Family Britain, 1951-1957 (78 page)

‘LAST BID TO SAVE RUTH ELLIS’ ran the
Daily Mirror
’s front-page headline the day after the Upper Precinct opening, with a story about the mass petitions flooding in to the Home Office. But this Saturday, the 9th, her fate was not on the mind of Frederick Sanderson, a 30-year-old Dalston man travelling on a 73 bus along the Essex Road in London. ‘You foreigners come to this country and take away Englishmen’s jobs,’ his wife said, during a row with the non-white conductor, Irvin Obadiah, who had been living for the previous two years in Hackney. To which, by his own account, Obadiah replied, ‘If I was a foreigner I should not be ashamed of being one.’ But by Sanderson’s account he called her ‘an English pig’. In any event, Sanderson bopped him one – leading in due course to a 10s fine (and £2 costs) as well as a rebuke from the Bench at Old Street Magistrates’ Court: ‘Why you want to make all this trouble on a bus and hit a man much smaller than you, I don’t know. He’s got his job to do and it’s a difficult one.’

It was a pity that PC George Dixon was not around to calm things down. Last seen shot dead in
The Blue Lamp
(1950), he miraculously returned to the screen – but this time the small screen – at 8.45 this Saturday evening for the debut of
Dixon of Dock Green
, subtitled in
Radio Times
‘The stories of a London policeman on his beat’. As before, Jack Warner played Dixon and the writer was Ted Willis, while the part of the sensible daughter, Mary Dixon, went to Billie Whitelaw. Willis would subsequently stress that in the television series he had wanted to convey the reality of a London copper’s day-to-day life – ‘traffic duty, drunks, night-beats, answering questions, handling minor criminals’ – and that ‘Dixon couldn’t be Dixon in a programme which was full of wailing sirens, screeching brakes, gun fights, murderers and crazy mixed-up kids’. The formula worked. ‘So wise, so fatherly, he earns everyone’s respect,’ noted Philip Hope-Wallace in the
Listener
of Dixon in the opening episode (called ‘P.C. Crawford’s First Pinch’), while after the third episode the
Spectator
’s John Metcalf wrote of how ‘P.C. Dixon saunters amiably about his beat catching bicycle thieves, reuniting fallen daughters with forgiving fathers, worrying about his day off and dodging the sergeant’, in all of which ‘the true ring of authenticity comes quite often’, adding up to ‘a vast improvement on the routine mechanics of
Fabian of the Yard
’. So too, on the whole, the members of the BBC Viewing Panel. ‘Pleasant, and suitable for family viewing’ and ‘Setting and action were refreshingly true to life’ were two early reactions, with further praise following at the end of the series: ‘Very fine series – we always have this programme marked as a “must see”.’ And: ‘Very high class and like Oliver Twist, I ask for more.’ More than 360 episodes indeed lay ahead, often starting with Dixon’s genial ‘Evenin’ all’, eventually creating – and reinforcing – a cosy, rose-tinted image of the police that would take a long time to shift.
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The weather was hotting up. ‘Another lovely day,’ recorded Florence Turtle on Sunday the 10th:

Went to Church but Amy was not there. Home & put roast pork in the oven on a very low flame & then went by car with Bernard [her brother] & Dinah to Richmond Park. Bernard brushed out car whilst I threw sticks for Dinah. We then made our way round to the Kings Arms at Roehampton past the Skyscraper Flats which are ruining the whole area & had a drink apiece. Home, cooked vegetables & Roast Pork with sage & onion stuffing, all of which were delicious, plus fresh fruit salad. Rested & then got tea consisting of Tinned Salmon & Salad. Crocheted a bit, then B [her sister Barbara] came on the phone & suggested my meeting her & Fred on the Towing Path, which I did & repaired to the Star & Garter for a very pleasant Session.

‘Brian [her other brother] started to lay linoleum in lavatory at 7 pm,’ ended her entry, ‘& was still at it when I got home at eleven.’

