Family Britain, 1951-1957 (17 page)

There was, in terms of race relations as a whole, one undeniably positive development in 1952. This was the opening of the Shah restaurant in Drummond Street, near Euston Station, by Sheikh Mohammad, some ten years after he had arrived almost penniless from Mysore in south India. The Shah was a hit from the start, discovered first by junior doctors from University College Hospital, and soon there were queues outside, with an average wait of 25 minutes for a table. It was not quite Britain’s first Indian restaurant, but it was the unmistakable start of a revolution in eating out, combining affordability with a sense of luxury – a revolution especially embraced by the indigenous white working class.4

It was an all-white line-up when in April, two months into the new reign,
Picture Post
picked ‘The New Elizabethans’. Forty-two men and five women were chosen, mainly predictable enough: ‘Rab’ Butler and Nye Bevan as politicians, Benjamin Britten and Sir William Walton as composers, Graham Greene as novelist, Henry Moore as sculptor, Graham Sutherland as painter, A. J. Ayer as philosopher, Fred Hoyle as mathematician and so on. The main surprises were thespian, with Alec Clunes as one of the two actors (Alec Guinness the other), Celia Johnson as actress and Glynis Johns (‘still recognisable as the girl-round-the-corner’) as film star. The other three women were the economist Barbara Ward, the barrister Rose Heilbron (Britain’s only female QC) and Margot Fonteyn (‘almond-eyed and mystically beautiful, she is quiet, modest, still a little shy, only occasionally obstinate’) – with no place for the recently married Margaret Thatcher, not yet an MP though author of a recent
Sunday Graphic
article on the position of women ‘At the Dawn of the New Elizabethan Era’.

In fact Thatcher was about to experience a great sorrow, for in May her beloved father, Alfred Roberts, was voted out as a Grantham alderman following Labour gains in the council elections. Still wearing his aldermanic robes, and speaking ‘with evident emotion’ in front of a crowded gallery, Roberts observed that he was the first alderman in a quarter of a century to be displaced by an opposing political party. There then took place, as reported by the local paper, a dramatic farewell:

‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour they are laid down.’

He recalled that he bought the robes himself and voiced pleasure at being able to present them to the Corporation.

As he was taking his leave, he declared: ‘No medals, no honours, but an inward sense of satisfaction. May God bless Grantham for ever!’

And with this he turned abruptly to leave the Council chamber.

Presumably there was less lip-trembling emotion in Oxford about the same time, after a thrusting Australian undergraduate had stood for secretary of the University Labour Club and, in defiance of the rule against open canvassing, had campaigned on the slogan, ‘Rooting for Rupert’. Complaints were made to the club’s chairman, Gerald Kaufman, who initiated a tribunal. The outcome was that young Murdoch was not allowed to stand for office.5

For most people, talk of a new Elizabethan Age – essentially got up by the press – was at most a momentarily pleasing irrelevance. Instead, in the context of a general relaxation of price controls, what was far more preoccupying was the question of the cost of living. ‘Have had a notice from the electricity board today that they will put the charges of electricity up without notice to individual customers, in future,’ recorded Kenneth Preston in Keighley barely a fortnight after the King’s death. ‘That is the sort of thing that is so infuriating nowadays. We have absolutely no power to protest or complain. Monopolies – monopolies all over and prices always up and up and again up.’ So too with Gladys Langford in north London. ‘Laundry price controls are to be removed next Monday,’ she noted in June. And two days later: ‘Chatted with a plain but pleasant woman in the ’bus who said she had given up her car as she could no longer afford to run it. She said ’phone charges are to be raised.’ When the previous month Gallup had asked people about their standard of living, 40 per cent had said it was going down and only 29 per cent going up; while in June one in five told the pollsters that they were trying to cut down on ‘everything’, compared with just one in twenty-five the previous summer. Moreover, there was still widespread rationing – meat, fats (including butter, margarine and cooking fats), cheese, tea, sugar and sweets – together with periodic shortages. ‘Ione has half holiday and I was glad of excuse to go out to lunch,’ recorded Judy Haines in Chingford on a Thursday in June. ‘Went to Silverthorn Café. Only “mixed grill” at 12 o’c! This “damned Government!” (our joke since we heard it so often of Labour Government and never at all now.)’6

