Family Britain, 1951-1957 (68 page)

Separate Tables
was a critical as well as a commercial success, but for the
Observer
’s gifted, impatient new theatre critic, it was not enough. The repressed agonies of majors in Bournemouth private hotels were all very well – ‘as good a handling of sexual abnormality as English playgoers will tolerate’, he conceded – but something else was needed. ‘Look about you,’ demanded Kenneth Tynan at the end of October:

Survey the peculiar nullity of our drama’s prevalent
genre
, the Loamshire play. Its setting in a country house in what used to be called Loamshire but is now, as a heroic tribute to realism, sometimes called Berkshire. Except that someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines. The inhabitants belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success – this being the only effort of imagination he is called on to make. Joys and sorrows are giggles and whimpers: the crash of denunciation dwindles into ‘Oh, stuff, Mummy!’ and ‘Oh, really, Daddy!’ And so grim is the continuity of these things that the foregoing paragraph might have been written at any time during the last thirty years.

‘We need plays about cabmen and demi-gods, plays about warriors, politicians, and grocers – I care not, so Loamshire be invaded and subdued,’ he ended his call to arms. ‘I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.’
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The poets and novelists were ahead of the playwrights. ‘It is bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility, about “the writer and society,” ’ pronounced the
Spectator
’s literary editor J. D. Scott in a bold, term-coining article (‘In the Movement’) at the start of October. ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic . . .’ Several letters to the magazine followed: Evelyn Waugh beseeching that ‘the young people of today’ be allowed to ‘get on with their work alone’ and not be ‘treated as a “Movement” ’, the young poet Alan Brownjohn asserting that there needed to be ‘a more original intellectual content to the new movement before it can support a genuine claim to transform the literary scene’, the even more youthful Malcolm Bradbury calling for the start of a new magazine in England to represent the Movement, and the critic Denis Donoghue identifying the Movement’s five key figures as Donald Davie, Thom Gunn (whose first collection,
Fighting Terms
, had just been published as he left Cambridge), John Wain, Iris Murdoch (a case of mistaken identity) and Kingsley Amis, with no recognition yet for Philip Larkin, though his ‘Church Going’, completed a few weeks earlier, would later be recognised as
the
Movement poem. Amis himself, writing to Larkin, tactfully called Scott’s article ‘a load of bullshit’.

If the Movement was indeed a movement, arguably three defining characteristics stood out: a zealous heterosexuality, with little taste for effeminacy, let alone homosexuality; an instinctive dislike of Modernism; and, especially on the part of Amis and Larkin, what Davie would many years later regretfully call an ‘aggressive insularity’. There were also similarities in background, immortalised soon afterwards by Philip Oakes’s ‘Identikit’ 1950s writer: ‘Born: Coketown 1925. Parents: lower middle-class. Educated: local council school, grammar school and university . . . Enthusiasms: Orwell, jazz, Doctor Leavis . . .’ Jazz – traditional,
not
modern – was important, and this autumn saw, at Raynes Park County Grammar School, the formation of a Jazz Club, though only after the headmaster had ‘expressed a wish’ that its members ‘might later gravitate to the serious side of music’. The notes in the school magazine suggested somewhat hesitant beginnings: ‘Programmes this term have included a personal choice, an excellently illustrated history of jazz, and a rather controversial programme of music by [Gerry] Mulligan and [Stan] Kenton. It has only been possible to arrange programmes for alternate weeks, owing to the lack of programme material, which in turn is the result of members either having no records to illustrate their topic or being too shy anyway.’
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Not all grammar-school boys were jazz-lovers, and in October one of them, the first of his family to go to university, went up to Oxford, still dominated by public-school boys. The awful truth hit Alan Bennett the moment he entered the college lodge:

It was piled high with trunks; trunks pasted with ancient labels, trunks that had holidayed in Grand Hotels, travelled first-class on liners, trunks painted with four, nay even
five
, initials. They were the trunks of fathers that were now the trunks of sons, trunks of generations . . . I had two shameful Antler suitcases that I had gone with my mother to buy at Schofields in Leeds – an agonizing process, since it had involved her explaining to the shop assistant, a class my mother always assumed were persons of some refinement, that the cases were for going to Oxford with on a scholarship and were these the kind of thing? They weren’t. One foot across the threshold of the college lodge and I saw it, and hurried to hide them beneath my cold bed.

