Family Britain, 1951-1957 (10 page)

Or take, near the south coast, the enormous Paulsgrove estate, with more than 10,000 people living there by 1951. Situated on Portsdown Hill, this estate had been developed by the City Architect’s Department in Portsmouth to house some of that blitzed city’s working class. ‘Ask a Paulsgrove resident if he likes it there, in the post-war “paradise” on the hill, and more often than not the answer will come back: “Yes, but . . .,” ’ began a graphic front-page story in the
Hampshire Telegraph
in February of that year on ‘Paulsgrove: A Paradise Lost?’:

Sometimes the ‘but’ means that he thinks it is too isolated, that he misses the cinema, or his favourite bar; that it is a long ride home, or ‘too far from Mum’. Very much more often though, it means that he is about to launch into a dissertation on the community’s No. 1 problem – children . . .

One of the qualifications for securing a house under the ‘points’ system is children. It was the big families who went to Paulsgrove. The result is that of the entire population of the estate, at least half are under 15. It is nobody’s fault, but it is having an unfortunate effect. Very few grown-ups think of any of their neighbours’ children as anything but scamps.

Everywhere it is the tale of a broken window, of a bell that rings too often at dusk, or of footprints in unfenced gardens.

There followed the usual litany of a new estate’s failings – no boys’ clubs, no cinema, no pub, one church, only about ten shops (all temporary), the long bus journey to either Portsmouth or Cosham. But the report also emphasised that, despite the estate’s ‘as yet impersonal tangle of modernity’ and its ‘strange 20th Century motley of brick, steel and curiously Continental-looking structures’, mainly a mixture of two- or three-bedroom houses and three-storey blocks of flats, ‘the average tenant is not unduly bothered’, for ‘after all, his new home is intensely practical’. Certainly, the gratitude was unmistakeable:

Hitler did a good job when he blew up my parents’ house in Portsea. I wouldn’t change this for anything.

You can’t know our relief when we moved in.

At last, something I can take a pride in.

I have a garden now and we catch the sun all day in the front room – no need for candles in the daylight now.

Just over a year later, the paper returned to the estate and focused on how the work of ‘the magnificent new schools’ had resulted in a significant improvement in youthful behaviour, in spite of class sizes averaging around 40. ‘How can they talk of us as the hooligan schools!’ declared one head teacher. ‘We have children here of all types and I say they are a perfectly wonderful lot. The parents are splendid, helping us in every way they can to do the most for their children.’ The report itself optimistically identified ‘a growing community spirit’ on the estate generally; and it predicted that ‘the association of the words “Paulsgrove” and “hooligan” ’ would soon become ‘totally obsolete’.

The outwards migration could also be from villages as well as cities and towns. Such was the case for the family of Lorna Stockton (the future literary critic Lorna Sage), whose remarkable autobiography,
Bad Blood
(2000), relates how her parents in about 1951 moved into a brand-new council semi half a mile ‘up the lane’ from Hanmer, a Flintshire village just inside the Welsh border. It was a house, complete with open-plan living room, ‘designed for the model family of the 1950s ads: man at work, wife home-making, children (two, one of each) sporty and clean and extrovert’. For her grandmother from south Wales, after years of living a proud but discontented life in the local vicarage, ‘the raw council estate, where cows wandered over the unfenced garden plots on their way to the fields and
the neighbours could see in
, was Hanmer squared, essence of Hanmer, and she scorned it with a passion’. It was an unprepossessing estate of about a dozen houses – ‘built on a flattened field at the top of a windy rise’ – and the nine-year-old Lorna, who had also lived at the much more spacious vicarage, ‘refused to feel at home there’ and spent as much time as possible ‘wandering the fields and footpaths in squelching wellies’. Indeed, the whole experience seems to have been a mismatch – ‘unlike the other houses, ours didn’t have net curtains, an act of impropriety which showed from the start that we didn’t know how to behave in our new life’ – and not even the arrival of a new three-piece suite could compensate for what Sage unsentimentally records as a (probably far from unique) ‘case of emotional claustrophobia’.11

One new, much-publicised council estate had no country fields anywhere near.12 This was the Lansbury estate in the bombed-out East End, named after the legendary inter-war Labour politician George Lansbury and serving during 1951, in its incomplete early development, as the ‘Live Architecture Exhibition’ for the Festival of Britain. ‘Here at Poplar you may catch a glimpse of that future London which is to arise from blitzed ruins and from the slums and chaotic planning of the past,’ declared a Festival brochure with typical confidence and forward-lookingness. John Summerson, visiting the estate in June, identified some key elements:

The general idea is the redevelopment of a ‘neighbourhood’ as envisaged in the Abercrombie-Forshaw plan of 1943. The old street-pattern is wiped out and a new pattern, with fewer streets, imposed; houses and flats are loosely and agreeably mixed, there is fluent adequacy of open space, and churches and schools are well sited . . . The completed dwellings include three-storey blocks of flats and a longish row of small houses. . . The market place or shopping centre, designed by Mr Frederick Gibberd, is a challenging departure. No traffic enters it and the shops are recessed under the buildings, arcade-wise . . .

Chrisp Street market (London’s first pedestrianised shopping centre), complete with clock tower, was indeed designed as Lansbury’s heartbeat – though revealingly, when Gibberd offered to design new stalls for the traders, they told him they preferred to carry on with their untidy, shabby old ones.

