Family Britain, 1951-1957 (26 page)

So much turns on the question of social mobility and aspirations to social mobility. But here there is a real problem, given the inevitable dominance in our historical imagination of the apparently many upwardly mobile winners. Joe Orton, growing up on a Leicester council estate, was driven by an ambitious mother and, in his biographer’s words, ‘would not accept the fatalism of working-class life’, a non-acceptance that included elocution lessons; Tom Courtenay’s mother, frustrated by her lack of education, was determined that her son should do better; as in Hull, so in Holmfirth near Huddersfield, where ‘I don’t want my lad to wear overalls’ was the watchword, said in a broad Yorkshire accent, of the mother of the future Labour MP Rowland Boyes, son of a lorry driver; and the mother of the future literary critic John Sutherland was the daughter of a Colchester labourer, craved to move up in the world as a result of what she had seen during the war, and put so much pressure on her son to perform academically that he ruefully called a chapter in his autobiography ‘The Family Racehorse’.

The defining life-event was usually the eleven-plus, both the exam itself and the preparation leading up to it. Sometimes the successful working-class child was self-motivating – ‘I didn’t want to become one of the hapless ones who went off to work at Ford’s in Dagenham or drove a lorry at Tate & Lyle’s in Silvertown,’ is how Terence Stamp has explained what got him to Plaistow Grammar School – but more often the push was external, either a teacher or a parent, usually the mother. Lynda Lee-Potter, daughter of a Lancashire miner-turned-painter/decorator married to a former shoe-shop assistant, wrote half a century later the classic account:

For a year before the exam we talked of little else. I practised writing what we called ‘stories’ and we did extra sums after school. My mother had an agile mathematical brain and she could reckon up a column of figures like a computer. For months before the scholarship examination [as the eleven-plus was for a long time also called], we did mental arithmetic together. The dress I was to wear on scholarship day was washed and immaculately pressed weeks in advance. On the Friday evening before the exam, she filled the tin bath with hot water and put it in front of the fire so that I didn’t have to use the tiny, freezing downstairs bathroom. On the Saturday morning, neither of us could eat but we had a cup of hot, sweet tea. ‘Give it all you’ve got, love,’ she said and there were tears in her eyes.

The scholarship exam was held in a school in the centre of Leigh and I walked there with two other girls. I was desperate to do my best and make my mother happy. She did so much for me and passing the scholarship was the one thing I could do for her. I sat down and looked at the title of the composition, which was where my greatest hopes of success rested. To this day I can remember my feelings of hopelessness when I saw the dreary, uninspiring title. ‘Write a composition,’ it said, ‘on the difference between an apple and an orange.’

I was heartbroken and I walked home convinced I’d failed. My mother put her arms round me and we cried in despair together. ‘Never mind, love,’ she said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a cup of tea,’ which was her antidote to failure, heartache and desolation. Three months later we got the letter telling me that I’d passed and I think it was the happiest day of my mother’s life.

Lee-Potter hardly needed to add that she ‘couldn’t wait to take me to Danby’s, the drapery shop in the centre of Leigh, to buy my uniform’.21

Unfortunately, for every real-life Billy Elliot – this was Terry Gilbert, a miner’s son who won a scholarship to Chesterfield Grammar School and at 16 entered the Ballet Rambert School, becoming in due course a celebrated dancer and choreographer – there were many, many mute inglorious Miltons. And fundamentally, for the great majority of working-class people in the immediate post-war period, that does not seem to have been a cause for regret or even concern. The crux was attitudes to the value of formal education, with Elizabeth Roberts concluding, on the basis of her extensive interviews in north-west England, that ‘a few parents were overtly hostile to the whole system, many were indifferent, and a growing minority very enthusiastic’. These findings were entirely consistent with F. M. Martin’s 1952 Hertfordshire survey, revealing that the further down the social scale one went, the less serious parental thought was given to a child’s secondary education. Moreover, even if a working-class child did make it to grammar school, there was an all-too-familiar syndrome. ‘It was like a portcullis coming down,’ the writer Alan Garner recalled. ‘A friend’s mother told me I wouldn’t want to speak to them any more. And while my family was initially pleased, they didn’t realise that getting an education is not like getting a car. The child expands and the family cannot cope.’