The following month, a public-school boy who had come down from Oxford four years earlier returned for a weekend. ‘The University seemed young, offensively callous,’ noted an unimpressed John Fowles. ‘On Sunday morning, little groups of earnest young men in dark suits and college scarves – the scarf seems sadly ubiquitous now, though the uniform can surely never be a symbol of freedom of thought – hymnbooks in hand. An oppressive air of religiosity everywhere, everywhere . . .’

Class was as pervasive as ever. ‘He carries rather too much of a chip on his shoulder about the middle classes,’ reflected Hugh Gaitskell in early October about one of Labour’s rising MPs, George Brown, son of a Southwark van driver. ‘But his record in speech and working is excellent. He has unlimited courage and plenty of sense.’ Soon afterwards, on Friday the 8th, this class warrior was on
Any Questions?
at the Town Hall, Lydney. ‘We stayed at the Feathers Hôtel,’ recorded a seasoned fellow-panellist, Lady Violet Bonham Carter. ‘Ralph Wightman and Mrs Wightman rolled up later – & at dinner [ie before the programme] a new member of the Team – George Brown – Attlee-ite Labour who was Minister of Works . . . Everyone was agreeable to him – but he was obviously lacking in “touch” – or any kind of “amenity” or intercourse.’ Then came the programme itself, as ever going out live: ‘George Brown’s “form” cld not I thought have been worse. He made 2 really “bad form” howlers – one a quite gratuitous & irrelevant insult to the Liberal Party – the other an allusion to my age!’ The transcript reveals that his crack against the Liberals was that ‘they hardly have any conference worthy of the name’, while he did indeed make a jocose reference to Lady Violet’s ‘present age of 26 or thereabouts’. Yet more unpardonable was still to come. ‘When we returned to the hôtel (our BBC hosts having left us) & we sat up talking he hectored & harangued us & addressed me repeatedly as “my dear Violet”. I was frozen – but did not I fear freeze him. I have never before – in the course of an unsheltered life, spent among all sorts & conditions of men – met anyone so completely un-house-trained.’
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Brown was on the right of the Labour Party, at a time of continuing discord between Bevanites and Gaitskellites. ‘How can you support a public school boy from Winchester against the man born in the back streets of Tredegar?’ Bevan in June had furiously asked Sam Watson, leader of the Durham miners, about their decision to support Gaitskell, not himself, for the party’s vacant treasurership. Gaitskell duly won it, announced in late September at the party conference in Scarborough, during which Bevan as usual spoke at the
Tribune
rally:

This took place [recorded the pro-Bevan Crossman] in a ghastly hall with dim lights and an audience fanning out all round into the darkness. Typically enough, Peggy Duff [tireless left-wing campaigner] hadn’t arranged the chairs on the platform or tested the microphones, which looked like broken chrysanthemum stems. You pulled them up to your level and they had a brilliant habit of slowly sinking down again in sight of the audience.

When Nye started, I don’t know what he had intended to say, but he spent forty minutes in a long attack on the press, prefaced by a statement that he never believed in personal attacks. Then there was a wild sloshing at unnamed, terrible, adding-machine leaders and a tremendous attack on trade union leaders. It was all very incoherent until the last fourteen minutes, when he did some excellent stuff on foreign policy. There was some quick applause, people began to file out and then the ‘Red Flag’ was sung, not very satisfactorily.

The ‘adding-machine’ passage was when Bevan bitterly declared that he now knew that ‘the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation’, even ‘if he sees suffering, privation or injustice’, for to do so ‘would be evidence of lack of proper education or absence of self-control’. This may well have been in reference to Attlee, but it was widely assumed to be Gaitskell, thereafter indelibly associated with the description. Gaitskell contented himself with the briefest of ripostes in his first post-conference newspaper article – ‘by the way we do need arithmetic for social progress’ – and Crossman privately reflected that ‘the Right wrongly think that Nye has finished himself’.
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The increasingly troubled industrial scene was starting to attract at least as much attention as the political. ‘No newspapers today,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on 11 October. ‘A strike. They strike, the dockers strike, everybody wants to strike.’ Two days later, Anthony Heap took up the chorus: ‘Strikes, strikes, strikes. First the docks, then the newspapers, now the buses, one sixth of which failed to run today.’ And after another two days, Raynham again: ‘The strikes go on, the bus & dockers strikes. It is very serious.’

