Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (79 page)

Thirteen days later, he was formally introduced to his fellow-members of the City Council. ‘Councillor Smith has shown his ability in public affairs, having been prominent in the youth movement for a considerable period’ were the reassuring words of Councillor Renwick. ‘He brings with him a spirit of integrity, which is a great thing in this Council Chamber. I am sure he will be a welcome addition to the Council and will carry out his functions as a councillor in an able and fitting manner.’ In his reply, the new man went beyond the customary bromides: ‘I hope I will be able to do the job well and that my work will meet with the approval of my fellow-citizens and that in time I will be feared by my opponents.’ Smith’s first substantive contribution followed in early June. ‘I believe so much in equality that if the workers get all they asked for, this issue would not arise,’ he asserted in a debate on the proposed abolition of workmen’s bus fares:

If there is one section of the community that is absolutely indispensable it is the working men. I represent the working-class ward of Walker . . . The workers have to travel before eight o’clock in the morning. If you go along Scotswood Road at five o’clock at night you will see them standing in hundreds waiting for buses. The buses are packed, and if they are not run at a profit no buses will ever be run at a profit. It may be only coppers a week, but every sum is made up of coppers.
^7.

The end of the 1940s – decade of war and austerity – signalled no immediate passage into the sunlit uplands. ‘The blackened, gutted hulks of houses one saw everywhere were the condition towards which the whole city was slowly, inevitably sinking’ was how a young South African writer, Dan Jacobson, recalled the London that he got to know after arriving in February 1950:

The public buildings were filthy, pitted with shrapnel-scars, running with pigeon dung from every coign and eave; eminent statesmen and dead kings of stone looked out upon the world with soot-blackened faces, like coons in a grotesque carnival; bus tickets and torn newspapers blew down the streets or lay in white heaps in the parks; cats bred in the bomb-sites, where people flung old shoes, tin cans, and cardboard boxes; whole suburbs of private houses were peeling, cracking, crazing, their windows unwashed, their steps unswept, their gardens untended; innumerable little cafés reeked of chips frying in stale fat; in the streets that descended the slope to King’s Cross old men with beards and old women in canvas shoes wandered about, talking to themselves and warding off imaginary enemies with ragged arms. As for the rest of the people – how pale they were, what dark clothes they wore, what black homes they came from, how many of them there were swarming in the streets, queuing on the pavements, standing packed on underground escalators.

Altogether, it was a ‘decaying, decrepit, sagging, rotten city’.

For those used to the old place, there was the odd sign of things getting better, however. One event in mid-March really got Vere Hodgson going:

Now we could hardly believe it but last week we had eggs OFF THE RATION. Absolutely remarkable and unheard-of . . . What this means to us only an English housewife can understand. We have been fobbed off with dried eggs and egg powder and lately not even that . . . and at last actually we could beat up two eggs and put them in a cake . . . THE FIRST TIME FOR TEN YEARS.

‘It’s strange to say “buy an egg” or “buy three eggs” & be able to,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton not long afterwards. ‘They can be got anywhere just now.’ Soap also came off the ration in 1950, but a wide range of foods remained on it, including meat, cheese, fats, sugar and sweets (after the false dawn of 1949), as well as tea. For Grace Golden – 46 years old, utterly lonely, frustrated by her commissions as a commercial artist (‘Working on Enid Blyton drawings – feel discouraged as soon as begin,’ she noted in July) – it was all part of the general misery, as exemplified on the last Friday in April:

Woke feeling grim – decide must get new ration book – climb up hill to Ronalds Road to food office to find it was to be had at Central Hall – that appeared to be a Methodist chapel with doors firmly shut – a woman across rd begins to wave arms at me – at last gather I am to go down a passageway – get wretched thing – have lunch in Express [Dairies] at Highbury Corner.

Even so, there was a striking Gallup poll in May. Asked to compare their present family circumstances with what life had been like as a child, only 25 per cent reckoned they were worse off than their fathers had been, whereas 56 per cent thought they were better off – hardly the march of material progress in irresistible Victorian style but still something.
^8.

There was also good news for the country’s two or three million motorists. Mollie Panter-Downes may have informed her American readers in late April that ‘the doubling of tax on gasoline, which brings the price up to three shillings a gallon, has proved to be the most unpopular item in a generally unpopular budget’, but the end of petrol rationing just before the Whitsun weekend a month later graphically revealed the pent-up appetite for unfettered use of the family car.
The
Times
urged motorists ‘to resist the temptation to say once more, after an interval of ten years, the magic words: Fill her right up!’, but the scenes on Whit Monday were chaotic. There were long queues on the main roads out of London, including one 2½ miles long on the road to Worthing; petrol-pump attendants were worked ragged; the car park at Whipsnade Zoo was soon full; and in the evening there was a huge jam on the road from Weston-super-Mare to Bristol. The same month, moreover, saw an equally telling portent. Vladimir Raitz, a Russian émigré who had recently started a company called Horizon Holidays, chartered a Dakota to take 20 holiday-makers to a camp near Calvi in north-west Corsica – reputedly the first British package holiday. For £32 10s they got their airfare, a fortnight under canvas, meals and as much wine as they could drink. ‘That was quite a lot of money for the time,’ recalled Raitz, ‘but compared with a scheduled airfare then of about £70 to Nice, it was definitely a bargain. Our first customers were people like teachers, the middle classes.’ So it remained for the next few years, as he ran tours to different Mediterranean resorts unhindered by competition. ‘We went to Majorca, Sardinia, Minorca and Benidorm. There was only one hotel at Benidorm then.’
^9.

