Family Britain, 1951-1957 (43 page)

He had a case. ‘Fleming wanted to inject something of Chandler’s gritty realism into the British spy novel,’ his biographer Andrew Lycett has observed, and ‘to write about an emerging culture of intelligence where spies were no longer amateur adventurers like Bulldog Drummond but professional hard men.’ Nothing more gritty and unsentimental than the brutal ending, with the lovely Vesper Lynd revealed as a double agent working for SMERSH. ‘He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief were relegated to the boxroom of his mind.’ The new hard-faced professionalism came, though, with some distinctly unreconstructed baggage. ‘These blithering women’, Bond believed, should ‘stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men’, while the baccarat players he was pitted against included an Italian who would ‘probably play a dashing and foolish game’ and the Maharajah of a small Indian state unlikely to alter Bond’s maxim that ‘few of the Asiatic races were courageous gamblers’. In fact,
Casino Royale
did not sell particularly well – probably because the time was not quite ripe for what the historian David Cannadine has characterised as Fleming’s ‘fictional brand of great-power nostalgia, imperial escapism and national reassurance’.
¹²
Put another way, Britain in 1953 was not yet a country in perceived – let alone self-perceived – decline.

Anyway, the undisputed literary event of 1952/3 had already happened: the publication in November of Dylan Thomas’s
Collected Poems
. Philip Toynbee in the
Observer
hailed him as ‘the greatest living poet’, while Stephen Spender in the
Spectator
asserted that Thomas represented ‘a revolt’ not only ‘against the Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard intellectualism of much modern poetry’ but also ‘against the King’s English of London and the South’, incapable of ‘harsh effects, coarse nature and violent colours’. The initial print run of 5,000 soon proved inadequate. One young writer and emerging literary impresario, however, professed himself impatient with Thomas’s ‘disastrously limited subject matter’. This was John Wain, who on the last Sunday of April 1953 introduced on the Third Programme
First Reading: A Monthly Magazine of New Poetry and Prose
. On the Home Service at the same time there was a programme about the British Red Cross, including a recorded interview by Wilfred Pickles at a children’s hospital in Warwickshire, while on the Light a variety show called
The Pleasure Boat
starred Julie Andrews and Jon Pertwee, but presumably some people listened. First up was an extract (read by the actor Alan Wheatley) from Kingsley Amis’s still unpublished novel
Lucky Jim
, with Wain announcing that ‘the particular episode we are going to hear opens with the hero, Dixon, suffering from a hangover and a bad conscience’. In fact the typescript of the novel was still with the publishers Gollancz, whose Hilary Rubinstein next day wrote to Amis to say that his firm did indeed want to publish it. Victor Gollancz himself disliked it, but was persuaded (including by his daughter Livia) to sanction the not exactly princely advance of £100.
¹³

If the literary scene in the early 1950s was due for new voices and new faces, so too was popular music, still dominated by ballroom dancing, big-band swing and romantic crooners. ‘Incredibly bland and lacking inspiration,’ was the succinct retrospective verdict of Bill Wyman, especially scornful of moon-in-June ballads ‘without any balls’. Even the commercial station Radio Luxembourg, on 208 medium wave, had relatively little to offer restless youth, to judge by its line-up on the evening of Friday, 14 November 1952:

7.30 – Nat Cole

7.45 – Hutch

8 – Vera Lynn sings

8.30 – George Elrick’s Cavalcade of Music

9.45 – Vic Damone

10 – Ray Ellington Quartet

10.15 – Highlights

10.30 – Tunes of the Times

That same day, though, marked the generally acknowledged start of the modern British record industry. ‘For the first time in the history of the British popular music business,’ declared
New Musical Express
, ‘an authentic weekly survey of the best-selling “pop” records [still mainly 78-rpm shellac] has been devised and instituted.’ Even so, the chart’s top five (Al Martino, Jo Stafford, the not yet crowned Nat Cole, Bing Crosby and Guy Mitchell) hardly represented seismic change, while the following spring the band leader Ted Heath, accompanied by his vocalists Dickie Valentine and Lita Roza, was top of the bill for the
NME
’s 1953 Poll Winners’ Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

