Family Britain, 1951-1957 (61 page)

There would be few stronger defenders of the welfare state – and fiercer critics of its inadequate scope – than the sociologist Peter Townsend, who in February 1954 joined Michael Young and Peter Willmott at the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green. He was soon under way with what ultimately became
The Family Life of Old People
(1957), beginning in late April with pilot interviews in Hampstead. His interviewees included a 65-year-old ‘spinster’ living in ‘a tiny attic room with sloping roof’ in Parliament Hill, working ‘part-time as a cook 10–2 nearby for a large family in Downshire Hill’, and paying 30s a week for furnished accommodation: ‘I don’t think it’s right [she told Townsend]. But there you are. Hampstead rents always were high. She’s [ie the landlady] doing pretty well out of it, I don’t suppose. She’s very particular though. But the house is always very clean. But you can’t tell me these landladies don’t make much out of it all. They do. I’m sure they do.’ Townsend also asked her about entertainment. ‘I don’t go out much,’ she replied. ‘Not to these pictures. I don’t like them. I go to a Presbyterian nearby every Sunday. I meet my friend from Muswell Hill there sometimes . . . I don’t see anyone living nearby. I don’t like prying neighbours.’ Townsend enquired about family. ‘Well, they’re all dead now. I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of my nephew at Ipswich but I don’t want to move there. I don’t like Ipswich.’

He also interviewed a more prosperous seventy-three-year-old widow, who as a result of having run a small laundry in Fitzrovia now owned a two-floor Edwardian house in Worsley Road, where she lived on the first floor with a nonagenarian friend, while eight relatives (aged between seventy-four and three) shared the ground-floor flat. Townsend described her as looking ‘rather like a female version of Charles Laughton in one his seedier roles’, but she sounded benign enough: ‘We’re a happy family. What I like best is when they’re all up here for the television. We sit and watch it after our Sunday dinner. Fred [her 47-year-old adopted son] usually falls asleep. Every day the baby [ie the three-year-old] comes up here at 4 o’clock. He has to look at the television. He comes running rag, tag and bobtail every day at 4 . . .’
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‘There is almost as much speculation about the size of tonight’s crowd as about the result of the match,’ noted the
Yorkshire Post
on Wednesday, 5 May. ‘If the ground record of 70,198 is approached, which seems doubtful in view of travelling difficulties, the fact that most of the spectators will be arriving at much the same time will test Bradford Northern’s big-match organisation to the full.’ Bradford Northern’s ground was Odsal, neutral venue for the replay of the Rugby League Cup Final between Halifax and Warrington, after a draw at Wembley. In the event – in a cavernous ground with, in Geoffrey Moorhouse’s words, ‘terracing made of nothing more substantial than railway sleepers, and the players reaching the field through the crowds, down a long cascade of steps from their dressing-rooms on the amphitheatre’s rim’ – the
Post
’s prediction was seriously out. Amid chaotic scenes, during which ‘some, unable to see the game, climbed to the roof of the old stand, and despite loud-speaker appeals refused to budge until the end’, 102,575 spectators packed the ground, a world record for a rugby league match, as Warrington won 8–4. ‘Many could not see all the game,’ reported the
Bradford Telegraph & Argus
, and the paper’s ‘obvious conclusion’ was that ‘much has to be done at the stadium before it can be considered as the “Wembley of the North” ’. But soon afterwards, a stirring article (‘The will of the north’) in
Rugby League Review
argued that the match had ‘demonstrated to the rulers of the Rugby Football League in a clear and unmistakeable manner’ that people ‘desired the final of the game’s major trophy to be played in their midst’. The debate would rumble on – though, given the BBC’s continuing indifference to the game, not as a debate of much resonance south of the Trent.

