Family Britain, 1951-1957 (51 page)

There was also fear in the air on the evening of Saturday, 18 July, when at 8.15 – after ‘Interlude: The Picnic, by Tissot’ and before ‘A film of wild life in Africa’ – there appeared on the nation’s screens one of the earliest dramas specifically written for television. Nigel Kneale’s six-part science-fiction series
The Quatermass Experiment
, involving an idealistic government rocket scientist battling the spread of a mind-bending alien vegetable brought home on a spaceship, from the first made a huge impact. ‘We were still living in a bomb-blasted Britain and there was the Cold War,’ he explained many years later. ‘On a day trip to Brighton, I remember seeing promenaders flinch when they heard the buzz of a light aircraft. Was it a Russian rocket?’ ‘Last night’s Terrorvision’ was the
News of the World
headline after the fifth episode, with one reader having phoned in: ‘I have seen nothing so frightening in my life . . . I won’t look in next Saturday unless I have someone with me, but I must know what happens.’ Viewers’ log sheets sent to the BBC confirmed the fearful addiction: ‘Wouldn’t have missed this for anything. Even missed a day’s holiday to see it.’ And: ‘Everything stopped at our home when serial time came round.’

There was nothing (despite events on Clapham Common) unsettling or futuristic about the programme that made its debut only two days after Professor Bernard Quatermass.
The Good Old Days
came live from the City Varieties Music-Hall at Leeds, reconstructed for the purpose as an Edwardian music hall, with the audience dressing in Edwardian clothes. The ‘chairman’ was Don Gemmell, succeeded from the third show by Leonard Sachs, whose speciality – before he finally got to ‘Your own, your very own . . .’ – was long words in alliterative combinations, provoking ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the almost invariably obliging audience. ‘Deeply dejecting’ was Peter Black’s verdict in the
Daily Mail
on the programme’s first outing, because ‘the attempt to recreate the atmosphere of 1912 was so pathetically artificial,’ but Barney Colehan, the show’s producer (who was also responsible for radio’s
Have A Go!
), almost certainly knew he had a nostalgia-driven hit on his hands.
²³

Increasingly, though, the present day had its own appeal, with 1953 at last the breakthrough year in terms of moving away from austerity and towards improved living standards and even a measure of affluence. ‘We’re Buying More Now’ was a
News Chronicle
headline in August, on the basis of Treasury figures for the first quarter revealing sharply increased expenditure on food, clothes, shoes, household goods and new cars (nearly 60,000 registrations, compared with about 40,000 in the first quarter of 1952), but relatively less expenditure on drinking, smoking and entertainment – the three staples of the austerity years. The trend continued, with food-consumption figures for the first seven months of 1953 showing meat up by 50 per cent on two years earlier, and bacon up by 24 per cent. Certainly, despite the continued existence of rationing, there was more meat in the shops. It was reported in late June that butchers were able to sell freely once they had provided their registered customers with their 2s 4d weekly ration, while Panter-Downes noted in July that butchers were now finding it difficult to sell their lowest-grade stuff, a development that ‘sharply marks the end of the time when housewives meekly queued up and paid for anything the butchers liked to give them’.

There were a couple of particularly emblematic, post-austerity moments in 1953: the opening by Gina Lollobrigida of the Moka coffee bar in Soho’s Frith Street, virtually the first café in London to have a gleaming, spluttering Gaggia coffee machine; and the British debut of the Wimpy beefburger, ‘the square meal in the round bun’, served for the first time at Wimbledon. For most people, material easement had a predominantly domestic focus. ‘Explored De Beauvoir Town and the side streets jammed in between Kingsland & Southgate Rds,’ recorded Gladys Langford after a long walk in July. ‘I may not share the tastes of the masses in window curtaining but I rejoice in that no longer is brown paper stuck over broken panes, there are no scrubby bits of net held in place by bent forks as there were when I started teaching in Hoxton in the 1930s.’
²⁴

August was holiday time. For day trippers there was a sunny Bank Holiday weekend – on the Sunday almost 10,000 Geordies had arrived by train at Whitley Bay before 2.00 p.m., with every beach hut and deck chair long taken – while on the Kent coast there was the newly opened attraction of Ramsgate Model Village, part of that vogue for the miniature typified by Meccano sets and Airfix models. For the second year running, Anthony Heap took his wife and small son to a boarding house in nearby Broadstairs, where on the third day of their week he reflected that there were only two blots on the landscape:

