Family Britain, 1951-1957 (85 page)

Overall, it was still, more or less, a believing people. Gorer found not only that two-fifths of adults in England made prayers ‘a regular part of their lives’, and another one-fifth in times of peril or grief, but also that 47 per cent believed in an afterlife, with another 30 per cent uncertain. That envisaged afterlife tended to be positive, often taking what Gorer called ‘a very material nature’:

It will be a wonderful place with everything just right and there will be plenty of lovely food without rationing I hope. (
Married woman, 41, West Bromwich
)

More peaceful than the present one, with no cold, wars or washing up. I hope there will be animals, music and no towns; a kind of ideal earth in heaven. (
Married woman, Berkhamsted
)

I believe it will be a very happy place, with no colour bars, no ‘class’ distinction, no intonation of speech, a place where everyone will have a job to do, no matter whether he was king or peasant in this world, a place where there will be a common language. Jesus Christ and his twelve disciples will be a form of Government, there will be no opposition, for there will be nothing to oppose. (
Young woman, Bishop’s Stortford
)

Similar to life here but no sex life. (
Divorced working-class woman, 41, Oldham
)

Gorer’s figures were broadly confirmed by Gallup’s 1957 survey: 71 per cent believing that Jesus was the Son of God, 54 per cent believing there was life after death, and only 6 per cent denying outright the existence of ‘any sort of spirit/god or life force’. For most believers, ethics trumped metaphysics. ‘The workers,’ noted Zweig, ‘are not interested in theology and you cannot make them discuss any of the theological problems which seem so important in religious literature. They believe that the supreme being exists and they think that this is enough.’ Hoggart encountered much the same amid the Hunslet working class’s understanding of religion: ‘doing good’, ‘common decency’, ‘helping lame dogs’, ‘doing unto others as y’would be done unto’, ‘we’re ’ere to ’elp one another’, ‘learning to know right from wrong’. Crucially, Hoggart emphasised the peripheral nature of these ethical precepts in people’s actual daily lives. ‘Doing your best, but remembering the “real world” outside, the world of work and debts,’ he wrote in an illuminating passage, informed by deep personal knowledge. ‘Life is making the best of things in this world, is “rubbing along” as best you may; you may have “Christ’s teaching” somewhere at the back of your head; you may, when you think of it, admire it; but still, when it comes to the living of life itself, well “you know . . .”.’5

If Hoggart is correct – that the ethical basis of most people’s Christian beliefs counted for relatively little in practice, by implication perhaps little or no more than the ethical convictions of non-believers – it is hard to see how Britain in the 1950s can, in any meaningful sense, be called a Christian society. Nevertheless, it was still a society in which religion had a greater day-to-day weight – was more deeply embedded – than would subsequently be the case.

Starting with religious affiliation. Here, Gorer revealed that more than three-quarters of the English adult population assigned themselves, however loosely, to some religion or denomination, predominantly the Church of England. The bond between people and churches was kept intact especially through Sunday schools – ‘a national custom’ (in Gorer’s phrase) to which the majority of parents in his survey sent their children, even though most of those parents were themselves not churchgoers on any regular basis. Not long afterwards, the Derby survey revealed that 63 per cent of children aged between four and ten, and 56 per cent between eleven and fifteen, attended a Sunday school. Parental motives were not exactly spiritual: getting the children out of the house, reckoned Hoggart, allied to ‘the notion that Sunday school is a civilizing influence, that it helps the children to avoid “getting into bad ways” ’. Churches were also involved in all sorts of youth groups, boys’ clubs and so on, while explicitly Christian organisations ranged from the Mothers’ Union to the Boys’ Brigade, whose Glasgow battalion in the 1950s ran the world’s largest football league, with some 200 teams competing on Saturday afternoons.