The morning after the Odsal crush, it was a distinctly southern, public-school-educated Oxford University cricket team that took the field at the Parks against Yorkshire. On a bitterly cold, windy day, with first a marquee and then a sight-screen being blown down, the visitors made 293 for 4 before declaring at teatime, leaving the students a tricky final session to bat. A fiery young fast bowler, no lover of the amateurs and their fancy caps, took the new ball. ‘The second ball of Trueman’s first over bowled Marsland, the fourth bowled Williams and from the sixth,’ reported J. M. Kilburn in the
Yorkshire Post
, ‘the ball jumped from Cowdrey’s glove to be caught at short leg by Appleyard, fielding substitute . . .’ That left the university 0 for 3 at the end of the first over; by 5.45, after two interruptions for showers, they were 19 for 6, with Trueman on 5 for 5; and eventually, at close, they were all out for 58. By then, however, the odd enterprising spectator might have decided to cross Oxford in search of other sporting fare.

In any case, there were only some 2,000 spectators, each paying 2s 6d, at the Iffley Road track to see Roger Bannister, Oxford graduate and now medical student at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, make a long-planned attempt to run the mile in under four minutes. The race was due to start at 6.00, and it was only a last-minute improvement in the weather that decided Bannister and his Austrian coach Franz Stampfl not to postpone the attempt. Helped by his pacemakers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, Bannister ran a fast race and finished first. Had he done it? ‘The result of event No 9, the One Mile, was as follows,’ announced a deadpan Norris McWhirter through the loudspeakers, before a lengthy, agonising, deliberate pause. ‘First, No 41, R.G. Bannister – in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track – English native – British national – British all-comers – British Empire – WORLD record. The time is 3 . . .’ The rest of the announcement was drowned by the crowd’s noise, including repeated chants of ‘He’s done it, he’s done it,’ while an exhausted Bannister was surrounded by admirers. For several minutes the rest of the programme was delayed, until at last McWhirter declared: ‘Life must go on.’

Bannister himself, once he had been allowed to change, left the stadium with a patriotic sentiment – ‘It is a great thing to think that an Englishman has been the first to do a four-minute mile’ – and then stopped off briefly at the Oxford sporting club, Vincent’s, before heading for London in a BBC television van.
Sportsview
, fronted by Peter Dimmock, had just started as a weekly sports magazine, and later that evening Bannister was at Lime Grove ready to be interviewed after the programme had shown a recording of his epochal run. Next day, the press chorus was triumphantly patriotic. ‘So Britain has been the first to conquer Everest and to achieve the four-minute mile,’ crowed the
Halifax Daily Courier
, speedily making up for the town’s Odsal disappointment. ‘Both feats may be equalled, but they will never be erased, for first is always the first. Britain has pioneered the way. So let us have no more talk of an effete and worn-out nation.’
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Bannister’s run may not in reality have been quite the carefree, gloriously amateur effort that it was almost immediately portrayed as, but it was still the apogee of the determinedly hopeful, optimistic ‘New Elizabethan’ moment.

‘I listened to Queen’s return on wireless sometimes,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton just over a week later, on Saturday the 15th. ‘Had our last coal fire. It’s still cold.’ Amid saturation BBC coverage – from the moment the Royal yacht
Britannia
sighted land off Plymouth Sound – the Queen was returning from her epic six-month Commonwealth tour. Richard Dimbleby was as usual the main man, including at the point of disembarkation at Westminster Pier, where it looked as if the three-year-old Princess Anne might get into the royal carriage ahead of her mother. ‘On royal occasions these days,’ he reassured viewers, ‘you can never be sure what’s going to happen next.’ The crowds were huge, among them Madge Martin and her clergyman husband, who lived in Oxford but happened to be in London that day and on the spur of the moment decided to watch (at the Horse Guards gate) the Queen on her route to Buckingham Palace. ‘What a thrill!’ she wrote. ‘Worth all the hours [11.00 to 3.45] of waiting – and somehow
being
there in a crowd of good-tempered enthusiasts – on a typical London day – rather grey – but fine – such a really
English
day for her to come back to.’ That evening, some 28 per cent of the adult population tuned into radio’s Gala Performance – introduced by Jack Buchanan and Margaret Lockwood, with stars including Peggy Ashcroft, Max Bygraves, Eddie Calvert, Tony Hancock, Edmund Hockridge, Al Read, Michael Redgrave, Beryl Reid and Terry-Thomas – while later there was
Dancing by the River
, featuring Ted Heath and His Music playing on the promenade of the Royal Festival Hall. For the police on the ground in central London, many drafted in from the suburbs, it had been a relatively unstressful but long day. ‘There were four in Inv’s carriage, all looking hot, rather grimy and tired,’ recorded a Mass-Observation investigator about her train journey back to Sutton that evening:

They loosened their collars and belts, settled down to look at the evening papers or leant back and closed their eyes. One remarked: ‘There’ll just be time for two pints. I was afraid we shouldn’t make it!’

