Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (20 page)

On the day itself, marred by rain, some six million (by one estimate) assembled to watch the parade. ‘The crowds were huge, Joyce, but really
huge
,’ the well-bred journalist Virginia Graham assured her friend Joyce Grenfell soon afterwards. ‘Most of the people had slept in the streets all night, & been rained upon, but there they were, paper caps & all, fainting like flies, cheering every horse or dog or policeman, as merry as grigs.’ Certainly there was pride among the spectators and the many other millions who listened to it on the radio – the latter including Marian Raynham in Surbiton, who wondered ‘what other country can make up such a varied performance’ and marvelled at ‘what organisation to do it’ – but for the most part grig-like they were not. A note the following Tuesday by Mass-Observation’s invaluable Chelsea-based investigator makes this clear:

Almost everybody Inv met on the 10th and 11th, whether friends or tradespeople or strangers in shops, were saying loudly how utterly exhausted and washed-out they felt, not only those who had gone to see the procession but those who had stayed at home and merely heard it over the wireless. The remark incessantly repeated, both on Victory Day and afterwards, was: ‘Well, it’s the last of its kind – I don’t suppose we shall ever see another’. Sometimes this was followed by ‘The next war’ll be short and sweet,’ or ‘We just won’t be there at the finish, next time’.

One or two women did remark that there was still Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to look forward to – but that ‘it wouldn’t be the same because there wouldn’t be the troops’.
¹⁸

The Victory Parade had – for relatively few, relatively well-off people – a side benefit. ‘Remember me?’ asked the announcer Jasmine Bligh on Friday the 7th, as BBC television began post-war broadcasting by showing the same Mickey Mouse cartoon that had been on the small screen when television had ceased in September 1939. That same day, the opening Variety Party featured Peter Waring, star of radio’s
Variety Bandbox
. ‘I must say, I feel a trifle self-conscious going into the lens of this thing,’ ran his rather arch patter. ‘But since I’m here I might just as well tell you a little about myself and my hobbies. I have one or two hobbies you know that Sir Stafford [Cripps, the famously austere Labour minister] can’t control. No, I thought that now I’m being televised, you might see the jokes quicker.’ Next day, Freddie Grisewood was the main television commentator on the parade, with Richard Dimbleby (who had made his name describing the liberation of Belsen) as second string. ‘You will forgive a man for saying that it is only a hat with feathers on it’ was his surprisingly flip comment on Princess Elizabeth’s elaborate headgear.
¹⁹
At this stage there existed only some 20,000 television sets (all pre-war), mainly within 30 miles of Alexandra Palace (from where programmes were transmitted), and as yet not many were inclined to take the new medium seriously as a force for the future.

The muted response to the Victory Parade was the first of three key symbolic events during the summer of 1946. The second was the imposition of bread rationing, announced four weeks in advance on 27 June by the new Minister of Food, the highly cerebral John Strachey. The generally negative reaction, especially on the part of women, was epitomised by a letter to her local paper immediately afterwards by E. Harris of 97 Cedars Avenue, Coventry:

I am a housewife, and I wish to protest against this last burden which is to be put upon us. We have stood everything else, but this is the last straw. I have two menfolk. I cut up one large loaf every morning for packing, and my son can eat the best part of another for breakfast. How do they think we can live on the ration they are going to give us? Are we housewives to starve ourselves still more to give to those who go to earn our living for us? We give up most of our food to them now, and many of us are at breaking-point.

Over the next few weeks, much of the public protest was channelled through the Housewives’ League, a largely middle-class organisation, which by mid-July had presented two petitions (one to the House of Commons, the other to the Ministry of Food), each with some 300,000 signatories. Judy Haines was probably not one of them. With the scheme due to start on Monday the 22nd, her approach was typically robust:

19
July
. How bakers are quibbling over bread rationing. I think Strachey is very patient with ’em. First they think it unnecessary (who should know?!), then they want it postponed! As if the Govt. are doing it for fun! I welcome it. Probably see more cakes, and the ration is generous anyway. People will just be more bread conscious.

20
July
. Housewives go ‘bread crazy’. Shortages or queues everywhere. As if it will keep! Unfortunately I had my hair to rinse and set. Then tried Chingford, Walthamstow and Leyton for bread. Mum was able to buy rolls at Mrs Negus’s and let me have half a loaf, which will do beautifully.

She was right. The amount of bread available on the Monday proved more than adequate; while as Grace Golden, a London-based commercial artist, perceptively put it in her diary, ‘significant to see the patient tired faces of people queuing at Food Office, most of us too tired &apathetic to resist any stricture’.

Nevertheless, over the next few days not only did bread supplies often run out with dismaying speed, but there was the harrowing, widely publicised story of a girl of 19 who, fearful of a fine if she put six slices of bread in a bin, tried to burn them by pouring petrol over them and in the process burned herself to death. ‘How do you feel about bread rationing?’ Mass-Observation asked some working-class women in Kilburn and Finsbury Park in mid-August. One of the main reasons for the government’s action had been to bring pressure on the Americans to do more to feed Germany, but the replies were unremittingly narrow in focus:

It’s been good for us, we’ve got more points as a result.

Disgusting. If anything it’s making people more discontented.

I’m well pleased with it. I haven’t used all my bread units and so I get extra points.

Well, I think it’s stopped a lot of waste.

It’s a damned nuisance more than anything.
²⁰

Even if the bread ration was adequate, as most acknowledged it was, the very fact of peacetime bread rationing would remain a symbolic sore as long as it remained in force. This was especially so on the part of the middle class, and it was a straw in the wind when in a clutch of by-elections in July, two working-class Labour seats were held with only a small swing to the Tories, but in suburban, middle-A class Bexley, captured by Labour in 1945, an 11 per cent swing to the Tories almost cost Labour the seat.

