Family Britain, 1951-1957 (82 page)

On 19 October, the day after the Martins went to
The Dam Busters
, Anthony Heap made one of his regular trips to the theatre:

At last catch up with the much discussed ‘Waiting for Godot’ which was produced at the Arts to a very mixed press early in August, and, on the strength of a surprising last minute rush on the Arts box office, unexpectedly transferred to the Criterion some six weeks later. The more exalted half of the critical fraternity deemed it a subtle, witty, sublime and moving masterpiece; the more low-brow reviewers, a meaningless morass of words, a conglomeration of tripe, a glorification of the gutless. Well, as I suspected, the latter were dead right. This obscure, verbose, unintelligible, and utterly infantile brainchild of James Joyce’s secretary Samuel Beckett, concerning the wearisome waiting of a couple of dreary decayed tramps for a never-appearing Godot is, in fact, as pretentious and preposterous a piece of highbrow-poppycock as ever I’ve had the misfortune to see.

Altogether, concluded Heap, it was ‘a crashing, exasperating bore’. Others agreed. John Gielgud ‘loathed’ it, Somerset Maugham called it ‘two dirty old men picking their toenails’, and the character actor Robert Morley, after brooding in his bath for an hour, came to the conclusion that ‘the success of
Waiting for Godot
means the end of the theatre as we know it’. According to Terence Rattigan, indisputably the leading British dramatist of the day, ‘all Mr Beckett has done is to produce one of these things that thirty years ago we used to call Experimental Theatre – a movement which led absolutely nowhere’.

But even amid the catcalls, inside the Criterion as well as outside, the fact was that
Godot
was playing to packed houses every night – so much so that when John Fowles tried to see it nine days after Heap, on the grounds that ‘everyone goes, so we must’, he found there were ‘no seats for three weeks’. In early November there was a stormy meeting of BBC Radio’s drama department on the subject of experimental productions. ‘Heaven defend us from an outbreak of
Godot
-scripts where the tricks only just hide an almost complete lack of anything to say,’ was the uncompromising view of the old guard, headed by Val Gielgud, brother of John. But the argument was won by Barbara Bray, a leading young script editor: ‘Third Programme planners will have to be prepared not only to be daring initially, but also to persist in the face of possible audience resistance long enough for public taste to accommodate itself.’ Not long afterwards, the
Evening Standard
drama awards were held for the first time, with feelings running high among the judging panel. After the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent had threatened to resign if
Godot
was given the prize for best play, an ingenious compromise was brokered: best play to go to Jean Giraudoux’s
Tiger at the Gates
, while the prize for
Godot
was ‘most controversial’ play of the year – a one-off award, never given again.
²⁰

October was not a happy month for Rab Butler. His give-away budget in April – directly leading to the Tory election win in May – had been predicated on the Bank of England exercising monetary control over the banks, but by July a mixture of inflationary and balance-of-payments pressures had made it all too clear that the strategy, for all its immediate political pay-off, had been economically flawed. Butler in late July had announced a round of credit-restricting measures, but during October severe pressure on sterling led to him having to introduce an emergency budget on Wednesday the 26th, involving significant cuts in government spending and an increase in purchase taxes. ‘These were steeply raised on everything from a car to a lipstick, and clamped for the first time on lots of hitherto free household goods, which the Tories gloomily fear will hardly induce the housewife to love the Conservative Party,’ noted Mollie Panter-Downes next day. ‘Labour currently has its best chance in months for an all-out attack on the Government, and will certainly take it.’ This particularly applied to Hugh Gaitskell, who delivered in the Commons an uncharacteristically personal, bruising attack on Butler:

He has persistently and wilfully misled the public about the economic situation and he has done it for electoral reasons . . . The April Budget – a masterpiece of deception – certainly encouraged instead of damping down additional spending. Now, having bought his votes with a bribe, the Chancellor is forced – as he knew he would be – to dishonour the cheque . . . He has behaved in a manner unworthy of his office. He began in folly, he continued in deceit, and he has ended in reaction.

The speech, reflected the
Observer
’s political diarist, marked the ‘Demise of Mr Butskell’.

