Family Britain, 1951-1957 (110 page)

In the West End, the shock news came through at about four o’clock that, in view of the international situation, Buckingham Palace had requested the cancellation of this evening’s Royal Command Variety show. ‘I just cannot believe it’s true,’ declared a distraught Sabrina, who had been due to sing ‘Temptation’, backed by the Nitwits. ‘And there was I insisting that they made the neck higher so that no one should protest about my appearance. It’s . . . oh, I don’t know
what
to say.’ Still, quite apart from bonfires and fireworks, there were plenty of alternative attractions this evening. Madge Martin in Oxford saw another MM (‘certainly an enchanting creature’) in
Bus Stop
; Tommy Steele gave his first major live performance, at the Sunderland Empire; on the box there was the debut of Granada’s
What The Papers Say
;
and in Gravesend, Benn addressed three protest meetings, though the poor turn-out ‘rather confirmed what I had suspected: that ordinary people are not yet moved on this issue’. A better-attended protest meeting was at Colchester Town Hall, where the speaker was the pro-Soviet Labour MP Konni Zilliacus. ‘He had quivering, fat jowls,’ recalled John Sutherland, and ‘in his Finnish accent he asked rhetorically: “What must a British soldier feel, as he drives his tanks against Egyptian women and children?” “Make the buggers run!” shouted back a member of the Young Conservative claque, who had taken over several of the front rows. Uproar ensued.’10

The main political news on Tuesday morning, offsetting the successful landing at dawn of the main invasion force, was a Gallup poll – conducted late the previous week – showing that only 40 per cent agreed with Eden’s Middle East policy, whereas 46 per cent disagreed and 14 per cent were don’t knows. Among the letters to the papers, probably the pick was Peter Ustinov’s to the
Manchester Guardian
, attacking the ‘odious hypocrisy’ of the government’s claim to have been conducting no more than a ‘police action’. Another letter was from C. P. Snow to his brother Philip. ‘I don’t think a total war is likely,’ he cautiously predicted, ‘but one can’t be sure that it’s impossible & perhaps we ought to make emergency plans.’

The crucial information Snow did not have was that during the morning’s Cabinet, Macmillan as Chancellor had outlined the severe pressure that Britain’s financial reserves were now under and the unwillingness of the Americans to come to the rescue by offering dollar loans, with Macmillan concluding that in economic terms there was no alternative but to end the military action. Accordingly, a consensus emerged that a ceasefire would be announced later in the day. Eden duly did so in the Commons in the late afternoon, to resounding cheers from the Tories behind him. ‘One of them said aloud, “What exactly are we cheering?”,’ recorded Benn on the basis of information emanating from Bob Boothby. ‘Gerald Nabarro, who was beside him, exclaimed in a stage whisper, “We are cheering the last chance to save our political bacon, old boy. That’s what we’re cheering and make no mistake about it.”’ According to Crossman, ‘the general Labour view’ as members left the Chamber was that ‘this was the greatest climb-down in history and that Eden couldn’t survive’. In the short term, they reckoned without the BBC, which had been Eden-friendly almost throughout the crisis and now treated the ceasefire news as, in the words of the historian Tony Shaw, ‘a vindication of the government’s daring action rather than what it actually was, an enforced and humiliating halt’. Among the diarists there seems to have been a prevailing sense of relief – ‘shameful relief’ in Nicolson’s case (as he told his wife), while for Last, despite this good news, ‘the waste, destruction & chaos makes me shudder’.11

‘“Bloody Yanks,” muttered my father, without looking up from his
Daily Mail
,’ remembered Anton Rippon about the Suez aspect of his Derby childhood. ‘“They’ve always been the bloody same.”’ A similar reaction around the country meant that during the week or so after Eden had announced the ceasefire, there was a perceptible shift of sentiment towards the government – that, in fact, Nabarro had called it right. The cumulative evidence was striking. A poll of 550 people in ten different London districts ‘immediately after the ceasefire’ found that 272 broadly approved of the government’s intervention, 166 disapproved, and 112 had no firm opinion either way; letters sent to the
Yorkshire Post
were starting by the 8th to run strongly in the government’s favour, while across the Pennines the voluminous daily postbags arriving at the
Manchester Guardian
showed a steadily declining majority against the action; a Gallup poll taken on the 10th and 11th revealed 53 per cent approving of the government’s action and only 32 per cent disapproving; the composer William Walton, who at the start of the month had been equating Eden to Mussolini, was by the 13th fearing that if the Russians ‘get Suez they’ve fairly got us by the balls (or testicles if you will) & they can cut (or bite) them off at any time they please’; and at a by-election at Chester on the 15th, the Tory vote held up sufficiently well to make it clear that, at a time of national crisis, the middle-class revolt against the party had run out of steam. John Fowles saw things differently. ‘The Tory Party are fundamentally wrong in their action over Egypt,’ began his letter to the
New Statesman
that appeared on the 10th, ‘and it seems pretty certain that they have handicapped themselves out of the race in the next election.’12