Of course,
everyone
apart from spivs and their suppliers became to a greater or lesser degree fed up with the inescapable reality of continuing rationing, shortages and all the rest of it. But broadly speaking, it does seem that the middle class lost patience more quickly and more conclusively than the rest. Clues lie in Florence Speed’s Brixton diary entry about the baker’s the day before the Victory Parade:

Mrs Randall when Mabel [probably a friend or neighbour of Speed] went in for the bread about 10.30 said ‘Sold out, & no more today’.

Mabel replied ‘Well I do think you might save a loaf for regular customers’.

Mrs R. flared up & retorted, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that’ . . .

Mrs R. looked sick when Ethel [Speed’s sister] went & paid the bill & said she wanted no more.

‘I think you’ve treated me badly!’ she told us. Treated
her
!!

We’ve dealt at no other shop for 35 years despite change of ownership, & as Ethel said, ‘It’s like begging for your bread. We’ve never had to do that.’

A week later, forsaking Brixton, the two sisters observed the black market in something like close-up:

While queuing in Regent Street, we watched a hawker with a barrow amply laden with peaches at 1/6d. In about 20 minutes he sold 25/6d worth. A boy with a whip, from a van, not more than 14 or 15, bought two & promptly ate them crossing the road back to his van. It is the most unlikely people who have the money! . . .

Peaches imported from France are very plentiful, but much too costly for most people.

Gladys Langford was similarly struggling to hold her own in what felt like an increasingly alien, unfriendly world. On a Monday in August, mercifully on holiday from her miserable schoolteaching, she spent a day in the West End:

In D.H. Evans hordes of highly perfumed and under-washed women thronged the departments. Assistants ignored my presence – the only one I questioned announced she was not a saleswoman – so I walked out . . . No queues for ice-wafers and cornets since typhoid has been traced to ice-cream. By Piccadilly Tube Station – outside the Pavilion – a woman about my age was playing a piano-accordion. She was plastered with rouge and powder, wore a smart black costume and black peaked cap and a scarlet scarf was knotted about her neck. Another woman, also a beggar, one-legged and grimy, sat slicing a large peach!

Then came the poignant pay-off: ‘
I
cannot afford anything more toothsome than plums at 4½d lb.’
²¹

Two contrasting novels explored the middle-class predicament during these attritional times.
One Fine Day
(1947) by Mollie Panter-Downes was written during the spring and early summer of 1946 and set contemporaneously in a quiet part of the Surrey countryside. Laura and Stephen are learning to make do without domestic servants, a sympathetically depicted struggle in difficult circumstances, and contemplate selling up and moving somewhere smaller and more manageable. Revelation comes to the husband, the inevitable ‘something in the City’, in the penultimate chapter:

No, damnit, he thought, let’s hold on a little longer and see if things improve. And it suddenly struck him as preposterous how dependent he and his class had been on the anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and worked the strings. All his life he had expected to find doors opened if he rang, to wake up to the soft rattle of curtain rings being drawn back, to find the fires bright and the coffee smoking hot every morning as though household spirits had been working while he slept. And now the strings had been dropped, they all lay helpless as abandoned marionettes with nobody to twitch them.

There was no such mellowness in Angela Thirkell’s
Private Enterprise
(1947), explicitly set in 1946, in this case among the minor gentry of ‘Barsetshire’. Dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs ran through the whole novel, but it was bread rationing that really got Thirkell going:

In addition to pages in the ration book called ‘Do Not Fill In Anything In This Space’, and ‘Points’ and ‘Personal Points’, and ‘Do Not Write On This Counterfoil Unless Instructed’, and large capital T’s and K’s and little things called Panels whose use nobody knew, and a thing called Grid General which meant absolutely nothing at all, the harrassed and overworked housewife was now faced with large capital L’s and M’s and small capital G’s, each of which, so she gathered from the bleating of the wireless if she had time to listen, or the Sunday paper which she hadn’t time to read, meant so many B.U.s. And what B.U.s were, nobody knew or cared, except that B seemed an eminently suitable adjective for whatever they were . . .

All in all, Thirkell shrilled on, there was after a year of so-called peace ‘a great increase of boredom and crossness, which made people wonder what use it had been to stand alone against the Powers of Darkness if the reward was to be increasing discomfort and a vast army of half-baked bureaucrats stifling all freedom and ease, while some of the higher clergy preached on Mr Noël Coward’s text of ‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans”, only they meant it and he didn’t’. Tellingly, Thirkell’s hatred of what she saw as the destruction of old England struck a deep chord, and in the immediate post-war years her Barsetshire sequence of novels (begun in the 1930s) sold prodigiously. ‘A clever though reliably conventional school friend rebuked me for never having heard of Angela Thirkell,’ the future novelist David Pryce-Jones would recall of this time. ‘“At home we think she’s the best living author. Everyone reads her.” Home was in Camberley.’
²²

Yet even a Labour-supporting, mass-circulation paper like the
Sunday Pictorial
, in effect the Sunday version of the
Daily Mirror
, conceded that things were pretty grim when in July 1946 it launched its panel of ‘100 Families to speak for Britain’ and give free rein to their many problems. ‘I can’t get shoes for my kiddies,’ complained Eileen Lewis, a printer’s wife of 246 Watford Road, Croxley Green. ‘A couple of weeks ago I spent all day trying to buy two pairs of shoes. I must have called at twenty shops.’ Generally the women volunteers on the panel complained about food rations, while the men (more than a third of whom smoked 100 or more cigarettes a week) were especially put out by being unable to buy a new suit. The paper, though, had no doubt about the headline story: ‘43 Families Out Of 100 Are Wanting A New Home’. And it was the continuing housing shortage that precipitated the third key episode that summer: the squatting movement.