Family Britain, 1951-1957 (3 page)

There were a few last diarist-visitors to the Festival. ‘I arrived early and joined a queue, a vast, orderly line of people,’ recorded the 25-year-old John Fowles on 29 August. ‘The Festival I saw in a morning, skimming through it. All the cleverness and the practicality and the didacticism I found rather repellent.’ About the same time, on a rainy evening, the slightly older Lawrence Daly, increasingly prominent as a Communist activist on the Fife coalfield, ‘splashed around for two hours, visiting the Dome of Discovery, the People of Britain, Land of Britain, Power & Production, & souvenir stalls’ – all of which he found ‘a magnificent show, of great educational value’. The final diarist was perhaps the best qualified to offer an insightful view:

12 September
. At last to S. Bank Festival. Arrive 12 – go straight in – first impression good – smaller exhibits – schools, sports, ‘1951’ – seaside – enjoyable while not too tired. Larger – engines – boats – begins to crowd – Dome of Discovery – gloom – unorganized wandering – symbolic of muddled mind – addled with too much knowledge . . . Did not see all – too tired & hot – Polar Expedition exhibit informative. ‘Lion & Unicorn’ quite charming – quite obvious. Designs in pottery & silks delightful. Stayed 2½ hrs – enough for one day.

16 September
. To Festival 12.45 – fine day, stayed till nearly 5 . . . Homes & Gardens delightful – especially bedsitter for elderly lady – obviously having seen better days. All well designed & colour – avoidance of ‘suites’ – chairs in different colours but same pattern . . . ‘The Country’ good large picture mounted on central rod for each month – amusing material (padded) picture of Womans Institutes. Certainly humour + invention allowed. Sad to see livestock there, especially Dartmoor pony . . .

The writer was Grace Golden, a talented but in many ways frustrated commercial artist. She returned on Friday the 28th for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, whose interior she examined with an acerbic eye. The setting for the orchestra was ‘like the crude models of cardboard I make for my own use – different colours stuck together with sticky paper & drawing pins which must surely be at the back of three walls which don’t join the ceiling!’ The sounding board was ‘like parts of a model not yet stuck together’. And the boxes ‘only remind one of the balconies outside the flats in Camden Town – needed only washing hanging to be complete’. All of which made her ask herself whether the human race had ‘developed sufficiently for it to be exposed against such nakedness as modern architecture’.12

‘It will be remembered as a moderately successful venture,’ reckoned the
Manchester Guardian
next day at the start of the Festival’s final weekend – exactly a week after a record 158,365 had flocked to the South Bank, many of them lured by the spectacle of Charles Elleano crossing the Thames on a tightrope. The mood to the last was determinedly cheerful. Saturday the 29th was Gala Night (with Gracie Fields, at her insistence paid in dollars, topping the bill in the open-air cabaret), while on Sunday there was a Thanksgiving service at the Festival Hall. That evening the Archbishop of Canterbury, in lieu of the ailing King, addressed the nation on the radio, declaring that the Festival had been ‘a good thing for all of us’ and had ‘brought encouragement just when it was needed’ – that in fact it had been ‘a real family party’. On the South Bank itself, there were almost 65,000 visitors during this final day, with well-nigh half still there by 10.00 p.m., when there began on the Fairway (the open space between the Dome of Discovery and the Transport pavilion) community singing to the accompaniment of the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards. The favourites followed one after another: ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘John Peel’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘The Old Hundredth’. Then at about 10.17 came the announcement over the loudspeakers, ‘Stand by for general black-out’, and all the lights duly went out as the three Festival flags were lowered. Then at 10.20 the lights were on again, as the still unsated crowd lustily sang ‘God Save the King’, ‘Abide With Me’ and, with hands linked, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Now it really was over. ‘Good night, for the last time, good night,’ said the voice over the loudspeakers, efficient and brisk as ever. According to the report in the by now reconciled
Daily Express
, it was not only the paying visitors who left in good order and good humour. As the site emptied, ‘the Men in Grey – the attendants – smiled as they dispersed with, they said, only one in ten having a job to go to’.13 A generation earlier, the Festival’s somewhat smug herbivores might have legitimately reflected, there would have been no such relaxed confidence about what their future held.

