Family Britain, 1951-1957 (15 page)

What were the implications of that prevailing, unquestioned colouration? In April 1979 – a pregnant moment – the chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, David Donnison, valuably summarised the key assumptions over the previous quarter of a century or so of ‘liberal, progressive, social democrats, men and women of the centre-left’:

(1) The growth of the economy and the population would continue.

(2) Although inequalities in earnings thought to be required to keep the economy moving would persist, they would be gradually modified by a social wage provided by social services distributed with greater concern for human needs, and by the growing burden of progressive taxes required to finance those services.

(3) Despite fierce conflicts about recurring but essentially marginal issues, the people who constitute the broad middle ground of the electorate – the people with middling skills and incomes: ‘middle England’ you might call them – could gradually be induced to give general support to these ideas and the programmes which follow from them.

(4) Therefore government and its social services, accountable to this central consensus, were the natural vehicles of progress. Equalizing policies would be carried forward by the public services, propelled by engines of economic growth which would produce the resources to create a juster society without anyone suffering on the way.

(5) Therefore, too, among the generally trusted instruments of progressive social change were doctors, teachers, town planners, nurses, social workers, and all the professions which man the public services.

(6) ‘Social’ policies were regarded as dealing with the redistribution of the fruits of economic growth, the management of its human effects, and the compensation of those who suffered from them. Thus social programmes were the concern of ‘social’ departments of government responsible for health, welfare, social security, housing, education and social control. The economy could be left to the economists and the departments of government concerned with economic management.

Not all these rather comfortable assumptions were fully in place by the early 1950s, but already they were unmistakably in the air. Even so, a 1952 Gallup poll surveying what qualities people thought contributed most to a successful marriage – with agreement on politics (6 per cent) bottom of the list – was perhaps a salutary reminder that activator assumptions were not necessarily everyone’s assumptions.12

‘I’ve yet to meet a Communist who wasn’t interested in money,’ the hero of
Biggles Follows On
tells Algy, Ginger and the rest. ‘It’s not having any that makes him a Communist. He wants some, and the only way he can think of is to get his hands into the pockets of those that have.’ This latest W. E. Johns yarn (subtitled
A Story of the Cold War in Europe and Asia
, pitting Britain’s most popular aviator against his old wartime foe Von Stalheim, now employed by the Russians) was published in 1952 – by which time the Cold War was, with the Korean War continuing, still at permafrost intensity. ‘I had a political argument with my father in which he called me a communist and I called him a warmonger,’ Kingsley Amis reported in July to Philip Larkin. ‘All quite as usual, you see.’

Earlier that month there was a revealing episode concerning the Red Dean of Canterbury, the notoriously pro-Soviet Hewlett Johnson. Returning from a visit to China, where local Christian leaders had presented him with an appeal protesting against what they claimed to be American bacteriological warfare in North Korea and north-east China, he found himself at the centre of a storm. To
The Times
he was ‘irresponsible’, to the
Economist
‘malignant’; even the
Manchester Guardian
condemned ‘his credulity, his capacity to believe nonsense, his ecclesiastical pomp’. The Chinese Christian protest was, in one historian’s words, ‘buried beneath a welter of personal abuse that suggested to the public that it was Johnson who was responsible for the germ warfare allegations’. Predictably, he received zero support from his archbishop, the establishment-minded Geoffrey Fisher, and in the ensuing House of Lords debate, Johnson was accused – virtually without demur – of being a traitor, a Communist Party lackey, an ‘enemy of Western civilisation’, and an agent of Moscow doing ‘the greatest mischief he can to the Anglo-American amity’.

Positions were just as entrenched in intellectual life generally, typified by how difficult the innovative new historical journal
Past & Present
– set up by the Historians’ Group (including Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill) of the Communist Party of Great Britain and characteristically subtitled ‘a journal of scientific history’ – found it to get contributions from non-Marxist historians. Later in 1952 the prevailing climate was encapsulated in a hostile review of Jack Lindsay’s
Byzantium into Europe
. ‘Marxian historiography is fundamentally opposed to the canons of western scholarship,’ declared the prestigious
TLS
, calling this a fact that ‘raises the question, which will have seriously to be faced, sooner rather than later, by those concerned with academic appointments, whether, in fairness to his pupils, any individual who adheres to the Communist doctrine can be allowed responsibility for the teaching of history’. As for Lindsay himself, he had presented ‘a picture of Byzantine civilisation which will be wholly unrecognisable by anyone on this side of the Iron Curtain who is neither a Communist nor a fellow-traveller’. The following week a letter from Christopher Hill deplored the use of a
TLS
review ‘to advocate a witch-hunt in the historical profession’, but soon afterwards an editorial broadly supported the paper’s reviewer. At the same time, in a shameful episode, the long-standing editor of the
New Statesman
, Kingsley Martin, sacked Basil Davidson – who had recently written a series of superb articles on the rise of Black Nationalism in Africa – because the word was out, in fact misleadingly, that he was a fellow-traveller. He soon became, in the words of Martin’s generally favourable biographer, ‘a skeleton in Kingsley’s cupboard’.13

Increasingly by this time there was focus on the shop floor – in part reflecting a shift in Communist Party thinking after its electoral disaster in 1951 (100 seats contested, none won, deposits lost 98).
The Communist Technique in Britain
was the title of a 1952 Penguin by Bob Darke, a Hackney-based bus conductor who had recently left the CP after 18 years. It was, Mark Abrams wrote in his review, a powerful, compelling piece of testimony:

He never rose to the top ranks, and he never had much use for the Party’s intellectuals and theoreticians. From beginning to end he was merely a tireless N.C.O. fighting and leading his platoons in the trenches of the class war. He was never without a role in one or more sectors of the working-class movement – branch chairman of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, official of the Fire Brigades Union, of the Hackney Trades Council, the London Trades Council, Hackney Borough Councillor, convener of Peace Campaign meetings, organiser of Tenants’ Committees, patron of youth cycling clubs. At every one of these and a dozen similar tasks, the author worked single-mindedly, not for his constituents, but for the Communist Party. He describes calmly and factually how a handful of Party members, always prepared to use chicanery, barely disguised embezzlement, bullying, lying, forgery, conspiracy, steadily exploited for the advancement of the cause, the poverty, political laziness and altruism of their neighbours and workmates. Almost every trade union branch and most large factories in the borough came under their influence.

Darke’s revelations made quite an impact, helped by a four-part series of extracts in
Picture Post
. ‘If Your Wife Objects, Leave Her!’ and ‘Some Of The People – Some Of The Time’ were typical headlines, as was the caption to a photograph of the scene outside Austin’s at Longbridge, Birmingham: ‘The man: R.A. Etheridge, former Communist Parliamentary Candidate, Convener of 350 Shop Stewards. The Audience: some of 20,000 workers engaged upon export work. General Thesis: The Party Line. The Message: Strike!’ Almost certainly, though, the Communist threat in the workplace was much exaggerated. The party generally was in numerical decline (fewer than 40,000 members by the early 1950s); barely half were also members of trade unions; and as a CP member somewhat wryly commented at a meeting of industrial cadres in early 1953: ‘Once many Lab workers come up against our policy cannot argue against us. But have reserve about are we agent foreign power.’14

Inevitably, Labour attitudes towards Communism, and in turn Soviet Russia, varied considerably. ‘The Communist Party hates social democracy even more than it hates Toryism,’ declared the formidable Bessie Braddock, herself a former Communist but now on Labour’s Gaitskellite rather than Bevanite wing, in the TUC-backed
Daily Herald
in August 1952. ‘It is astonishing,’ she added, ‘how many supporters of Labour still fail to grasp this fundamental fact.’ A few weeks earlier, Gaitskell himself had privately pondered on the increasingly prevalent anti-Americanism since the start of the Korean War in 1950:

The truth is that we have a dilemma. We do not like to admit our relative weakness, because we should then look much too like a satellite. But if we try and live up to a military standard we cannot afford, that means economic trouble. A poor relation who is driven to live beyond his means by his rich cousins will not feel well disposed to them. Faced with this dilemma people search for an escape. In England there is not much serious neutralism but there is a great deal of wishful thinking – chiefly about the Commonwealth. It is easy to see how powerful anti-American prejudice can be when to this already difficult relationship is added the genuine fear felt by many people that America will land us all in war. Moreover the war if it comes will engulf and destroy Britain and Europe while very probably leaving the territory of America physically untouched.

Naturally, he went on, anti-Americanism was especially widespread on the left: ‘The left is more open to communist propaganda. It is still somewhat sentimental about the Russian regime: it is even more sentimental about the Chinese communists: the mere fact that America is large and powerful stimulates some opposition among those who instinctively favour the poor and the weak . . .’

Where did Bevan, Gaitskell’s great rival, fit into that typology? On the one hand his unambiguous belief in parliamentary democracy led him to castigate the CP as ‘the sworn inveterate enemy of the socialist and democratic parties’; on the other hand, his whole-hearted belief in scientific planning (‘society must be brought under control in exactly the same way as man has tried to bring natural forces under control’) inevitably meant that he tended to adopt an indulgent, uncritical stance towards Russia’s command-style economic achievements. He also, of course, remained adamant that the Russian military threat was exaggerated and that the best way to combat the spread of Communism was to devote resources not to military hardware but to (as he put it in
In Place of Fear
) ‘the provision of the industrial equipment which the under-developed areas of the world must have if they are not to go on bubbling and exploding for the rest of the century’. It was a logical enough position: yet as long as the Cold War lasted, Bevan and the Labour left more generally would be acutely vulnerable to the charge of being soft on Communism, even of being labelled as fellow-travellers.15

None of which much concerned Doris Lessing, who in 1949 had come to London from Rhodesia as a young, as yet unpublished novelist. Three years later, in the summer of 1952, she performed what she would famously describe as ‘probably the most neurotic act of my life’. In time it inspired some of the most eloquent passages of her remarkable autobiography,
Walking in the Shade
(1997):

I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my ‘doubts’ had become something like a steady, private torment. Separate manifestations of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices – the equivalent of looking over one’s shoulder to see if anyone could hear. I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-depth discussion about the implications of what we were hearing. Rather, sudden burstings into tears: ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’ Sudden storms of accusation: ‘It’s just anti-Soviet propaganda anyway.’ Marital quarrels, even divorces . . .

The first and main fact, the ‘mind-set’ of those times, was that it was taken for granted capitalism was doomed, was on its way out. Capitalism was responsible for every social ill, war included. Communism was the future for all mankind. I used to hear earnest proselytizers say, ‘Let me have anyone for a couple of hours, and I can persuade him that communism is the only answer. Because it is obvious that it is.’ Communism’s hands were not exactly clean? Or, to put it as the comrades did, ‘There have been mistakes’ That was because the first communist country had been backward Russia; but if the first country had been Germany, that would have been a very different matter! Soon, when the industrially developed countries became communist, we would all see a very different type of communism . . .