The reverberations of Budapest, meanwhile, were only just starting. The
Daily Worker
on the 9th published a letter from Eric Hobsbawm, who as his alter ego of
New Statesman
jazz critic Francis Newton had recently described Elvis Presley as ‘a peculiarly unappealing Texan lad . . . with a line in suggestive belly-dancing’. Here, he called ‘the suppression of a popular movement, however wrong-headed, by a foreign army’ as ‘at best a tragic necessity’, though at the same time stated that he was ‘approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary’. Then in the paper exactly a week later, in the same issue in which a group of docker-members of the party (including Jack Dash) stated that ‘we regard as fully justified the calling in, at a late hour, of the Red Army to safeguard the working class of Hungary’, there was an important piece by Peter Fryer, who in October had gone to Budapest as the paper’s correspondent and had now resigned after his reports had not been used. In it he insisted that the Soviet troops who had entered the city on 4 November were not fighting fascists, but instead ‘they fought workers, soldiers and students’, and ‘could find no Hungarians to fight alongside them’. The following week he elaborated in the
New Statesman
. ‘From start to finish the
Daily Worker
– or rather the Stalinists who control it – has lied, lied, lied about Hungary,’ Fryer wrote. ‘Shame on a newspaper which can spit on a nation’s anguish and grief. Shame on party leaders who can justify with smooth clichés and lies the massacre and martyrdom of a proud and indomitable people.’

Other
Daily Worker
journalists also left the paper and the party – including Llew Gardner (future television reporter) and Leon Griffiths (future creator of
Minder
) – during these often difficult, even agonising times for many Communists, not just journalists. ‘We are both in an awful dilemma,’ wrote one Nottinghamshire couple on the 13th to a friend in Leeds who was also a CP member, in his case in the process of leaving. ‘When one has devoted a number of years, and sacrificed one’s family life, for something we firmly believed would benefit mankind, then one doesn’t give up easily . . .’ But the fact was that ‘we are both terribly disgusted with events in Hungary as we feel sure many comrades are’. Altogether, over the coming days and months, some 7,000 individual Communists did leave the party, representing around one-fifth of the membership. Those who stayed loyal included Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill and many trade unionists, though not Les Cannon of the Electrical Trades Union; those who went included Thompson, Saville, Doris Lessing and the youthful historian Raphael Samuel, as well as the
Daily Worker
journalists. ‘It wasn’t easy psychologically for me to leave the Party, even with the events of 1956 as my solid reason,’ recalled Jean McCrindle over half a century later. ‘I had heard my father [a CP member who stayed] say often that people who left the Party were weak and neurotic bourgeois individualists who usually “ended up” needing Freudian psycho-analysis – another
bête noire
to communists of that generation. I seem to remember Doris Lessing being put in this category after she left. Everything was political. Personal private life was of no consequence compared to the collective comradeship of the fight for the future world revolution.’13

Back on the Suez front, there were mixed post-ceasefire fortunes for those parts of the fourth estate that had spoken out against Eden. The
Manchester Guardian
lost readers in the north, but gained many more in the south; the
Mirror
and
News Chronicle
took significant circulation hits, of 80,000 and 25,000 respectively; and the
Observer
’s circulation – contrary to subsequent mythology – did not fall (despite Margaret and Denis Thatcher cancelling their subscription), but there was a serious loss of advertising, the start of a long commercial decline for the paper. For the
Spectator
’s Ian Gilmour, these were personally fraught times. ‘Eden is indeed unspeakable,’ he wrote on 19 November to Hugh Trevor-Roper in Oxford. ‘In the present semi-fascist atmosphere up here it is considered treacherous to whisper a word of criticism. When I go into my club [White’s], I feel as if I had been cheating at cards or something vile like that! Still we go plugging on even though our readers leave us in shoals.’14

Nor were these easy times for many other people. On the 20th – three days before Eden left for three weeks’ much-criticised recuperation in Jamaica – it was announced that petrol rationing (a weekly maximum of 200 miles for private motorists) would start in mid-December, a development that led directly to BMC’s Leonard Lord inviting back Alec Issigonis, designer of the Morris Minor, to create a new, fuel-efficient car: the Mini. Then on 3 December there were two further announcements: that the British forces would be withdrawing from Egypt and the tax on petrol would rise by 40 per cent. ‘Newswise it’s altogether a wretched Wednesday morn – petrol up to 6/- a gallon, bread going up, dollar reserves down a wump, a promise of increased income tax,’ gloomily reported Virginia Graham on the 5th to Joyce Grenfell. ‘It really does seem to have been a disastrous enterprise, & even Tony, who has been staunchly pro-Eden, is beginning to feel it wasn’t
quite
the most brilliant idea he ever had.’ Eden himself returned to the Commons on the 17th and was greeted, according to Panter-Downes, by ‘a decent amount of friendly cheering by some, but noticeably not all, of the Tories, and decibels of ringing silence from the Labour and Liberal benches’. Three days later in the Chamber, he explicitly denied collusion: ‘I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt – there was not.’15 The politics of Suez were not yet played out.

