Family Britain, 1951-1957 (52 page)

The material world was continuing to improve. ‘I began my expedition among the bulging shops of Notting Hill Gate and Paddington,’ reported the
News Chronicle
’s David Malbert in early September about a shopping trip round London that revealed the extent to which food rationing was informally if not yet officially ending:

In a big provision store I bought 1 lb of best grilling steak for 4s; ½ lb of margarine; 2 lb of sugar and 1 lb of back of bacon for 4s 10d.
The subject of ration books did not crop up
 . . .

I went out to the Old Kent Road. ‘Will 4 lb do?’ the grocer asked when I mentioned sugar. ‘I’ve no ration book,’ I explained. He laughed. ‘That doesn’t matter. Never use ’em now.’ In three other shops in the district I bought more margarine, sugar, butter and best bacon. At two others my umbrella was regarded with slight mistrust and I was reminded: ‘Sorry, it’s rationed.’

Mollie Panter-Downes confirmed the trend. ‘Butchers for some time now,’ she observed later that month, ‘have been sticking up signs saying, “Anyone served with anything on sale” in their windows,’ adding that ‘that strange, prized symbol of pre-war good living – pure-white bread – has, for the first time since the war, turned up in the shops for those who can afford to pay more for it than for the subsidised semi-white national loaf’. There was also a signal moment on the 28th. ‘
Sugar rationing is over
,’ recorded Marian Raynham. ‘That is wonderful. Now I will have more brown, dem, & some lump. I mostly had granulated because it goes farther.’ It was, in Panter-Downes’s words, ‘one more move toward making a nice little bonfire of ration books’.

The cultural standard of living stayed, from a Reithian perspective, disappointingly poor. ‘It appealed strongly to a minority only and was consequently given the low Reaction Index of 54,’ noted BBC audience research after the second act of T. S. Eliot’s new play,
The Confidential Clerk
, had gone out live in late August. ‘The most frequent complaints were that the play seemed difficult, wordy and “highbrow”.’ A viewer was quoted as saying: ‘Couldn’t for the life of me pick the story up.’ By contrast, the return soon afterwards of the comedy
How Do You View?
(‘How do you view? Are you frightfully well? You are? Oh, good show!’) won an RI of 76. ‘One has only to
look
at Terry-Thomas and one feels a laugh coming,’ declared one enthusiastic viewer, another that ‘this was grand stuff; interesting, very amusing and
clean
’. Squeaky clean also were
Rag, Tag and Bobtail
, the latest addition to the
Watch with Mother
portfolio, but Nella Last in Barrow was not so sure about the whole phenomenon after listening to her next-door neighbour Mrs Atkinson complain about how her little granddaughter was now always wanting to rush home to watch
Children’s Hour
. ‘As she talked,’ reflected Last, ‘I saw plainly how T.V. must be changing a lot of people’s habits.’ J. B. Priestley had no doubts about the perniciousness. ‘Because people spend their evenings watching idiotic parlour games on TV or
Chu Chin Chow
on ice,’ he declared in the first of his ‘Thoughts in the Wilderness’ columns in the
New Statesman
, ‘this does not mean that the last glimmer of intuitive perception has been dowsed, though after a few more years of mass communication on this level the crowd may be permanently half-witted.’ His next column, later in September, was a lengthy, fiercely anti-American diatribe against the mass media and how it was creating a new world – ‘a world I dislike intensely’.
²

Almost everyone on the left agreed that an improved educational system was pivotal to the country’s future health, whether moral and/or socio-economic. ‘The child who lives in Merioneth has eight times more chance of going to a grammar school than has a child in Gateshead,’ asserted Alice Bacon at Labour’s conference at Margate this autumn, calling for an end to ‘the grammar school gamble’, while Jennie Lee wanted the party to ‘put all its enthusiasm and skill into comprehensive schools’. Moreover, although the party had for some time been theoretically committed to the comprehensive principle, there was also considerable – if far from unanimous – rank-and-file enthusiasm for the cause expressed at the conference. Not that it was a cause likely to proceed smoothly so long as Florence Horsbrugh was Minister of Education. Over the winter she largely resisted attempts by Labour-controlled local authorities in London, Coventry and elsewhere to go comprehensive and in particular ensured that, in London at least (where at this point eight comprehensives were being built and four more were on the drawing board), no existing grammar school was lost. One of the planned four was Holland Park Comprehensive, notwithstanding strenuous objections (publicly supported by John Betjeman) from the wealthy residents of Campden Hill, Kensington. ‘An educational abortion, a vast factory, mass-producing units for the prefabrication of the classless dictatorship of the proletariat,’ ran a typical super-Nimby cry of despair to the local paper.
³

