Family Britain, 1951-1957 (28 page)

Kingpin of the Sunday papers was the
News of the World
, with a circulation of around seven million, a readership of around eighteen million, and a relentless diet of crime-based stories. ‘He Felt a Darkness – And Found Death’ jostled on 23 November 1952 alongside ‘Scandal Exposed by Writing on the Wall’ and ‘ “I Let Him Have It With The Hairpin” ’, not to mention ‘Attack in Cubicle Number 38’ and ‘He Trailed Wife’s Car and Got a Black Eye’. There was also in this issue a leader advocating the return of flogging, an article by the high-profile Tory MP Robert Boothby on how ‘Empire Can Show The World The Light’, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s ‘Care of Your Cat’ column (‘How Clever Are Cats?’), a lengthy investigative article (‘Vice in the Heart of the Capital: A Stain on Britain’s Good Name’) about the Paddington district, and a fashion competition (1½d entry fee for two coupons, £500 prize) requiring contestants to arrange in order of merit ‘photographs of a distinguished West End model wearing nine different jumpers or cardigans taken from Selfridge’s stock’.

Tellingly, though, the paper’s dominance did not extend to Scotland, where instead the obligatory Sunday reading for a staggering 77.3 per cent of adults in 1949 was the altogether homelier, more down-to-earth, Glasgow-published
Sunday Post
. Typical items on this particular Sunday included ‘Our Food Reporter’ on the latest prices and supplies, ‘Magic Tricks for the Xmas Party: Priscilla Tells You the Secrets’, a story called ‘The Silken Web’, and the ‘Pass It On’ column of domestic tips from readers, including Mrs M. Dunnett of 4 Main Street, Clackmannan: ‘A half-burnt coal on the last fire at night can be saved by making an air hole with the poker in the centre of the fire. The flames die out quickly, leaving the charred coal for easy lighting in the morning.’ There were also, as ever, the latest adventures of the long-running cartoon characters, notably ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’, with the latter’s strapline entirely characteristic:

Oor Wullie’s job of paper lad

Aye makes him late for school. Too bad!

He’s bolted twice, and more to come,

But third time’s lucky for our chum!

Oor Wullie was a tenement boy with dungarees and boots, his spiky hair invariably uncombed and ungelled; his creator was Dudley D. Watkins, a devout member of the Church of Christ in Dundee; and the world he evoked was, in the subsequent words of the Scottish publisher Bill Campbell, ‘a Scotland of quaintness, kindness, and community intimacy, where political thoughts or aspirations are taboo’.7

In the Sunday press as elsewhere there was abundant, wholly shameless advertising of the joys of smoking. ‘ “The cigarettes for me” says football genius Stanley Matthews,’ ran an ad for Craven ‘A’ in the
News of the World
in December 1952, while earlier in the year, in
Autosport
, the up-and-coming ‘speed merchant’ Stirling Moss was positively eloquent: ‘I’m a light smoker, and that makes the taste of the cigarette an important consideration. Craven “A” gives me all I want of a smoke – and nothing I don’t!’ It is impossible to exaggerate the ubiquity of smoking. ‘People smoked at work, at home, in the cinema, down the pub, on public transport,’ remembers Anton Rippon (born 1944) about his Derby childhood:

One of my earliest memories of floodlit football at the Baseball Ground is of thousands of cigarettes glowing in the darkened stands. Abstainers just had to lump it. I grew up in a house full of tobacco fumes. My father [a linotype operator] smoked cigarettes and a pipe – St Bruno tobacco for his briar and either John Player’s Navy Cut or Gold Flake cigarettes. He was never without one or the other and could smoke a cigarette down to the tiniest nub. Still alight, it stuck to his bottom lip and wobbled up and down when he spoke . . .

Phil Vidofsky lit one cigarette from another as he cut hair at his barber’s shop . . . Ted Barker, a butcher whose shop was at the top of Gerard Street, smoked as he prepared Sunday joints, his fingers stained brown by nicotine, ash falling on the meat. Nobody seemed to mind . . .

It was much the same for John Sutherland (born 1938). ‘I was brought up in a household as thick with fumes as a kippering shack in Arbroath,’ he recalls of his more or less working-class childhood in Colchester. ‘I was routinely woken up by a morning chorus of hacking, or phlegmy or dry coughs, as distinctively identifiable as the voices of the coughers. I could, from my earliest years, distinguish “Willy Woodbines” from Senior Service or Three Castles Virginia by their smell alone.’

