Family Britain, 1951-1957 (105 page)

Reaction from the Labour left proved predictably hostile, with Will Camp’s review in
Tribune
appearing under the headline, ‘Socialism? How Dare He Use the Word!’. Camp himself was uniformly negative, among other things accusing Crosland of a mixture of ‘optimism about the achievement of “welfare capitalism” and pessimism about the traditional objectives of Socialism’. He ended:

Heaven help the Labour Party if Crosland’s ‘realism’ ever takes a hold on its leaders. The silent coalition between Right wing Labour and ‘progressive’ Tory which has ruled the country, with a few off moments, ever since the majority Labour Government fell in 1950 will then continue indefinitely. The voters will cease to bother which of the two parties is nominally in power. And as for the Labour rank-and-file, they will lose their faith in Socialism.

Crosland’s treatise had a deservedly long shelf life and in 2006 was republished with a foreword by Gordon Brown. ‘His breakthrough fifty years ago was telling the Labour Party how a market economy could be made to work in the public interest,’ noted Brown, who implicitly identified in Crosland the seeds of the New Labour project, above all through the way he had spelled out the challenge to be ‘both radical and credible’. For Crosland himself in 1956, no longer an MP, it was at the age of 38 a huge ambition fulfilled – to have become, in Roy Hattersley’s felicitous phrase, ‘the political philosopher of the libertarian left’.15

At a less platonic level, plenty else was happening during September and October. Plans to drown the Welsh-speaking Tryweryn Valley in Merionethshire, in order to supply water to Liverpool, provided a popular cause for Welsh nationalists, with Plaid Cymru holding in September a Save Tryweryn rally in Bala. Nationalism had been quiescent in the Principality for a long time, but this marked the start of a new, more powerful sense of grievance. Elsewhere, ‘squealing women . . . weeping women . . . screaming women . . . fainting women’ greeted the arrival of the flamboyant pianist Liberace at Waterloo station on the 25th, according to the
Daily Mirror
, whose ‘Cassandra’ next day launched a vicious, implicitly homophobic attack on ‘the biggest sentimental vomit of all time’ – the attack appearing in the same issue as the first of a three-part series by Keith Waterhouse on ‘The Royal Circle’, which he accused of being ‘as aristocratic, as insular and – there is no more suitable word – as toffee-nosed as it has ever been’. The dons were returning, and in the Forest of Dean the working-class Dennis Potter left home to go up to New College, Oxford. Everyone wished him luck at his ‘farewell’ drink with his parents at the Berry Hill Working Men’s Club, ‘but, to my shame, I realized that more than anything I wanted to get away from it all, more than ever before that I was glad to be going, glad to be taking this heaven-sent passport to the world of . . . what? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was a world where I should be happier, a world where my books were not muddles, where I wasn’t on the defensive when putting forward my opinions and value-judgements’. Cultural divides were not only about class, and in the
New Statesman
dated Saturday, 6 October – the day that Bobby Charlton made his Manchester United debut, scoring twice in a 4–2 home win against Charlton Athletic – there was a first outing for C. P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’, ie literary and scientific, with Snow making a cogent case for their bridging. The following week the Tories were at Llandudno for their conference, where Eden made a strong speech that, according to Henry Fairlie, left him safe at No. 10 until the next election in 1960.16

The diarists, meanwhile, had mixed fortunes. ‘We had coffee at the “Whimpy” in Lyons Corner House,’ noted a discontented Madge Martin after a day wandering round Regent Street and Bond Street. ‘London is too full of these crowded, meretricious “stand-up” coffee bars. Where are the old days of sitting quietly to elevenses, in a serene, old-fashioned café?’ Poor Gladys Langford, who had had a stroke the previous winter and only quite recently resumed her diary, found herself one rainy Monday unable to cross ‘a whirling stream pouring across the path’ in Highbury Fields. Happily, ‘two passing “Teddy-boys” came to my rescue and lifted me over the torrent’. There was a similar experience for Judy Haines, out shopping with her mother in Highams Park: ‘We had a good lunch at the A.B.C. (downstairs) and then made our way home. A teddy boy was very kind assisting mum on the moving stairs.’ Frank Lewis, now living in Barry but working in Cardiff, was stood up one Tuesday evening by a girl called Julie. ‘I seem to be doomed at the Capitol [cinema],’ he glumly recorded. ‘That’s a second time a girl hasn’t turned up there . . . And after me bloody well rushing to get there . . .’ He then went ‘looking for talent’, but as usual to little avail.17

