Family Britain, 1951-1957 (62 page)

There was no footballing subtext in Iris Murdoch’s first novel,
Under the Net
, published three days before the Budapest mauling. Its themes were existential – befitting an Oxford philosophy don who had recently written a study of Jean-Paul Sartre – and at one point the solipsistic narrator Jake, for whom life was ‘a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction’, offers a brief political critique: ‘English socialism is perfectly worthy, but it’s not socialism. It’s welfare capitalism. It doesn’t touch the real curse of capitalism, which is that work is deadly.’ Reviews were mixed. ‘A brilliant talent’, acclaimed the
TLS
, while Amis in the
Spectator
acquitted Murdoch of ‘philosophical gallimaufry’ and called her ‘a distinguished novelist of a rare kind’. But Betjeman in the
Telegraph
disliked the book’s ‘intellectuals, washouts, and seedy characters in general’, the
Guardian
thought it ‘sentimental . . . strictly for those who can take their fantasy neat’, and for John Raymond in the
New Statesman
it was ‘a bluestocking fantasy, a brilliant but long-winded piece of café writing’.

None of which stopped the novel from being a considerable commercial success (including a 215,000 print run for the Reprint Society book club), and J. B. Priestley may well have had Murdoch in mind, along with Wilson, Amis and probably John Wain and perhaps William Cooper as well, when in June his ‘Thoughts in the Wilderness’ column in the
New Statesman
considered new English novelists and found them sadly wanting. Not only were their settings insufficiently realistic (‘rather like stage scenery out of drawing and queerly coloured’), but their central characters were ‘too deliberately unheroic, and often seem such bumbling nitwits that it is hard to sympathise with them in their misfortunes’. In their attitude to society, moreover, these characters were ‘artful dodgers rather than open rebels’, and, he went on, ‘It is impossible to imagine any buying a house, bringing up children, paying taxes, organising a business, serving on a committee, standing for Parliament. They are simply not with us. They no more live in our political and economic world than children of six do.’ It was an escapism that Priestley found profoundly disturbing, given that ‘not since the Wars of the Roses has literature been held in such low esteem’, so that ‘any television mountebank is now more important than any poet, novelist, dramatist’.
¹⁴
That was no doubt to exaggerate, but his critique as a whole was more than just an older writer’s jealous gripe.

June was also notable for the varying fortunes of three young performers. ‘The tension of this dramatic play was maintained by excellent team work,’ reported the
Whitby Gazette
on the Spa Theatre Company’s presentation of Agatha Christie’s
Murder at the Vicarage
, running at the local theatre for a week from the 10th. Five actors were singled out for praise, including David Baron – ‘assured as the sophisticated artist, mixing charm and ruthlessness to bring the character always in focus’. The actor’s real name was Harold Pinter, not yet a playwright; but soon afterwards he left Whitby under a cloud, having resigned from the company when the young assistant stage manager, with whom he had been having an affair, was sacked by the company’s manager after being reported by her landlady for staying out into the early hours. ‘You’ll never work in the theatre again,’ were the parting words of the manager (a local butcher) to Pinter. But it was onwards and upwards for Benny Hill, who on television’s
Showcase
on the 21st set the nation talking by performing virtuoso live parodies – involving, in his biographer’s words, ‘super-fast changes of costumes and props’ – of Barbara Kelly, David Nixon, Lady Isobel Barnett and of course Gilbert Harding, the four regular panellists on
What’s My Line?.
‘Benny Hill is the most original and refreshing comedian that British TV has discovered,’ declared the
Sunday Dispatch
, and many agreed. The third performer was Gerard Hoffnung, who on the 29th appeared with Petula Clark and Julie Andrews on television’s latest panel game,
Music, Music, Music!
, ‘a musical battle of wits’ chaired by David Jacobs. ‘This infectiously happy character blew his tuba to such effect,’ noted an appreciative critic, ‘that he nearly saved newest entrant in the Panel Games Stakes from the fate of an “also ran”.’
¹⁵
Cartoonist and raconteur as well as gifted musician, the 29-year-old Hoffnung, who had left his native Germany just before the war, slipped comfortably into the role of an ageing, pipe-smoking music master and was well on the way to becoming one of the great British humorous eccentrics.