‘ “I’M CONTENT TO DIE” SAYS RUTH ELLIS’ was the
Mirror
’s front-page headline on Monday morning, with only 48 hours to go before her appointment with Albert Pierrepoint. An announcement was expected this day as to whether there was to be a reprieve from the Home Secretary, and it duly came. ‘Ruth Ellis is NOT to be reprieved,’ recorded Gladys Langford at the end of Monday. ‘She is to hang on Wednesday. How grim the intervening hours must be for her and her parents. Poor unfortunate children too. Thank God I had a good mother. Bad thunderstorm tonight & such clammy weather all day.’ And next day she wrote: ‘There are still agitations to obtain a reprieve for Ruth Ellis. She has been in my mind all day; worthless as she is, it is a grim thought that she is to be hurled into eternity in this golden weather.’ Other diarists this Tuesday concentrated on the weather rather than Ellis. ‘A sweltering day – hottest of year so far’ (Heap in St Pancras). ‘A real heat wave now, with terrific sunshine all day, and most places having thunderstorms which don’t break up the heat’ (Martin in Oxford). ‘Hot enough to keep one perspiring tonight’ (Raynham in Surbiton).
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What to wear during this exceedingly hot spell? ‘I have been wearing a straw boater and a bow tie in London,’ John Betjeman told the readers of his ‘City and Suburban’ column in the
Spectator
. ‘In Bond Street the glances of the women and men were so contemptuous of this ageing Teddy Boy that I had to take off my hat and expose my bald head to the sun.’ This summer there was all too little male sartorial distinction around, at least according to Cecil Beaton. ‘Young “teddy boys”, with their bright blue or scarlet corduroy pants, seem to show spirit,’ he observed, ‘but generally men still go about in dirty old mackintoshes, shiny, striped City trousers, and greasy bowlers. The English have not recovered from the war, and it shows itself in the torpor of their vestments.’ It was not torpor, though, that bothered E. W. Swanton, a stickler for the maintenance of cricket’s traditions. ‘One was left wondering,’ he grumbled in the
Daily Telegraph
after the Varsity match at Lord’s in early July. ‘Does the shoddy dress of many of the undergraduate spectators, the shedding by the cricketers of part of their historic uniform [a reference to Cambridge caps and Oxford sweaters], derive from the same basic cause, a weakened sense of personal dignity and good manners? Are the young gentlemen of 1955, outwardly so polite to their seniors, intentionally cocking a snook at the past?’
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There was a late twist to the Ruth Ellis story. On the Monday evening she sent for the solicitor Victor Mishcon, who had handled her divorce, and told him about how much Pernod she had been drinking before she fired the gun and of the role played by Cussen. But despite Mishcon’s best efforts next day, no reprieve was forthcoming. Wednesday dawned fair, the start of another scorcher. ‘It’s a fine day for hay-making,’ declared ‘Cassandra’ (William Connor) on the front page of the
Mirror
. ‘A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way – and I mourn to say that millions of you do – it’s a fine day for a hanging.’ Outside Holloway Prison, where Ellis was due to be hanged at 9.00 a.m., a large crowd, thousands-strong, surged behind a massive police cordon. And in the playground of a boys’ school in Middlesex, the headmaster came across four pupils, all under the age of 11, standing still. One had a watch in his hand and was saying, ‘Only four more minutes and she is going to swing. One, two, three, four, she has had it boys.’ Gladys Langford surely had it right when she asserted in her diary later that day: ‘I feel sure that if executions were in public there would be as great crowds today as ever there were. People don’t change.’ For one young writer, the whole thing made a considerable impression. ‘I daresay she was a vulgar little tart with a predilection for wearing crosses round her neck, but to sentence her to die at such and such a time, in
that
way, is to make her into a dying goddess,’ reflected Frederic Raphael. ‘London shuddered in the heat, and so it should. Executions are unnatural crimes.’

Almost half a century later, in 2003, Ellis’s sister Muriel was at last able to ask the Court of Appeal to quash the murder conviction and instead substitute a verdict of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and/or diminished responsibility. Despite all the eloquence of Michael Mansfield, acting for her, the appeal was rejected, being described as ‘without merit’.
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8

It’s Terribly Sad

‘Whew! The Men Are in Revolt’ exclaimed the
Daily Mirror
on Saturday, 16 July. It was three days since Ruth Ellis had been hanged – days that had included a sharp controversy in Blackpool over the Chamber of Horrors exhibiting a wax effigy of her, dressed in a low-cut black evening gown with a black tulle stole – and the heat wave was unabated. The male revolt was about not being allowed to wear cooler clothes, and the
Mirror
quoted the hard-line general manager of a big London store: ‘Whatever the weather our men must dress in a grey suit, collar and tie. The public expects them to look smart. If we allowed them to dress anyhow, the place would look very tatty indeed.’ In the City that week, not far from his Cloth Fair home, John Betjeman’s sartorial eyes were opened. ‘I was walking down Newgate Street with a girl in the hot weather,’ he wrote soon afterwards. ‘She remarked on how unattractive men were. Looking at their clothes, I realised she was right – retired tea-planters bursting out of linen suits; youths with rows of pens and pencils in their pockets, and badges and combs and tubular grey-flannel trousers; businessmen in dark suits minus the waistcoat, with the sweat showing through their shirts.’ On the other hand, Betjeman had nothing but praise for ‘the cheap cotton dresses’ bought from chain stores. And he offered a considered compliment: ‘I cannot believe that English women have ever looked prettier than they have done in the summer weather of this year.’
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It was probably an unhappy weekend for Edward (E. P.) Thompson in Halifax. ‘This long, tendentious volume,’ the anonymous reviewer (in fact, the writer James Pope-Hennessy) in the latest
TLS
called his first major book,
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
. ‘Heavily biased by Marxian thought, his book is also splenetic in tone. It is perhaps a remarkable feat that he manages to sustain a mood of ill-temper through a volume of 900 pages.’ After asserting that Thompson’s study ‘merely serves to emphasise aspects of Morris which are better left forgotten’, the review finished: ‘Mr Thompson is too shrill to be persuasive – and when he declares that Morris’s
A Factory as it Might Be
is not an unpractical poet’s dream but has been already “fulfilled” in the Soviet Union, readers of common sense will part company with him for good.’ Thompson himself, in a 1976 postscript to a revised edition, subsequently conceded some ground – ‘It is true that in 1955 I allowed some hectoring political moralisms, as well as a few Stalinist pieties, to intrude upon the text’ – but at the same time emphasised the larger context, namely that ‘the book was published at the height of the Cold War’ and ‘intellectual McCarthyism was not confined to the United States’.