That was on 16 October, the same evening that the BBC showed a 25-minute extract (introduced by Lord Harewood) from
Look Back in Anger
, a huge shot in the arm to the Royal Court box office and attracting there a wholly new type of audience, recalled by the stage manager, Michael Halifax, as ‘young people gazing around wondering where to go and what the rules were’. As if to prove that John Osborne had not overnight transformed the London theatre, there was a new play at the Duchess,
Plaintiff in a Pretty Hat
by Hugh and Margaret Williams (parents of poet Hugo, actor Simon), which, described by
The Times
as the ‘lightest of light comedies’ about ‘an urbane Welsh peer’ trying to get his son out of a breach of promise action, could not have been more polar opposite. Still, the new kept on coming, and on 27 October, the same day that Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’ reached number 2 in the Top 20, there was a first appearance in the charts for Tommy Steele, performing ‘Rock with the Caveman’, part-written by Lionel Bart. For a fresh-faced Bermondsey boy, discovered at the already renowned 2i’s coffee bar in Soho, this topical ditty about the discovery of a Piltdown man’s skull made him Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll star.18

In the midst of all this, on 17 October, Calder Hall at Windscale in Cumberland was officially opened by the Queen and became the world’s first nuclear reactor to feed power into a national grid. ‘One thing which no one can doubt,’ asserted the
Financial Times
on the morning of the ceremony, ‘is that from now on the nuclear power programme will be pressed ahead to the limits of the national resources and of technical possibility.’ In the
News Chronicle
, ‘The Atom Goes to Work for the Housewife’ was the title for a bullish article by the leading science writer Ritchie Calder, who called the opening ‘a historic and symbolic act – Britain’s entry, in the forefront of all the nations, into the Atomic Age, with the atom tamed for domestic and industrial purposes’. At the ceremony itself, the Queen ringingly pronounced that ‘all of us here know that we are present at the making of history’, a cue for
The Times
’s correspondent to let himself go a little:

Today, with a boisterous wind to display the flags – and nearly wreck the marquees – the colourful and almost Wellsian-looking installation deeply stirs the imagination. Nothing like it exists elsewhere. Truly it has been described as a ‘courageous enterprise’; for Calder Hall represents the inauguration of a comprehensive programme of atomic power stations which, in time, will provide Britain with an ample supply of electricity without the use of coal or oil. Therein lies its magic.

Not just magic but, according to Anthony Wedgwood Benn, socialist magic. ‘We’re told we should be proud of it and we should,’ he declared on
Any Questions?
two days later, ‘and it is public enterprise both in the Atomic Energy Authority and in the British Electricity Authority which distributes it, and I’m sure Ted Leather [the Tory MP on the panel] in boasting rightly of the achievement of Calder Hall will remember that when the nation as a nation gets down to the job it’s capable of leading the world, and I as a Socialist am very proud of that too.’ Nor in global terms was he inclined to minimise the achievement itself: ‘We’ve talked since 1945 of the atomic age presenting alternatives of utter obliteration or great hopes for rising standards and up until now we’ve had a bit too much of the utter obliteration brought before us and not enough of the hope and the possibility for rising standards, and Calder Hall shows what can be done and we’re very delighted to see it.’19

An innovation a fortnight later was not quite such a cause of national pride. ‘The G.P.O. was
packed
– five queues for Pensions,’ recorded Nella Last on Wednesday, 1 November. ‘By the time I got to the counter, I felt as if I could just push my book, through the little “grill”. I said “I’ve
never
seen such a crowd” and was told “it’s been like this since 9 o’clock – it’s these Premium Bonds!”.’ They had attracted some flak on their announcement by Macmillan in his April Budget – a ‘squalid raffle’ (Harold Wilson), a ‘cold, solitary, mechanical, uncompanionable, inhuman activity’ (the Archbishop of Canterbury) – but Gallup soon afterwards had found that 54 per cent approved of a government-sponsored lottery and only 31 per cent disapproved.20 Now on the first day of purchase, the queues in Barrow told their own story. With a top prize of £1,000, it only remained for Ernie next summer to do the honours.

