Family Britain, 1951-1957 (77 page)

‘The public, which to date has had a good deal of sympathy for the seemingly underpaid express-locomotive drivers, is now beginning to feel sick and tired of being caught between the unions’ crossfire at increasingly frequent intervals,’ recorded Mollie Panter-Downes at the start of June. ‘The British are a good-tempered people who lumber toward rage at a majestic rate, but they seem to be on the move.’ A degree of rage was probably felt at the Woodstock Hotel in Highbury Park, north London, where at breakfast on the 3rd a resident held forth to Gladys Langford about how he had been ‘calling at a firm yesterday which had suffered from 3 strikes in one day’, while three days later Langford herself noted, in relation to Eden and the railwaymen: ‘I do hope he succeeds in breaking the strike but I doubt his success.’ Soon afterwards, on the 8th, Judy Haines in Chingford went to the post office with a present to send: ‘Assistant gave me corrugated cardboard & I packed it all up. Too heavy! Parcels over 8 oz cannot be accepted during rail strike! I said, “Oh well, if my troubles are no worse than that . . .” Assistant appreciative of my bright spirit and said most people moaned frightfully, as if it was
his
fault.’ The novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton was among the moaners. ‘A singularly depressing and,
I
think, rather muddled, strike,’ was how he described it to his brother on the 10th, adding that it merely confirmed his increasing feeling that the proletariat was ‘as moribund a class as the “aristocracy” ’. Or, as Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park put it about the whole phenomenon when a rail settlement was finally announced, ‘Am fed up to the back teeth with everlasting strike.’
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Yet the underlying reality was that for most people the natural desire to get back to normal life vastly outweighed any larger considerations. ‘There is a general handing out of compliments and medals, as if some unpopular war had ended,’ rather caustically noted Panter-Downes on the 15th, with cheering in the Commons for the ‘brilliant and popular’ Monckton – for whom congratulations poured in from all quarters, including Miss Riley of 27 The Drive, Wallington, Surrey, ‘and all her friends who travel with her on the 8.30 from Wallington’. Crucially, there was not yet, despite widespread grumbling about the inconvenience of strikes, a stigma attached to the unions as such. ‘Generally speaking, and thinking of Britain as a whole, do you think Trades Unions have been a good thing or a bad thing?’ Gallup asked in August. To which 67 per cent said ‘good’ and only 18 per cent ‘bad’. Gallup also revealed who in the public’s opinion ‘are not paid enough’ (railwaymen, schoolteachers, factory workers and engineers), who ‘are paid too much’ (dock workers, lawyers, miners and civil servants) and who ‘take life too easily’ (civil servants, schoolteachers, builders and dock workers).
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Another area politically off-limits, beyond a very modest extent, was privatisation. On 3 June, in the middle of the railway strike, the
Any Questions?
panel – comprising Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the farmer-writer A. G. Street, Gerald Nabarro and James Callaghan – met at a hotel before that evening’s broadcast from a factory in Poole. Nabarro, ‘a very a-typical Conservative’ in Lady Violet’s words, was according to her ‘very proud of being of humble origin & told F.G. [Freddy Grisewood, the chairman] to announce him as having started life as a builder’s labourer & been a private in the Army’. Then came the pre-programme dinner: ‘The conversation was painfully & tediously “class conscious” – one long harp on how many Etonians were in the Cabinet etc., in all of which Nabarro joined “con amore”.’ And in the broadcast itself, there took place ‘a terrific slanging-match between Callaghan & Nabarro on the merits & demerits of nationalization’. It included, in the context of a question about whether workers in nationalised industries should have the freedom to strike, this exchange:

Nabarro
: What is wanted, I think, is a very much greater sense of responsibility in the nationalised industries, as well as in other industries, where strikes have taken place or are pending, and I must add there that it is not without significance in our industrial economy, that the majority of recent strikes seem to have taken place in nationalised industries, where labour relations are generally speaking infinitely poorer than in private industry.

Callaghan
: So what?

Nabarro
: Denationalise them as much as you possibly can. (
Applause
.)

Grisewood
: Yes Jim, Jim Callaghan.

Callaghan
: Denationalise the coal mines? Come on, let’s have a straight answer.

Soon afterwards, to more applause, Nabarro reiterated his point that ‘the answer is to try and denationalise as many industries as possible’.

