Family Britain, 1951-1957 (8 page)

They must enjoy the simple pleasures. (Mrs Newcomb likes best a quiet evening at home with her husband ‘relaxing and making a mess with his pipe and the family watching television’ or walking in the country with their dog Rover.)

A husband who doesn’t drink, except for a sherry at Christmas, and who doesn’t grumble.

A wife who, although told by her employer that she was a career girl who would never enjoy married life, makes a success of it, and who loves making such dainties as lemon meringue pie and fruit flan for a most appreciative husband.

A husband who doesn’t mind doing the washing-up on his Sundays off . . .

Phyllis Prescott, years later still bitter about the sheer atypicality of the Newcombs (not least their claim that they never had rows), remembered Hancock as one of the judges.1 That seems unlikely from the accounts in the press, but even if he had been, the family that so openly and cheerfully enjoyed a punt was probably never going to win. Only a week after the election, it was another sign that the middle class was back in the box-seat.

Another railwayman’s son was also destined for disappointment, in his case permanently so. This was the writer Jack Common, whose most ambitious novel,
Kiddar’s Luck
, was published in November to considerable critical acclaim. ‘This is a rich, tolerant, considered and indeed really brilliant picture of working-class life and a profoundly human one,’ declared V. S. Pritchett in the
New Statesman
about Common’s largely autobiographical account of a working-class childhood in Newcastle during the early part of the century. ‘This book makes most of the novels of working-class life look faked and overstrained.’ The
Daily Express
even speculated that ‘it may collect the jackpot, as Walter Greenwood did 20 years ago with
Love on the Dole
’. It did not happen. ‘Having been,’ to quote the historian Robert Colls, ‘too late (and perhaps unwilling) for the Proletcult of the 1930s,’ Common now found himself ‘too early (and perhaps too old) for the Angry Young Man marketing of the 1950s.’ Still, one authentic working-class voice from the region was by this time starting to be heard – albeit not south of the Trent. This was the stand-up comedian Bobby Thompson, ‘The Little Waster’, who since October had been featured about one week in three on the variety programme
Wot Cheor Geordie!
This went out on Tuesday evenings at seven on the North of England Home Service, recruited all its acts from the Newcastle area and was invariably recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience in local theatres or miners’ welfare halls. By the time the current series ended in April 1952, Thompson was top of the bill, with
Radio Times
calling him ‘a Durham lad who has made quite a hit’. He was in fact 40 and, after years performing mainly in pubs and working men’s clubs for little or no money, had just given up his full-time job as a labourer at the Royal Ordinance Factory in Birtley, County Durham.2

It was also on a Tuesday evening this winter, 11 December, that the Royal Albert Hall featured, at the bottom of the bill, three six-round contests (one welterweight and two lightweight) of a peculiarly family nature. ‘Lew Lazar, Aldgate, displayed a varied selection of punches before knocking out Charlie Kray, Bethnal Green, in the third round,’ reported
Boxing News
. ‘The Kray twins from Bethnal Green had mixed fortunes. Reg turned in the most memorable performance of the pair to outpoint Bobby Manito, Clapham, but Ron never found an answer to the speedier leading of Bill Sliney, King’s Cross, and was well outpointed.’ Charlie was 25, Reg and Ron were 18, and (in the words of one of Ron’s obituarists) ‘the twins’ street reputations were the result of successful unlicensed bouts with various local rivals’. Three weeks later there was also violence in the air in Glasgow, at the annual New Year’s Day ‘Old Firm’ match between Celtic and Rangers. Far from unprecedented in the fixture, and invariably fuelled by sectarian chanting and flag-waving, the trouble started this time when the visiting Rangers went 4–1 ahead some 20 minutes from time. ‘It was stated by the police,’ reported the
Glasgow Herald
, ‘that a bottle was thrown from high up on the terracing, and landed in the middle of the crowd, who scattered. There was more trouble and a man was arrested. Bottles were thrown at the policemen, who took the man away.’ The trouble then spread as several hundred in the covered enclosure scrambled on to the track surrounding the pitch, some even getting on to the pitch itself, before mounted policemen managed to clear them. Eleven people were arrested, with two of them jailed. ‘Something must be done,’ declared the
Herald
with feeling rather than originality. ‘This hooliganism on the sports field cannot be allowed to go on. The sport of football must be cleaned up.’ In fact hooliganism at football matches was still pretty rare – in England in 1951, only 21 incidents of spectator misconduct and disorderliness were reported to the FA – but, contrary to subsequent mythology about a ‘golden age’, it was not non-existent.3