13

Brisk Buying and Selling

‘The bright bricks of new homes, hedged with well-tended gardens, sprouted the dubious joys of a TV age,’ wrote Geoffrey Goodman after a visit to a council estate in Barnsley. ‘Children, happy and healthy, played around the garden fences. A new pub had been built, with a drive-in, chromium and glass saloon bars and plush leather upholstery; there was a dimpled blonde behind the bar, and even in the “public lounge” there were waitresses.’ That was in the
New Statesman
dated 26 May 1956, and the same day Harold Macmillan visited his former constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, which had suffered so much during the slump of the 1930s. ‘We drove round some of the parts which we knew very well and have been much altered by slum clearance etc,’ he noted. ‘The wealth and prosperity of the town is incredible. . .’ A week or two later, a special feature in
Encounter
on ‘This New England’ led with an even more emblematic northern town. ‘On Saturday afternoons the market-place, which in Orwell’s days was full of angry speakers and hungry listeners, is full of brisk buying and selling,’ observed Wayland Young in ‘Return to Wigan Pier’. And overall, he reckoned that since the publication of
The Road to Wigan Pier
in 1936, Wigan had ‘changed from barefoot malnutrition to nylon and television, from hollow idleness to flush contentment’.1 Barnsley, Stockton, Wigan: the inescapable conclusion was that there was, relatively speaking, a new affluence afoot, a fundamentally different condition.

Another resonant symbol of this changing state of affairs was the declining demand for allotments. ‘For the first time in years there is no queue for allotment sites in East Ham,’ reported the
Star
in January 1956, quoting a dismayed official from the local Allotment Association: ‘What has happened to them all? A few years ago all available ground in the borough was taken up. Today, with fewer sites, we find a great many of our plots are vacant and still more members are giving up this coming season.’ But of course it was not just vegetables that were being bought as a mixture of full employment, rising real wages, generally easier credit facilities – including in the flourishing mail-order sector – and few remaining constraints on supply pushed Britain into becoming by the mid-1950s, if not quite yet a fully fledged consumerist society, at least a proto-consumerist one. Indisputably in the vanguard was ‘the teenage consumer’, as he or she would soon be called. ‘Before the war many young workers handed over their earnings to “Mum” and received back an austere allowance of a few shillings to cover fares, snacks, and pocket money,’ whereas ‘in the post-war world the roles tend to be reversed’, noted Mark Abrams, the closest, most alert observer of the phenomenon, in May 1956. Now, he went on, ‘“Mum” is given £1 or £2 as a contribution to the family’s household expenditure and the young earner holds onto the rest’, so that in comparison with the generation earlier ‘the working boys or girls of today are magnificently well off, and their spending is one of the mainstays of many flourishing markets’. All this was predicated upon a labour market in which unskilled and semi-skilled youth labour was heavily in demand, resulting in the real earnings of teenagers being 50 per cent higher by 1957 than they had been in 1938. ‘There was plenty of work,’ a teenager in the Brighton area would recall. ‘There was no trouble getting work. . . Once you got to the age of sixteen you could go to any builders or garage or anywhere and get a job. . .’2

It is impossible to know to what extent advertising fuelled this proto-consumerism, but certainly advertising itself was on the increase – its total expenditure up from 0.77 per cent of GNP in 1952 to 0.93 per cent by 1956, and this despite continuing newsprint rationing until 1956. Women’s magazines benefited particularly, with for instance
Woman
’s advertising revenue almost quintupling between 1951 and 1958. Another favourite target for advertising agencies was a fairly upmarket but still nuts-and-bolts magazine like
Homes and Gardens
, whose February 1954 issue, page 1, was typically devoted to the actress and singer Florence Desmond extolling the virtues of the Kenwood Chef – ‘saves hours of work, and makes a whole range of new exciting dishes possible’. So too
Picture Post
, which regularly in the mid-1950s included a lengthy ‘advertising feature’ on ‘The Modern Kitchen’, with the one in February 1956 insisting that ‘first-rate kitchen ware is something you will never regret possessing’. By contrast with the print format, television advertising from September 1955 took a while to find its feet, with many of the early commercials being too long and too clunky, remembered unfondly by Ronnie Kirkwood of the Colman Prentis & Varley agency as ‘loud-mouthed salesmen who confused shouting with communicating, and bullying with persuading’. Still, there were some palpable hits during the first 15 months or so, including an animated ‘Snap, Crackle and Pop’ for Rice Krispies and the introduction of subsequently impermissible ‘pester power’ as a short-trousered boy implored, ‘Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum’. Gallup polled viewers throughout the first year of commercial television, and despite high marks for Shell’s carefully produced miniature travelogues and for Mackesons with their comic animated stout bottles, easily the favourite was the jingling, catchy cartoon for Murraymints. ‘Viewers,’ noted the
News Chronicle
, ‘are amused by the lazy guardsman who refuses to obey orders until he’s finished his too-good-to-hurry-mint.’3