Family Britain, 1951-1957 (4 page)

There were no twilight shadows for Margaret Rose, 21 later that month. Whole packs of reporters pursued the glamorous, vivacious, fairy-tale princess to Balmoral, where their lack of access did not prevent torrents of gushing, breathless prose about the latest developments. ‘Yes, HE WAS on the 9.46,’ started the despatch from Mamie Baird in the
Daily Express
on the actual morning of her birthday. ‘He’ was 24-year-old Billy Wallace, who had arrived to join the royal party having ‘at the last minute changed his plan to drive all the way from London to Balmoral in a dashing red sports car’. Next day the paper’s Eve Perrick gave the lowdown:

The Princess’s birthday party was such a cosy affair.

After dinner – grouse again – at Balmoral Castle, the green carpets were rolled back, the radiogram moved in, and Princess Margaret’s grand birthday ball began.

After all the scarcely suppressed excitement there was no shiny dance floor swept by the trains and trailing skirts of romantic gowns, no famous bands, no floodlit gardens, no coronets, and no fuss.

Just high spirits and friendly fun, with the two Princesses, their best friends, and some of the Duke of Edinburgh’s cousins participating . . .

But
The Times
, in its leader to mark the occasion, warned against a new intrusiveness – ‘having wished her many happy returns of the day and been told how in general she spent it, her fellow-citizens would be glad if the family party were left undisturbed’ – before concluding that ‘her future will be followed with kindly good wishes by all, in every corner of the Commonwealth, who know the priceless value of a happy home background’.6

A month earlier, on 17 July, illness had prevented the King from opening the Steel Company of Wales’s huge new continuous-strip mill at Port Talbot, though he did send a message heralding its contribution to ‘our ability to maintain our historic position in a free world’. Instead, Hugh Gaitskell, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the honours – appropriately enough, given that the steel industry had recently been taken into public ownership. The site had previously been some 500 acres of marshland and sand dunes, and it was claimed that the conversion into steelworks was the biggest single project in Britain since the railway age. ‘Today the 200-ton ladle was seen to pour metal from one of the eight new open-hearth steel furnaces into moulds,’ reported the man from
The Times
at the opening ceremony. ‘The 20-ton ingots, still brilliantly red, were run one by one down to the slabbing mill to be rolled into slabs. The process was controlled by a flick of the finger and a movement of the foot.’ It was a great day for the locals, not only in terms of future employment prospects, as Gaitskell led a party of some 1,200 luminaries, including (in the words of the
Port Talbot Guardian
) ‘the most fabulous names in British industry’. But steel was not quite everything, and that Tuesday evening, at a meeting of the Port Talbot Borough Council, there was a disquieting moment as Councillor Idwal Hopkins alleged that burial forms were being issued incompletely. He cited a recent case: ‘The husband of the family had died, and the funeral had been all-male. The only son had gone away for six weeks following the funeral, and he had left it to the undertaker to point out the grave to the widow and daughter-in-law. This the undertaker had done, and during the six weeks he was away – every Sunday – the women had placed flowers on the grave. When the son returned he, too, went to the grave, and found that they had been placing the flowers on the wrong grave.’ It was an episode that had, in Hopkins’s words, ‘caused considerable distress’. However, the fact of an all-male funeral was, in this part of south Wales at least, taken for granted.

Clive Jenkins, the son of a railway worker, had grown up in Port Talbot. ‘He was a precocious child,’ noted an obituary, ‘and seemed set for a good schooling when his father died and he was obliged to go to work at 14. This disappointment had much to do with his future attitudes.’ Now, in the summer of 1951, at the age of 25, he was a member of the Communist Party and a full-time official for the Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians (ASSET), with particular responsibility for organising workers at London (Heathrow) Airport, where he was rapidly increasing union membership. Shortly after his hometown’s hour in the sun, he was at the centre of the civil aviation industry’s first significant dispute, causing the state-owned British European Airways (BEA) to cancel more than 800 fully booked services. ‘Angry passengers “squatted” at Kensington Air Station this morning, waiting to be flown to Nice,’ reported the
Daily Mail
at the height of the dispute. ‘They had been told that the Argonaut plane chartered for last night’s flight in the B.E.A. cheap-rate service was not available . . . Passengers cried “Iniquitous!” and “What about our bookings?”.’ Soon afterwards, a ministerial intervention by another self-confident operator, Alfred Robens, settled the matter, very much in favour of the white-collar supervisors and technicians whom the already deeply ambitious Jenkins represented. ‘This was my first major national dispute and gave me my first sense of real satisfaction as a collective bargainer,’ Jenkins recalled. ‘Deeply influenced by this set of events, I learned that it was possible to have disputes which were immensely interesting to the public as well as being attractive to potential members as long as they were in high-technology industries.’7