The verdict of most critics was at best lukewarm (‘not overwhelmingly impressive’, reckoned Summerson overall, ‘worthy, dull and somewhat skimpy’, thought J. M. Richards), while only 87,000 people visited the site during the Festival’s five months. But as usual, most of those (mainly drawn from Poplar itself) who moved in to the new houses and flats were pleased to be doing so. ‘Our new place is just a housewife’s dream,’ Mrs Alice Snoddy told the press in February 1951 after her family (husband Albert a welder, she a part-time paper-sorter, two young children, one mother-in-law) had been the first to be given keys, in this case to a ground-floor flat. ‘There are fitted cupboards and one to air clothes in, a stainless-steel sink, hot water tanks. It’s the sort of home to be proud of.’ During 1952 two well-disposed sociologists, John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, interviewed several hundred of those who had moved in. ‘I never thought I’d see such luxury,’ was the heartfelt assertion of a lorry driver’s wife; ‘I can’t stop laughing to myself – I’m so happy,’ confessed a housewife who with her husband and two children had been living in one room in a condemned house in Stepney. Equally predictably there were complaints – the new market’s layout was too congested (‘you can’t take a pram round’) as well as discouraging to those wanting to have an initial recce before buying anything, there were too few facilities for mothers with small children, the kitchens were too small for eating in, the rents were on the high side. But overall, ‘the view that Lansbury offers a fundamentally satisfactory environment is shared by most of the people within and around the new neighbourhood’. Mrs Snoddy herself was settling in for the long haul. Three decades on, in the mid-1980s, she told the BBC that when she first saw her flat, ‘I can’t say I was all that keen on it, I would have preferred to have gone and lived in a house.’ But by 2001 she was happy to concede to the
Guardian
that ‘once other people from Poplar began to move on to the estate, I soon began to adjust’, adding, ‘I must have adjusted rather well as I’m still here 50 years later.’13

On almost all the new council estates, severe financial constraints – sometimes allied to a lack of imagination and drive – resulted in a damaging absence of those accompanying facilities that might have made the ideal of a complete neighbourhood unit closer to reality. In March 1952, for example, when Glasgow Corporation’s Sub-Committee on Sites and Buildings heard an application from Pollok Estate Tenants’ Association ‘requesting the erection of a hut or hall for the use of the tenants of the flats for aged persons at Kempsthorn Crescent as a recreational centre’, it was compelled to refuse it; at the same meeting there was a similar response to an application ‘for an area of ground at Drumchapel for the purpose of erecting a cinema in the new Drumchapel township’. The sociologist Charles Madge published that year a striking audit of community facilities on 100 post-war housing estates:

Day nursery

13

  0

Nursery school

46

  1

Infant welfare clinic

24

  6

Infant play space

22

  2

Open playground

52

14

Health centre

33

  0

Community centre

50

  4

Branch library

46

11

On all estates, whether built before or since the war, there was also the problem of maintaining facilities. ‘What we really want is a supervisor on the lines of a park ranger, whose full-time job it would be to patrol the flats and find the culprits,’ declared a tenant in October 1951 after it emerged that children at the huge, showpiece Quarry Hill estate in Leeds were in danger of losing their three playgrounds unless vandals methodically destroying sets of swings were detected. ‘The police can’t be here all the time.’

The following June the subject arose on
Any Questions?
of the social status of public housing. ‘Of course I don’t think for a moment it’s degrading to live in a council house, obviously that goes without saying,’ declared the young, ambitious Labour MP Anthony Crosland. ‘But there certainly was a time obviously, twenty years ago, when it was considered degrading to live in a council house, to some extent.’ This was, he insisted with undisguised egalitarian passion, an issue of central importance:

Today the situation is much better, partly because council houses obviously are so improved in quality that it’s nonsense to say that they’re worse than other houses. They’re extremely good on the whole now; and partly also because council house estates are manned by a much wider social group than they used to be, I mean they’re much more widely drawn. Now I feel very strongly about this because I’m a Socialist and my definition of Socialism quite simply is a classless society – it’s a society in which people don’t think of themselves as belonging to the working class, or the middle class, or the upper class, or whatever class you like, they haven’t got that feeling. Now at the moment I think very strongly what still allows this sense of class to persist, isn’t so much income differences that people have, it’s differences in education and housing and general social and family background like that. And the most important thing that one could do to eliminate the sense of class in Britain today, isn’t now so much to tackle income differences – although that’s still important – as to tackle these sort of things like housing and education and to make certain – and this is the crux – that you can’t tell that a person belongs to this class, that class or the other class, by looking at the sort of house he lives in or by asking him what school he went to. And when we’ve got to that state of affairs we shall have a jolly good society . . . HEAR. HEAR. APPLAUSE.

The implacable fact remained, though, that type of housing and social class were inextricably linked. It was mainly the working class (though at this stage often the respectable, improving working class) that occupied council houses and flats, while owner-occupation was almost entirely a middle-class preserve. Also in 1952, a Gallup poll revealingly found that 65 per cent of the people interviewed, of whom 56 per cent were Labour voters, approved of the sale of council houses to tenants – a controversial policy being applied rather nervously and ineffectually by the new Tory government. ‘Socialist voters were not so wholeheartedly against the sale of council houses as Socialist councils were,’ a Ministry of Housing official reflected on the findings. Telling also, on that
Any Questions?
programme, was the contribution of the next panellist, the bluff, right-wing Wiltshire countryman Ralph Wightman, who deployed a sarcasm that, however unattractively, did its job in undercutting the indignant upper-middle-class product of Highgate and Oxford:

On that point of Tony Crosland’s I would suggest that they have made a completely new class, a superior class, living in council houses, they’re the only class in the community – the only class of tenants whose rents can be raised by their landlords. They’re the only class of tenant who can be turned out if they take a sub-tenant, if they don’t cut their front lawn in conformity with the Council’s instructions. LAUGHTER. They are a completely privileged class . . . LAUGHTER . . .14