Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (19 page)

Almost certainly a bigger source of oppression, on a day-to-day basis, was the unattractive mixture, certainly in peacetime, of not only a ceaseless preoccupation with ration books, vouchers and ‘points’ but also enforced exposure to frequent displays of petty authority. The writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, demobilised in the spring of 1946 and returning to what was still bombed-out London, was struck by how often he saw ‘the feelings of gentle people, of naturally timorous people being trampled on by loud-mouthed bullies, frequently in uniform’, such as policemen or public-transport officials or cinema commissionaires. Such behaviour was hardly the result of the new political dispensation but in difficult times could not but stimulate anti-government feelings. Happening in April 1946 to catch
Workers’ Playtime
(the radio variety programme that began during the war to boost production in the factories and continued long into peace), Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London and, like many Londoners, much disgusted by the peacetime determination of bus conductors not to allow standing passengers, was ‘amazed’ by the programme’s criticism:

I do not listen very often, so it was all fresh to me. Much at the expense of Aneurin Bevan [the minister responsible for housing as well as health]. One comedian was going to Wales because a house had been built there last year! Then the song that struck me as being very remarkable was one called ‘I’d Like To Be A Refugee From Britain’. All in rhyme it was . . . we were under fed and over taxed, and spent our lives in queues, etc, docketed and ticketed. But the most remarkable lines were the end . . . about they say they can do without Churchill, so they can do without me, I
want
to be a refugee from Britain.

‘The factory girls,’ she added, ‘cheered to the echo.’

Crucial to the sense of malaise were the corrosive effects, in peacetime if not in war, of the overriding context of rationing, price controls and production controls. ‘It’s very easy to spot people who buy things without coupons in Barrow,’ reflected Nella Last as early as September 1945. ‘They have the Jewish stamp, over decorated & doll eyed bits & pieces of fur & tucks.’ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, historian of austerity, makes it abundantly clear that the black market and all its devices – including off-ration and under-the-counter sales as well as tipping and favouritism – were at least as extensive after the war as during it. Food orders, the Minister of Food noted in May 1946, were ‘generally being ignored and evaded more flagrantly now than at any time during the war’, while soon afterwards his ministry found that a ‘substantial section of the agricultural community habitually disregard the Food Orders, adopting the attitude that they are just more regulations to be “got round” – at a profit – and not that such avoidance is fundamentally dishonest and unfair to the whole community’, with farmers and dealers in Wales identified as the worst offenders. No doubt some of them had been partly responsible for the scandal that had done much to spoil the first peacetime Christmas (at least in London), with Panter-Downes reporting that ‘most butchers refused to pay more than the legal prices for fowl and consequently had nothing but a nice row of empty hooks to show their customers’.
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It was about this time, moreover, that the black-market spiv really started to emerge as a well-known type: coat with wide lapels and padded-out shoulders, tight collar on shirt, big knot in tie, hair parted in middle with wave on either side, pencil moustache, he was grudgingly admired, essentially disliked. Yet the fact was that a significant part – perhaps even the majority – of the respectable middle class, and indeed of the respectable working class, simultaneously condemned
and
used the black market, without which they would have been hard pressed to maintain an even barely recognisable quality of life. Some even found themselves succumbing to the temptation of coupon fraud. ‘I suspect there’s more dishonesty in this country today than for many years,’ Hodson reflected in May 1946. ‘Rationing, controls of material, very high income tax [9 shillings in the pound], a feeling of despair at the state of the world – all these contribute to it.’ Returning servicemen could, in this as other ways, find it particularly difficult. Thomas Hanley, 28 and just married, decided to try his luck in Devon. Half a century later, his memories were still sharp and painful:

I found business, even in a small seaside resort [probably Paignton], was run on chicanery and spivvery. I found that men, some not much older than myself, who had managed either by reason of age or health to miss a call-up, controlled all aspects of public life. In an atmosphere of rationing and shortages, interlopers like myself had a hard time. Helping hands were weighted by self-interest. Even persons of the utmost integrity, after six years of war, were motivated by self-preservation. It wasn’t so much of ‘dog eat dog’, rather to make sure that no opportunity of easing one’s existence was missed. I doubt if a single Englishman did not avail himself of the help of the ‘black market’. Expedience was the name of the game.

In such a situation, Hanley reflected in retrospect, a returned serviceman’s ‘main attribute was the stoic acceptance of the inevitable, so much a part of his service life’. His formative years may have been taken from him, but ‘at least he was alive’.
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There were plenty of other signs, big and small, of a society apparently out of joint. ‘The trains are lighted now,’ the headmaster Ernest Loftus conceded in October 1945, ‘but the lighting is not always good & it is not easy to read unless one is lucky & manages to get a compartment with single lights behind the seats. People are awful vandals & some compartments are in darkness through the bulbs being pilfered – the window straps are also cut off – war disease – little sense of honesty.’ That month was the busiest that Scotland Yard had ever known, and shortly before Christmas the Independent MP W. J. Brown considered in his diary the ‘vast crime-wave in Britain today’:

A most disturbing feature of it is the number of crimes with violence. In an effort to keep the thing within bounds the police have taken to large-scale raids on the public. Without warning they cordon-off a large area and make everyone produce his identity card [introduced during the war]. They take anyone who cannot satisfactorily account for himself to the police station for further enquiries. The first of these raids took place in the West End this last week. Many deserters were picked up and many clues found to gangs of robbers responsible for recent crimes. But it adds a new terror to pleasure-seeking in the West End . . .

It was also reported that one butcher in the pre-Christmas period, having managed by hook or by crook to obtain some turkeys, slept in his shop with a loaded revolver.