In fact, almost half the adult population were only passive smokers. The Hulton Survey for the first quarter of 1949 revealed that whereas 79.1 per cent of men were smokers (mainly of cigarettes only), only 37.7 per cent of women were. Moreover, women who did smoke averaged just 6.5 cigarettes a day, compared to 14.9 for the average male cigarette smoker. Importantly, smoking was a thoroughly cross-class activity: not only were members of the working class just as likely (or unlikely) to smoke as members of other classes, but if anything their men on average smoked slightly fewer cigarettes daily than better-off men. If beyond that there was a specific working-class twist to smoking, it was perhaps threefold: a marked disinclination to smoke pipes; on the part of the poorer working man an economically enforced penchant for roll-ups, with the French-owned Rizla by this time already a brand leader; and an almost tribal loyalty to untipped Woodbines, often sold in corner shops in ones and twos out of an opened packet kept by the till.8

‘Should We Smoke Less?’ asked
Picture Post
in September 1948, exactly two years before the publication of the first British research – only slowly disseminated – on the link between smoking and lung cancer. The context was a serious tobacco shortage, brought on by balance-of-payments difficulties, and graphic photographs of anxious queuers outside London tobacconists were accompanied by some eloquent captions about the smoking motivation:

Mrs Mary Whittle, of St George’s Buildings, London E., goes into a queue twice a day to collect five a time for her two sons. They get cigarettes on the way to work, but rely on her to make it up to 20 a day each. ‘They don’t drink, they work hard, and Charlie would rather go without his dinner money than be without a smoke. They’ve smoked since they were men, and I don’t see why they should stop. It’s their only bit of consolation.’

The old age pensioner in the trilby is a regular. He is Alfred Harris of Ashmore Road, Paddington, who rations himself to ten a day because of the price. He has his coupon allowance and works as an assistant stoker because it helps with his tobacco money. He couldn’t afford it otherwise, and he can’t give up smoking. He has tried but his resolution lasted only a couple of days. He became irritable and went back to ten Woodbines. Tobacco, he says, soothes him and helps him at work.

John Equilant, plumber, once gave up cigarettes altogether because of the cost. Smokes twenty a day now because it is ‘comforting’. His assistant, Gerald Tubbs, smokes fifteen a day. Won’t give it up or cut it down.

Mr R Meatyard is a GPO linesman. He gets through a packet of twenty a day – sometimes more. He tried to stop smoking when the price was raised in the last Budget, but after three days ended the struggle. ‘Why should I give it up, anyway?’

Perhaps most typical of all, though, was the 20-a-day, 35-year-old factory worker highlighted soon afterwards by Rowntree and Lavers in their study
English Life and Leisure
. ‘Cannot afford so many because he is married with two children, but cannot do without,’ noted his mini case history. ‘Has tried several times to give up smoking, but becomes so irritable that home life is impossible and his wife begs him to start smoking again.’9

So too with the demon drink. ‘Drinking is
definitely
[double-underlined] a form of escapism from the pits – from the steel works – from the surroundings – from the depressing atmosphere of a small mining town,’ declared Mass-Observation’s investigator in his 1947 report on drinking in Blaina, south Wales. In fact, consumption of alcohol was on a long-term downward trend: annual per-head intake of beer (overwhelmingly the most popular drink) had been some 27.5 gallons before the Great War, 14.2 gallons by 1938, and by 1951–2 was down to 12.5 – though even that last figure worked out at well over three-quarters of a pint a day for every beer-drinking adult, with relatively little difference across the classes. Of course, there were those (including in the late 1940s about 22 per cent of the male working class and 61 per cent of the female working class) who never drank beer; while for women who were not teetotallers, there was by the early 1950s a new, sparkling drink available in the form of the affordable (1s 3d), brilliantly marketed ‘champagne’ perry with the appealing Bambi deer symbol. Babycham’s creator was Francis Showering (of the Somerset cider-making family firm), who thereby at last freed women from the dismal inexpensive alternatives of, in an obituarist’s words, ‘milk stout, sweet cider or the sickly VP wines’.10