An American woman in the same carriage offered sweets all round and tried to get them to talk, but mostly they didn’t seem anxious to respond. Inv overheard one policeman say ‘they’ll be having their bread and jam by now’ and another ‘I’ll be seeing them again soon. I’m going to the garden party.’

‘The American woman thought this was serious,’ added the investigator, ‘and the other policemen laughed when he went on, “Oh, yes. We’re always there. Outside the gates!” ’

Next Saturday it was the turn of Billy Graham, for the last time on his crusade, to attract the crowds. Some 65,000 came that afternoon to White City Stadium, followed in the evening by 100,000 at Wembley Stadium, as well as another 22,000 on the playing area itself. ‘Some 2,000 people waded through the mud to respond to the Invitation,’ Graham himself recalled about that Wembley meeting, and, according to a newspaper report, ‘they were of all ages, of all classes of society’. Altogether, over the twelve weeks, Graham and his team had attracted more than two million people to meetings and won thirty-eight thousand ‘decisions for Christ’ – a remarkable achievement. That same rainy Saturday evening, Henry St John was at the Chiswick Empire. ‘I saw a variety show which included an American singer named Diana Decker, and a comedian called Peter Sellers,’ he dutifully noted. ‘The show could not be rated higher than fair; the songs were rubbish, and, as usual, jokes about excretion earned some of the biggest laughs.’ But for the evangelist, there was one final meeting before he headed home to North Carolina. ‘Tell me, Reverend Graham, what is it that filled Harringay night after night?’ asked a gloomy Churchill at No. 10 on Monday. ‘I think it’s the Gospel of Christ. People are hungry to hear the word straight from the Bible. Almost all the clergy of this country used to preach it fruitfully, but I believe they have gotten away from it.’ A sigh accompanied Churchill’s response: ‘Yes. Things have changed tremendously. Look at these newspapers [early editions of the three London evening papers] – filled with nothing but murder and war and what the Communists are up to.’
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Between Wembley and Downing Street there was Budapest. ‘Have we any chance of victory?’ the
Daily Mail
’s Roy Peskett asked ahead of England’s return match against Hungary on Sunday the 23rd, almost exactly six months after the previous autumn’s humiliation. ‘No England team is beaten until the final hand-shake, but I have viewed other matches with greater confidence . . .’ Even so, ‘if the ball can be wrested from Puskas and Co their defence will be in trouble’. The outcome was even worse than before: this time, 7–1 to the Magyar masters. ‘Until we can win or at least hold our own in such contests,’ argued the British minister in Budapest in the continuing Cold War context, ‘it will be better to avoid arranging them with countries such as the Satellites whose propaganda made largely at the expense of our own prestige it cannot be our policy to further.’ The Foreign Office bluntly replied that ‘it would be
much worse
propaganda if it got around that the West would not make fixtures with the Iron Curtain because they were afraid of losing’, and thus ‘the only remedy for this admittedly sorry state of affairs is for us to concentrate on getting good enough to win’. There were still a few weeks to regroup before the World Cup – during which Birmingham’s Diane Leather became the first woman in the world to run a mile in under five minutes but received barely a tithe of Bannister’s instant fame, and the eighteen-year-old Lester Piggott won his first Derby on Never Say Die at 33–1, coolly telling reporters that ‘it was just another race’ – but by Saturday, 26 June it was quarter-finals time at Basle, with England up against a Uruguay team that the previous Saturday had thrashed Scotland 7–0. ‘I seem to be the only person in Switzerland who gives England a chance,’ wrote the incorrigibly optimistic Peskett. ‘I feel they can win if they attack from the start . . .’ Uruguay duly won 4–2, leaving Peskett to praise ‘a gallant performance’ in ‘a heart-breaking match’ – and to make the glancing but obligatory flick at ‘the prima-donna attitude of certain of the Uruguayan players’.
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