In the event, it was the docks that were the most serious concern, with Merseyside members of the giant Transport and General Workers’ Union unofficially supporting – to the undisguised fury of their fiercely right-wing, anti-Communist national leader, Arthur Deakin – the striking London dockers who belonged to the more left-wing National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers. That union was, Deakin publicly declared, ‘led by a moronic crowd of irresponsible adventurers’. It was generally a very bitter dispute, turning on the question of whether overtime was compulsory, and on the 29th it emerged that the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Noel Bowater, was cancelling a Mansion House banquet in aid of the Docklands Settlement – essentially a charity for children in the Docklands area – ‘in view of the attitude of the dock workers’. In fact, following a government-appointed court of inquiry which recognised the need to require ‘reasonable overtime’ in the docks, the end was nigh, with the dockers returning to work at the start of November. Just before they did so, Crossman went to speak at a meeting at Huyton, Harold Wilson’s Merseyside constituency. ‘As I entered the door,’ he recorded, ‘five enormous dockers stood towering over me, saying, “What have you written in the
Sunday Pic
about £30 a week for dockers?” Apparently, next door to my column there was a news story saying that, by working overtime to make up for the strike the dockers might earn as much as £30.’ Crossman added that both there and at Toxteth, where he had spoken earlier in the day, all the party officials, dockers to a man, had spoken about Deakin ‘in terms which are almost impossible to reproduce, since they clearly regard him as the greatest single enemy of the people’.

Who had won? ‘My dear Walter, hooray – hooray – many congratulations on yet another triumph,’ an exultant Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, wrote to the Minister of Labour, Sir Walter Monckton, while Harold Macmillan saw the outcome as, with any luck, ‘a set-back for the Communists and “fellow-travellers” ’. But for an increasingly prominent dockers’ leader in London, the fiery Jack Dash, establishing that ‘never again could the dock employers threaten compulsory overtime’ was ‘perhaps the greatest victory won by the united action of the portworkers for fifty years’. The real loser, according to the leading socialist intellectual G.D.H. Cole, was Deakin’s ‘unmanageably huge and clumsy’ T&G, and he drew a wider lesson for the trade-union movement as whole:

The centralisation of collective bargaining has done a good deal to encourage the belief among leaders that they own their members, rather than are owned by them. If trade unions are to be truly democratic bodies, they will need to devise new ways of fostering free activity at branch and workplace levels in order to offset the atrophy of local life which is all too marked a feature of current trade union practice.

In the wake of the dispute, the
News Chronicle
’s industrial correspondent, Geoffrey Goodman, spent three weeks touring all the docks, in the process discovering ‘astonishing inefficiencies, poor management bordering on the absurd, corrupt trade union practices and a bewildered workforce’. At his insistence, before the paper printed his three-part series, Goodman put his findings to Deakin: ‘He eyed me with great suspicion and demanded to know my sources for what he regarded as “scandalous inventions”. Of course he knew I would not, could not, divulge any names, so he simply dismissed the whole business as a “load of malicious anti-T and G lies”, and warned me against publishing the material. The paper ignored his threats . . .’

Goodman added, in his recollections of covering the tangled post-war industrial scene, that a major problem was ‘the casual, lazy assumption’, including on the part of ‘the average news desk’, that ‘all disputes and certainly all unofficial strikes, were the work of the Communist Party and its army of industrial activists’ – usually an unjustified assumption. Still, the Communist rhetoric could be ambitious enough. On the day the dockers returned to work, the party’s West Ham North branch considered a report stating that the aim for the coming year was ‘to organise 15 comrades who must be capable of political leadership and Marxist approach to working-class problems’, which if achieved ‘could lead to our Branch becoming of the size, character and vigilance necessary to lead the people to political power in West Ham and indeed to be the key to the winning of the Labour Movement for a decisive end to capitalist power in Great Britain’.
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