The crime wave, especially in the form of burglaries, did not abate in 1946; Panter-Downes that spring spoke for upper-middle if not middle England when she lamented the fact that ‘practically nobody has a servant to leave on guard in the kitchen’. She then related the story of how a Chelsea householder had recently come home from the cinema one evening only to find that burglars had visited for the third time and taken his last overcoat, some tinned sardines, a pound of tea and two pots of marmalade. ‘These are things,’ she hardly needed to add, ‘which are painful and grievous to lose nowadays.’ The figures are patchy, but it seems that an appreciably higher proportion than usual of these burglaries were committed by juveniles – a fact that subsequent police reports not implausibly attributed to the way in which ‘during the war years children have lacked fatherly control and restraint and in a large number of families mothers have obviously tended to allow too much freedom’.
¹⁶
What was indisputable was that a moral panic was brewing up nicely.

Reassuringly, during the spring and disappointingly poor summer, the old sporting rituals reappeared, apparently unscathed: not only the Cup Final but the Boat Race (‘the Prime Minister was there, the swans were out, young men back from the services wore beards, folk picnicked on roofs, ate ice-cream, let off crackers,’ noted Hodson), the Grand National (Captain Petre, on leave from the Scots Guards, winning on Lovely Cottage, very much the housewives’ choice) and Wimbledon (the British players routed by the French, American and Australian ones). Then there was that traditional highlight of the social calendar, the Eton versus Harrow match at Lord’s. ‘There were only five tents in the usually close-packed stretch of turf,’ reported Panter-Downes, ‘and . . . the men looked an extremely shabby bunch. As a parade of the upper crust, valiantly pretending that everything was still the same, the occasion was a little saddening.’

Still, the cricket authorities made a fair show in this first peacetime season of pretending that nothing had changed. Although professionals were at last given their initials on the scorecards at Lord’s, they were carefully put after the surname, with the initials for amateurs continuing to precede the surname; while the two classes of cricketer continued for the most part, though no longer invariably, to change in separate dressing rooms. Moreover, of the 17 first-class counties, only one was captained by a professional, Les Berry of Leicestershire. ‘There has probably never been a better collection than those who have been appointed for this year,’ the
Daily Telegraph
’s new cricket correspondent, E. W. Swanton, declared reassuringly on the season’s eve. ‘Better in the sense,’ he explained, ‘of having a truer notion of the essentials of a cricket match, of whatever kind.’ Perhaps so, but the year’s crop included not only at least three non-bowling amateurs who by no chari-table stretch of the imagination were worth their places as batsmen but also Surrey’s Nigel Bennett, an undistinguished club cricketer who got the job only through a case of mistaken identity. ‘Want of knowledge of county cricket on the field presented an unconquerable hindrance to the satisfactory accomplishment of arduous duties’ was the mild but telling verdict on him of
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
, no friend of the open society.

Large crowds watched the run-stealers flicker to and fro. As usual, the final test (against India) was at The Oval, and on the first day ‘rain that fell until one o’clock so affected the ground that it was doubtful if play would have been attempted even at five o’clock but for the crowds of people who waited around the walls from early in the morning’. Elsewhere, the wet summer did not hinder the pursuit of the poor man’s opera – March 1947 would prove to be the peak of the post-war Bulge – and indeed 1946 set a new record for venereal infections. There was also the dream of the first proper summer holiday for at least seven years, but for many it remained a dream. In Coventry, when the factories closed in late July, the local paper described ‘thousands of people, walking aimlessly through the streets or standing in queues for buses to take them a few miles away for a change from the every-day’. A 60-year-old working-class man, outlining his holiday plans to Mass-Observation at the start of August, was more enterprising or perhaps fortunate: ‘We tried everywhere but we couldn’t get in – they’re so packed. People have booked up months ago, they’re all full up. So in the end I told the wife to write to a place we stayed in Margate . . . We’re very fond of Margate, it’s lively and the air’s good and we’re going to make day trips to Ramsgate and elsewhere. It’ll be a change.’ For a 30-year-old more middle-class woman, waiting for her husband to be demobbed, common sense vied with natural yearnings:

Well, we’re going up North to Glasgow. We’ve gone up there every year for the simple reason it’s cheapest and Mum and Dad are always glad to see us, and what with this rationing business and now the bread, well, it’s too much bother going anywhere else. Besides think of the money it would cost to have a seaside holiday . . . Oh, but I’d give anything to give Johnny a real holiday – one where he could make sand-pies on the beach. He’s never been to the seaside . . .

The Friday before the August Bank Holiday weekend (still then at the start of the month) saw huge queues for trains out of London, and at Paddington the railway officials for once relented and put up a notice: ‘All platform tickets suspended’.
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The generally downbeat summer mood was epitomised by the lack of popular enthusiasm ahead of the full-scale Victory Parade in London on Saturday, 8 June. ‘Are you going to put out your decorations?’ Florence Speed asked a Brixton neighbour on the Thursday. ‘No, things are worse,’ was the gloomy reply. The same day a couple of Nottingham working-class women gave their reactions. ‘I don’t know what they want to have another V Day Parade so long after the war [for],’ one said. ‘People have had enough of it.’ The other was even more negative: ‘I don’t agree with it at all. We haven’t got much to celebrate about. The food is bad, the young fellows are still in the Forces – what will those women who have lost their sons in the war think?’ On Friday afternoon, joining a queue of about 30 outside a baker’s shop in London, a Mass-Observation investigator found the grumbling positively savage. ‘“I’ve been queuing ever since eight o’clock this morning, what with one thing and another,” says F40D. “I’m about done for. I’d like to take that Attlee and all the rest of them and put them on top of a bonfire in Hyde Park and BURN them.” “And I’d ’elp yer,” says F65D. “Same ’ere,” say several other angry women.’