Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (10 page)

Almost three-quarters expressed the wish to continue living in Middlesbrough after the war, with easily the most common reason being ‘born here, used to it’, followed by ‘reasons connected with employment’, ‘friends and relatives here’, and ‘like it’. Predictably, it was younger people and higher earners who most frequently expressed the wish to live elsewhere. Asked about Middlesbrough’s post-war problems, most people put unemployment and housing as their two main concerns; but although ‘neither men nor women in Middlesbrough considered problems of physical planning to be of first importance’, they were prepared to express views when asked what ‘should be done after the war to make Middlesbrough a better place to live in’, with ‘improved roads and traffic circulation’ seen as the top priority. Most people also wanted to see more libraries, theatres, playing fields, play centres, swimming pools and health clinics, but there was no majority support for more meeting places.

In answer to the question ‘In what part of Middlesbrough and its neighbourhood would you prefer to live – why?’, the most popular reason for choosing a particular district was ‘healthier, better air, better for children’, followed by ‘like country, open’, ‘like the district’ and ‘better housing’, with ‘near relatives and friends’ trailing badly behind. Asked if they wanted to move to a new house, in practice almost certainly in a suburb, more than two-thirds answered in the affirmative – with the desire for better amenities (including a garden) as the principal motive but with what Chapman called ‘dissatisfaction caused by the social quality of the neighbourhood’ also playing a part. He got closer to that factor by asking the pertinent question ‘If you were entirely free to choose, would you want to live amongst the same kind of people that are in your neighbourhood now, or would you prefer to live amongst a different group of people?’ In reply, 55 per cent said they did want to go on living among the same kind of people; 28 per cent would prefer to live among different people; and 17 per cent were ‘unable or unwilling to express an opinion’. By far the most common reason given by the satisfied was ‘like them, they are all right, etc’, while among the dissatisfied a pervasive complaint was that ‘people are noisy, rough, etc’, though ‘don’t have much to do with neighbours – don’t like people round here’ was also popular.

Chapman further found that ‘neighbourly relations are of considerable extent and play an important part in many fields of the daily life of the housewife’, though he added the crucial qualifying point that ‘the unit of neighbourly relations appears to be very small, a handful of families participating in each group’. Moreover, not only was it the case that ‘the common social institution has so far been an insignificant source of “best friends” and even the common school is of very minor importance’, but ‘visits to common social institutions between neighbours who are friends are likewise seen to affect only a small number of people’. There were, accordingly, no strong grounds for ‘centring a residential unit around a common social institution – a community centre or a school – from the point of view of creating social integration’. Put another way, ‘the evidence is fairly conclusive that the idea of a neighbourhood unit [à la latest American town planning] which should be a microcosm of the social structure of the whole community is incorrect’.
³⁶

All in all, Chapman’s report was sober, unsentimental stuff. It realistically portrayed people’s strong desire for improvement in their personal conditions, preferably as part of a suburban lifestyle; their almost equally strong wish to live among those whom they perceived to be their own kind of people (whatever that kind might be); and their strictly limited appetite for the communal.

Was ‘the Titmuss version’ a complete myth, then? No, not quite. An official survey in late 1942 into public attitudes to plans for reconstruction located what it called a ‘thinking minority’ that was
actively
in favour of more state intervention in order to implement policies (in areas such as employment, welfare, housing and education) that would seek to benefit all – even if such policies involved higher taxation. The size of this ‘thinking minority’ was reckoned at between 5 and 20 per cent. Beyond that point it is difficult to salvage the myth. Indeed, the probability is that the size of this minority (inevitably disproportionately middle-class in composition) was actually shrinking towards the end of the war. Penguin Specials, originally launched in 1937, probably hit their peak in February 1942 with the publication of Archbishop William Temple’s
Christianity and the Social Order
, which sought to marry faith with socialism and rapidly sold 140,000 copies. But by 1945 sales of the Specials had slumped to such an extent that the series was temporarily abandoned.

Fundamental social and cultural continuities remained – indeed, were arguably strengthened rather than lessened by the war. ‘Class feeling and class resentment are very strong,’ Harold Nicolson observed with foreboding soon after the European conflict ended. The Cutteslowe walls – built across and even along a north Oxford road in 1934 in order to separate private from council housing – stayed obstinately in place. The most-watched films during the war were Gainsborough melodramas, virtually without political or even social content, while the plots of the ever-popular Mills and Boon novels coursed along almost regardless of what was going on in the outside world. A culture that was still holding its own was that of the improving, intensely respectable, wanting-no-hand-outs working class. The gasfitter’s wife Margaret Blundell spoke eloquently for it in her 1941 letter to
Picture
Post:
‘What sort of men and women will the New World children turn out to be if they are to have no struggle? One must strive if one is to develop character. Your picture of Rich
v
Poor does not ring quite true. A considerable number of working-class manage a holiday every year, all the more enjoyable when one has struggled for it. You would make things too easy. Jealousy is the canker of our time. The rich will always be with us in one form or another and rightly so.’ But within the working class the cultural future lay elsewhere – a future simultaneously epitomised and hastened by the startling rise in the
Daily
Mirror
’s popularity (beginning in the mid-1930s but accelerating from 1943, with circulation rising from two million that year to three million by 1946). Drawing inspiration directly from America, it successfully relied on a threefold formula: a brash irreverence (not only in peacetime) towards the authorities; a Labour-supporting politics of a far more populist, less heavy-duty type than that ponderously upheld by the Trades Union Congress-backed
Daily Herald
; and a very professionally assembled tabloid blend of cartoons, comic strips (the legendary Jane), human interest, sport and (often Hollywood) celebrities. ‘Catering for short tea-breaks and even shorter attention spans’, in the regretful but probably accurate words of one historian, it was a formula whose time had come.
³⁷