June also saw tragedy. Back in April the Cabinet had reluctantly agreed to allow the Home Office a departmental committee on the legal aspects of homosexuality and prostitution, while in May all four members of the
Any Questions?
team (the prominent Liberal figure Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the farmer-writer A. G. Street, the BOAC chairman Sir Miles Thomas and the already famed foreign correspondent James Cameron) had answered in the affirmative to the question, ‘Should the law relating to homosexuality be altered?’ That was on the 21st at a secondary modern in Yeovil – not so far from Wells, where five days later at the Somerset Assizes seventeen men were found guilty of ‘unnatural acts and acts of gross indecency’. Nine of them aged between 23 and 46 received prison sentences of between one and four years; six aged between 18 and 21 were bound over for up to two years, three of them on condition that they received ‘treatment’; and two others were put on probation. ‘Once this vice gets established in any community,’ gravely stated Mr Justice Oliver, ‘it spreads like pestilence, and unless held in check it threatens to spread indefinitely.’ Gilbert Nixon, 37-year-old holder of the Military Cross and director of a firm of manufacturing chemists in Liverpool, was given only a 12-month sentence, but within a few minutes he had fatally taken poison. That was tragic enough, but something even more resonant occurred exactly a fortnight later, when the great mathematician Alan Turing, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, dipped an apple in a cyanide solution and took several bites. After his arrest in February 1952 for homosexual offences, he had undergone, in a biographer’s words, ‘a slow, sad descent into grief and madness’. During the rest of the summer, with the committee due to start work in the autumn under the chairmanship of John Wolfenden, university administrator and former public-school headmaster, the persecution of homosexuals perceptibly eased. But the huge human damage had already been done.
¹⁶

For most people, though, the summer’s dominant discourse was quite different and altogether more benign. ‘
Butter is off the ration
,’ gleefully recorded Marian Raynham in May. ‘And
margarine
which I never want to see again, & cooking fat, & Trex is back. The price is supposed to be high, I
think
it is sure to be cheaper soon.’ No one benefited more from growing consumer confidence and possibilities than Marks & Spencer, which had just opened a huge new store in Coventry that was 25 per cent bigger than the one destroyed during the war and, according to the admiring local paper, incorporated ‘all modern department store features, with fluorescent lighting, illuminated wall panels, furniture (other than counters) of steel, air conditioning, and terrazzo flooring’. At M&S’s annual meeting in June, the visionary Simon Marks reported record turnover and an increasingly encouraging environment:

The general conditions in which the business operates have changed markedly in the last two years. The most notable factors have been the removal of Government controls and the increasing availability of raw materials. With more abundant supplies at our disposal, and the lifting of restrictions which for so many years hampered our freedom of action, we have been able to take steps systematically to improve our values over a wide range of goods . . . There is no doubt that our goods are making a considerable appeal to the widening section of the community we now count as customers.

‘The miracle has happened,’ claimed even more euphorically the usually cautious
Economist
at about the same time, ‘full employment without inflation.’

Not that austerity habits were set to disappear overnight – and certainly not in the pages of women’s magazines. ‘All action, no waste!’ declared the advertisement in
Woman’s Own
at the start of July for Gibbs toothpaste, sold by the tin. ‘A little Gibbs equals a lot of toothpaste, with
concentrated
Gibbs you can clean your teeth twice a day for as little as 1d a week.’ Elsewhere, the ‘Handy hints’ part of the letters page saw readers like Miss W. of Southsea still obeying the god of thrift. ‘I save the rubber rings from bottled fruit and use them in place of string on pudding basins,’ she confided. ‘They can be washed and used many times.’ Or take the ad in
Woman
for a surprisingly popular coffee and chicory essence: ‘ “Camp” is concentrated to save you money. Every drop is used. Not a drop is wasted.’ And in the more upmarket
Lady
, an article by Alison Settle on ‘Wardrobe for a Careerist’ pointed out that ‘terylene suits such as Harrods sell (at £15) will last (in my experience) for years, keeping their pleats, and allowing the worker to wear pale shades’, while an ad from Express Handbag Repairs of Stamford Hill, N16, positively reeked of make-do-and-mend, or at least make-do-and-mend-by-somebody-else: ‘Don’t discard that damaged handbag when it can be relined & renovated . . . Crocodile handbags renovated as new from 60s. Every type of repair by experts . . . Thousands of delighted customers.’
¹⁷