The value of education tended to be particularly dimly perceived in the case of daughters; but either way, whether a son or a daughter, at a grammar or a secondary modern, the pressure was almost always there to leave as early as possible and get a job. The 1951 census showed that around 80 per cent of young people (aged 15–19) were in full-time employment, and the basic fact was that their contributions were often vital to working-class households, especially (Zweig found) those with two or more children under 14, or lacking an adult male wage-earner. The imperatives of the family budget and the deep socio-cultural divide separating the working class from the rest of society were a formidable combination indeed. The still huge British merchant navy did provide an important, historically underestimated escape valve for many troubled male adolescents; but, like National Service, it seldom shook up predetermined life-chances. That needed the educational route – a route that simply was not on the typical working-class road map, inasmuch as such a map even existed.

‘Theoretical’, with ‘little practical bearing on everyday life’, was how Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside summarised the far-from-impressed view of education on the part of 200 working-class soldiers and their wives whom they interviewed just before and just after the end of the war. ‘Beyond what was immediately useful, the ability to read, write and reckon, it was nearly all forgotten. It formed no cultural background for reading and study in later life; and most of them felt that all they had learned that was worth learning had been from their experience of life itself. Their schooldays had been irksome and irrelevant to the real business of living.’ Or as one mother eloquently put it in relation to her son: ‘I am not going to let him learn anything; I want him, if need be, to be able to put his hand to everything.’22

Still, it all depended. Brian Thompson’s father, Bert, was working-class in origin, but as a youngish adult had been transformed by the war into a ruthlessly upwardly mobile figure. ‘The former telephone linesman wore a RAF Association scarf, a heavy grey overcoat and the first of a long series of brown trilbies,’ is how his son memorably depicts him in peacetime:

He gave the civilian world his burly truculence, signed off papers with a beautifully assertive signature, blanked the weak and venal. In shops, buying his cigarettes, he would proffer his money and at the same time specify the change he was to receive . . . In politics he was a working-class Tory, with a fine disdain of lefties, commies, poofs, conchies, spivs, scroungers, tarts and of course, above all, Yanks. The French were gutless, the Italians pitiable, the Spanish more akin to gypsies than anything else. The Jocks could be tolerated for their qualities of courage and nippiness but there was never a kind word to be had from him about the Taffs. Paddies were treated with indulgence, the way simple-minded people are . . .

In the spring of 1951 he took Brian in hand and coached him hard for the new exams called ‘O levels’. Brian, who was at a grammar school, duly passed all ten – one of only three in his county to do so – but had already been told by his father to leave school and get a proper, money-earning job. A timely visit from the headmaster persuaded Bert otherwise. ‘You go into the sixth form when the new term starts,’ an unabashed Bert announced to his son after the head had left. ‘And you work. No more pissing around, you understand? Now wipe that look off your face and get out there and mow the lawn.’ Cambridge and ultimately a writer’s life beckoned for the boy. It had been a close-run thing, for as his still unmistakably working-class, cruelly put-upon mother, Peggy, innocently asked after Bert’s pronouncement: ‘What the bloody hell’s the sixth form?’23

8

It Makes a Break

‘It is rare for anyone to “go out” straight from work although the men may call in at a public house on the way home,’ Doris Rich explained in her account (based on 1948–9 fieldwork) of a typical weekday evening in working-class Coseley, near West Bromwich:

The evening starts when the men get home from work and all the family sit down to a cooked ‘tea’. After tea the workers wash in the kitchen, rather than the bathroom, if there is one, or, if they live in a back-to-back house, in a basin on the living-room table. Any youngsters (15 to 20s) in the house wash, change their clothes and go straight off to visit friends or to the cinema. The man of the house changes his clothes if he is going to the club, or on a special outing with his wife, but he may not change if he is staying at home or only going to his usual public house nearby. At home the evening passes with the wife knitting or sewing and her husband playing with the children, resting (sometimes sleeping) and reading the newspapers. The wireless may be on in the background: some people had the wireless on while being interviewed and appeared to be oblivious to it. At about 9 pm the husband may go to his usual public house (‘it makes a break’), leaving his wife to put the children to bed or continue with her knitting. When he comes in they have ‘supper’, generally a cold snack, and then go to bed.

‘In some households,’ added Rich, ‘while the men are at the public house, the women (particularly the older Black Country women) may go out to get a bottle of stout from the “outdoor” and some fish and chips for supper.’

Neville Holder (born 1945, son of a self-employed window cleaner, nicknamed ‘Noddy’ at school) was brought up in the Black Country, in his case Walsall. ‘Our council house was at the end of a long terrace,’ he recalled about an entirely characteristic working-class domestic backdrop to his childhood:

The front door opened directly on to the pavement and you walked straight into the front room, which was only used on special occasions. My mum said it was ‘to be kept for best’. You then passed into the living room, where there was a dining table and chairs and a couple of armchairs around a big black coal-fire stove. A huge black kettle, full of hot water, would always be resting there. The living room was also the setting for my Friday night scrub-down in an old tin bath . . . A door opening on to the stairs took you up to two bedrooms. There was no bathroom or indoor toilet. If you were caught short during the night, you used a chamber pot under the bed . . . Downstairs, the room at the back of the house had a gas stove and a large sink where clothes were scrubbed clean by hand. The back yard was shared with three other families and the only toilet was at the end of the yard, with a bolt on the inside of a rickety wooden door . . .

There were cultural compensations. Listening with his parents to light-hearted entertainment shows on the radio; accompanying them on a Friday or Saturday night to the local working men’s club (Walsall Labour Club) and collecting the balls from the snooker-table pockets in order to put them back on their spots, as well as (in 1953) making his performing debut singing Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’; and, during the week, waiting for his generally good-natured father (betting and watching sport his other favourite pastimes) to return drunk from the pub after boozing with his mates. The premium placed on habit and conformity was undeniably heavy. ‘We always sat at the same table, in the same seats, as did everyone else in the room,’ he remembered about the working men’s club. ‘It was part of the reason that you rarely met anyone you didn’t already know.’ And: ‘No one we knew ever went abroad.’ Altogether, Holder concluded, ‘it really was an incredibly insular way of life’ – but, as he also insisted, ‘everyone we knew was happy with their lot’, in that ‘as long as you had work, your sport and you could go for a drink, you considered yourself lucky’.1

Holder lived at 31½ Newhall Street, but there was no more emblematic working-class street in the country than Newcastle’s Scotswood Road – emblematic of a way of life that flourished for the best part of a century before ‘the great disruption’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s.2 Celebrated in folk anthem (‘Gannin along the Scotswood Road to see the Blaydon Races’), it was by the 1950s still a vibrant, populous thoroughfare running for 3 miles near the banks of the Tyne. Pubs (of which at one time there had been forty-four) included the Ordnance Arms, the Hydraulic Crane, the Mechanics Arms and the Moulders Arms, all names that reflected the area’s main source of employment, the vast Vickers-Armstrong works; while among a plethora of small shops on the north side that dealt in food there were as many as eighteen (five grocers, two general dealers, two bakers, two fishmongers, two fish-and-chip shops, two fruiterers, two butchers and one confectioner) on the quite short stretch between the Crooked Billet pub and Atkinson Road. On the south side, a series of streets ran sharply down to the Tyne, with, across the river, the six tall, belching chimneys of Dunston power station. It was at the top of one of those streets (Clara Street) that Bert Hardy in 1950 took his evocative, touching rear-view photograph of a mother hand-in-hand with her small son.