Inevitably, so much depended on vantage point and comparison. ‘The Rhondda: 1952’ was the title of Geoffrey Goodman’s upbeat reportage for the
New Statesman
in April. ‘The four Labour Exchanges are rather like museum pieces from a wicked age,’ he declared, noting that whereas between 1931 and 1935 an average of more than 16,000 had been out of work in the Rhondda, together with many more thousands only partly employed, now just some 2,500 were jobless. ‘New clothing shops, food stores, electrical and radio shops have all elbowed their way into the cramped hub, and shop-space is now virtually unobtainable,’ was his description of Pontypridd. ‘Glass and chrome have come to the valleys’ market town and over rough, cobbled streets run high-heeled shoes, nylons and West End drapes . . .’ Soon afterwards, in nearby Merthyr Tydfil, ‘grateful people packed High Street Chapel to give thanks for returned prosperity’, while the local paper also reported the almost euphoric speech by the President of Merthyr Chamber of Trade at the new Mayor’s installation luncheon:

Mr Evans claimed that the Chamber, in co-operation with the Council, had done magnificent work in terms of trying to bring new industries to the borough. They felt very proud of what they had done and that Merthyr was now ‘on the map’. There was also a happy relationship between management and workers since the advent of new industries and there had been very little labour trouble. Business people had beautified their premises and the town looked more prosperous than it had been for many years. He maintained that the future of the borough was rosy.

Less reliance on coal, iron and steel was undoubtedly a sensible strategy, but there was a shock in June when Hoover, whose factory was situated just outside the town, dismissed some 300 employees, almost a quarter of its workforce. ‘Cessation of shipments of washing machines to Australia’ was the company’s explanation – a sharp reminder of the precariousness of the new prosperity.

‘England: the most civilized country on earth, but also the most boring!’ the German political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote from Manchester to her husband in New York a week or so later:

A dull blanket of fear lies over the country, which is softened, though, by the fact that they’ve been eating too little for such a long time that they barely notice the difference anymore. And yet it’s almost unbelievable. Not just what the shops look like – groceries and so on, everything scarce, everything of bad quality (which is quite new for this country), but also their genius to make life uncomfortable. Everything set up as if expressively to make life difficult, or at least to challenge you to muster so much cheerfulness that everything can be overcome.

And yet I admire no other people as I admire the English, as a people I mean. Everything we like so much about America, the decency, the lack of hypocrisy, no to-do, fairness, etc is Anglo-Saxon. But all of this without the slightest zest and also without vitality.

Soon afterwards Arendt was in Durham. ‘A small English suburban town near Newcastle in the middle of a mining district,’ she reported. ‘But all of England looks like it’s mainly made of coal. Everything black from 150 years of coal dust. The people here are doing well, and the rise of the working class is much more palpable than in London.’

For two less occasional observers of the English scene, these were difficult times. ‘All through this last year I have been in trouble – it’s the result, I think, of switching my career, leaving politics and preparing to start in at the bottom again in a new field,’ Michael Young wrote in early July to Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in Dartington. He was just back from a ‘most stimulating’ trip to Lancashire (in the middle of a textile recession) and Yorkshire:

I interviewed dozens of families, and have I think done as much as possible until I can begin on a more systematic research programme. The slum district I stayed in in Manchester was full of warm and friendly people. It was repeatedly amazing to see the intelligent eyes, the humour and the self-assurance of mothers in dark, crowded rooms cluttered up with broken-down furniture. Even the thousands of women in the dole queue at Blackburn were smiling and joking, and in their smart Marks & Spencer coats they presented a sharp contrast to the mill-girls of the ’thirties with their shawls & clogs. M&S may have done as much to create the social revolution as the Labour Party . . .