Still, something was undeniably in the air when ‘The Nabob of Sob’, aka ‘The Prince of Wails’, aka Johnnie Ray, flew into London Airport in March for his first visit to England. Centrepiece of his tour was a fortnight at the London Palladium, watched by the
News of the World
’s ‘Old Trouper’: ‘When Johnnie walked on, the audience swooned in an ecstasy of hysteria; when he shouted his song down a hand-mic as he threw himself all over the stage, I didn’t think they could bear any more. “Cry, Johnnie, cry!” they shouted . . .’ Noël Coward attended the opening night – ‘He was really remarkable and had the whole place in an uproar’ – but even more appreciative was the prominent Labour MP and socialite Tom Driberg. He went to see Ray’s act (only about 25 minutes long), spoke ‘tenderly’ about him, showed him round the House of Commons, had his advances repudiated and wrote a lengthy article (‘For Crying Out Loud . . .’) in the
New Statesman
. ‘His impulses are generous and not anti-social,’ noted Driberg, before concluding even more pompously: ‘His best service to himself, and to society, would be resolutely to complete his adjustment to adult life. Some of his fans might then start growing up with him, too.’
¹⁴

In the City of London, another new, rather more brutal face was also the subject of condescension, albeit tinged with fear. An entirely self-made man (the son of Russian Jewish immigrants), Charles Clore was in his late forties and had made most of his money in property. A biographer’s phrases are striking about this pragmatic, hard-bitten outsider. He possessed an ‘utterly ruthless honesty’; his will had ‘the force of granite’; a pair of ‘cobalt eyes made people cringe’; and ‘he expected the worst of people and was rarely surprised’. Another biographer describes Clore as ‘virile, sexually gluttonous, often crude and impatient’. Early in 1953 he made a contested bid – an almost unheard-of phenomenon – for the Northampton-based shoe manufacturers J. Sears & Co, parent company of Freeman, Hardy & Willis. In the end, amid palpable City shock, his offer proved too good to refuse. ‘We never thought anything like this would happen to us,’ were the valedictory words of the departing Sears chairman, while the
Northampton Independent
quoted Clore himself: ‘I am, of course, delighted. Now we must take our coats off and get down to business.’

Hard-headed commentators like the
Economist
shed no tears, arguing that ‘it is those who make the bids for shares who are paying the greatest regard to economic principles’ and warning that ‘Government interference with such bids would be a shelter for inefficient directors, inefficient utilisation of assets and inefficient distribution of risk capital’; but Tory backbenchers as well as City grandees expressed disquiet, especially as Clore did not deny that he had further takeover plans. ‘Lord Bicester [of the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell] came in to say that he was very agitated about further manoeuvres by Mr Clore,’ the Governor of the Bank of England, Kim Cobbold, recorded in June, and a little later he noted that the even more senior Sir Edward Peacock of Barings was ‘unhappy about Mr Clore and similar activities which seem to be spreading but he agrees with me in not seeing what on earth can be done about it’.
¹⁵
The wider import was unmistakable: the cosy, paternalistic world of family capitalism, deeply embedded in the British economic system even after the rise of the large corporation during the first half of the century, was now under threat as never before.

Leonard Lord, in charge of Austin at Longbridge, was temperamentally in the same domineering, unyielding mould as Clore. In September 1952 he presided over the dismissal of seven hundred workers, seven of whom were shop stewards, including John McHugh, an Austin employee since 1928. Over the next five months, as the economic climate improved, McHugh remained out in the cold. There is conflicting evidence as to whether he himself was a Communist, but it is clear enough from contemporary documents that his dismissal was, in one historian’s words, ‘a deliberate management attempt to weaken the NUVB [National Union of Vehicle Builders], the Austin Shop Stewards Committee [headed by Dick Etheridge, an avowed Communist] and the left-wing in the factory’. The strike began on 17 February, involving 2,278 of Austin’s NUVB members, and Lord that day issued a notice denying that McHugh had been victimised and refusing to give him ‘preferential treatment’ because he was a shop steward. As usual, the strikers received little sympathy from the press, with
The Times
predictably emphasising the Communist influence in the dispute, and even the
Mirror
expressing its opposition to preferential treatment for shop stewards. Towards the end of March, Lord dismissed 1,800 strikers. ‘The N.U.V.B. have asked for a fight and they have got it,’ commented the
Birmingham Post
. ‘It is in the general interest that they should be thoroughly beaten . . . Partnership between managers and workers is essential for our national survival.’ A government-appointed Court of Inquiry broadly came down on management’s side, and the strike finally ended in early May very much on Lord’s terms, with no reinstatement for McHugh or indeed the other six shop stewards. It had not only been the biggest strike in Birmingham since the war but also set a record as the motor industry’s largest single-firm stoppage. ‘In my opinion,’ retrospectively commented Les Gurl (emerging as Etheridge’s counterpart at the Morris plant at Cowley), ‘this dispute soured the relationship between the Unions and Austin Management for many years.’
¹⁶