Away from the terraces, this first post-war winter under a Tory government remained for most people a daily struggle. There were reductions in imports of unrationed foods; rationing itself remained firmly in force for the time being; and Churchill even had to announce a cut in the weekly meat ration. It was presumably around this time that, confused by figures and weights, he asked his Minister of Food to show him an individual’s rations. ‘Not a bad meal, not a bad meal,’ said Churchill when the exhibit was produced. ‘But these,’ responded the Minister, ‘are not rations for a meal or for a day. They are for a week.’ Inevitably housewives were as much as ever at the sharp end, including of price rises. Nella Last in Barrow, noting ‘rail fares up 2/- in the £’ and ‘coal 3d or 6d more a cwt’, reflected just after Christmas that ‘it seems startling to have to face such “jumps”, after the feeling that a change of Govt would make for early betterment’; and in Chingford on New Year’s Eve, Judy Haines was told by the ‘girl in Dyson’s’ that ‘I have lost my last week’s fats, cheese and bacon rations for four as I didn’t get them before they stock-took’, which got Haines properly ‘worked up’ before she ‘took it up with Manager, who gave no trouble!’ Equally inevitably, continuing shortages meant a continuing role for the spiv – a role commemorated in February by the rhyme chanted by an 11-year-old girl living in Hackney:

We are three spivs of Trafalgar Square

Flogging nylons tuppence a pair,

All fully fashioned, all off the ration

Sold in Trafalgar Square.

‘Victoria tells me her brother, aged ten, made it up,’ her teacher informed Peter and Iona Opie. ‘Victoria and her friends skip to the rhyme very fast with a “bump” on the last word.’4

For non-skipping pedestrians, these were fraught times. ‘Lots of pedestrian crossings have been swept away in Notting Hill Gate,’ complained Vere Hodgson in the same entry that acclaimed the Churchillian restoration. ‘I am foaming with rage.’ Four days later, on 31 October, new regulations came into effect about the use and markings of pedestrian crossings, against a background of government having asked local authorities to do away with uncontrolled crossings, which had neither traffic lights nor policemen and were being widely ignored. Instead, the emphasis was going to be on the recently introduced zebra crossings, with a £5 fine for pedestrians who lingered unnecessarily. Over the ensuing weeks and months, controversy rumbled on: parents protesting against the removal of crossings outside schools formed human barriers in order to hold up traffic while children crossed safely – protests that stimulated the arrival by the mid-1950s of school-crossing patrols and, in due course, the circular ‘children crossing’ sign (aka ‘lollipop’). Test cases led to judges giving various rulings about the respective rights of motorists and pedestrians at zebra crossings, with the more right-wing press (typified by the
Daily Express
’s anti-pedestrian motoring correspondent Basil Cardew) tending to support those behind the wheel.

Cardew also had a word of sympathy for the unfortunate George Samson, a 57-year-old bus driver who on the evening of 5 December, the day before he was due to receive a medal for 25 years of safe driving, came down a badly lit hill in Chatham and accidentally ploughed into 52 Marine cadets (aged between ten and thirteen) who were marching to the naval barracks for a boxing match. Twenty-four died – Britain’s worst road disaster yet. At the trial in January, Samson was fined £20 for dangerous driving and disqualified for three years, after the jury had found him guilty but entered a plea for leniency. Relatives as well as some newspaper columnists were sharply critical of the mild punishment, but the great majority of the 1,500 letters that Samson had received from all over the country since the tragedy had been of a sympathetic nature. ‘I am very grateful for the letters appreciating my position,’ Samson in tweed overcoat and cloth cap told a reporter over a cup of tea near the Old Bailey. ‘I know they are only words, but I want to say again how very deeply sorry I am for the parents of the boys.’ And he added, almost in tears: ‘Don’t forget, I knew many of them. Many of those little cadets used to come to my home. They called me “Sammy”.’