How much drunkenness was there? When Mass-Observation undertook in 1947–8 a comprehensive survey of drinking habits, involving some 5,000 hours being spent in pubs and clubs by its team of investigators, the striking result was ‘less than a dozen cases reported at first hand of people being violently drunk’. Three years later the findings were much the same in an M-O survey (involving Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Nottingham and Salford) that focused specifically on the question. ‘Pretty free from drunkenness,’ a Bristol policeman avowed. ‘It all depends what you mean by drunk. Somebody out cold or just merry. I mean unable to look after themselves. There’s not very much in this particular town. For myself I expect to see one drunken person per day when I’m on duty.’ He added that the ‘really drunk’ tended to be ‘the very lowest class person’. Also in Bristol, a middle-aged, working-class woman (and ex-licencee) living near a pub agreed that times had changed. ‘Nothing like it used to be,’ she declared. ‘People know more how to conduct themselves now-a-days. People used to be more free and easy. Now the police have got more control. They didn’t used to mind.’ Amid much continuing ‘activator’ whittering about the drink problem – typified by the disapproving, deeply condescending chapter in the Rowntree/Lavers survey – this relative new sobriety was a deep disappointment to the defiantly non-puritanical Raymond Postgate, pioneer of the
Good Food Guide
. ‘When I was small, in a provincial town in the reign of Edward VII, there was real drinking, heavy continuous drinking by great masses of people,’ he fondly recalled in 1949. And once, when he had pointed out to his mother a swaying, tottering, shouting man on the pavement in broad daylight and asked why he was behaving like that, she had answered casually: ‘He is a working man, my dear; he is drunk.’

Even so, there was still a significant amount of drinking being done in post-war Britain – not only in pubs, but also in a dense urban network of workplace clubs (typified by the Finch Lane social centre for Liverpool Corporation conductors and drivers, with George Harrison’s bus-driver father, Harold, as Saturday night MC), a rich, diverse array of sports and social clubs, and the 3,000 or so working-men’s clubs attached to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union. These clubs had, for their predominantly male members, several distinct advantages over pubs: more liberal opening hours; greater selectivity, ie keeping out women (except at weekend concerts) and rowdies; often better games facilities, for instance snooker, as well as less constrained gambling; and what M-O identified as ‘an atmosphere of trust that does not often appear in pubs’, exemplified by the men on entering the Grafton Club in York leaving their hats and coats on pegs by the door. In Coseley, Doris Rich asked some members (of working-men’s clubs and other social or sports clubs) what they liked about them and why they attended:

Sooner come to this club than others . . . all your own folks from round about home.

No women.

Satisfaction of knowing profits.

Much the same as a public house but more free and easy.

Handy.

Somewhere to go.

Nothing else to do in Coseley.

Pass an hour away watching people play.

It’s a break after being at work all day.

I pass an hour . . . play dominos and talk different things . . . as regards politics I’m not interested.

There’s never no falling out.

Never no bad language.

Force of habit.

Ultimately, though, as Dennis et al made clear in their study of Featherstone, a smallish mining town with six working-men’s clubs, it all came down to the liquid amber: cheaper than in the pubs, and free to each member – up to eight pints anyway – during each of the Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and August bank holidays. ‘In essence,’ they concluded, ‘the Working Men’s Club is a co-operative society for the purchase and sale of beer.’11

Pubs by contrast were already on a long, slow retreat. In 1904 there had been 99,500 in England and Wales; in 1919, 83,400; by 1950 it was 73,500 (compared with 19,200 licensed clubs, almost triple the 1904 total). ‘There is a general awareness that there is less drinking going on,’ an M-O investigator reported from Cardiff in 1951. ‘People talk about the pubs being empty and some publicans complain about a drop in trade.’ In particular, pubs during the early post-war era seem to have had a problem attracting young people. The sociologist John Mogey in his composite portrait of the Jolly Waterman at St Ebbe’s, a traditional working-class district in Oxford, emphasised that virtually all the regular clientele were over 55; while Donald James Wheal, growing up in White City, recalled ‘most London pubs’ as ‘unappealing places for the young’, with ‘spilt beer, ancient Scotch eggs and a bar dominated by the middle-aged’.

One should not exaggerate the retreat. After all, M-O’s 1947–8 survey of drinking habits found that 79 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women said that they went to the pub. Within these overall figures there was little in the way of occupational differences, but some regional variations, with overall (ie men and women) pub-going percentages of 69 in London, 67 in Middlesbrough (men 81, women 53), 64 in Bolton, 63 in Birmingham and 49 in Blaina (reflecting the Welsh temperance tradition, with men 73 and women 24). As for
frequency
of pub-going, ‘the most regular drinkers are working-class people earning £4–6 a week, nearly all are over 25, and most of them married with children’. One of those regulars was a Dagenham milkman. ‘I get home fairly early on my job,’ he told M-O, ‘but soon after six my wife turns to me and she says, “It’s time for me to get the kids to bed, come on, get out of my way,” so out I come, round here to the pub.’12