Family Britain, 1951-1957 (79 page)

Two days later, on Wednesday, 3 August, the first English production of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
opened at the small Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street. Directed by the 24-year-old Peter Hall, it proved a fraught evening. Hall would recall how ‘on the line, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful”, a very English voice said loudly: “Hear! hear!” ’, while the line ‘I have had better entertainment elsewhere’ provoked ironical laughter, and when a character yawned, so too, loudly and pointedly, did someone in the stalls. A sizeable part of the audience left at the interval, and at the end, remembered Peter Bull (who played Pozzo), ‘the curtain fell to mild applause, we took a scant three calls and a depression and sense of anti-climax descended on us all’. The reviews over the next day or two did not help. Not all the critics were as outrightly hostile as the
Daily Mail
’s Cecil Wilson – his piece adorned by the headline ‘THE LEFT BANK CAN KEEP IT’ – but Derek Granger’s mildly amused condescension in the
Financial Times
was fairly typical, calling it ‘a cast-iron copper-bottomed, rubber-lined, water-proof, high-brow’s delight with knobs on’ and adding that ‘even its “great thoughts” seem just the kind that we ourselves might have fathered given moody enough circumstances and a dull day’.

The turning point came at the weekend, as Harold Hobson in the
Sunday Times
and Kenneth Tynan in the
Observer
both wrote in very positive terms about the play’s uniqueness, and from that moment the size of the audiences quickly picked up and its London future was assured, not least as a talking point. In due course it fell to
The Critics
on the Home Service to offer their assessment. ‘Tremendously funny, deeply sad,’ thought J. W. Lambert. ‘Could have gone on listening to it for ever,’ declared Colin MacInnes. ‘A play of profound religious symbolism,’ asserted G. S. Fraser. Upon which the fourth critic, the humorist Stephen Potter, announced that, although he had disliked the play when he had seen it, ‘for the first time on record my opinion has been somewhat changed by the opinions of the other critics’, and he went on to praise it as ‘a masterpiece of production – beautifully acted . . . a very refreshing change from the average West-End play’. Potter slipped up, however, by further remarking that while watching it ‘I thought the play had no real centre – it’s exactly like Peer Gynt’s onion’. To which Lambert scornfully riposted, ‘That seems to me practically the whole point of it.’
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Eight days after
Godot
, on a Thursday morning in Soho, there took place the so-called ‘Battle of Frith Street’. London’s two dominant gangsters of the era were undoubtedly Jack Spot (real name Jack Comer) and Billy Hill, and this was a knife-fight between Spot and one of Hill’s sidekicks, Albert Dines. It ended in a greengrocers, where a large fruiterer, Bertha Hyams, finished proceedings by hitting Spot with a brass weighing-pan. Spot duly found himself at the Old Bailey, were he was charged with affray and successfully defended by Rose Heilbron. ‘Thank you very much,’ the East Ender yelled to the jury. ‘I have suffered enough.’ Which earned a sharp rebuke from Sir Gerald Dodson, Recorder of London: ‘Behave yourself!’ It soon transpired that key evidence – including from an octogenarian Anglican clergyman badly in debt to his bookmakers – had been rigged and bought, provoking John Gordon to ask bitterly in the
Sunday Express
: ‘Are the JACK SPOTS above the law?’ In fact the best days for both Spot and Hill were past them, but the Krays were still just limbering up, with Reg perfecting his celebrated ‘cigarette punch’, offering a cigarette with one hand and breaking the jaw with the other. For most people, though, the persistent fear was less of criminal godfathers than of teddy boys. One evening that summer, a Ted sat on a bus next to a friend of Gladys Langford and ‘pinched her legs & stroked her bosom and she was afraid to complain to the conductor lest she was razor-slashed – so she left the ’bus & got on one following’.
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On Saturday the 13th, two days after the Soho fracas, Philip Larkin made the memorable journey, on a slow, stopping train from Hull to London, that he eventually transmuted into ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.
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The return trip involved different emotions. ‘I had a hellish journey back, on a
filthy
train,’ he wrote to the friends he had stayed with, ‘next to a young couple with a slobbering chocolatey baby – apart from a few splashes of milk nothing happened to me, but the strain of feeling it might was a great one . . .’ Soon afterwards, reviews starting appearing of Kingsley Amis’s second novel,
That Uncertain Feeling
, which were generally favourable and, as with
Lucky Jim
, viewed him as offering something different from most other contemporary novelists. ‘He is brashly, vulgarly, aggressively unsensitive, and the world his characters inhabit is the world that has succeeded the posh,’ declared V. S. Pritchett (under the pseudonym Richard Lister) in the
New Statesman
. ‘It is the world of the Welfare State in all its crudity, and Mr Amis is a literary Teddy boy.’ Pritchett elaborated on this ‘new world’ – one of ‘sitters-in [ie babysitters], and nappies and half-washed tea-cups, and multiple stores and mass-producing tailors’ – and reckoned that Amis depicted it ‘with a mixture of two parts disgust and three parts farcical comedy’. Amis himself reflected that ‘the reviewers have been very decent on the whole, but all this “vulgar” stuff makes me wonder where they live and where they go on their free evenings’. August also saw the publication of the first
Guinness Book of Records
, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter after the Irish brewery had turned to the statistically minded twins to compile a reference book that would settle pub arguments. It would become the best-selling work of non-fiction after the Bible.
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Larkin’s thank-you letter of the 17th included a scribbled addition – ‘
Am going to buy some 6d postal orders tomorrow, for Football Pools
’ – and three days later the football season began. For the first time, Saturday-evening television was able to show in a programme called
Sports Special
some highlights of the afternoon’s action, though up to a total maximum, insisted the Football League, of only 15 minutes each week. On the opening day itself, the most heartwarming scene was at Southend United, who entertained Norwich City in Third Division South for the opening of the new Roots Hall ground, entirely financed by supporters (who apparently never thought of trying to achieve ownership). Before the kick-off, there was music by the band of the United Supporters Club, a service of dedication by the vicar of Prittlewell and everyone standing to sing ‘Abide with Me’. On a baking-hard surface on a hot afternoon, Southend ran out 3–1 winners in front of a 17,000 crowd, which after the final whistle swarmed over the pitch. The new season also featured Roy Race and Blackie Gray making their first-team debuts in
Tiger
for Melchester Rovers, at home to Elbury Wanderers. ‘The pals struck their best form right from the kick-off. Then the crowd roared as Blackie snapped up the ball, and sent a perfect through pass to Roy. Roy flicked the ball past an Elbury back, followed up and shot first time. “Goal!” “Good old Roy! Up the Rovers!” “By thunder! That new lad Race can certainly shoot!” ’ The match finished three apiece, with a brace for the blond-haired Roy of the Rovers, a centre forward with a long, turbulent career ahead of him.
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On the same day that Southend was
en fête
, John Fowles and his girlfriend opted for a different coastal destination, going to Littlehampton for a week’s holiday and staying ‘with a Mrs Sopp in an archetypal seaside lodging-house’:

A great lump of a groaning, creaking, aging, double-bed; to make love on it was like driving a lorry of old iron down a bumpy lane. A religious text lord of the mantelpiece, guarded by two drab China Alsatian dogs. Three faded pictures. ‘The Letter’, ‘The Ride’, ‘The Important Message’. A faded chromotint of men herding sheep in Australia. The enamel wash stand with basin, jug and soapdish – quite redundant, with a modern bathroom next door, but kept, one felt, for the essential artistic effect.

This summer holidays it was the customary Wales for the Fulham-based Bull family, making the journey in a second-hand van, with no windows in the back. ‘We had all the usual rituals, the 6.30 a.m. start, no breakfast till we reached somewhere called Brownhills north of Birmingham, where Mum put on an apron and cooked a fry-up of bacon and eggs on a primus stove in a lay-by,’ remembered Janet Street-Porter. ‘Oh, how I longed for a meal in a café like other people! The journey up the A5 was as interminable as ever, and my sister was reduced to counting milk churns to pass the hours, while I read till I felt car sick.’ For the 12-year-old Mike (not yet Mick) Jagger, this August was the month not of holidays but of work – a summer job on an American base near Dartford. There he played American football and baseball, drank Coke, and met a black cook, José, who introduced him to rhythm and blues. The newly Americanised Jagger would have to go back to school in September – unlike Mary O’Brien, a 16-year-old who decided this summer, having left St Anne’s convent school in Ealing, that the time had come for a complete makeover. In the privacy of her bedroom, out went the sensible, librarian look, and instead (in her biographer’s words) ‘on went the tall blonde beehive wig, the glamorous French pleated dress and grown-up high heels’, while ‘in a gesture of teenage daring’ she ‘put around her eyes layers of Indian kohl, false eyelashes and heavy black mascara’.
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It was the start of Dusty Springfield.