2

A Narrow Thing

Mercifully for listeners, radio programmes during the second summer of the 1950s were not entirely about the Festival of Britain. ‘We read till 8.15 and Twenty Questions,’ noted Nella Last on a Monday in Barrow-in-Furness. ‘Whatever it “lacks”, it’s not happy “friendliness”.’ Another housewife on another Monday had a more chequered time. ‘Woman’s Hour started today,’ recorded Marian Raynham in Surbiton. ‘A nuisance but I must listen, it is interesting. Also Mrs Dale & Bob Dale actress & actor were changed today & I like neither as well as last ones. This Mrs D. has a bit of a scrape in her voice, & the Bob is quite different.’ In the last three weeks of August, a BBC survey found that 59 per cent of housewives always or often listened to
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, 57 per cent to
Housewives’ Choice
(musical requests) and 30 per cent to
Woman’s Hour
.
The Archers
was not included, but it was during this time that a third diarist-housewife, Mary King in Birmingham, wrote of ‘feeling very angry with Phil Archer for not telling Grace Fairbrother what his real thoughts towards her were’.1

That summer there was one new programme – in time iconic – that none of the diarists mentioned. ‘This series is based upon a crazy type of fun evolved by four of our younger laughter-makers,’ promised the
Radio Times
: ‘The members of this entertainingly eccentric quartet are old friends. They met during the wartime perambulations of the “Stars in Battledress”. Since then Secombe and Sellers have joined the successful company who can top-the-bill. Ex-Etonian Michael Bentine has won his spurs in the West End and Spike Milligan is making a reputation both as a comedian and writer (it is he who has compiled the “Goon Show” material). Now it remains to be seen what will happen when their differing brands of comedy are fused in one show.’

Thus a somewhat nervous BBC launched
Crazy People
– ‘featuring Radio’s Own Crazy Gang “The Goons” ’ – on Monday, 28 May on the London Home Service, before gradually extending to other regions. The format was initially the traditional variety one of sketches interspersed with music; few of the subsequently famous characters had yet been created; and by the end of the series in September, with the shows being repeated on the Light Programme, listening figures were respectable (at around 16 per cent of the radio audience) rather than remarkable. ‘This series has drawn divided opinions,’ noted the BBC report summarising the reactions of its listeners’ panel, ‘and the Appreciation Indices [going up to 100] have been low in the 50s. One section of the audience found this an amusing and original show, but there are apparently many still listening to it for whom the “crazy” type of humour and accompanying “noisiness” have no attraction.’2 Still, the consolation for the quartet – whose humour was arguably a subversive take on the
ITMA
radio shows of the 1940s – was that the BBC did commission a second series for early 1952. This time it would, as they had always wanted, be called
The Goon Show
.

One of radio’s biggest stars, the already notoriously irascible Gilbert Harding, spent the summer in enforced rustication from his trademark quiz programme,
Twenty Questions
, after an unfortunate outburst in April. ‘I hope that pompous “superior” Gilbert Harding never gets back on to this programme,’ reflected Last. ‘He seemed to delight in snubbing poor Jack Train!’ But by September and its 200th show, he was back in the chair. ‘I think Gilbert Harding must have had a “lesson”,’ noted a relieved Last. ‘He has thrown off that over-bearing “superiority”.’ He had also found a new game-show vehicle, this time on television – a development unrecorded by Last, who like at least nine in ten adults did not have a set. The programme was
What’s My Line?
, requiring a celebrity panel to work out, through replies and miming, the occupations of contestants. It made a Harding-free debut on Monday, 16 July, sandwiched between
Men O’ Brass
(with the Fairey Aviation Works Band) and
The Lights of London
(‘A visit to the South Bank to watch the scene as its buildings are floodlit. Commentator, Richard Dimbleby.’). ‘What made last night a pale imitation of the transatlantic original was the sogginess of the experts,’ was the stern verdict next morning of Leonard Mosley in the
Daily Express
. ‘Barbara Kelly spent much of the time scratching her pretty head. Miss [Marghanita] Laski looked as if she were only there because of the money. And the two male experts [Jerry Desmonde and Ted Kavanagh] just seemed puzzled.’ The following week they tried out Harding in the chair, but because of a mix-up over his cards it proved a fiasco, as he confused a male nurse with a motor mechanic. ‘It was a simple mistake,’ he told a reporter afterwards. ‘They put the wrong chap in the wrong place, but there was no trouble nor unpleasantness.’ Soon, though, he was a regular on the panel, with Eamonn Andrews equally a regular in the chair, and by the end of August as many as 86 per cent of sets were turned on for it, with of course no competing channels in existence.