It was a crisis that had shown many things: Britain’s inability to act independently of her American ally; the futility of clinging on to illusions of Empire; the ability of those in power to practise deceit, with the extent of the collusion not definitively emerging until well into the 1960s; and an undeniable waning of deference, symbolised by the Trafalgar Square demonstration. How much impact did it really have on people at the time? Certainly it is possible to construct a ‘high’ narrative that sees the Suez Crisis as a turning-point in British geopolitical-cum-economic policy, with for instance the
FT
’s gifted, left-leaning leader writer Andrew Shonfield blasting out a series of editorials calling for a fundamental rethink as well as a longer piece in the January 1957 issue of
Encounter
that strongly urged a downgrading of ‘considerations of prestige’ and a new realism about Britain’s overseas responsibilities. Yet for ordinary people? Florence Turtle, too preoccupied by the pre-Christmas rush at work, made no mention of Suez in her diary, while Panter-Downes at the very height of the crisis noted that ‘through all the shaking events and bewilderment of the past week, London has seemed a city of preternaturally calm people, who pause on the street corners to buy their papers and stand there a minute to stare at the headlines with a total lack of expression before tucking the things under their arms and marching on’. A mere three months later, at the start of February 1957, Crossman was much struck when he attended a by-election meeting in Lewisham in support of Labour’s young, middle-class candidate. ‘He talked far too much about Suez, whereas this election should be decided on rents and the cost of living, as nobody, at least in that audience, wanted to look back and discuss the merits of Suez,’ reflected Crossman afterwards. ‘We’ve settled down again in the most amazing way. Though the whole foundations of the country have been shifted by the earthquake, we are inclined to deny it ever occurred.’16

Nothing after all had let up in the distracting national pageant. A week after the ceasefire, Gerard Hoffnung and friends gave at the Royal Festival Hall London’s first ‘crazy concert’, a sell-out affair aimed at making concert-going less solemn, though
The Times
reviewer found little amusing in ‘Mr Hoffnung’s private Tuba joke’ or ‘a septet of stone hot-water bottles and a quartet of household electrical cleaning devices’. Another week later, filming complete, Marilyn Monroe flew out of London Airport, telling reporters that ‘meeting your Queen’ had been her biggest thrill, ‘I didn’t manage to get any of your fish and chips’ her biggest disappointment. Granada TV on the 28th gave
Look Back in Anger
a full run-out, to complaints only from the
Daily Express
, while Amis on 6 December provided Larkin with a buoyant domestic update: ‘I have more or less got my wife back (no Henry for 6 months; resumption of marital relations; much increased cordiality between the partners to the matrimonial arrangement in question) for the time being, and that is sodding good-oh, believe me, sport.’ Henry St John remained impenetrable, inscrutable Henry St John. ‘Despite the vile weather,’ he noted on Sunday the 9th, ‘of 13 passengers of both sexes, mostly young, on the upper deck of the trolleybus on which I returned [from Southall to Acton], all but one were hatless, and the one exception had a scarf on her head.’ Two days later Fanny and Johnnie Cradock had their hour in the sun, presenting at the Royal Albert Hall, in front of an audience of 6,500 and the television cameras, the Bon Viveur International Christmas Cookery show, sponsored by the North Thames Gas Board. It turned out to be, more than ever before, a TV Christmas. ‘Now at least there is the television to fill in the boring hours,’ reflected Fowles, back home at Leigh-on-Sea; in St Pancras, the Heaps had only just acquired a set, which on Christmas Day itself was on ‘almost continuously’ between 3.00 and 9.00; and that day saw the first PG Tips ‘chimps’ ad, shot in a stately home with Peter Sellers doing the voices. On New Year’s Eve there was a hint of satirical times ahead, when at the very small New Lindsay Theatre Club in Notting Hill Gate, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann gave the first performance of
At the Drop of a Hat
, opening with a wry song, ‘A Transport of Delight’, about the peculiar ways of London buses and their drivers and conductors. The first controversy of the New Year concerned the Honours List, specifically the CBE for Stanley Matthews. Now that ‘our leading cricketer [Len Hutton], Association Footballer [Stanley Matthews] and jockey [Gordon Richards] have all received high recognition’, grumbled a Hampshire colonel to the
Daily Telegraph
, ‘is it too much to hope that the nation will recover a proper sense of values and reserve such honours for those whose services to it have been of greater moment than skill at games and horse-racing?’17