Increasingly, a central plank of the pro-comprehensive case was that the eleven-plus method of selection for grammar schools was not just cruel and divisive but also inefficient in terms of measuring intelligence. A key figure was Brian Simon, a Communist who as a youngish teacher at Salford Grammar School in the late 1940s had been much struck by how the handful of boys each year who passed a ‘transfer’ examination from the secondary modern to the grammar
then
flourished more than some of the original eleven-plus passers. ‘Did this mean, given the opportunity, that there were potentially hundreds of 11-plus failures perfectly capable of doing well at grammar school?’ was how he recalled his thinking. During the early 1950s, by now based at Leicester University’s School of Education, he started to conduct research leading in late 1953 to a short but highly focused study
Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School
. Even the pro-selection
Times Educational Supplement
conceded that it was ‘a formidable indictment of the theory and practice of intelligence testing’, while John Garrett, headmaster of Bristol Grammar School and a virtuoso publicist for the grammar-school system, wrote in the
New Statesman
that the case ‘deserves respect and demands an answer’. Simon’s ultimate conclusion was that intelligence testing essentially tested the differences of social class and that it was time to concentrate, without selection, on the educability of the ordinary child.

Quite apart from the generally high prestige of grammar schools (‘Your school and other schools like it, represent what may be called the cream, and it is the object of schools such as yours to direct students to walks of life that call for leadership, ability, character and high standards – in a word, endeavour,’ declared Air-Marshal Sir Francis J. Fogarty in July 1953 before handing out the prizes at Purley County Grammar School for Boys), it was not quite so cut-and-dried even in Labour ranks as Simon might have wished. ‘Nearly all the delegates either were at grammar school or had their children at grammar schools,’ Richard Crossman astutely noted at Margate, while the following month the veteran local Manchester politician Wright Robinson privately confessed himself a ‘heretic’:

My own points are first a strong exception to any one type of education being regarded as It, the complete super type justifying the exclusion of all others. The argument is that all other valid types are comprehended within this perfect common school. It is further contended that it cannot be successful unless the competition of its most powerful rival is removed from its catchment area. The grammar school must go. Given free choice the parents will prefer to send their children to a grammar school. Parents are not the best judges of what is best for their children, it is said . . . London which has wholeheartedly gone in for the C.S. is building one seven storey and one nine storey school, vast education factories with most of the features of the mass production workshop, in order to produce, or mass produce, ready made democrats. We jeer at the totalitarian methods of the Soviet, and ape them ourselves by trying to impose in a compulsory system of education, one common pattern, one type of school.

Crossman may also have had further reservations after dining at about the same time with the headmaster of Maidstone Grammar School. ‘Claydon made an extremely good impression on me,’ recorded the Wykehamist diarist:

What he really believes in is building up the maintained grammar schools on the one side, and making the Modern schools really good on the other. His central argument is that the comprehensive school really does neglect the differences in intelligence. ‘When you talk of Eton being a comprehensive school, it’s sheer nonsense,’ he said. ‘Every boy at Eton, however stupid, is far above the average intelligence. You don’t understand the average intelligence, and you will flood the grammar school and kill it if you try to mix the average Modern school child with the grammar school child.’
⁴

With the political temperature over selection starting to rise, it was a potentially acrimonious debate set to run and run.

Lorna Stockton (later Sage) – fresh from her semi-triumph on Coronation Day – began that autumn at Whitchurch Girls’ High School in Shropshire. ‘The high school cultivated the air of being somehow still fee-paying, it was designed to produce solid, disciplined, well-groomed girls who’d marry local traders and solicitors like their fathers,’ she recalled. ‘The eleven-plus had let in a leavening of out-of-towners and outsiders, but that had only made it more vital to insist on sub-public-school mores – uniforms, “houses”, and an elaborate hierarchy of prefects and deputy prefects whose job it was to remind their juniors to stand up straight, and send them out to run up and down the playing field at break in wet weather instead of huddling in the cloakrooms.’ Social distinctions were naturally acute on the bus from and to the village where she lived:

The back seats were reserved for big girls of fourteen and fifteen who went to the secondary modern, but only just. They had perms, boyfriends and jobs lined up, and they wore their school uniforms in a sketchy, customised way, with extra bits and bits missing, and nylons whose ladders they fixed surely with nail varnish. They had a lot to talk about and laugh over in private. They painted their nails on the way home and picked off the varnish the next morning . . .

