Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (8 page)

One activator who had no doubt that things were going the right way was Mrs Madge Waller, who in March 1942 chaired a meeting at the Housing Centre in London. In her introductory remarks she assured the audience that ‘there seemed to her to be a fairly general opinion that after the war everything was going to be better, especially among young people’; remarked that ‘she had come in contact with several who were thinking and talking about planning for post-war Britain’; and declared that after ‘an almost wasted quarter of a century – muddled thinking and mere talking about planning, without any real plan – we would probably not be allowed to “muddle through” again’. She then introduced her main speaker, Tom Harrisson, co-founder five years earlier of Mass-Observation.

Almost certainly the audience, including Mrs Waller, sat up in their seats as Harrisson at the outset stated bluntly that the growing assumption ‘that everyone wanted a better Britain in future’ was ‘rather a false one’:

There was quite a striking number of people who were thinking not in terms of helping to make this country better to live in, but of getting out of the country after the war and going to America, Australia, etc. A strong feeling was growing up that people should have less planned and ordered lives and could be themselves more. Certain types of people were in favour of more co-operation in planning, but a very large number of people of the working-class population were so appalled by what would have to be done after the war that they felt rather hopeless about the task.

For elaboration, Harrisson then turned to the study that Mass-Observation had been making of what people wanted after the war compared with what they expected:

What were most hoped for were equality of opportunity, better housing and education, socialism, security, abolition of unemployment, and a mass of other things which might be lumped together as town planning, but was not consciously thought of as such. Their expectations were far inferior to their hopes . . . People had the right hopes, but the feeling that these hopes would not or could not materialise was very strong. Overwhelming emphasis was laid on what had happened after the last war. Disappointment then had created a kind of neurosis that seemed unconquerable to a lot of people.

He ended this section of his talk with his killer facts: ‘It had been found that five people were pessimistic to every one that was optimistic about reconstruction plans in general after the war, and that proportion increased to nine to one in certain heavily-raided areas.’
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The evidence suggests that Harrisson was broadly right – that although in 1940/41 there was at least some popular, largely positive engagement with post-war reconstruction issues, from 1942 the trend was (apart from a blip at the time of the Beveridge Report) the other way. Indeed, some qualifying remarks even need to be made about Beveridge. Before it appeared, a wide-ranging survey (supervised by G.D.H. Cole, a leading socialist intellectual) into popular attitudes to welfare found that, in the words of its Manchester investigator, ‘some seemed to be quite satisfied in an inarticulate sort of way’ and ‘the majority just
did not know
’. At the time of the report’s celebrated publication, there was a significant minority of dissenters (‘If people here stand for the trades unions putting this bloody Beveridge scheme across they deserve to lose the sodding war’ was how one middle-aged man, who called himself a ‘Jack of All Trades’, put it to an Mass-Observation observer in London), and it is far from clear how many outside the middle class were among those who bought the report in either of its forms. Moreover, from soon afterwards there was widespread cynicism about whether it would ever be implemented, typified by a 55-year-old woman of the ‘artisan class’ telling an interviewer that ‘soon as it’s over and they’ve no further use for you, they’ll have a general election and apologise that they can’t stand by the promise of the war government – it’ll happen just as it did last time’.
²²

A Gallup poll taken in April 1943, asking people whether they would like to see ‘any great changes’ in their way of life after the war, probably captured accurately enough the popular political mood. Of the 57 per cent who agreed with that proposition, 35 per cent had ‘no comment’ on what changes these might be; 16 per cent hoped for ‘better working conditions, better wages, work for everybody, no unemployment’; 15 per cent nominated a ‘better standard of living all round, pension and security when old’; a bare 3 per cent mentioned ‘socialism’ or a ‘changed economic system’; and only 1 per cent plumped even more idealistically for ‘no more wars, better international understanding’. The widespread middle-class feeling that the focus on reconstruction was premature may well have been shared instinctively by at least some in the working class. ‘Meeting many people in various occupations daily, I find, with my own opinion, too much is being broadcast by the BBC, and circulated in the newspapers, re post-war plans,’ wrote a correspondent styling himself ‘Commercial’ to his local paper in Wolverhampton later that year. ‘It is generally agreed that these plans could be arranged without all this prattle, because it definitely tends to make everyone certain that our Government know just when this war will finish, and encourages people to sit easy, instead of getting on with the job.’
²³

