Family Britain, 1951-1957 (108 page)

Well, I do like shopping if I have plenty of time.

Well, I ask you, the prices put you off.

Well, you get a bit tired of it, don’t you? From day to day the same, but it’s got to be done.12

‘More than nine out of ten houses visited showed signs of recent redecoration and alterations – usually a new fireplace,’ recorded Tom Brennan in June 1956 after visiting tenements in the Gorbals. ‘Several scores of families had obviously spent a lot of time and money trying to improve their one or two rooms. The prosperity of recent years showed very clearly. It has not all been misdirected as is often suggested.’ There was indeed a reflex middle-class tendency to criticise the frivolous, extravagant expenditure of the newly better-off working class, a tendency embodied by Nella Last in Barrow. ‘Mrs Salisbury often makes me
gasp
,’ she wrote a few months earlier about her cleaner. ‘She was paddling round in a nasty old pair of rubber soled shoes. I said, “Oh Mrs Salisbury,
look
, you are making marks all over the carpets. Haven’t you brought your old slippers?” She said a bit mournfully, “No, they have fallen to bits, these booties are all I’ve got” – & she is paying for a £108 T.V. set, & a “racing” bicycle for her schoolboy, though he owns one good enough to go to school on it!!’ There was also a more general sense of unease, typified by the reaction of the Glasgow-based
Evening Citizen
, about the time of Brennan’s interviews, to the pronouncement of the Scottish Under Secretary, J. Nixon Browne, that two vital ingredients for a happy home life were a ‘kitchen to be proud of’ and a ‘room for a TV’. ‘Fine,’ riposted the paper. ‘But many people manage very well without a dream kitchen – and a lot of folk were quite happy before TV existed. Material comforts help, but it is a mistake to over-accentuate them. No home will be a happy one – whatever the amenities – without the mutual love, respect and unselfishness of the family.’ From the left, as evidenced by the painful saga of commercial television, there was palpable discomfort with the whole area of advertising and consumption, forcefully though Crosland argued that ‘the wide and plentiful diffusion of consumer goods’ was a perfectly valid ‘route towards social equality’. And from the guardians of high culture and high-mindedness generally, the dismay was almost total. ‘All that solemnity in the 1950s, it just seems so remote,’ the poet and critic Ian Hamilton poignantly reflected in 2001 shortly before his death:

It’s very close too because it determined so much of one’s own thought and action; and yet it is a million miles away. They said: look out, people are doing these demoralising things, we are going to enter a society dominated by mass-communications and consumerism, a society that isn’t going to care about the things you care about. You do realise that’s the way we’re going, don’t you? That was the Leavisite cry. And we said: Yes and we must prevent that. And we devoted whole lifetimes to trying to prevent it – and look what’s happened . . .13

The history train was rolling by the mid-1950s in only one direction. And whatever the concerns, whatever the critiques, nothing was going to derail it.

14

A Pretty Mess

‘Terrible 24 hours,’ noted Clarissa Eden on 27 July 1956. ‘Nasser trying to take over the Suez Canal. Anthony and the Cabinet decide to fight, if necessary alone.’ It was a concise, accurate summary, and the same day Macmillan observed that the Egyptian President’s speech announcing his seizure of the Canal had been ‘very truculent – an Asiatic Mussolini’, adding that the Cabinet’s ‘unanimous view’ was ‘in favour of strong and resolute action’. Most of the press over the next few days agreed, while in the Commons on 2 August, after Eden had stated that Britain could not allow this to pass unchallenged, Gaitskell laid such stress on Nasser as a 1930s-style dictator that he appeared to be giving support to Eden’s firm line.