The show’s almost instant popularity no doubt reflected a winning formula – fascination with the variety of jobs on display (most famously the saggar maker’s bottom-knocker in the pottery industry) and the almost novel attraction of seeing ordinary people on television – but there was also fascination with Harding himself. Partly it was his sheer rudeness (‘I am tired of looking at you,’ he famously snapped at one particularly sphinx-like contestant), partly because the former schoolmaster’s manifest intelligence seemed so out of place, and partly because it was impossible not to speculate what lay behind that moustachioed, sometimes self-pitying face almost invariably wreathed in cigarette smoke. Indisputably he was the dominant television star of the first half of the 1950s, with an off-air persona just as crusty and dogmatic, not least through a regular crusading column in the
People
that tackled bureaucrats who were giving individuals a hard time. ‘All who remember him know he bristled with prejudice,’ noted John Betjeman in a subsequent appreciation: ‘They knew his feelings about American civilisation, the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy, about so-called progress, about plastics, and his deep mistrust of majority opinions, civil servants and everything that goes with officialdom and the suppression of the individual. In his way Gilbert Harding, by being his irascible, generous self, did more to encourage the individual against domination by the State and heartless theorists than any television personality of his time.’3 That such a set of attitudes could, so soon after the ‘1945’ welfare-state revolution, strike such a chord was suggestive indeed.

The film of the summer, premiered about a fortnight before the launch of
What’s My Line?
, was undoubtedly
The Lavender Hill Mob
, an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness in which the police were treated somewhat less deferentially than in the previous year’s
The Blue Lamp
, but not radically so. Gore Vidal would claim that Guinness modelled his part on the young actor-turned-critic Kenneth Tynan, especially ‘the way that Tynan stagily held a cigarette between ring and little fingers’. Tynan himself, signed up by the
Evening Standard
, was now making his mark. Danny Kaye at the Palladium was first in his sights (‘trades on sex-appeal too openly ever to be a recruit to the small troupe of great clowns’), then the ‘periwinkle charm’ of Vivien Leigh, starring that summer with her husband Laurence Olivier in
Antony and Cleopatra
: ‘Hers is the magnificent effrontery of an attractive child, endlessly indulged at its first party.’ Letters of disgust immediately followed, but Tynan was unconcerned; Noël Coward soon afterwards found him to be ‘charming, very intelligent and with a certain integrity’. Neither was at the Coventry Hippodrome in early September for the first night of
Zip Goes a Million
, an American-style musical about a man who has to spend a million dollars in order to inherit a fortune of seven million. ‘George Formby is the undisputed star of the show, an eminence he gains by being determinedly and more than ever George Formby,’ declared the local paper. ‘He displays his old genius for provoking laughter by the least of his broad-vowelled asides. Once again he is the one-man pantomime that never palls.’ Admittedly the ukulele-playing Lancashire comedian told ‘a clamant audience’ at the end of the performance that there had been ‘a bit of a muck-up at times’, but there was justifiable confidence that the under-rehearsed production would be in good order by the time it got to London the following month.4

The summer’s big sporting drama, attended by massive publicity, was also an Anglo-American affair. No one gave Randolph Turpin, a black boxer from Leamington Spa who had been a cook in the navy, a chance in his fight on 10 July at Earl’s Court against the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title. In the event he won quite comfortably on points – even though the radio summariser, the fruity W. Barrington Dalby, badly misled almost twenty-five million listeners by pronouncing that ‘only a whirlwind grandstand finish can possibly snatch it for Turpin’, an assessment with which Raymond Glendenning (‘portly, pertly-voiced commentator with handlebar moustache’, in Frank Keating’s words) concurred. Dalby afterwards claimed that he had meant ‘clinch’ not ‘snatch’, but that did not save the patrician pair from an avalanche of criticism. Just over a fortnight later, the far from proletarian Dorian Williams was the television commentator for the
Horse of the Year Show
at White City stadium. ‘My cup of happiness was full,’ recorded Vere Hodgson (there in person), ‘for we saw Foxhunter jump with Colonel [Harry] Llewellyn riding and we saw Rusty with Miss Kellett and we saw Miss Pat Smythe. We all held our breath while Foxhunter jumped, and then he was cheered to the echo . . .’ Later, Hodgson went round to the stables and fed the mighty Foxhunter with sugar. It was exactly a week later, on the Saturday at the start of the August Bank Holiday weekend, that Wally Hammond, the great Gloucestershire and England batsman of the inter-war era, was persuaded to come out of retirement to play against Somerset at Bristol. A crowd of 10,000 saw him survive a first-ball lbw appeal from Horace Hazell and then scratch around for 50 minutes, making only seven, before being clean bowled by Hazell. The future actor Milton Johns, then a Bristol schoolboy, was taken to the match by his father, complete with ‘a flask of tea and enough tomato sandwiches to feed half the crowd’. Owing to three changes of bus they arrived too late, ‘Oh dear’ being his father’s restrained comment on seeing the scoreboard. ‘He had slipped through my fingers and was lost forever, leaving me with a lifelong conviction that one should never go back, but always forward,’ reflected Johns over half a century later. ‘Did Wally Hammond feel the same, as he mounted those long pavilion steps that day? Maybe, or should I say probably?’5