Religious broadcasting was still hugely important to the BBC, whose Gallup survey in 1954 found over two-thirds of the sample listening frequently (37 per cent) or occasionally (31 per cent) to such programmes. Generational tensions surfaced that year when the BBC objected to Don Cornell’s chart-topping ‘Hold My Hand’, on the grounds of the profanity of the line ‘This is the kingdom of heaven’. An amended line (‘This is the wonder of heaven’) was overdubbed for purposes of airplay, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, still publicly criticised the song when Cornell came to Britain on tour. The American balladeer expressed his annoyance – breaking some furniture in front of the press – and everywhere the audiences loyally shouted out, ‘Sing your banned song, Donny boy!’6

Sundays remained special – and, for most younger people anyway, specially awful. The boredom, the sense of nothing happening or ever likely to happen again, seemingly affected everything:

The streets of Carlisle would be totally empty as if a bomb had gone off – no shops, no pubs, no life, no everything. My father would not even allow me to ride my bike on a Sunday, let alone play football in the street, read the
Dandy
or
Beano
or do anything much that smacked of pleasure and enjoyment. Not that he was religious or went to church . . . (
Hunter Davies
)

Sunday lunch: family favourites, mum scraping veg, he [father] carving the lamb. I always tried to be out before
Billy Cotton’s Bandstand
[in fact
Band Show
]. Wakey wahhhkey. (
Ossie Clark, Warrington
)

Cinemas opened, but only briefly, and no God-fearing person would be seen going to the pictures on a Sunday. So after the Light Programme’s lunchtime diet of
Two-Way Family Favourites
,
The
Billy Cotton Band Show
and
Educating Archie
, it was either a game of Ludo or a good stiff walk. The weather had to be particularly bad for my father not to suggest the latter option. (
Anton Rippon, Derby
)

On fine days, we went out as a family for long walks or rode our bikes past hatted church-goers (which we weren’t) in stilled villages. Apart from the occasional newsagent, no shops were open, nor cinemas, nor pubs. Small railway stations closed and the signals on many lines stood all day disappointingly at red. Neighbours chatted over the hedge as they dug their gardens, church bells sometimes tolled. Otherwise, a great external quietness meant to encourage reflection in our internal souls. (
Ian Jack, Fife
)

In 1953 a Labour MP, John Parker, introduced a Sunday Observance Bill seeking to repeal the existing legislation and allow a greater range of Sunday entertainments. This was not only voted down by 281 to 57, with Churchill refusing to allow a royal commission on the subject of Sunday observance, but a Gallup poll found that most people were opposed to professional sport, let alone horse racing, on a Sunday.7

Two developments in September 1955 signalled a degree of change in the air. The first concerned the Duke of Edinburgh’s penchant for playing polo or cricket on Sundays, behaviour strongly attacked by the Free Church of Scotland in its monthly magazine. The
Daily Mirror
, in a characteristic leader on ‘The Duke’s Sunday’, returned fire:

Who in Britain thinks it is a crime to play cricket on Sundays?

  Who in Britain thinks it is a crime to play polo on the Sabbath?

 
VERY FEW PEOPLE.

 
People whose ideas are as out of date as the penny-farthing bicycle.

A few days later a reproachful Archbishop Fisher wrote to Prince Philip, in effect accusing him of giving ‘great encouragement’ to ‘all who now are constantly seeking to invade the domesticity of Sunday rest and recreations, and who when the time comes will press very hard for legislation to remove all restrictions upon the full secularisation and commercialisation of Sunday’. Philip’s shortish, rather breezy reply – ‘I don’t think there is any need to be apprehensive about Sunday observance . . .’ – yielded nothing. Later that month arrived commercial television and
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, decisively supplanting radio’s more decorous Jean Pougnet and the Palm Court Orchestra, coming from the Grand Hotel. ‘The most daring Sunday programme yet,’ asserted
Picture Post
’s Denzil Batchelor, who wondered what was going to happen to ‘the English Sunday as we know it’ if, driven by the very commercial dictates of the new channel, ‘the most exciting cricket, the top boxing and athletics, find their way to the TV screens’:

I think the coming of competitive TV will see the end of the British Sunday as a day of rest, church-going and good works – and nothing more. Whether, as a result of this, church-going itself will fall off – whether, in fact, in some cases it
could
fall off – I would not care to prophesy. It is possible that it may increase, when people know that the rest of their holy day is to be regarded as a holiday – as it was in the glorious past when Britain was a Christian Country.8

Deference, respectability, conformity, restraint, trust – these were probably all more important than piety in underpinning ‘the 1950s’.