The strike coincided with the passing of the world’s most famous Communist. ‘We touched on the Stalin situation and we agreed it was just as well Eden [the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden] was over there as he might be a stabilising influence,’ the chairman of the London Discount Market Association complacently reflected after a conversation with the Governor of the Bank of England, as the Russian leader lay on his deathbed. Next morning, 6 March, Stalin’s death was duly announced. ‘The Radio news-reader did not use the sepulchral tones and make the reverential pause customarily used in the broadcasting of obituary notices,’ noted Gladys Langford, probably with some pleasure, but the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was outraged by ‘an account of such gross & vulgar malice’ that ‘I could hardly believe my ears.’ Later that morning, at Yates’s wine bar in Manchester, Michael Wharton (the future
Daily Telegraph
satirist ‘Peter Simple’) joined colleagues from the BBC features department. ‘What’s the matter? What has happened?’ he asked after noticing that they seemed stunned and unhappy. ‘Haven’t you heard the news? Stalin is dead,’ one of them replied. ‘Pity he was ever born,’ was Wharton’s instant response – a response that ‘to these people was simply blasphemous’, he recalled, with the result that ‘they did not speak to me again for a fortnight’.

Public reactions to the death of Uncle Joe inevitably varied widely. ‘Never’, declared the British Communist leader Harry Pollitt in the
Daily Worker
, ‘have I met anyone so kindly and considerate,’ but the
Daily Mirror
’s ‘Cassandra’ offered an unyielding judgement: ‘His purpose was evil and his methods unspeakable. Few men by their death can have given such deep satisfaction to so many.’ It was a death that offered the possibility of a thaw in the Cold War, especially with the Korean War winding down towards an eventual ceasefire in July. Even so, the experience of the left-wing Reverend Stanley Evans suggested it was a thaw that would take some time to permeate the British establishment. In April, after 17 years in Orders but still without a proper job in the Church of England, he appealed directly to the Bishop of London, explaining that ‘. . . the cause which I have most espoused, that of friendship between East and West, is of fundamental importance not only for our national future but also for the future of Christianity as a whole.’
¹⁷
But despite the Church’s manpower problems, he remained out in the cold.

There were two rather more auspicious moments this April, starting at 4.00 on Tuesday the 21st with the first broadcast of
Watch With Mother
. Initially it was shown only two or three times a week, with the well-established
Andy Pandy
more or less alternating with
The Flowerpot Men
, the latter first seen climbing out the previous December. Their creator was Hilda Brabban, whose younger brothers, William and Benjamin, were so mischievous that their mother would shout, ‘Was it Bill or was it Ben?’ So a catchphrase was born, though the Flowerpot Men’s language (officially known as Oddle Poddle) was so incomprehensible that the programme was quite sharply criticised for encouraging immaturity. The other moment was of a different order: Francis Crick and James Watson, British biophysicist and American viro-chemist, publishing in
Nature
on the 25th a description of the double helix – in effect, revealing the structure of DNA, widely acknowledged as the scientific discovery of the century. In fact, much of their data derived from the work of Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant young physical chemist based at King’s College, London. To Crick and Watson fell the glory of the Nobel Prize, along with the molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins; to Franklin, an early death from cancer and years of obscurity before her contribution was properly acknowledged.

The last day of the month was a Thursday. For Nella Last in Barrow, domestic life that evening revolved as usual round her fussy, valetudinarian husband: ‘He decided he would like to hear the play from 7 to 8 o’clock. Luckily it was an effortless “happy” play. How “fashions” in entertaining are changing, a kind of little “story” in place of the joyous idiocy of
ITMA
& oh dear they
don’t
seem very entertaining. Plays, &
Twenty Questions
,
Palm Court
, & the schools broadcast are the best of “light” entertainment. I often feel sorry that
Woman’s Hour
& my husband’s rest after lunch, should coincide.’
¹⁸