‘Educational opportunities here should be as good as in any grammar school,’ Mrs H. R. Chetwynd, head of the just opening Woodberry Down comprehensive school in Hackney, told the
Hackney Gazette
on the first Tuesday in September. ‘We would like people to know that this will be one complete school. Pupils will not be called grammar, central or modern, but will all belong to one school with the same chances.’ The school itself, noted the paper approvingly, was ‘one of the latest and best equipped in the country’, having taken five years to build, and could accommodate 1,250 pupils. There were three four-storey buildings, ‘extensive use of prefabricated construction’, and altogether ‘the whole lay-out is large and impressive’, enabling courses to be ‘planned to meet the needs of children of varying ability’. A handful of other new comprehensives were also opening this term, including Woodlands in Coventry. Amid significant local reservations about the change of educational direction, Alderman S. Stringer was careful to insist at the formal ceremony in October that ‘it was never the intention of the Education Committee that such schools should be competitive with the grammar school type of education’, but rather they should be complementary, giving ‘opportunities that probably would never have been there otherwise’. By contrast, the Lord Mayor, Alderman T. H. Dewis, was entirely unabashed, boasting that with this new comprehensive Coventry was in ‘the exalted position’ of ‘giving a lead to the country’. That was not strictly true, but there was no doubt that the comprehensive experiment was by now starting to take real, tangible shape. And soon afterwards, Margaret Cole expressed the hope in
Tribune
that people might at last stop assuming automatically, on the basis of no evidence, that ‘a comprehensive school “must be” a perpetual traffic-jam, a universal sausage machine of mediocrity in which the child is a lonely atom and all individuality and all initiative suppressed’.

Meanwhile, the majority of secondary-age children continued to attend secondary moderns. With its ‘118 airy rooms, including laboratories and lecture halls’, a library (with one wall completely made of glass) stocking 3,000 books (half of them non-fiction), laboratories ‘with sinks and gas points to permit a maximum number of individual experiments’, woodwork and metalwork rooms ‘so well equipped that it would be reasonable to describe them as small factories’, blackboards ‘on the roller principle’, floors ‘laid with non-slip plastic bricks’ and corridors into which ‘light streams through transparent plastic domes’ – it was no wonder that the
Chorley Guardian
was ecstatic about Southlands School, the Lancashire town’s new secondary modern. So too with the new Dick Sheppard School in Tulse Hill, a secondary modern-cum-technical school for 900 pupils. ‘The keynote of the whole school is lightness and brightness with glass walls used wherever possible,’ noted the
South London Press
, arguing that it ‘cuts at the root the deep-seated prejudice of parents and Londoners that unless a child wins a grammar place in the eleven-plus examination its career is crippled’.

It was a quite different, much less optimistic take that John Laird offered. A New Zealander who had taught at five London secondary moderns – none of them in ‘bad’ or ‘slummy’ areas – in the previous two years, he delivered in the
News Chronicle
in September a devastating three-part exposé. ‘What seems to have happened,’ he asserted, ‘is that the tradition of respect for the teacher and all that he represents has broken down. Consequently the young teacher has to fight his battle alone, unaided by any accepted background of discipline.’ The title of one piece was ‘Jungle in the Classroom’, and Laird emphasised the futility of hoping for any parental support: ‘London parents of secondary modern children apparently do not regard education as very important. They take little interest in school unless they suspect that their children are being maltreated.’ Laird reckoned that ‘about 30 per cent leave school semi-literate’, stated that ‘very few pupils read books as distinct from comics’, and concluded bleakly that ‘we are still turning out from our State schools a very large number of children who in speech and writing recognisably belong to a “lower order” ’. Unsurprisingly, many middle-class parents were loath to leave matters to chance when it came to the eleven-plus, and a few days after Laird’s articles Judy Haines in Chingford noted that several neighbouring girls were having ‘private coaching in sums’.
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