One is the deck-chair-hiring system whereby, to save the chair attendants the trouble, one has not only to collect the chair one hires at 6d a time from a certain part of the beach and carry it to wherever one wants to sit but lug it all the way back again afterwards or lose the 6d deposit one also has to pay. The other is the primitive changing room accommodation for bathers – just a yard-square cell with a stone floor and nothing to sit on. Otherwise I remain completely captivated by the sedate elegance and old world charm of this ideal seaside resort for both adults and children – for whom it caters so diligently that even the pubs have special children’s rooms.
²⁵

That same week poor Gladys Langford, some three years after retiring as a teacher, was forced by economic necessity to start a clerical job at Educational Supplies Ltd near Drury Lane:

11 August
. Office work wears me down badly. It is so hot in the low ceilinged room and the work is so monotonous. The other clerks I have no doubt find me formidable while I find them foolish. The young ones giggle & chew, the older ones drone about their home affairs.

12 August
. My fellow workers most uninspiring – silly little girls tittering and chattering of their boys and older women talking of their children and their ailments. I get not only tired but inexpressibly bored.

13 August
. The young girls talk incessantly of films, ‘boys’ and the Royal Family while the older women chew over illnesses, the doings of husbands & children – and the Royal Family.

Unable to bear it, she left the job a few weeks later.

Among less exclusively female workforces, there was also the topic of sport this remarkable summer. Picking up the Matthews/Richards baton, Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton triumphed in June at the gruelling Le Mans 24-hour race, reputedly after a night on the town; over the following weeks, the 22-year-old athlete Gordon Pirie, a bank clerk from Coulsdon invariably known as ‘Puff-puff’ Pirie, attracted huge publicity with stirring performances over several different distances. Unlike the Oxford-educated Roger Bannister, the other young rising star in British athletics, Pirie made no pretence of being the gifted, effortless amateur. ‘No one committed themselves to the grind of training quite like Pirie did,’ wrote his biographer. ‘He ran, at first, four or five times a week, then daily, then, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, twice a day.’ There was also, most compelling of all, the cricket, as England sought to regain the Ashes lost to Australia in 1934. ‘A servant showed us into an end room where Colonel Luttrell was sitting watching the Test Match on television,’ recorded James Lees-Milne in June after a visit on National Trust business to Dunster Castle in Somerset. ‘He did not get up or shake hands but said quite politely, “I must see the end of the match. Sit down where you can.” So we did, and when it was over he took us round the castle with much affability.’ So too Madge Martin, no cricket-lover. ‘I find myself quite interested in Test Match now,’ she noted later in June, ‘and like listening to the commentaries.’
²⁶
The first four Tests all ended in draws, so everything rested on the fifth, starting at the Oval on Saturday, 15 August.

A full house on the first day included Denis Thatcher, uncontactable for several hours after his wife had given birth to twins in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. Tuesday, the third day, saw the pivotal phase of the match, with Australia batting, recalled soon afterwards by A. A. Thomson, a cricket-loving civil servant:

Word came to me from a colleague at the far end of my building who, in turn, was receiving signals from some honest workmen who had a television set in a factory on the opposite side of the road. The progress of the battle was conveyed to me by telephone – an instrument I had not previously admired – and though it started sedately, the tempo of the match perceptibly quickened. There is nothing to affect the blood pressure in a score of 59 for one, but . . . the telephone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Fifty-nine for two. It’s Hole.’

Pause and ping.

‘Hello? Who is it?’

‘Sixty for three. It’s Harvey.’

‘Hello. Who is it?’

‘Sixty-one for four. It’s Miller.’

Short pause and ping-ping.

‘Hello? Who is it now?’

‘Sixty-one for five. Now it’s Morris. They’re on the run.’

The feeling was incredible, outside and beyond human possibility. Sixty-one for five. Hassett, Hole, Harvey, Miller and Morris had travelled the broad road.
We have them
. These wickets had fallen so unbelievably quickly that I could no longer exercise normal patience. Five minutes passed. Nothing happened. Ten minutes. The telephone bell rang shrilly and I snatched the receiver with shaking hand.

‘Who is it now?’

‘The Foreign Office,’ replied a slightly outraged voice, ‘if you have no objection.’

That same afternoon Judy Haines and her family were on holiday in Boscombe. ‘Several wireless sets on beach and people very friendly passing round the score,’ she noted. ‘Abbé [her husband] was suddenly missing from his deck-chair. He had gone to toilet and then, fascinated by somebody’s wireless, stayed.’