The major industrial strike of the summer, though, was at the Austin Motor Company’s works at Longbridge, Birmingham. Eventually involving more than 10,000 workers, it was called on Wednesday, 20 June by shop stewards after management had dismissed (and, despite an existing agreement, refused to redeploy) seven men, including Sid Pegg, who was not only an Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward but also Secretary of the Communist Party’s Longbridge branch. Pegg’s close colleague, Dick Etheridge, works convener and himself an active CP member, insisted to the
Birmingham Post
that he ‘had proof’ of ‘blacklisting’, adding: ‘We are not silly over redundancies. Shop stewards have not said that they will not accept redundancy in any circumstances.’ It was, in other words, a case of victimisation – which it undoubtedly was. Nevertheless, another prominent shop steward, John McHugh, was adamant that it was not a political dispute, asserting that of the 350 stewards at the meeting that had decided on strike action, only 50 had ‘Communist sympathies’. The crunch came with a mass meeting at Cofton Hackett Park (next to the works) on Monday the 25th. It was, reported the not entirely objective
Post
, a ‘stormy’ affair:

Part of the uproar was due to a denunciation by Mr [Dick] Nester, chairman of No 5 Machine Shop stewards, of Communist activity in the factory, which, he said, he had watched for 18 months. Communist propaganda went on daily, he added.

As he went on to describe the events which led up to the stoppage there were shouts of ‘Take him off!’ and the microphone was taken from him by Mr George Varnon, chairman of the shop stewards committee. This seemed to incense many in the crowd who demanded a hearing from Mr Nester.

When Mr Varnon said he abided by the decision of the workpeople, somebody in the crowd said ‘You’ve got to!’

Mr Varnon was shouted down when he tried to tell the workers again of the need for continued support of the strike. There were cries of ‘We’ve heard all he’s got to say’, ‘We want to get back to work’, ‘Put the resolution and let’s vote on it’.

As the shop stewards convener, Mr R. Etheridge, was putting the motion to continue to strike before the meeting there were cries of: ‘You are trying to mislead us’.

Eventually, those in the crowd of more than 6,000 who were in favour of returning to work were asked to move to the right, those against to move to the left. A ‘big majority’ moved rightwards. There were two almost immediate outcomes to this humiliating defeat for the more militant shop stewards: the ultra-astute Etheridge privately decided never to call another mass meeting, and the sacked Pegg was soon replaced as CP branch secretary by a young toolroom worker, Derek Robinson, the future ‘Red Robbo’ of tabloid demonisation.8

Elsewhere in Birmingham, at about the time of the Longbridge dispute, a young researcher called Michael Banton took a walk along Sparkbrook Road, looking at the cards in newspaper-shop windows. He counted more cards from people advertising rooms that stipulated ‘No Irish’ than ‘No Coloured’. But his main research was in Stepney, where during the summer he sent out questionnaires to 40 employers in the clothing and building industries in order to gauge their attitude to the employment of black immigrants. He found that whereas the largely Jewish-run clothing industry saw ‘the coloured man at little disadvantage’, it was different among builders and contractors, where ‘there was a considerably greater resistance to the idea of engaging coloured workers’, particularly on the part of small firms. ‘You have to consider how other people would feel, especially the other employees,’ replied one. ‘There’s not enough work for English people and many of the coloured people only got here by smuggling themselves away.’ Overall, Banton reckoned that ‘from the small numbers employed there is probably a fair amount of discrimination in employment in this trade’, and that ‘in a time of unemployment it would increase’.

Housing was even more susceptible to prejudice. ‘I have been carrying out a small experiment with the help of my friend O.,’ the left-wing writer Mervyn Jones related in August: ‘We copied down the addresses of ten rooms advertised as “a let” outside a Notting Hill Gate newsagent’s shop. O. went round and asked for rooms; I went to the same addresses twenty minutes later. His score: rooms available at two places, all rooms gone at eight. My score: rooms available at seven, a share offered at another, all rooms gone at two. An odd result; but whereas I belong to what E.M. Forster called the pink-grey race, O. comes from Nigeria.’ In most parts of the country, of course, a black person was still a considerable rarity. The experience of Ian Jack, growing up near Bolton and six in 1951, was probably typical. ‘The first black person I ever saw was on the Piccadilly line, somewhere near Hammersmith,’ he remembered. ‘We’d come to stay with my granny and to see the Festival of Britain. A black man, who wore a smart suit, sat across the train’s aisle and smiled at me. I think my father encouraged me to smile back. Perhaps I had been staring.’9