A final survey.
Patterns of Marriage
by Eliot Slater (a psychologist) and Moya Woodside (a psychiatric social worker) was not published until 1951, but its richly suggestive fieldwork comprised a detailed survey conducted between 1943 and 1946 of 200 working-class soldiers and their wives, mainly from the London area. Slater and Woodside’s central focus was on courtship, marriage and sex – revealing in the last area an extensive amount of what the authors called ‘passive endurance’ on the part of the wives, typified by one’s remark: ‘He’s very good, he doesn’t bother me much.’ But there was much else. Both men and women, they found on the class front, ‘were dominated by the distinction that is expressed in “We” and “They”, and, even in this war in which all were involved together, by the feeling of a cleft between the “two nations”’. Typical assertions quoted were: ‘there’ll never be much improvement so long as the country is run by people with money’, ‘the working class should be given a fairer do than they have had’, and ‘MPs have no worries, they’ve all got money in the bank.’ The war itself had done little or nothing to broaden horizons. Nearly all the male conscripts, Slater and Woodside found, ‘were bored and “fed up”, took little interest in wider and impersonal issues, and were only concerned to get the war over and get home again’. As for their wives, ‘the war was a background to daily life, irritating, endless, without significance other than its effects on their personal lives.’ And for ‘men and women alike patriotism was a remote conception, not altogether without meaning, but associated with feelings which were entirely inarticulate’.

For the husbands in particular, Slater and Woodside emphasised, one concern dominated above all:

The spectre of unemployment is never very far away. Some have experienced it themselves; others remember its effect on their own childhood; and for still others it exists as a malignant bogy that must dog the steps of every working man. Again and again a preference is expressed for the ‘steady job’ as opposed to high wages, more especially by the older men. It is not likely that the lesson that England learned from the years of the trade depression will ever be forgotten . . . There was a strong feeling that the fate of the individual under the capitalist system had little to do with merit, and depended on nebulous and unpredictable social forces. If only these could be controlled, a rich reward for personal ambitions was of secondary importance.

None of which guaranteed any more than a minimal interest in politics: ‘Politics, it was felt, had nothing to do with their ordinary lives, in which other interests, sport and home, predominated. Politics was a special subject, beyond the understanding of the uneducated, or too vast and impersonal for any individual effort to influence.’ A mere 21 out of the 200 men took ‘an active interest in politics’, but the attitude of the overwhelming majority was summed up by assertions like ‘I’m not interested in politics, it isn’t my job’, ‘politics are a pain in the neck, I’ve not the education to understand them’, and ‘me being an ordinary working-class man, politics is nothing to do with me; we’re too busy with our families and jobs’. Politicians themselves, moreover, were generally seen in a dim light – ‘all politicians are rogues’, ‘I’m against political parties, they’re only out for their own gain,’ ‘no government is any good’.

The wives, meanwhile, were not sufficiently engaged with politics even to be cynical, with ‘a serious and intelligent interest’ being taken by only seven out of 200. ‘The remainder showed an extreme apathy and lack of interest. Politics are felt to be remote from real everyday life, as incomprehensible as mathematics, the business of men. Preoccupation with personal concerns, the affairs of the home, children, leave little room.’ Slater and Woodside quoted some of them: ‘I married young, and had no time, with the children’, ‘I don’t read papers much about the Government’, ‘After being on your feet all day, you just want to sit down and have somebody bring you a nice cup of tea.’ With a note of palpable disappointment, the authors concluded about the wives that ‘their effect as a whole is negative, conservative, a brake on any change from the established order’.
³⁸

It hardly took a Nostradamus to see that the outriders for a New Jerusalem – a vision predicated on an active, informed, classless, progressively minded citizenship – were going to have their work cut out.

Britain in 1945. A land of orderly queues, hat-doffing men walking on the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and children, censored books, censored films, censored plays, infinite repression of desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a lifetime sentence. (‘I didn’t want it,’ my own grandmother would say to me in the 1970s when, making small talk soon after my grandfather’s death, I said that at least he had lived long enough for them to have their Golden Wedding party. ‘All I could think about was the misery.’) Even the happier marriages seldom companionable, with husbands and wives living in separate, self-contained spheres, the husband often not telling the wife how much he had earned. And despite women working in wartime jobs, few quarrelling with the assumption that the two sexes were fundamentally different from each other. Children in the street ticked off by strangers, children in the street kept an eye on by strangers, children at home rarely consulted, children stopping being children when they left school at 14 and got a job. A land of hierarchical social assumptions, of accent and dress as giveaways to class, of Irish jokes and casually derogatory references to Jews and niggers. Expectations low and limited but anyone in or on the fringes of the middle class hoping for ‘a job for life’ and comforted by the myth that the working class kept their coal in the bath. A pride in Britain, which had stood alone, a pride even in ‘Made in Britain’. A deep satisfaction with our own idiosyncratic, non-metric units of distance, weight, temperature, money: the bob, the tanner, the threepenny Joey. A sense of history, however nugatory the knowledge of that history. A land in which authority was respected? Or rather, accepted? Yes, perhaps the latter, co-existing with the necessary safety valve of copious everyday grumbling. A land of domestic hobbies and domestic pets. The story of Churchill in the Blitz driving through a London slum on a Friday evening – seeing a long queue outside a shop – stopping the car – sending his detective to find out what this shortage was – the answer: birdseed. Turning the cuffs, elbow patches on jackets, sheets sides to middle. A deeply conservative land.