He might also have mentioned the deep rut which history itself was in by the mid-1950s. John Drummond went up to Cambridge in October 1955 to read the subject and was intensely disappointed: not only were the dons remote, but the history they taught was ‘both fractured and partial’, with ‘no sense of a whole society’, while ‘the very phrase “social history” was disallowed’. That last point was not quite true, but what G. M. Trevelyan, doyen of social history, meant by the term was something essentially Whiggish and patrician, rather than concerned with the lives and struggles of ordinary people. For Drummond, the sterile, top-down approach in Cambridge was epitomised by Geoffrey (G. R.) Elton (whose hugely studied
England under the Tudors
appeared in 1955): excellent on government and pipe rolls, much less so on music, literature and architecture. Thompson himself, a Cambridge graduate, consciously preferred to stay outside the academy, instead teaching adult-education classes in West Yorkshire. The two men were of the same generation – Elton born in 1921, Thompson in 1924 – and over almost four decades would battle it out for Clio’s soul.
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At Aintree on the 17th, the Sunday of this July weekend, Stirling Moss became the first British driver to win the British Grand Prix, albeit driving a Mercedes and possibly because the world champion, Juan Manuel Fangio, was happy to let Moss triumph on home soil. Next day, Ford unveiled its latest Anglia, a small two-door, four-seater family model. ‘From every aspect the Anglia is a good-looking, well-proportioned car,’ acclaimed
The Times
, ‘yet the comfort and convenience of the passengers have not been sacrificed for the sake of appearance,’ adding that ‘the close view of the road surface ahead should be of great benefit when driving in fog’, a tacit reference to the continuing frequency of smogs. The age of the all-dominant car was dawning fast, not least in Birmingham, where on Friday the 22nd the Minister of Transport, John Boyd-Carpenter, formally opened the road-widening scheme at Digbeth, converting a bottleneck into a dual carriageway, with some stirring words: ‘This scheme in this great city, the heart and centre of the industrial Midlands, will contribute directly towards providing an efficient transport system to serve the industry of this country, by which every man, woman and child in this country lives.’ One dissenter, viewing the motoring phenomenon as part of a wider, disagreeable pattern, was Philip Larkin. ‘The pubs here are nightmares of neo-Falstaffianism, coughing laughter well soused with phlegm,’ he grumbled from Cottingham, just outside Hull, to a friend on the 28th. ‘The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish. And everywhere creep the new cars with L on the front, Auntie Cis and co. learning to drive i.e. clog up the roads some more & further endanger my life.’

Next day, Madge Martin arrived in Scarborough for her annual holiday there, noting that the Spa ‘thank goodness is fully restored to its former dignity and beauty’, while Judy Haines took her two girls to the Odeon to see Mr Pastry (aka Richard Hearne) in
The Happiest Days of His Life
and Walt Disney’s
The Vanishing Prairie
: ‘Both very good. Pamela regretted Mr Pastry’s film was not in colour.’ Saturday the 30th saw the start of the Bank Holiday weekend, with the forecast good and the holiday rush starting early. Liverpool was typical. From 7.00 in the morning, buses to the city centre were full of ‘bucket-and-spade laden families and haversack-carrying teenagers’; city shops were ‘crowded by families making last-minute purchases before going on holiday’, with a particular rush for cheap seaside shoes, ‘sun dresses’ and men’s socks; packed trains were leaving Lime Street station, with ‘many people going to North Wales standing in the corridors or crowded in the guard’s van’, while from Exchange ‘trains to Blackpool and Morecambe were full long before they were due to leave’; motor coaches were also fully booked; and there were long queues for the three steamers going to the Isle of Man, though an official was adamant, ‘There is no danger of anyone being left behind.’ Sunday morning was spent by an appreciative Martin ‘listening to an orchestra on the Spa with the well-dressed audience, which is still, in a minor way, the custom’, and then on Bank Holiday Monday the Haines family treated itself to a car outing to Chelmsford (with a picnic stop on the way), where they watched Essex play Worcestershire. ‘Instead of lining up for cup of tea, at my insistence we had 2/6d set tea,’ wrote Judy. ‘It was delicious. Dainty sandwiches, bread and jam, delicious cakes, two pots of tea instead of watering down first lot. Girls charged half. A lovely sunny day and we stayed till end of match – 7 pm. Bought fish and chips at Epping, so no cooking on arrival home. Opened tin of peaches. What a lovely day!’
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