The kindness of strangers was probably more common between whites. In June, barely a month after he had started at RADA (‘O bliss!’), a young aspiring actor from Leicester, Joe Orton, was taken to the bosom of another new, more prosperous student, Kenneth Halliwell. ‘Move into Ken’s flat,’ recorded Orton on 16 June, before four expressive entries:

17 June.
Well!

18 June.
Well!!

19 June.
Well!!!

20 June.
The rest is silence.

It was also in June that an almost equally young Jeffery Bernard, four months after he had gone AWOL from National Service in Catterick, gave himself up, ringing the police from the Gargoyle Club in Soho at two in the morning. There ensued two brutal days and nights at a military detention centre near Scotland Yard, with Bernard being kicked every few hours by a Scots Guards sergeant, before he was sent back to Yorkshire. His biographer records how ‘when he was being hauled across the concourse at King’s Cross, handcuffed to a Military Policeman, strangers came up and gave him cigarettes, money, sandwiches and a magazine and shouted “good luck, mate” and “don’t let the bastards get you down”.’10

Summertime, naturally, was also holiday time. ‘It’s been a perfect summer’s day,’ noted Nella Last in Barrow on the last Monday in July, after she and her husband had gone in the afternoon to a nearby beach:

I watched with real concern at chalk white bodies & limbs in bathing suits – both sex & every age – lying and playing in the strong sea air, many already looking ‘burned’, knowing the
agony
many would be in tonight. I was sorry for the hapless children, some already beginning to squirm & scratch their sunburned flesh, and I didn’t see
one
tube of ‘cream’ or oil being used. Long queues constantly stood at a big ice cream stall, fresh supplies were brought twice, but till after 8 o’clock they sold as quickly as they could make sandwiches.

Over and above day trips, or the traditional lodging house at a popular resort, there was also the recent, increasingly popular phenomenon of the holiday camp. At about the same time as Last was tut-tutting, the writer C. H. Rolph visited one on Canvey Island, run by the local landowner, councillor and magistrate Colonel Horace Fielder. Rolph asked why he charged £5 (double the usual rate) for a chalet in August. ‘Keep out the rough stuff,’ replied the Colonel. ‘I don’t need the money – this place makes thousands. But it’d be a nightmare here at £2 in August.’

The research organisation Mass-Observation was also intrigued, and in September sent two investigators to Butlin’s at Clacton. There, like previous M-O investigators at Butlin’s in Filey, they found a world all of its own. In the dining hall, where Kent House and Gloucester House had separate sittings, the House Captain (a Redcoat called Len) addressed the company through a microphone: ‘He invariably started off with: “Good morning, you smashing campers of Gloucester House, and good morning, staff – HI-DE-HI!” to which we answered: “HO-DE-HO”.’ Len himself was born to his role: ‘Tall, swarthy and spivvy, he appeared to be tireless. He was always cracking jokes, pretending to chase the girls and generally clowning. He was enormously popular.’ Most evenings there were Redcoat-compèred ‘sing-songs’ in the Jolly Roger bar, with ‘its olde worlde oak-beam decor’. ‘As well as community singing, individual campers were invited to perform. There was one young man who performed regularly and excruciatingly. He was regarded by the audience as a great “card” and received a tumultuous welcome.’ There was also the already time-honoured ‘Personality Girl’ contest, won by Greta: ‘She was chosen by outside judges and the choice was unpopular with the campers. Her forwardness and general brashness were disliked – disapproved of by the elderly and resented by the young. Contestants were judged not only on their appearance, but also on their talent. (Greta’s talent consisted of singing “Too Young”.) When asked her ambition, one girl said she had already achieved it in marriage, and we were interested to note the loud applause.’ The week ended, as usual, with the Campers’ Concert. ‘For an amateur show the standard was quite high,’ the M-O team found. ‘Greta, who was accorded a tepid reception, exhibited an unexpected versatility and sang “Nevertheless”. The most popular turn was given by a boy of fifteen, who did farm-yard imitations.’ And, they added in a reference to the radio programme on the BBC in the 1940s, moving to Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s,
Opportunity Knocks
, ‘his performance was better than that of most of Hughie Green’s discoveries’.11