Family Britain, 1951-1957 (96 page)

5.55 pm.
As the weather forecast for land areas starts on the radio in the kitchen, Dad, on cue, makes his way upstairs to wash.

6.00 pm.
The news headlines follow the Greenwich Time Signal on the Home Service, and the radio is switched off. Mum calls me in from the garden. Dad appears, wearing trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, looking pink and scrubbed.

6.05 pm.
Everyone is now sitting at the table except Mum, who is serving up each meal on plates in the kitchen. She brings plates through, starting with Dad’s first, apologising as she does so for the way she’s cooked the food. Each plate has on it a lamb chop, a number of boiled potatoes, peas (picked from the garden) and carrots. ‘I don’t know if you’ll really like these chops,’ admits Mum. ‘They weren’t very good to start with – that Tony’s a real twister – but I’ve burned them a bit as well.’ No one responds to these apologetic remarks; we’re used to them, and also know that the chops will be delicious.

6.08 pm.
We all start eating, except Mum, who hasn’t sat down yet nor brought a plate of food for herself. No one comments on this. We know that, about half-way through the first course, she will bring a much smaller, scrappier portion of food into the living room for herself. I have an uneasy feeling, looking back on this, that, like a lot of women in low-income families, Mum was regularly cutting back on her own food so her children and husband could have enough. She would eventually sit down reluctantly and say things like, ‘You don’t really fancy the food you’ve cooked yourself. I’m fed up with looking at it.’

6.20 pm.
The first course is over. Dad has left two boiled potatoes on his plate, a small gesture to signal that he had been given more than enough and is satisfied – a pointless gesture that annoys Mum.

6.21 pm.
Mum, who has hardly touched her food, brings in the second course, which is rhubarb crumble, made with rhubarb from the garden – and Bird’s custard. Mum apologises again for the poor quality and the predictability of this pudding idea, and doesn’t have any herself. We all enjoy it.

6.30 pm.
The males finish their rhubarb crumble. Mum goes out to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. Dad says something about the weather. Mum returns with teacups and saucers, a milk jug and a sugar bowl. She goes back out again, to the pantry this time, returning with a brown loaf, butter in a butter dish and a slab of red Cheshire on a plate, with a small cheese knife. Dad gets up and stretches his arms, then stands surveying the garden, swaying gently at anchor. Mum, who has gone out to the kitchen yet again, comes back in with a large metal teapot.

6.35 pm.
The atmosphere is suddenly more relaxed. Dad and Mum share a joke, then Dad picks up his cup of tea and the
Daily Telegraph
and wanders through to the front room to read, chewing a Rennie’s digestion tablet. We all chat as Mum butters thin slices of bread and we all help ourselves to slivers of moist, red cheese. This is the food Mum likes best. The tea in my cup is strong and brown and has thick Jersey milk in it, with two teaspoonfuls of sugar.

7.00 pm.
Mum washes up.

Blakemore adds that generally, in terms of the domestic economy, there were ‘two big flies in the ointment’ for his mother. The first was the increasingly inadequate housekeeping money. ‘Dad left a certain amount of money on top of the bureau in the kitchen, every week. He seemed to assume that Mum would discover it, with a little cry of pleasure and surprise, as she went about her dusting. The actual amount that was needed to cover the cost of the week’s groceries, coal and milk was never discussed. On Planet Dad, it seemed that a full catering and fuel supply service could be obtained by leaving a modest amount of cash like this under an old butter dish.’ The other problem was boredom. ‘She had been left with all the responsibility of what to make for tea, but basically she had gone off the idea.’ And Blakemore quotes her remark to him in the 1970s, after Wilfrid had died: ‘At last! No more cooking. I can eat what I really like –
sandwiches
!’55

PART THREE

10

Less Donnie Lonegan

The winter of 1955–6 was a chilly affair, especially February. The 1st was the coldest day since 1895, and later that month Richard Ingrams arrived in ‘incredibly cold and very primitive’ Aldershot to begin his National Service. So too, as ever, in Cambridge. ‘I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and
still
I can’t stop my teeth chattering,’ Sylvia Plath (there on a Fulbright scholarship) wrote home on the 24th. ‘The gas fire eats up the shillings and scalds one side and the other freezes like the other half of the moon.’