So many good things were said. One of the best was Gwen’s char-lady who said ‘I don’t know where any of my babies came from. I’ve never been a willing partner. I’ve always turned my back on him.’ I went to see this lady, who had 114 close relatives, extending over 5 generations . . .

Later that month, a less enthused, patronless Sid Chaplin, staying in a Nottingham hotel, described to a friend his ‘pilgrimage to the castle (where D. H. Lawrence took
his
Marion) just to try to recapture the Lawrencian spirit’:

I’d have spent my time better reading ‘Sons & Lovers’. They have now installed a restaurant after the pattern of British Railways, administered by three pleasant sluts. People were sunbathing on the lawn. The sun beat down like a Pittsburg blast-furnace being tapped. And there it was, below the dowdy blackened old spinster of a castle, belching power-station stacks, factories, high, hard roads, as remorseless as the roads to hell, sidings, the foul & filthy Trent, and smog (not honest smoke).

Working full-time for the National Coal Board’s magazine
Coal
, involving a monthly feature and much travel, Chaplin was acutely conscious of his lack of progress with his creative writing. ‘This last 2½ yrs,’ he added, ‘have been hard to bear.’7

Irrespective of such glooms, it was never realistic that a new reign meant the turning of a moral corner. In late April the
Brighton & Hove Herald
reported ‘a wave of wanton destruction by teenage hooligans’ striking the seafront, with ‘juvenile gangsters’ vandalising property and assaulting passers-by; soon afterwards, ‘Disgusted’ of south Wales complained to the local paper about vandalism in Aberfan’s cinema and attributed it to ‘lack of parental control’. Increasingly, the focus was on the pernicious consequences of the widespread importation of American ‘crime’ and ‘horror comics’, with
Picture Post
in mid-May publishing an investigation which found that they were extensively read by schoolboys, adolescents generally and National Service men. ‘Unknown before the war, the first copies arrived with the American troops, who had grown up with them. Now you can buy them all over the country, especially in big towns.’ The comics themselves all used the picture-strip technique, were ‘concerned almost exclusively with crime and violence’, and ‘depend for their appeal on violence, sex and racial hatred’. The article (by a Communist teacher called Peter Mauger) demanded that children be protected. The connection between these comics and rising juvenile delinquency was seemingly obvious, and not long afterwards Gallup found two in three adults approving of a blanket import ban. Nor was it just American comics that appalled the moral majority. ‘I saw rows of “Life in the Future”, “Tales of Thrills & Horror”, “True Love Stories”, etc, etc,’ recorded Nella Last in June after spending part of a Saturday looking at a big magazine stall in Barrow’s market. ‘I’ve often said lightly “my breath nearly stopped” – but felt it true this morning. I never imagined such sexy – pornographic – pictures & captions, such sadistic, grim “torture”, such “might is right” type of trash. How they got past the censors who ban books is a mystery.’8

Fears of unhealthy American influence were also in play when it came to the question of commercial broadcasting. A fortnight after the King’s death, and four months ahead of the renewal of the BBC’s Charter, Crossman was told that at a recent meeting of Conservative MPs there had been a heavy vote in favour of ending the Corporation’s monopoly. ‘No doubt the increased agitation is due to the high-handed B.B.C. performance during the King’s funeral,’ he reflected. ‘If there had been a rival, the B.B.C. couldn’t have closed the service down in the way it did.’ There ensued in late March and early April, ahead of an expected White Paper, a bout of agitated correspondence in
The Times.
‘This is the age of the common man, whose influences towards the deterioration of standards of culture are formidable in all spheres,’ warned Lord Brand. ‘It is discouraging to find that it is in the Conservative Party which one would have thought would be by tradition the party pledged to maintain such standards, that many members in their desire to end anything like a monopoly, seem ready to support measures which will inevitably degrade them.’ Violet Bonham Carter agreed: ‘We are often told the B.B.C. should “give the people what they want”. But who are “the people”? The people are all the people – including minorities. Broadcasting by the B.B.C. has no aim but good broadcasting. Broadcasting by sponsoring has no other motive but to sell goods.’