only way you could be fired was by putting your hand in the till.’ In many (though far from all) of the much smaller firms that made up the City of London, the spirit was somewhat similar, if more intimate. When a 16-year-old called Godfrey Chandler joined the stockbroking firm of Cazenove, Akroyds & Greenwood & Co during the war, he warmed from the start to the family atmosphere and could not help but think of the Cheeryble brothers in
Nicholas Nickleby
. At Cazenove’s as elsewhere, much depended on the office manager: it was a given that he was an autocrat, the question was whether or not he was a benevolent one.

In industry at large the classic paternalist firm was the soap and detergent manufacturer Lever Brothers, the nineteenth-century creation at Port Sunlight near Liverpool of William Lever, the first Lord Leverhulme. Housing, leisure, health, retirement – all were directly taken care of by the company, which unflaggingly stressed that employers and employees alike comprised one large family. In 1953 more than a third of its 8,389 workforce had served for 15 years or more, with almost a thousand having been there for 30 years or more. Three years earlier, when
Port Sunlight News
featured seven men who had completed more than 40 years’ service, the accompanying article hailed them as exemplars and noted proudly that they had grown up in the ‘Lever tradition’ of ‘enlightened industrial outlook’. By this time, indeed, the 10,000th gold watch had already been handed out. Yet there were limits to the family spirit: in the model village (where nonmembers of staff could not buy houses until the late 1970s) there operated strict residential segregation between workers and senior managers.

It was similarly not quite all roses at another arch-paternalist firm, the well-known machine-tool manufacturers Alfred Herbert Ltd. The founder and, right up to his death, dominant figure was Sir Alfred Herbert (1866–1957), whose approach is perhaps best described as an authoritarian and strictly hierarchical benevolence, offering moral as much as material guidance. Discipline was everything; workers knew that there would be no seasonal lay-offs; and the prevailing parsimony, for all the pioneering welfare provision (including sports and social facilities), was positively Gladstonian. That in essence was the ‘deal’ Sir Alfred offered – and during his lifetime many skilled workers in Coventry were glad enough to accept it. Or take the paternalism of the aggressively anti-nationalisation Tate & Lyle. For all those connected with its sugar refinery at Plaistow Wharf, the biggest in the world, there was a weekly treat at the social club. ‘It was known as the Tate & Lyle Saturday night out,’ recalled one worker, Ron Linford. ‘It was really great. All the family would go including the kids. First thing we used to do was to make sure we had our seats right alongside the bar, so that we didn’t have too far to carry the drinks. There was cabaret, fancy dress with prizes for the children, dancing to the band, spot waltzes and comedians doing turns.’
^8.

In almost any manufacturing firm run along more or less paternalist lines, there was the annual ritual of the works outing – perhaps to one of the National Parks (such as in the Peak District) created by the government in 1949 but more often to the seaside. ‘Rewarded for Their Labours’ was how in July 1948 the
Merthyr Express
reported 310 employees of Hoover being ‘treated to an outing to Weston-super-Mare’ by the company the previous Sunday, including lunch and high tea at the Grand Pier Restaurant. ‘The whole cost of the outing was borne by the company in recognition of the whole-hearted co-operation of all the workers within the organisation. Mr A. R. Northover, works manager, accompanied the party, which made the journey by coach and boat.’ The imaginative importance of these factory outings, comparable to that of the Christmas office party in a later, more white-collar era, was nicely reflected in a Max Miller joke. The foreman asks four pregnant women at their sewing machines when their babies are expected. ‘Mine’s due in May,’ replies the first, ‘hers is also due in May, and so is hers.’ ‘What about the other girl?’ asks the foreman. ‘Oh, I don’t know about her. She wasn’t on the charabanc trip.’

The more prosaic reality is probably caught in Valerie Gisborn’s account of her first factory outing, in 1950, as a 16-year-old working in a Leicester clothing factory. The coaches, each with a supervisor, left at 7.00 a.m. and just over four hours later pulled up along the seafront at the inevitable Skegness:

It was fine and windy but we made the best of it doing exactly what we pleased. We had many laughs and purchased silly ‘Kiss me quick’ hats. The fairground was a big attraction and we spent a couple of hours there trying to win something or other on the darts and shooting ranges. A couple of the young girls made themselves sick by having too many rides on a whiplash merry go round . . .

Everybody turned up for the coaches at 7 pm and, when the check-in was completed to ensure no one had been left behind, the coaches set off back to Leicester. Halfway home the coaches separated, each one taking a different route to a selected public house so that we could all have a drink. We stopped for one hour, and as I did not drink in pubs a girlfriend and I walked around the village, purchased some chips and a drink from the local fish and chip shop, and returned to wait for the others in the coach. Later as we drove towards Leicester the coaches caught up with each other and we all arrived back outside the factory about midnight.

‘The day out was the talk of the firm for days,’ she added, ‘and the manager, Mr Pell, organised a letter on behalf of everyone to say thank you to the boss.’
^9.

For women as a whole, the range of available jobs may have expanded during the first half of the century, but the work they actually did was still largely gender-determined. The figures are stark: 88 per cent of women working for wages in 1901 had been in occupations dominated by women; by 1951 the proportion was virtually unchanged at 86 per cent. Teachers, nurses, clerical workers, cleaners, waitresses, shop assistants, barmaids, textile-factory hands – these were typical female members of the workforce, with often not a man in sight, at least at a non-supervisory level. Most of that work, pending greater employer flexibility, was full-time: of the female workforce of just over 6 million in 1951, only 832,000 worked fewer than 30 hours per week.

Whether full-time or part-time, women seldom enjoyed other than lowly status in their jobs. In banks and building societies, for example, female clerical workers were largely confined to the ‘back office’, with many managers and customers unable to countenance lady cashiers before the 1960s. Moreover, although the ‘marriage bar’ (the policy of not employing married women) was gradually being lifted – from teaching in 1944, from the Civil Service in 1946, from the Bank of England in 1949 but still in place at Barclays Bank until 1961 – there was still the crucial question of pay. Here the gender differential was undeniably narrowing, with the hourly earnings of women increasing by 163 per cent between 1938 and 1950, compared with 122 per cent for men. But it was still huge. If one takes the last pay week of October 1950 in all manufacturing industries, the average earnings of women (over 18) compared with the earnings of men (over 21) amounted to about 53 per cent. In the 1950s as a whole, full-time female workers earned only 51 per cent of the average weekly pay of male workers. It was not so much a pay gap as a pay chasm.
¹⁰

At a national policy level, the official desire by 1946/7 to see women back in the workforce (following their return home at the end of the war) was readily understandable in the context of the prevailing labour shortage, but, among other things, it ran up against an equally prevailing anxiety that the war and its immediate aftermath had done significant damage to the social fabric, which would be more readily repaired if women stayed in their traditional homemaking capacity. The outcome, predictably, was only modified encouragement – and certainly no dangling of the carrot of equal pay or anything like it. A particularly influential economist, Roy Harrod, emphasised to the Royal Commission on Equal Pay how important it was ‘to secure that motherhood as a vocation is not too unattractive compared with work in the professions, industry or trade’. Even Bloomsbury’s finest (and Harrod’s hero), the liberal-minded John Maynard Keynes, was no crusader for equal opportunities. ‘A world in which young married women spend eight or nine hours a day away from home doing office work when their husbands are doing alike, seems a gloomy one’ was his view of the Bank of England’s prospective removal of its marriage bar.