On the Wednesday morning, with England needing only 94 to win, the fast bowler Fred Trueman arrived at the ground with his captain Len Hutton. ‘Outside the gates there was already a huge, excited throng, cheering and milling all around, and I remember seeing across the road a cockney chap frantically waving at us a newspaper placard bearing a huge drawing of the Ashes urn, surrounded in massive type by just three words: THEY ARE OURS!’ So they were, amid stirring scenes after Denis Compton in due course hit the winning stroke down to the gasometers. But for Judy Haines it proved the most bittersweet of days:

I decided to go to Wimborne Rd Bournemouth, to buy Mum the corsets she had seen advertised. I suggested Abbé stay at home for the Test Match but he wanted to come. The particular shop was miles up the road and a long way out of Bournemouth Town. Abbé
was
fed up. I was annoyed as I had not wanted him to come. He had wanted to be back for the cricket commentary at 11.30. When we regained Boscombe I suggested he go ahead. He and Ione chased off while Pamela and I relaxed. We bought some embroidery (Radio Times Cover) for Ione, and purple knitting for Pamela, and I felt better. We are booked for coach ride to Salisbury. I suggested putting it off as Test Match is coming to a thrilling end. Abbé says ‘no’. Despite Kwells, girls were all but sick, and while we were at Salisbury it rained.
Test Match and Ashes won by England
. We wanted to hear John Arlott’s summing up at 10.15. I reminded Abbé at 10.10 but he let it go, not wishing to disturb the other guests. In mentioning my disappointment they all expressed theirs. I was
so
miserable in bed I couldn’t help sobbing and then had a good cry. Felt better after that.
²⁷

12

Moral Courage

Ashes to ashes – the day after England had regained the urn, and less than a fortnight after the Russian leader Georgy Malenkov had told the Supreme Soviet that ‘the United States no longer has a monopoly of the hydrogen bomb’,
Pravda
reported that the Soviet Union had indeed tested a hydrogen bomb, with an explosion showing that the H-bomb’s power was ‘many times greater than the power of atomic bombs’. Humour was one response to this alarming development – ‘the atom bomb with its familiar rococo mushroom plumage will still be useful in minor engagements’, reflected the cricket-loving Bernard Hollowood in
Punch
– while most people simply got on with their lives and, more or less successfully, tried not to think about it.

Certainly the Cold War remained, despite the recent end of the Korean War, an obstinate reality, taking a new cultural form in October with the first issue of the monthly magazine
Encounter
. Edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, it was an explicitly anti-Communist organ (secretly funded by the CIA) of wide intellectual range and high literary quality. At a less rarefied level, Mass-Observation found during the autumn that although twice as many people in Britain were anti- as were pro-Russian, there persisted ‘the identification of the Russian people with the “we” group . . . the innocent victims of the machinations of the mysterious “they” ’. There were, moreover, mixed feelings towards Americans: admiration for their ‘generosity’, yes, but also resentment about their ‘big-headedness’ and for being, most damning of faults, ‘all talk’. But predictably, whether towards Russians or Americans, the most common attitude expressed to M-O was that old, deeply insular favourite, ‘no opinion’.

Sport for its part did not suddenly stop distracting attention from the momentous issues. ‘As usual of course,’ warned the
Shetland Times
eight days after
Pravda
’s announcement, ‘there are the critics who predict dire results at the hands of an Orkney team,’ as the footballers of the two islands prepared to contest that afternoon the Milne Cup. Shetland had not won on Orkney soil since 1929, but on a wet Friday afternoon at Bignold Park, with all places of business in Kirkwall closed, 3,540 spectators saw, in the regretful words of the
Orkney Herald
, ‘the Orcadians humbled 3–1 by a much faster and cleverer Shetland side’. Kirkwall City Pipe Band did the musical honours; Shetland’s captain, the stopper centre-half Tommy (‘Blondie’) Newman, received the Cup from the local Liberal MP, Jo Grimond; and on Saturday, still recovering from the Friday evening reception and dance, ‘several hundred Orcadians were at the pier’ to give the Shetland party (just over a hundred) ‘a good-humoured send-off and to have a farewell glimpse of the Milne Cup’. Three weeks later there was another, higher-profile annual ritual with the Last Night of the Proms, as usual conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent and as usual in front of, according to
The Times
, ‘an outsize audience keyed up as if for a Cup Final’. The BBC’s head of music had controversially omitted Sir Henry Wood’s
Fantasia on British Sea Songs
, an old favourite, from the printed programme – but such was the public outcry that a shortened version was included as an encore. ‘As clappers in the horn-pipe, the audience showed a disregard for the conductor’s beat that would have won any orchestral player the sack.’
¹