The programme ended with a question from Sam Holt about why people in the south of England, compared to those in the north, were ‘generally surrounded by a high wall of shy reserve’. This provoked Callaghan into asserting that the answer was ‘quite simply and shortly because people in the South are more snobs than people in the North’, adding that ‘there’s still far too much forelock-touching in the South of England, especially in the County areas, still far too many class distinctions and rigidities’. To which Lady Violet replied, ‘I entirely disagree. I would say, with all respect to Mr Callaghan, it takes a snob to see a snob.’ This sally earned, she noted with satisfaction afterwards, ‘thunderous applause’, leaving Callaghan, with no time to come back, ‘distinctly annoyed’. But the most resonant event this Friday took place in a Hammersmith flat, concisely recorded in the pocket diary of a young actor and budding dramatist: ‘
Look Back in Anger
finished.’ It had taken John Osborne precisely four weeks and a day, including a week’s sojourn in Morecambe to play a small part in the naval comedy
Seagulls over Sorrento
.
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This particular Friday was also the final day of the Messina Conference, a gathering of the six member states of the European Coal and Steel Community that led directly to the creation of the European Economic Community in 1958. Britain deigned to send an observer, but by this time he had already departed for home, reputedly with the words: ‘I leave Messina happy because even if you continue meeting you will not agree; even if you agree, nothing will result; and even if something results, it will be a disaster.’ Eden, the Foreign Office, the Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture were all dead set against British participation in the new organisation. The Commonwealth weakened, free trade undermined, further European integration (even a federation) on the cards, industry exposed to increased competition – such was the Cabinet’s assessment, with only one policy outcome possible. Moreover, even if it had been accepted by the political elite, the very concept of a pooling of sovereignty would at this stage have been almost impossible to sell to the British people. Not long afterwards, English football’s new league champions, Chelsea, encountered a pure Little Englander in action when the autocratic secretary of the Football League, Alan Hardaker, bullied the club into agreeing not to take part in the first European Cup (forerunner of the Champions’ League). A dyed-in-the-wool northerner, he subsequently confessed, with a little grin, to the football writer Brian Glanville why he preferred not to get involved with football on the Continent: ‘Too many wogs and dagos.’
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One European now doing business in England was the 32-year-old bouncing Czech Robert Maxwell, who on 15 June endured
un mauvais quart d’heure
in Winchester House, Old Broad Street, as almost two hundred publishers and their advisers listened to the official receiver’s report on the collapse of the book-wholesaler Simpkin Marshall, some four years after Maxwell had taken control of it, promising the
Bookseller
as he did so that ‘this will prove to be a long and successful chapter’ and that ‘nothing will be spared to promote the completeness and efficiency of this service in every way’. Also on the 15th, at Lord’s, the young England amateur batsman Colin Cowdrey scored 47 on his first appearance of the season, looking, reported the
Evening Standard
, ‘assured and immensely powerful, with no hint of any difficulty regarding footwork’. He had recently been discharged from National Service in the RAF on the grounds of ‘a long history of foot trouble’, thereby provoking a storm of hate mail and public attacks (including from Nabarro, who in the Commons accused him of dodging the column), but by early July he was back in the England team, playing under its new amateur captain, Surrey’s Peter May.

This same summer, the 18-year-old Paul Bailey more deliberately evaded National Service through a virtuoso performance at the medical: a confession to bed-wetting did the trick, even before he mentioned possible homosexual tendencies. ‘ “I’m ashamed of you,” said my mother. “Whatever will people think?” “Which people, Mum?” “Everybody. The whole street. They’ll think there’s something wrong with you.” ’ Bailey only found out later that the evening before his medical she had paid a rare visit to the local parish church in Battersea in order to pray for his acceptance by the army. Dennis Potter, 20 years old and from the Forest of Dean, was meanwhile reluctantly sticking out his National Service, having been transferred to the War Office in London on account of his knowledge of Russian. ‘God! those long afternoons in summer when you could hear the clock on Horse Guards Parade strike every quarter-hour, and it would be stiflingly hot and all those nerds would have their tightly furled umbrellas and their bowler hats on,’ he recalled almost 40 years later. ‘And having to go through that ridiculous “permission to speak – Sah!” routine every time you opened your mouth. That little phrase seemed to me to sum up the whole of English life at that time.’ He was hoping to go up to Oxford in the autumn, but failed his Latin responsions and had to wait another year.
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Five days after Cowdrey’s cameo, the trial began at the Old Bailey of the 28-year-old Ruth Ellis, accused of murdering her lover, an unsuccessful racing driver and two-timing socialite called David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead on Easter Sunday – a week or so after he had hit her so hard in the stomach that she had suffered a miscarriage. Ellis herself, daughter of an abusive professional cellist who had made her older sister Muriel pregnant, was a club hostess, sometime prostitute, occasional model and single mother of two. ‘Ruth Ellis: I Shot To Kill Him’, ‘Model Weeps: I Was a Jealous Woman’ and ‘Model Smiles at Murder Verdict’ were three of the
Daily Mail
’s headlines during the two-day trial, and generally there was a censorious tone to much of the press coverage, with great emphasis laid on Ellis’s platinum-blonde hair and smart black suit with astrakhan collar and cuffs, as well as her unwomanly lack of emotion on hearing the guilty verdict. As for the trial itself, the judge, Sir Cecil Havers, refused to allow her counsel, Melford Stevenson, to argue provocation as a defence, while the jury reached its unanimous verdict in less than half an hour.