Yet it was also the winter that popular music at last began to generate some real heat. Initially down as ‘a foxtrot’ in the Decca catalogue, ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets hit the charts on the back of being featured in
Blackboard Jungle
, recalled by Ray Gosling as ‘a cheap film about a high school in America where the teenagers beat up the teachers . . . a jolly good boo, clap and foot-stamping film’. It entered the Top 20 on 15 October, supplanted Jimmy Young’s ‘The Man from Laramie’ to go number 1 on 12 November, and stayed there for seven further weeks, fending off Mitch Miller’s ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’, the Four Aces’ ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing’ and Dickie Valentine’s ‘Christmas Alphabet’, before finally (on 14 January) giving way to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Sixteen Tons’. Selling a million copies in the UK – the first record to do so – this achievement effectively marked the advent in Britain of rock ’n’ roll. Moreover, hard on the heels of the all-American Haley was an East Ender of Irish ancestry. He was Lonnie Donegan, whose ‘Rock Island Line’, a Leadbelly song with a hard-driving narrative (sung by George Melly at the Royal Festival Hall in 1951), peaked at number 6 on 11 February and altogether was in the Top 20 for 19 weeks. For the 16-year-old John Ravenscroft (later Peel), growing up in Cheshire, but going to Shrewsbury School, the performance had ‘a sense of space and freedom, a kind of take-it-or-leave-it spirit that made everything that had gone before sound overcooked and claustrophobic’ when he heard it on a radio request programme, probably either
Housewives’ Choice
or
Two-Way Family Favourites
.

‘Rock Island Line’ almost overnight started a teenage craze – skiffle. The keynote was do-it-yourself. ‘The double-bass, a broomstick implanted in a tea-chest, and the washboard plus a few thimbles to extract the obligatory rasping sound from it, could be acquired by rummaging through grandma’s (if not mother’s) junk room,’ fondly recalled a Donegan obituarist. ‘For the rest, a simple acoustic guitar (or banjo) could be acquired for a tenner. And no great mastery of that instrument’s potential was required. Three chords played in a few different keys enabled many a canny practitioner to strut the stage without his musicianship being called into question.’ Over the next year or so, skiffle groups mushroomed around the land, including in Liverpool the Quarrymen with John Lennon on a cheap little mail-order guitar, at first mainly playing at church halls and suchlike. Ravenscroft, meanwhile, began to perfect the role of embattled believer. ‘Lolly Dolligan’ was his businessman father’s invariable wind-up, while at the end of the Easter term his report urged, with owlish schoolmasterly humour, ‘less Donnie Lonegan and more of the constructive effort’.1

Another popular new phenomenon was also the object of condescension. ‘Watched commercial television for the first time,’ noted John Fowles in January 1956. After referring to ‘the dreadful obsequiousness of the compères and performers’ he went on:

The drinkers in the pub sat in silence, watching, not drinking. Transfixed by the shimmering screen; like the first cavemen to make fire. Agape. And such rubbish . . . Desecration of most sacred themes – death, birth; American voices and manners; and the viewers all sad, bored, when the publican turned the lights on again; a deprivation of opium that forced them to drink again.

There was no doubt which channel viewers preferred if they had the choice: in December 1955, three months into the new television era, 57 per cent told Gallup that ITV was better than BBC whereas only 16 per cent expressed a positive preference for BBC – a humiliating result for the Corporation.

Instead, the pressing problem facing commercial television was building up sufficient critical mass, especially before the Midlands and the North came on stream, which they did in February and May respectively. Accordingly, the sense of crisis in late 1955 and early 1956 was palpable – and the brutality of the solution all too predictable. ‘Although prepared to cater for minorities who appreciate more serious programmes,’ announced a spokesman not long before Christmas, ‘we have decided to put on such programmes outside peak viewing hours. Programmes like the Hallé Orchestra, documentaries and discussion features just aren’t popular with the public. As a commercial organisation we have to give the public what it wants.’ Unsurprisingly, there ensued considerable controversy about independent television’s ‘retreat from culture’, but ATV’s Richard Meyer frankly informed ITA’s director-general, Sir Robert Fraser, in February that ‘the lot of the pioneer programme contractor is not a very happy one financially and we do feel that we must use every possible endeavour to obtain maximum audiences in the initial stages of the development of the medium so that we can be certain of getting worthwhile sales of advertising space’. Or, as one of Meyer’s colleagues rather more crisply told a Birmingham paper shortly before ATV’s opening, ‘I think the public want good light entertainment and that is what we shall try to give them.’2