For the thrifty and less thrifty alike, this first weekend of July 1954 was memorable enough. It began on Friday afternoon, the 2nd, when the bespectacled, slightly portly Czech exile Jaroslav Drobny won the Wimbledon men’s singles title at his 11th attempt, beating the 19-year-old Australian prodigy Ken Rosewall. ‘Good tennis and good sportsmanship,’ noted an appreciative Judy Haines in Chingford, adding that ‘Wimbledon has kept me going this week’, while according to the
Daily Telegraph
’s Lance Tingay, ‘the warmth of Drobny’s reception as champion could not have been greater had he been a genial Englishman’. For several years it had been a joke in a long-running West End comedy – ‘Anyone for tennis? I fancy old Drob’s got a real chance at Wimbers this year’ – and now at last this modest accountant had done it. That evening, while Marian Raynham ‘listened on radio to the Piltdown man skull & why it is a fraud, or hoax’, the Minister of Housing and his wife were at Petworth House, stately home of his friend John Wyndham. ‘We stayed till 3am,’ recorded Harold Macmillan. ‘The ball was a tremendous success and seemed like a return (for a few hours) almost to the pre-1914 world. Many old friends – from all over England; all the jewels out of the banks (or out of pawn), champagne; two bands (dancing indoors and out) and the glorious pictures, statues, furniture – all looking superb.’

There was more Wimbers on Saturday afternoon. ‘Very sorry Louise Brough didn’t beat that cockey little Maureen Connolly in the Women’s Singles,’ commented Haines after the 19-year-old ‘Little Mo’ took her third successive title. It was not a contest that registered with Iris Murdoch, torn between two (or possibly three) men. She met one of them, the young literary critic and academic John Bayley, at Victoria station, and that afternoon, after a feverish conversation beside the lions in Trafalgar Square and a scratch lunch in St Martin’s Lane, they retreated to the London Library in St James’s Square in search of privacy: ‘I followed J. upstairs. It was fantastic. We walked up & down the long dark alleys of books. Always there was here & there a reader, hidden. We kept climbing up more & more iron stairways. At last we found a floor where there was no one. We leaned against the shelves in the half darkness & clung to each other. J. wept. After a long time we went out, & I came with him in the taxi to Paddington . . . What will come of all this?’
¹⁸

Saturday’s great event was still ahead – namely, at midnight the end of meat rationing, so that henceforth only mothers with children entitled to free milk had to keep their ration books. Generally, this end of rationing after 14 long years was marked with surprisingly little fanfare. ‘All the celebrations we promised ourselves seem to be a bit pointless now,’ a Leeds housewife explained to a paper. ‘I suppose it is because we expected all rationing would end at the same time. We certainly never thought it would be nine years after the war ended.’ Nevertheless, this evening there was a ceremonial tearing up of ration books in Trafalgar Square, and in the Sussex town of Heathfield an even more ritualised procession and bonfire.

The procession, reported the
Sussex Express & County Herald
, was headed by an undertaker ‘in official garb’ and ‘behind him, two by two, came local representatives of those who had been most involved in rationing’:

There were housewives (Mrs R. W. Pink and Mrs Behennah), a draper (Mrs Jermyn), grocers (Mr N. Farley and Mr M. Barrow), dairy farmers (Mrs Anne Mortlock and Mr E. Richardson), baker and confectioners (Mr D. Phillips, Mr W. Flower and Mrs Hackett), general store-keepers (Mr F. Godley and Mr J. McKay), millers (Mr W. Ashby and Mr W. Bucking), a poultry farmer (Mrs J. Collins), farmers (Mr E. Seymour and Mr Penfold), and, finally, as being the last to be released, two butchers (Mr E. Haffenden and Mr E. J. Hamper).

And after them, hand in hand, danced a long ring of happy children, who had always accepted rationing as part of the natural order of things, and had gradually seen one control after another removed.

A 14-year-old lad, Colin Saunders, was chosen to light the bonfire . . .

After the procession had circled the flames, but before everyone in the crowd threw their ration books on to the bonfire, there came the dramatic high point. Mr R. D. Sparkes, an official from Eastbourne Food Office, was present, and suddenly he was ‘seized, shoulders and feet, and hoisted into the air (still clutching his briefcase and rolled umbrella) and swung heartily towards, but not quite over, the flames, three times, before being set on his feet again’. This was done by pre-arrangement, and Sparkes remained calm throughout, but for the spectators it was a glorious, avenging, Ealing-film-like moment.