After the trial, Ellis refused to appeal, probably because of not wanting to implicate Desmond Cussen, a sugar-daddy accountant who had driven her to the pub and provided the gun, and who now promised to look after her children. On 23 June the execution date was fixed for 13 July at Holloway Prison. ‘I have been tormented for a week at the idea that a highly civilised people should put a rope round the neck of Ruth Ellis and drop her through a trap and break her neck,’ the still visiting Raymond Chandler wrote in the
Evening Standard
on the last day of June. ‘This was a crime of passion under considerable provocation. No other country in the world would hang this woman.’ And he finished with a reference to ‘the medieval savagery of the law’. But at least as typical, perhaps more typical, was the reaction in Kingston-upon-Thames of Jacqueline Wilson’s mother, Biddy, to a newspaper serialisation of Ellis’s story. ‘I read over Biddy’s shoulder,’ recalled Wilson. ‘She tutted over Ruth’s blonde hair and pencilled eyebrows and dark lips. “She’s obviously just a good-time girl. Look at that peroxide hair! Talk about common!” ’
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Sir Alfred Munnings – past President of the Royal Academy, tormentor of Henry Moore, and scourge of all things modern and Modernist – was probably not an abolitionist. On Monday, 4 July, he performed the annual ceremony, in the Village Hall at Brantham, Suffolk, of ‘Dubbing the Knight’. After the ceremony, and the singing of ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’ and ‘The Maid’s Song’, it was time for Munnings to speak, as reported by the
Stowmarket Mercury
:

Showing signs of emotion, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose in a large, gaily-coloured handkerchief. ‘These are fine words,’ he said, ‘and they rhyme too. Not like these modern poems.’

He told the children they were lucky to be living in the countryside where they could daily see the miracles of God in every hedgerow and tree top. ‘A thrush can better Sir Malcolm Sargent and all his philharmonic host.’ Parts of Britain were still unspoiled by industry, and they should take advantage of that: they were lucky, too, that they did not have to go to school by bus to some big town to be taught in a huge classroom by ‘urbanised teachers’.

He told the girls: ‘The place of every woman is the home. Learn to cook, and to cook well.’ And to the boys: ‘Marry a good, useful woman, not one of these silly asses who want to go to the pictures every night.’

‘As the meeting ended,’ concluded the report, ‘the children crowded round Sir Alfred waving autograph books.’

Four days later, on Friday the 8th, the Lord Mayor of Coventry officially opened the city’s Upper Precinct, a pedestrianised shopping area with a first-floor level. ‘There is certainly nothing like it in Britain,’ one of the architects involved proudly told a local paper. ‘There may be something as new in Europe, but nothing quite the same.’ Even so, for all its importance as a symbol of Coventry’s pioneering reconstruction, it did not prove a huge success, partly because of the decision – whether on aesthetic or financial grounds is unclear – not to have access ramps, but instead to rely on stairs. ‘The Precinct shops on top floor hardly did any business,’ remembered one Coventrian. ‘As quick as they opened, they tended to change or close. I don’t think Coventry people were too keen on climbing up steps and going to shops at different levels. I think everybody had got so used to being on the ground floor.’ There was also for the ruling Labour councillors, viscerally committed to the 1940s concept of the new Coventry, the wider problem of continuing trader-cum-Tory resistance to pedestrian shopping – a resistance sufficiently strong to make it a real possibility that a new motor road was going to drive through the whole pedestrian shopping area. But some three months after the opening of the Upper Precinct (with the Lower one still under construction), the Labour proposal that a new central thoroughfare, Market Street, should become a traffic-free shopping street was carried. ‘We are going to keep our heads in front,’ declared Alderman George Hodgkinson, for many years the dominant local politician behind Coventry’s reconstruction. And he added: ‘This resolution is a test of faith in the adventure we have begun.’
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