The secondary modern boys were younger for their age and scuffled about in the middle seats, playing at being wild, priding themselves on the filthiness of their ties and wearing spare cigarettes behind their ears. Although they sometimes looked up girls’ skirts and told dirty jokes, they were second-class passengers, the bus was girl territory, the real tearaways among the boys didn’t stoop to catch the bus, but biked to school on the days when they weren’t truanting.

And the grammar school boys and high school girls, a conspicuous and shifty minority, distributed themselves around the front seats as they boarded. Grammar school boys stood out sacrificially in bright purple blazers and caps. At least the high school’s navy blue matched the majority – although only at a distance, there was no getting around the stigma . . .

‘In theory,’ Sage added, ‘we who’d passed the eleven-plus were supposed to despise the secondary modern kids for being common and thick. In practice we envied them for knowing how to be outsiders and as we grew older we aped their style: caps and berets balled up in pockets, greased and lacquered quiffs of hair, secret lockets and chains with rings on them under their shirts.’

The real fee-paying schools inhabited in every sense a separate world. ‘If they believed in equality of opportunity,’ Crossman’s fellow-Wykehamist Hugh Gaitskell was reported as telling the party conference, ‘they could not continue with a system of education under which wealthy parents were able to buy what they and most people believed to be a better education for their children.’ At the same time, Gaitskell insisted that he was ‘not attacking public schools, or the parents who sent their children to them, but the system was wrong and must be changed’. Alice Bacon, for all her left-wing credentials, disagreed, declaring to conference that the far more important priority was to focus on ‘privilege within the State system’ and that any attempt to outlaw private education ‘would lead to a black market in private tutors and the privileged classes would send their children abroad to be educated’. At which point the whole issue, virtually moribund since 1945, returned to its slumbers. One brave soul, John Wilkes, personally sought to cross the chasm between the worlds by deciding at the end of 1953 to give up the headmastership of Radley in favour of becoming a poorly paid vicar in the heavily working-class Hunslet district of Leeds. His reward was to be treated by his mother-in-law (wife of a former headmaster of Eton) ‘as if he had forged a cheque’.
⁵

‘This will be the first time a British actress has appeared as leading lady at Drury Lane, home of the American musical, since before the war,’ noted the
Daily Mirror
’s Eve Chapman on 1 October (the same day as Labour’s education debate). The musical was
The King and I
by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the somewhat surprise choice for the role of the governess was Valerie Hobson, the subject of Chapman’s profile, with her ‘pale, ladylike looks, her well-bred clothes, and her quiet hobbies – she likes embroidery and painting’. Opening night was exactly a week later. ‘Valerie Hobson was most charming and made a triumphant success,’ applauded Noël Coward; ‘more divinely fair and gracefully dignified than ever’, agreed another diarist, Anthony Heap. The weeklies were somewhat less obliging. The
Spectator
’s Derek Monsey found the whole thing only ‘adequate’, especially given that ‘the brilliant glow of
Oklahoma!
[the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that had hit London six years earlier] still warms and lights our memories’, though he did praise Hobson for her ‘grace and sincerity’; while according to the reliably acerbic T. C. Worsley in the
New Statesman
, she was ‘deficient in voice but works the charm hard’. Later in the year, during the Christmas holidays, the Eton schoolboy Hugo Williams, whose theatrical parents knew Hobson, saw the show. ‘I went to meet her in the star dressing room, said to be the most beautiful in the world,’ he recalled. ‘It had been freshly painted pink and white for her, and was like entering a risqué French apartment. There were three adjoining rooms: vestibule (for casual visitors), softly lit drawing room and brightly lit dressing area, the holy of holies, where Miss Hobson was taking off wide padded hips. I still have her autograph, but not that of her husband, who wasn’t famous yet.’