Away from Westminster and Fleet Street, as the Army Reserve was called up and Royal Navy ships sent to the Middle East, a class dimension was rapidly emerging. ‘Arthur rang up,’ noted Nella Last on the 2nd about her civil servant elder son. ‘He seemed very concerned about the Suez problem, – feared the govt were “rushing things”.’ Three days later, John Fowles muttered darkly to himself about the ‘hideous bellicosity of the Tories’ in the ‘Suez Canal scare’ and described Britain as being ‘in a hopelessly immoral position’. But it was Billy Butlin who had his finger on the popular pulse, refusing to allow Egypt’s brilliant swimmers to participate in the annual Butlin’s Cross-Channel swimming race. ‘They’ve got the Suez Canal,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘I’m not going to let them have the English Channel.’ And for a young David Owen, working on a Costain’s construction site in Plymouth prior to going up to Cambridge, there was the painful shock of discovering that his fellow-workers ‘were adamant from the start that the Egyptians should not be allowed to get away with it’ and that ‘the “Gippos” had hit us, so we should hit them’.

Between early August and late October – amidst endless rounds of diplomacy, largely a charade from the British government’s point of view – Suez positions steadily hardened. ‘The blunt fact is that there is now a clear clash of parliamentary opinion between Government and Opposition on how to deal with Colonel Nasser,’ reported ITN’s Robin Day from the Commons on 12 September, after Gaitskell had made it clear in a stormy emergency debate that Labour would not support any military action unsanctioned by the United Nations. ‘The unity which appeared to pervade Parliament on August 2nd has now completely evaporated.’ In the press, there was majority support – but not overwhelmingly so – for the Eden line about the folly of a re-run of inter-war appeasement. And in the public at large, polls revealed a deep mistrust and disapproval of Nasser, but a preference at this stage for going down the UN route rather than taking unilateral action.1 The pace of events quickened during October. Publicly, the Tory conference at Llandudno was unashamedly hawkish; privately, a meeting at Sèvres (a Paris suburb) on the 22nd saw Britain, France and Israel cooking up an astonishingly disreputable, highly secret scheme by which a week later Israel would invade Egypt, thereby enabling an Anglo-French intervention that could be presented as peacemaking while in reality seeking to regain the Canal and in the process overthrow Nasser. If not quite something out of
Blackadder
, it was not much better.

On the evening of Monday the 29th, as Israeli tanks and armoured cars duly crossed Egyptian border outposts and headed for the Suez Canal, the Queen was attending the Royal Film Performance (
The Battle of the River Plate
) at the Empire in Leicester Square. There, accompanied by a possibly nose-out-of-joint sister, she was presented to a galaxy of stars, including the three leading sex symbols of the day – Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg. ‘Marilyn Monroe Captures Britain’ was one headline next day, but on the set at Pinewood it was an even more difficult time than usual. ‘The trouble is that she takes extra pills when she doesn’t feel 100%,’ noted Colin Clark, ‘without really knowing what effect the pills will have.’ He added that ‘MM looks more and more vulnerable and I am sorry for her’, but chatting the same day to one of the exasperated lighting men, ‘veterans of countless Rank films’, he was told that ‘if it wasn’t for our loyalty to Sir Laurence, I’d have edged a spanner off the grid and onto her head’. In Westminster at 4.30 this Tuesday afternoon, Eden stunned the Commons by announcing an Anglo-French ultimatum to Nasser, who was given 12 hours to withdraw his troops from the Suez Canal or face the consequences. The Tories, according to Labour’s J.P.W. (‘Curly’) Mallalieu, ‘roared their delight’. But that night there was no mention of Suez in Anthony Heap’s diary, which instead lamented how ‘those horrible yellow tubular street lights that have been gradually introduced along suburban main roads during the last year or two are now beginning to render central London hideous by night as well’.