As British economic policy prepared to enter the stop-go cycle that would continue for at least the next quarter of a century, there were other signs, this time from the right, that that cosy, consensual, mythical figure was now past the high tide of his influence. At the Conservative Party Conference at Bournemouth earlier in the month, a chorus of louder-than-usual grumbles was heard from constituency representatives about the impact of rising prices on the lifestyles of the middle classes – some of whom, according to the man from Peckham, were ‘rapidly arriving at the position’ where they ‘can hardly afford even a theatre ticket’. Or take the speech some six weeks earlier by J. Gibson Jarvie, chairman of United Dominions Trust and a well-known City personality, at his company’s annual meeting. After a disparaging analysis of the British workforce – ‘in many factories the most unpopular man is the hardest worker and the fastest’ – he turned to the government and directly blamed it for inflation: ‘It is their incredible weakness in dealing with organised labour and their demands for goods and services, their calls on the capital market and the inflated national income resulting from unproductive Government employment, which tear our economy to pieces.’ Nor, in terms of government, was it just the politicians: ‘Beginning with the war years, there has been a sinister abdication of power and authority to the established civil servants. Whitehall is the bureaucrat’s paradise. The creation and perpetuation of employment for civil servants seems to have been a prime objective.’ Finally, after a swipe at modern youth – ‘ambition sadly lacking . . . undisciplined . . .’ – Jarvie called for lower government spending, for lower taxation, and for ‘the strike weapon’ to ‘give way to a more sensible – I could say a more grown-up – method of settling industrial disputes’.

Delivered in the same year that the newly created, incorrigibly pro-market Institute of Economic Affairs brought out its first publication – on the desirability of the free convertibility of sterling – it was not quite a Thatcherite agenda, but not too far off.
²¹

Butler’s budget,
Waiting for Godot
, even
The Dam Busters
– all mattered infinitely less to the British public this October than the unfolding Princess Margaret drama. The final phase of this act had begun on 19 August, two days before her twenty-fifth birthday. ‘COME ON MARGARET!’ screamed the front page of the
Daily Mirror
, adding, underneath a large photograph of her, ‘please make up your mind!’ The matter to resolve was whether, two years having elapsed since their enforced separation, she would now seek to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend – and what the price of such a marriage would be. ‘She has
not
absolutely decided,’ Harold Macmillan noted a week later after a conversation with Eden, who in turn had been talking with the Queen. ‘It will be a thousand pities if she does go on with this marriage to a divorced man and not a very suitable match in any case. It cannot aid and may injure the prestige of the Royal Family.’

There things rested until October, when Townsend was due for some home leave. ‘Mrs Atkinson came in,’ recorded Nella Last on Thursday the 13th as press coverage increased its intensity:

She had got me some yeast. She said idly, ‘Looks as if you’re going to be right, that Princess Margaret
will
marry Townsend – seen the paper yet?’ We discussed it. We both felt ‘regret’ she couldn’t have married a younger man. Mrs Atkinson too has ‘principles’ about divorce that I lack. We just idly chatted, saying any little thing that came into our minds, for or against the match. I wasn’t prepared for my husband’s wild
condemnation
or his outburst about my far too easy-going way of looking at things! . . . I poached him an egg for tea.

That evening the storm-tossed couple had two hours together at Clarence House. ‘TOWNSEND VISITS MARGARET’ and ‘NOW – THE NATION WAITS’ were among next morning’s headlines. ‘Nothing much else than Princess Margaret’s affairs is being talked of in this country,’ observed the
Manchester Guardian
on Saturday morning, and that weekend the press besieged Allanbay Park in Binfield, Berkshire, where Margaret and Townsend were guests of the Hon Mrs John Lycett Mills, a first cousin of the princess. ‘NO RING YET!’ announced a disappointed
Daily Mirror
on Monday, with an accompanying photo of Margaret and the bare third finger of her left hand.
²²

