Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (21 page)

It began with the mass occupation of disused service camps – eventually involving as many as 40,000 people in more than a thousand camps – but really attracted attention when families, either homeless or living in appalling lodgings, started occupying empty hotels and mansion blocks in central London, most notably the seven-storey Duchess of Bedford House just off Kensington High Street. Eventually, by late September, eviction and a certain amount of rehousing had taken place. Although they had been helped by the organisational skills of members of the Communist Party, there is no evidence that the bulk of the squatters in Kensington, and probably elsewhere, had any political motives other than wanting somewhere decent to live. An observer, Diana Murray Hill, asked one squatter what sort of house she would prefer if given the choice. ‘A prefab,’ she replied. ‘They look so neat and you can keep them nice. With a garden in front and your own bath. Then you could have the key to your own door and come in and go out as you liked.’

Arguably, though, the real significance of the episode was not the additional spotlight it put on the housing question, with its accompanying embarrassment to the government, but rather the distinctly mixed response of the public at large – partly in the context of most of the press vigorously insisting that, whatever the human predicament of the squatters, such flagrant breaking of the law was liable to open ‘the floodgates of anarchy’ (as W. J. Brown put it in the
Evening Standard
). On the day the Duchess of Bedford squatters departed, Murray Hill listened to a young woman, apparently employed as a domestic at a neighbouring block of luxury flats, chatting with a middle-aged friend:

Well, really, how anyone has the face to behave in such a silly way beats me!

Ridiculous, isn’t it!

I wouldn’t do a thing like that; not unless the Government told me to!

Well, I mean, just look at the Types!

Yes, it’s only types like that’d do a thing like that. Some lovely kiddies though.

Poor little souls, fancy bringing your kids along to a place where there’s no food! No electricity or anything! Poor little souls must be starving!

It’s ridiculous! Why, these flats aren’t fit to live in – they’re in an awful state! They’ve got to have a lot done to them before they’re fit to live in.

It’s not as though doing a thing like this helps them at all, it only makes things worse in the end . . .

That’s right. They should learn to be
patient
and
wait
.
²³

Being patient, waiting your turn, behaving with restraint, respecting the law: even in the difficult, disturbed conditions immediately following six years of war, these remained formidable codes to break.

The squatters were still in situ when on 16 September the Wilfred Pickles quiz show
Have a Go!
was broadcast nationally for the first time, radio’s first real vehicle for ordinary working-class voices to be heard. Ten days later, the new series of
ITMA
began, soon introducing an all too expressive character, Mona Lott (‘it’s being so cheerful as keeps me going’), while on 7 October there was the debut of
Woman’s
Hour
, scheduled for 2.00 on the grounds that that was when women were doing the washing-up and thus had plenty of time to listen. For almost its first three months it was presented by a man, the journalist Alan Ivimey, and the opening of the edition on 7 November gives a flavour of its tone and contents:

Ivimey:
Good afternoon. I have three ladies round the table to keep me in order today – Edith Saunders, who has been to a fascinating exhibition of Second Empire Styles at a big West End store –

Saunders:
Good afternoon.

Ivimey:
Marion Cutler, who’s been looking into the working of that splendid service to housewives and mothers begun during the war, the Home Help scheme –

Cutler:
Good afternoon.

Ivimey:
And Marguerite Patten, who wants to save some of those teatime tragedies when the lovely cake you’ve baked comes out of the oven with a hole in the middle instead of a nice brown bulge . . .

Four days later, the
Daily Mirror
condemned the programme as ‘uninteresting, waste of time, full of old ideas’, but the very next day Judy Haines was more charitable: ‘Washing already damp and ironing quickly done. “Woman’s Hour” does improve.’ Soon afterwards, 61 members of the BBC’s London Listening Panel attended meetings at the Aeolian Hall and were asked to evaluate extracts by different football commentators. Among them was one Wolstenholme, presumably Kenneth, but he fared poorly, with negative ratings for ‘skill in giving a picture of play’ and ‘knowledgeability of soccer’.
²⁴

A new arrival this autumn was Franklin Birkinshaw (the future Fay Weldon), whose voyage from New Zealand ended as both dawn and her 15th birthday broke. ‘Was this my mother’s promised land?’ she asked herself:

Where were the green fields, rippling brooks and church towers? Could this be the land of Strawberry Fair and sweet nightingales? Here was a grey harbour and a grey hillside, shrouded in a kind of murky, badly woven cloth, which as the day grew lighter proved to be a mass of tiny, dirty houses pressed up against one another, with holes gaping where bombs had fallen, as ragged as holes in the heels of lisle stockings. I could not believe that people actually chose to live like this.

‘It’s just Tilbury,’ my mother said. ‘It’s always like this.’

Just Tilbury? The greyness was so vast, as far as the eye could reach.