On Wednesday morning there was unqualified backing from the
Telegraph
,
Express
and
Financial Times
, while the
Daily Sketch
also weighed in, declaring that ‘the critics of Eden are the critics of Britain’. This lurid tabloid had put on some 70,000 circulation since the middle of the year, employing what one press critic, Francis Williams, called a ‘formula of cheese-cake, sensation and extreme Toryism of the most old-fashioned jingoist kind’ – anticipating Murdoch’s prime-era
Sun
. Elsewhere in Fleet Street, both the
Mail
and
The Times
sounded cautious notes, while the
Manchester Guardian
began a notable leader unambiguously: ‘The Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt is an act of folly without justification in any terms but brief expediency. It pours petrol on a growing fire. There is no knowing what kind of explosion will follow.’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn reflected later on Wednesday how the paper was providing ‘the intellectual leadership in the country’, adding that ‘the churches, leading figures in science, universities and among professional people are coming out solidly on this’. Two experienced observers certainly felt strongly. ‘How they can have done such a thing with the whole of world opinion against us passes my comprehension,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife Vita Sackville-West, while Violet Bonham Carter was privately ‘convinced that we have made the biggest blunder in our history’. So too at Nuffield College, Oxford, where Raymond Streat spent the Wednesday evening with the fellows. ‘The talk went on furiously until a late hour,’ he recorded. ‘The outstanding emotions I think were horror at the prospect of Britain being branded as an aggressor, horror of a long struggle followed by an interminable occupation in the midst of hatred and nationalistic tactics as in Cyprus, and shock at losing friends in Canada and U.S.A.’ By this time, with the ultimatum rejected, British bombers were close to having destroyed the Egyptian air force, to the unstinting applause of Virginia Graham’s husband for one. ‘Tony,’ she wrote from London to Joyce Grenfell in the States, ‘is being wonderfully blimpish – he is so convinced that neither England nor the Conservative Party can do wrong – & he is all for us occupying the Canal Zone & to hell with UNO [United Nations Organisation].’2

‘IT’S ON – AND EDEN STICKS TO HIS GUNS!’ proclaimed the
Sketch
on Thursday, 1 November, with an editorial declaring that ‘Suez for us means survival or ruin’ and that ‘if Britain were now forced into an ignominious retreat by a frenzied faction at home, then indeed would our nation be eclipsed and our standing in the world lost for many years to come’. But the
Sketch
’s circulation was still only about a quarter of the
Mirror
’s, which now pronounced on ‘EDEN’S WAR’: ‘There is NO treaty, NO international authority, NO moral sanction for this desperate action.’ The
News Chronicle
also came in strong – ‘This is folly on the grand scale . . . Only a miracle can save the Prime Minister now’ – and
The Times
wondered aloud about the wisdom of President Eisenhower only hearing about the Anglo-French ultimatum from press reports. In the Commons, a censure debate descended into what Mollie Panter-Downes called ‘a bear garden’, with Reggie Maudling subsequently claiming that Denis Healey had got so angry that steam had come out of his ears.

Among the diarists, both Frank Lewis (going to the Royal to see Hitchcock’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much
) and Henry St John (focused on his breakfast conversation with his landlady about her unsatisfactory method of frying his bacon) ignored the crisis, as, more surprisingly, did Anthony Heap, who instead took advantage of the first-day Premium Bonds and bought £10 worth. Up in Barrow, back from the post office after her wearisome queuing, Last had a visit from a friend, Mrs Higham. ‘She was so full of “admiration” of Eden’s policy I felt envious,’ noted Last. ‘She laughed to scorn my fears & qualms. I wished so
heartily
I could too.’ Madge Martin in Oxford kept things in perspective. ‘It does seem awful,’ she reflected on the news about the bombings, ‘but I still get more worried by personal problems.’ Streat, back from the dreaming spires, met Sir Frank Lee, Permanent Secretary at the Board of Trade, who said not only had he known ‘absolutely nothing of what was going on in the Cabinet’, but that ‘he was utterly opposed as a private person to what had been done’. If Streat had stayed in Oxford this Thursday, he might have witnessed a clash between anti-Eden student demonstrators and people with placards proclaiming ‘Shoot the Wogs’, and conceivably also Isaiah Berlin hurrying to catch the post. ‘I should like to offer the Prime Minister all my admiration and sympathy,’ he assured Clarissa Eden. ‘His action seems to me very brave very patriotic and – I shd have thought – absolutely just.’ Over in Cambridge, a motion at the Union opposing armed intervention was carried 218–136, amidst memorably rowdy scenes, while the
Manchester Guardian
-reading Sylvia Plath wrote home. ‘This attack is a disaster from every angle – moral, military, political,’ she told her mother. ‘Britain is dead; the literary and critical sterility and amorality which I long to take Ted away from is permeating everything. God Bless America.’3