In the workplace there was (in the context of full employment in a wartime economy) an undeniable new self-assertiveness – Hodson in his ‘ledger of war’ complained that ‘the working-classes, feeling their power, have often shown some ruthlessness, manifested by bus drivers refusing to stop at halts, transport workers striking on Christmas Day, coal-miners refusing sometimes to do a decent day’s work’ – but this was far from automatically translating into any enhanced political radicalism.
War Factory
, Mass-Observation’s 1942/3 study of a Gloucestershire factory producing radar systems where the workers were mainly women, revealed resentment, boredom and alienation as the predominant sentiments, including predictably little interest in the progress of the war. Soon after Beveridge, an engineer from Dudley told M-O that, as far as his fellow-workers in an electrode factory were concerned, the prevailing atmosphere of each man for himself had ‘dulled the mind to all except personal problems’. Nor were the armed forces quite the radical hotbed they have sometimes been depicted as. Analysis of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs suggests that their debates were seen more as an opportunity for a welcome respite from military duties than as an occasion to engage in serious political discussion; the future novelist Nicholas Monserrat wrote of the sailors under his command that ‘there is no time and, in effect, no occasion for political interest’; or as Hodson heard an officer with the 79th Armoured Division in Germany put it just before the war’s end, ‘in fifteen months in the ranks I never heard politics mentioned’.
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Was there perhaps widespread popular anticipation of a future national health service? Those who have scoured wartime diaries report remarkably few sightings, and indeed the 1944 Gallup poll revealing 55 per cent approval also showed a not inconsiderable 32 per cent in favour of the status quo. Polling evidence demonstrated that approval towards the end of the war for Labour’s nationalisation plans was reasonably broad (usually in the 40–60 per cent range) but invariably shallow, with few people seeing it as a high-priority issue. As for education, a poll in early 1945 found less than half those questioned had heard of the recent Education Act and a mere 13 per cent were aware of its provision to remove fees from grammar schools. Understandably, Orwell’s earlier optimism about a newly radicalised people had by this time completely vanished. ‘I overhear very little discussion of the wider issues of the war,’ he told his American readers in autumn 1944. ‘Everyone expects not only that there will be a ghastly muddle over demobilization, but that mass unemployment will promptly return.’ And he added, ‘Everyone wants, above all things, a rest.’
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There was plenty of further statistical underpinning available for these and similar assertions. In the autumn of 1943, for example, more than 500 interviews by Mass-Observation across the country found that 43 per cent expected heavy post-war unemployment, 46 per cent another war after the present one, 50 per cent uncertain or without an opinion as to whether the government was paying too much or too little attention to post-war reconstruction, and 49 per cent (up from 19 per cent a year earlier) saying that their main priority after the war was to ‘relax or have a change’. But in the end, over and above the figures, we need to listen to the voices, as in the cynical, mistrustful, rather truculent tone of four young tradesmen in an army unit – reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ – describing their expectations of demobilisation:

It’ll be the same old story, those who can pull the strings will be all right, the other poor buggers can look after themselves.

Just the same mess as last time.

Personally I don’t trust the Government and I don’t suppose they’re likely to worry much about us. We’re heroes while the war’s on, but we can look after ourselves afterwards.

I can’t see they can afford to unload everybody at once, or there’ll be a lot of trouble. Chaps aren’t going to stand for it.

In August 1944, with the long war clearly drawing to an end, an MO team was in Gloucester. ‘What do you feel the next ten years of your life will be like?’ it asked a group of working-class mothers. ‘Are you looking forward to them, or aren’t you looking forward to them much?’ The replies have a wonderful – and revealing – authenticity about a world where the big picture was infinitely more local and immediate than any of the activators ever imagined:

Oh God! I’m not good at answering questions.

Well, yes and no. As long as I don’t have any more kids I shall be all right.

Don’t know. Really I don’t.

Why, yes.

Well, I suppose I am – we like to think the future’s going to be better.

Oh yes, I don’t want to die yet!

Am I? I’ll say I am. I want to buy my own house if I can. But it won’t be in Alma Place – the row here is terrible, and they keep the kids up till 11 and 12 at night, yelling about the street.

Oh, well, of course I am, hoping for the war to end and things to improve.

Well, it’s all according. It all depends on if it’s any better than the last two or three.

One of the women was the ‘worn and dirty’ 43-year-old mother of fourteen ‘filthy and ragged’ offspring aged between twenty and eight months. ‘Well,’ she answered when she found a moment, ‘I hope I live to see ’em all grow up to look arter theirselves.’ She was also asked whether she was religious. ‘Well, I believe in God but I can’t say I’m religious. You get a bit hasty when you’ve so many children.’
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These were the sort of people whom Harrisson surely had in mind when in March 1942 he turned specifically to his lecture’s title, ‘Propaganda for Town Planning’, and let rip:

The idea that places really were going to be rebuilt and better new houses constructed had not penetrated down to the large masses of the population. While there had certainly been much talk and propaganda about town planning, about 95 per cent of it had been quite above most people’s heads. Mr Harrisson said that he was worried most by the way that planners and others associated with the matter talked as if they were winning over the general public when really they were only winning over each other. He had never met any group of people who ‘scratched each other’s backs’ more than planners did.

For those in the audience bitten with the planning bug there was worse to come:

The planning conferences were only for those who knew about the subject; the talks on the wireless probably did not reach the people for whom they would be most use; the majority of the planning exhibitions seemed to mean little to any of the general public who saw them. The people needing planning propaganda are those who are used to thinking in concrete terms – who could talk for ages about things connected with their own house, but could not frame a single sentence about planning.

‘Planning will have,’ Harrisson concluded bluntly, ‘either to find out what people want and design propaganda that will have an immediate appeal, or educate people to appreciate how their own lives could be improved by putting into practice the theories held by the planners.’
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The record of the meeting does not, sadly, include any ensuing discussion.

Was Harrisson being unfair to the planners? Significantly, only a few months earlier, the editor of the
Architectural Review
, J. M. Richards, had strongly criticised organisations like Mass-Observation (‘a phenomenon very typical of recent years’) as tending to block properly visionary town planning. ‘The needs of society are a fit subject for scientific study, but they cannot be elucidated by a gigantic piece of consumer research’ was the Richards line. ‘It is a fallacy that the needs of society are the aggregate of as many individual demands as can be ascertained.’ In practice, many planners, exemplified by Max Lock at Middlesbrough, did try quite hard to initiate and then sustain a dialogue with public opinion at both a local and a national level, in order to try to keep that opinion broadly on side with their plans; any view that sees the planners (of the 1940s anyway) as crazed, tinpot dictators is simply a caricature. The fact that there were so few opportunities during the war, and indeed afterwards, for those being planned for to express an explicit democratic verdict on the plans was less the fault of the planners than of local (and arguably national) politicians.