It had been shortly before this dreadful accident that the merger had been announced between Morris Motors (largely based at Cowley, Oxford) and the Austin Motor Co. (largely based at Longbridge, Birmingham). Its motives were mainly defensive – in a context of increasing market share for Ford and Vauxhall (both of them American-owned), as well as German, French and Italian car outputs starting to reach almost pre-war levels – and the press gave the decision a generally easy ride. Citing economies of scale and increasing standardisation of parts as future boons, the
Economist
reckoned that ‘its promoters may well be justified in claiming that the amalgamation will not only be of advantage to their shareholders, but will be also “in the national interest” ’. The merger duly took effect in 1952, with the new combine called the British Motor Corporation – the largest motor company in the world outside the US. Chairman and managing director was the 55-year-old Leonard Lord, who in the 1930s had had an unhappy relationship with Lord Nuffield at Cowley before moving to Austin. No one ever denied his qualities as a relentless, even bullying production man, but whether he would have the requisite vision and skills to oversee Britain’s flagship car maker, responsible for almost two-fifths of the country’s output, was altogether another question. ‘You know what BMC stands for?’ Lord himself enjoyed boasting. ‘Bugger My Competitors!’5

Neither motoring nor television-watching were yet majority pursuits, but it was a major development when the BBC’s Holme Moss station opened in October, shortly before the election, at a stroke creating 11 million potential viewers in the north of England. One TV critic, Leonard Mosley, went on an immediate recce, an experience that convinced him that in the north the TV set ‘will not (as it often is in the south) be a fill-up for the corner of the lounge, a stand-by when there is nothing on at the local flicks or theatre, or something to keep the children quiet’, but instead something much more vital and central to everyday life. A letter in
Woman’s Own
at the start of 1952 suggested he may have been right. ‘Up to a few months ago I was hardly ever at home in the evenings, but now I find it’s much more fun to stay in,’ Jane Collins wrote from Manchester. ‘The reason for this sudden change is that my father has recently bought a television set. And it’s surprising what a difference it has made to our family. Now, instead of going out for entertainment, we stay in our own front room where our friends and relations are welcome to pop in and join us if there’s something they particularly want to see.’ It was symptomatic that already in November
Radio Fun
had become
T.V. Comic
– though two days later, on Remembrance Sunday, Mary King in Birmingham defiantly noted, after listening to Richard Dimbleby’s commentary on the ceremony at the Cenotaph, that ‘the picture he drew was quite equal to seeing it on a “Television Set” ’. Soon afterwards, a BBC survey of listening habits found that ‘those over 50 listened to the Home Service in the evening twice as much as those under 20’, whereas on the Light Programme there was no such split. Even so, in terms of individual programmes, ‘youngsters listened more than older people to such Light Programme evening series as
Variety Bandbox
,
Life with the Lyons
,
Variety Fanfare
,
Fine Goings On
,
Family Favourites
, Sport, Dance Music and, of course,
Jazz Club
, whose listeners are almost confined to 16–19 year olds.’6

There were presumably some jazz-lovers among the students at Aberdeen University who in November elected a new Rector to succeed Sir Stafford Cripps. The university’s liveliest campaign for many years produced a striking outcome: 104 votes for the black singer and campaigner Paul Robeson; 104 votes also for the Deeside laird Captain A.A.C. Farquharson; 370 votes for the celebrated war hero Lord Lovat; and 430 votes for the
Take It From Here
star Jimmy Edwards, only 31 but already known as ‘Professor’. ‘The students did not put me in as a comedian but as someone to help their interests,’ the winner told an Aberdeen paper from his country home in Sussex. ‘If there’s anything the students want me to do I will do it.’ Soon afterwards,
Picture Post
attributed the outcome to how ‘a gathering undercurrent of hostility had been swirling to and fro between the students and the “senators”, or governing body, with the students complaining of an immoderate and Grundyish interference with their out-of-hours activities’. But if there was just a whiff of the sixties and student rebellion about the choice of Edwards, the fate this same winter of the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing – mastermind behind the cracking of the German Enigma code and arguably the father of the modern computer – was testimony to darker, wholly unreconstructed forces. On the evening of 7 February, just weeks after he had appeared on a Third Programme discussion about whether machines could be said to think, the police came knocking on his door at Wilmslow. His crime, following a brief liaison with a fair, blue-eyed Manchester youth called Arnold Murray, was ‘Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885’. At one point Turing gave the detectives a lengthy, handwritten statement, which particularly struck them because of his lack of shame. ‘He was a real convert,’ one recalled, ‘he really believed he was doing the right thing.’7 The case would be heard at the next Quarter Sessions.