About this time, Mass-Observation’s Tom Harrisson returned from a lengthy spell in Borneo and was struck by ‘the lack of dynamic enthusiasms, the apathetic mood of the moment, the decline in laughter’. There were moments of uplift – the Britain Can Make It (cruelly dubbed ‘Britain Can’t Have It’) exhibition of industrial design at the V&A attracted one and a half million visitors, the 300,000 waiting list for private telephones started to come down (‘I only want a footman and a large income to complete the picture,’ observed a delighted Vere Hodgson after getting hers), and the first British-made, American-style nylon stockings went on sale, albeit in tantalisingly small quantities. But overall Florence Speed’s experience, lunching one Thursday with her sister at Fleming’s in Oxford Street, was about par for the course. The fish, supposed to be plaice, was ‘a horrible piece of fin’ and the price of 2s 6d was exorbitant; altogether, she reflected, ‘old Mr Fleming who took pride in quality & service must turn in his grave at the deterioration.’

It was also by December 1946 getting ominously chilly. ‘Mr Thomson in particular is “blue” – says he is too cold to sleep altho’ he has four blankets, an eiderdown, a travelling-rug and a great-coat on his bed,’ Gladys Langford in her north London hotel was writing by the 8th of a fellow-resident. ‘He has been buying socks at 3/6 per pair at WOOLWORTH’S!! Not the kind of place you expect the director of a big firm to use as a shopping centre.’ It was not a great time to be having one’s first baby. ‘Sick,’ scribbled an understandably frazzled Judy Haines in St Margaret’s Hospital, Epping, on the 19th, two days before the birth. ‘Had a bad night with Sister Hilton nagging me the whole time. I had pains every few minutes and she said I was all right till
she
came on. She told me to forget myself and think of babe and termed me neurotic. Said I was disturbing the patients who had
had
their babies.’
²⁵

Another rather cheerless Christmas was approaching. ‘Prefab houses in Lottman Road have already hung up their Christmas decorations (paper chains, etc),’ sniffed Speed in Brixton as early as 5 December. ‘Anything less gala in appearance than the houses themselves couldn’t be imagined.’ Three days later, Henry St John in Bristol went to Sunday evensong, not a habitual occurrence, and found he was one of only 16 people in the congregation, that church’s lowest figure in its 90 years of existence. ‘Are we a pagan country?’ asked James Lansdale Hodson on the 13th. ‘Few of my friends go to church. I read in the report of an Archbishop’s Committee on the Use of Modern Agencies for Evangelistic Propaganda that 90 per cent of our people seldom or never attend church. The church each week has five million attendances; the cinemas have 40 million.’

About this time, Mass-Observation conducted a survey of 500 residents of a semi-suburban London borough, ‘Metrop’, most probably Fulham; three-fifths of the sample did not belong to any sort of organisation, and predictably their favourite unorganised activities were the cinema and pub. The investigation, published as
Puzzled
People
, found that two-thirds of men and four-fifths of women believed, ‘or believed more or less’, in the existence of a God. ‘Yes, I think there is a God,’ said a 20-year-old girl, ‘but He seems a bit preoccupied at the moment.’ Only 61 per cent of those believing in God also believed in the divinity of Christ; paradoxically, 25 per cent of those
not
believing in God
did
believe in the divinity of Christ. Only one person in 10 in Metrop went to church ‘fairly regularly’, and congregations had roughly three women to one man, with the women being mainly old and mainly educated. The survey threw up ‘frequent’ criticism of institutional religion and those who practised it, with double standards a favourite target:

A lot of bloody hypocrisy, if you ask me. Go to church and then tear your neighbour’s character to tatters, that’s all it is. There’s worse people goes to church than stays at home, I can tell you that.

Going off to church on Sundays and bowing and scraping to others that does the same.

Oh, the parsons and the churchgoing and all the setting yourself up to be better than ordinary folk.

But when asked their attitude towards religion as such, most people were tolerant enough, if hardly enthusiastic. As two women and a man replied:

I dunno, I’ve not got any attitude, because I’ve not got any interest.

It’s all right for them as has time and inclination.

Doesn’t touch me much – it’s all right for women, especially when they’re getting on a bit – but I don’t think I need it just yet, thanks.

A 40-year-old man captured the prevailing view – low-level tolerance of what was essentially an irrelevance – exactly: ‘I think it’s all right in a way, provided it’s not overdone.’
²⁶

Ferdynand Zweig may or may not have visited Metrop, but between August 1946 and February 1947 he immersed himself in London’s working-class districts and interviewed some 350 working men – interviews that this Polish-born economist (before the war a professor at Cracow University) conducted in pubs, cafés, parks, dog-racing stadiums or wherever he could get his subjects to talk freely. The inquiry began as a study of spending habits and poverty but rapidly broadened into a portrait of the English working class, that flesh-and-blood fodder for so many ambitious post-war plans. ‘A working man is a great realist,’ Zweig found in his eventual book:

He sees life as it is – as a constant struggle, with its ups and downs. He has no illusions about life. He is little influenced by books or literature, and is more genuine and natural than people coming from other classes.

If you ask working men about their views on life, in a large majority of cases you will get the invariable answer: ‘Life is what you make it.’ This English proverb is ingrained in every working man’s brain. It is astonishing how many times they express this as their philosophy of life.