As usual this winter, the cultural pageant continued. ‘It seems that what listeners like about the series is not its breadth or its occasional excitements, but rather its stable continuity and the absence of any harrowing tragedies,’ observed
Radio Times
, marking the 2,000th episode on 14 November of
Mrs Dale’s Diary
. Later that month, ‘few listeners had a good word to say’ about a dramatisation of
Lucky Jim
. ‘Many were baffled and to others who were not, the play was ugly and vulgar in tone’, their dissatisfaction not allayed by ‘the sound effect (dustbin lid) used to herald Jim’s soliloquies’. Altogether it earned a Reaction Index of 47, 30 less than a recent radio production of J. B. Priestley’s
An Inspector Calls
. In December the arrival of
The Woodentops
(joined in their ‘little house in the country’ by Sam, Mrs Scrubbit and of course Spotty Dog) completed the
Watch with Mother
portfolio, while
The Ladykillers
was in retrospect the last major Ealing comedy, if criticised at the time by the
New Statesman
’s William Whitebait as ‘stylish but just a bit of a bore’. The by now ritualised ‘Books of the Year’ saw a warm mention in
The Times
for Philip Larkin’s hitherto ignored new collection
The Less Deceived
, the first in which he revealed his authentic voice, though the reading public as a whole voted for Nicholas Monsarrat’s
The Cruel Sea
, Paul Brickhill’s
Reach for the Sky
and Alistair MacLean’s
HMS Ulysses
as the best they had read in 1955.

There was a short-lived literary storm after Somerset Maugham on Christmas Day had launched a full-scale attack in the
Sunday Times
on the boorishness of Kingsley Amis’s young male characters, calling them ‘scum’ and much else besides, but for the really young in the early part of 1956 the two words invariably on their lips were ‘Davy Crockett’, as a hit song and an avalanche of merchandise (Davy Crockett buckskin outfits, Davy Crockett bows and arrows, Davy Crockett ‘Whistling Pipes of Peace’, above all Davy Crockett raccoon-skin hats (ten million sold at 12s 6d each)) relentlessly sharpened appetites for the Disney film
Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier
, to be released in early April – or, as Iona and Peter Opie put it not long afterwards, ‘the most ambitious adult-organised assault on the juvenile imagination since before the war’. Elsewhere, the Great Drawing Room of the Arts Council’s headquarters in St James’s Square was the scene on 9 January of Britain’s most uncompromisingly modern concert yet (featuring Harrison Birtwistle as well as Peter Maxwell Davies, and scornfully attacked by the
Daily Mail
), while exactly a month later, at the National Film Theatre, there were long queues for the first Free Cinema showing of documentary shorts, mainly about working-class life (still an unusual subject) and including Lindsay Anderson’s
O Dreamland
. A working-class girl made good by this time was Blackpool’s 19-year-old Norma Sykes, better known as Sabrina. ‘What Sabrina has “got” is no mystery,’ declared
Picture Post
’s Robert Muller. ‘With her forty-inch bust and very blonde hair, she has become the Teddy Boy’s symbol for opulent sex. Incessant Sabrina propaganda had turned Norma Sykes into a national tonic, a seaside postcard brought to life, sex for the unimaginative, inflated into absurdity.’ For another blonde, two days after her
cri de froid
, 26 February was a date with destiny, as Sylvia Plath (dressed in red and black, with thick crimson lipstick) met Ted Hughes for the first time, at a noisy, drunken party at the Cambridge Women’s Union – an electrifying encounter that ended with blood running down Hughes’s bitten cheek. ‘This man is terrific . . . He is the best of the best,’ was, however, a BBC viewer’s reaction to the end on 3 March of the first series of
The Dave King Show
, showcasing a comedian with a relaxed, engaging, mildly subversive style. ‘We shall miss him sadly,’ said another. ‘A great favourite in this house.’3