British cooking was also due for some Continental influence. ‘When I first came,’ the Hungarian-born gastronome Egon Ronay recalled about settling in Britain soon after the war, ‘you could eat well in top-class restaurants and hotels, where there were French chefs, but there was nothing in the medium range, apart from Lyons Corner Houses, where you could get a good breakfast. Some of the food was unbelievable, those strange tennis-ball things, Scotch eggs, very badly done.’ It was a mediocrity, he believed, driven by class: ‘The people who influenced food at this time had been to public school, where the food had been not just without interest, but horrifying. So you didn’t discuss food.’

In domestic kitchens, of course, there were all through the 1940s severely limited ingredients available. ‘All winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and oatmeal with just a little meat’ was how the leading cookery writer Marguerite Patten retrospectively encapsulated that decade’s diet. The pages of the Reading-based
Berkshire Chronicle
suggest, however, that by the early 1950s things were starting to change – and not just in a derationing sense. Advertisements became rife in 1950 for new types of convenience food, including the range of Birds Eye ‘frosted’ foods. ‘Don’t moan when summer fruits are over,’ declared one, aimed directly at the housewife: ‘Birds Eye Quick-Frozen Foods give you garden fresh fruits and vegetables all the year round – without a refrigerator! And husbands love them, particularly Birds Eye strawberries, which are sweetened – and sliced so they’re sweet
right through
!’ The following year, the paper’s Ladies’ Page began to explore Continental cuisine, albeit with some diffidence and necessary ingenuity: in its Lasagne Casserole, macaroni took the place of lasagne sheets, while cottage cheese made do for mozzarella.
¹⁰

The person usually credited with hauling British cooking out of the dark ages is the writer Elizabeth David.
A Book of Mediterranean Food
appeared in June 1950, three and a bit years after her initial scribblings in the bleak midwinter of Ross-on-Wye. Complete with an alluring John Minton dust jacket, David’s recipes conjured up an exotic Mediterranean abundance far removed from the realities or even the possibilities of mid-century Britain. The book was enthusiastically received – ‘deserves to become the familiar companion of all who seek uninhibited excitement in the kitchen’, declared the
Observer
– and David quickly followed it up with the equally evocative and attractive
French Country
Cooking
, published in September 1951.

It is impossible, though, to gauge confidently the true extent of David’s influence. Certainly she wrote extensively, including in the 1950s for
Harper’s
and
Vogue
; certainly, as Arabella Boxer has pointed out, there sprung up in the early 1950s a whole clutch of small London bistros, such as Le Matelot and La Bicyclette in Pimlico and the Chanterelle near South Kensington, where ‘not only the menu but also the décor owed much to the David books’; and certainly she had her proselytising disciples, most notably George Perry-Smith, whose The Hole in the Wall restaurant opened in Bath in 1952. Yet for all David’s elegant prose and, in Boxer’s phrase, ‘uncompromising intelligence’, it is arguable that her influence has been exaggerated. Not only was she far from the most widely read cookery writer – significantly, she seems to have had little or nothing to do with the mass-market women’s magazines – but there would be many other factors at work in the gradual post-war emancipation of British cooking and eating, including the spread of foreign travel (not least through National Service), increasing prosperity, and the arrival of Indian and Chinese immigrants. 11 But among those at the very vanguard of the culinary broadening out, David was the totemic figure.

There was one other key mover. Raymond Postgate, son-in-law of the former Labour leader George Lansbury and brother-in-law of the leading socialist intellectual G.D.H. Cole, was a well-known journalist and author in his own right. He was also, in his biographer’s words, ‘a connoisseur of wine and cookery’. In the late 1940s he decided that the best way to do something about Britain’s dreadful reputation for eating out was to recruit a team of volunteers who would offer candid and impartial assessments of the fare being proffered. The first edition of the
Good Food Guide
, under his editorship, duly appeared in the spring of 1951 and sold some 5,000 copies. Perhaps inevitably, the several hundred entries on individual restaurants (barely a handful of which outside London served ‘foreign food’) comprised recommendations – recommendations that Postgate hoped would stimulate the unrecommended into action. However, while conceding that the shortage of butcher’s meat was a genuine problem, he did let fly in his introduction: ‘For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted. Indeed, it is quite arguable that worse meals are served today in hotels and restaurants than were in Edwardian days.’ From the start, the
Guide
had a pleasingly quirky, readable quality to it (‘Preston is a desperate place for anyone who dares to want food after 7.30 p.m.,’ observed one volunteer), and that, together with the integrity of the venture, soon won it a considerable reputation. It was also a pioneering case of consumer power – and all the more telling given that its initiator came from the left of the political spectrum.
¹²

One aspect of the food revolution is often overlooked: nutrition. Diet records of 4,600 children (across the country) who were four in 1950 revealed the following as a typical day’s intake:

Breakfast:
Cereals with milk, egg with bread and butter.

Lunch:
Lamb chop with potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots; followed by rice pudding and tea.

Tea:
Bread and butter; jam, cake and tea.