Despite the egalitarian effects of the war, deference still ran deep in British society, whether towards traditional institutions, or senior people in hierarchical organisations, or prominent local figures (the teacher, the bank manager, the JP, the GP), or older people generally, or the better educated, or that increasingly influential phenomenon, the somewhat stern but more or less benign expert, for example in childcare. Hard empirical evidence for this deference is surprisingly elusive, but three brief vignettes are evocative. First, in that ultra-hierarchical, status-conscious, age-respecting, largely male preserve, the City of London, where in most offices it was still ‘Mr this’ and ‘Mr that’, with no ready assumption of first-name terms. ‘You may call me Ernest,’ the merchant banker Thalmann (of Warburgs) announced towards the end of the decade to a recent recruit, Peter Spira, and the proverbial pin was heard to drop when the young man eventually mustered the courage to do so. Or take the response in August 1954 after the
Sunday Pictorial
had dared to speculate on what sort of school the almost six-year-old Prince Charles would be going to and had printed an accompanying coupon asking readers to send in their views. ‘1-in-4 say M.Y.O.B. [ie Mind Your Own Business],’ rather ruefully noted the following week’s headline, a view typified by G. A. Septon of Glebe Gardens, New Malden: ‘If half the parents in the country were as good and conscientious as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh there would be little cause for concern anywhere. Trust the Queen and Prince Philip.’ A few months later, Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford) was at Hearsall, on the outskirts of Coventry, addressing a Parent-Teachers’ Association about the city’s comprehensive experiment. ‘Rather ominously,’ he recorded afterwards, ‘in the vote of thanks one parent said that it was so nice to have the thing explained by somebody who talked English properly, unlike some Councillors, who had tried to teach parents how education had been organised but obviously were not educated themselves.’9

It was hard to avoid – or evade – the culture of respectability. ‘I found it quite easy to alter all the Boot’s things, and of course I perfectly well understand the reason for it all,’ Kingsley Amis wrote in February 1955 to his editor at Gollancz after concern had been voiced about some expressions in
That Uncertain Feeling
that might lead to the novel being banned by Boots Circulating Library and possibly other libraries also. ‘ “Balls” and “a quick in and out” were very easy, and I found the best treatment for the “buggers” was to alter each one on its merits rather than trying to devise an equivalent for the word.’ Few patrolled the boundaries of respectability more assiduously than Winifred ‘Biddy’ Johnson, all-powerful editor of the mass-circulation
Woman’s Weekly
, first port of call for most Mills & Boon serialisations. Doctor–nurse romances were her preferred genre; the doctors themselves had to be unimpeachable, and neither the language nor the drink were permitted to be strong. ‘Do Johnson women go to pubs?’ an exasperated author asked Alan Boon as his hero Bruce was about to take Trudi out for a drink. ‘I always think “country inn” sounds so ingenuous, especially if they go for
supper
, even if it’s bread and cheese and a gallon of wallop . . . Anyhow I shall write it that way for the book, and we can always make it a milk bar or something when we approach Johnson.’

An intrinsic part of respectability was what the film critic Penelope Houston called ‘that celebrated English custom of ignoring a disagreeable fact, on the assumption that if left alone it may quietly go away’, and she complained with justifiable bitterness about how this meant that ‘many areas of experience are closed off to the British film-maker’, or at least a film-maker who wanted any degree of commercial success. The BBC did not help. ‘I want you to see yourself as – well – as having become an officer in a rather good regiment’ was how the new recruit Robin Day was welcomed to the Radio Talks department in 1954. It was in general a slow-moving, highly bureaucratic organisation with precious little appetite for taking risks or giving offence. News bulletins remained, in David Hendy’s words, ‘pillars of grammatical rectitude’; for most of the decade there was, to Peter O’Sullevan’s considerable irritation, a complete ban on any betting information in horse-racing broadcasts; and, down with flu in December 1954, John Fowles noted how ‘everyone on the BBC talks as if they are a little bit older and cleverer than anybody else, but they’re doing their damndest to conceal it’.10