Next day, Tuesday the 18th, the Cabinet discussed the question and took a collective view that if Margaret went ahead and married Townsend, she would lose both her rights of succession and her Civil List allowance. On the Wednesday, Nella Last had a visit from two former neighbours, a mother with her married daughter. ‘She is a rather silly “bobby soxer” who never really grew up,’ she wrote afterwards about the daughter, ‘& if there’s one thing I detest on the whole of God’s green earth it’s an “adolescent” of 37 or so! How she yammered about the “fairy tale” romance of Princess Margaret – just like you read about in Fairy Tales.’ The
Mirror
’s headline of the day, however, was ‘MARGARET DINES TONIGHT WITH PRIMATE WHO WON’T MARRY HER TO TOWNSEND’, and that evening (while Anthony Heap waited impatiently for Godot) Margaret did indeed dine with the unrelenting Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, who did indeed counsel her against. One increasingly exasperated observer of the whole business was Malcolm Muggeridge. ‘The probability is, I suppose, that the monarchy has become a kind of
ersatz
religion,’ he wrote in this week’s
New Statesman
(in a piece called ‘Royal Soap Opera’), which was out on Friday morning. And he concluded:

The royal family and their advisers have really got to make up their minds – do they want to be part of the mystique of the century of the common man or to be an institutional monarchy; to ride, as it were, in a glass coach or on bicycles; to provide the tabloids with a running serial or to live simply and unaffectedly among their subjects like the Dutch and Scandinavian royal families. What they cannot do is to have it both ways.

Muggeridge’s reward was an
Evening Standard
editorial accusing him of treasonable views.

This same Friday, the 21st, with ‘MARGARET AND PETER TOGETHER AGAIN’ the
Mirror
’s unashamedly soap-opera headline, the Queen, watched by the Cabinet and the rest of the Royal Family, unveiled a statue of George VI in Carlton Gardens. ‘Much was asked of my father in personal sacrifice and endeavour,’ she said in heavy rain in words equally heavy with resonance. ‘He shirked no task, however difficult, and to the end he never faltered in his duty.’ Gazing sympathetically at the royals as they returned to the Palace was Madge Martin, down in London for the day with her husband. ‘We had a grand view of them in the Royal cars,’ she recorded. ‘The Queen lovely, and delicate; Princess Margaret, pale and strained, under all the nerve-wracking time she’s going through now – regarding her possible marriage with Captain Peter Townsend. Poor young thing.’ Joyce Grenfell, albeit in New York, felt much the same. ‘Papers here full of Meg and Peter,’ she wrote later this day to her friend Virginia Graham in London. ‘Wish they’d decide. Sad whatever they do. Poor girl.’ Saturday found Margaret in the East End – where she opened a new community centre and heard women shouting, amid cheers, ‘Good luck, Maggie! You marry him!’ – while next day Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park reflected: ‘A lot of gossip in the papers . . . Why can’t they leave the girl alone? They abuse the freedom of the press.’
²³

Monday and Tuesday were quiet, but the next two days paid for all. ‘Princess Margaret’ was the authoritative title of the main leader in
The Times
(hitherto standing aloof) on Wednesday the 26th, the day of Butler’s emergency budget. Almost certainly reflecting the strong views of the paper’s editor, Sir William Haley, in effect this was the Establishment seeking to deliver a knock-out blow in order to end an unseemly, even dangerous controversy. After describing the ‘enormous popular emotion’ on the subject as ‘sentimental’ and ‘ill-informed’, and referring to the press’s ‘odious whipping-up of these honest and warm-hearted feelings’, it defined the fundamental purpose of the Royal Family as to be ‘above all things the symbol and guarantee of the unity of the British peoples’. Accordingly: ‘There is no escape from the logic of the situation. The QUEEN’s sister married to a divorced man (even though the innocent party) would be irrevocably disqualified from playing her part in the essential royal function.’ In practice, went on
The Times
, this would entail ‘abandonment of her place in the Royal Family as a group fulfilling innumerable symbolic and representative functions’. The editorial ended on an appropriately sententious note: ‘Her fellow-subjects will wish her every possible happiness – not forgetting that happiness in the full sense is a spiritual state, and that its most precious element may be the sense of duty done.’ This did the job, for Townsend subsequently recalled that, after reading it, he and Margaret had privately agreed that it would be impossible to go ahead. The following day, she called on Fisher and told him that, on the grounds of conscience, she had reached her decision. ‘Was her act of abnegation from a sense of duty, or through an unwillingness to lose her title, status and income?’ Nick Clarke would ask almost half a century later, and with the passage of time it is hard not to view the latter motive as having been somewhere near the fore.