Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (29 page)

‘I would prefer the Third Programme to be a little more familiar ground,’ complained one member of the BBC’s Listening Panel, an unemployed miner, fairly soon afterwards. ‘After all, we are not all University Students or even past students.’ A housewife agreed: ‘It bangs us right into the middle of things we really cannot understand.’ And an accounts clerk frankly admitted that ‘the great majority of items’ did not attract him because they were ‘too remote, too heavy, requiring mental powers which I simply have not got at the end of an ordinary weekday’. Such lack of engagement was consistent with Tom Harrisson’s early warning, in January 1947, that there was ‘a real danger in the Third Programme becoming somewhat “cliquey”, a bit of a mutual admiration society’; among recent examples he cited ‘the amazingly unreal, donnish utterances of A.J.P. Taylor on foreign affairs’, ‘the lack of topical controversy’, ‘the total neglect of sociology’ and ‘the exaggerated use of Dylan Thomas’s vocal qualities’. Among those even willing to be engaged, perhaps the best advice came from the novelist Rose Macaulay: ‘One should have a long but not debilitating illness and really get down to it.’
^6.

Significantly, Priestley’s returning serviceman had to do more than just raise his cultural game. ‘I think we make too much of our separateness in this country,’ the great man warned, and, after a dark reference to how the pre-war suburbs had been like ‘tree-lined concentration camps’, he went on: ‘Beware the charmed cosy circle. Don’t stay too long in that armchair . . . but get out and about, compel yourself to come to terms with strangers (who will not be strangers long), make one of a team or a group, be both worker and audience, and put a hand to the great tasks.’

Was Priestley knocking at an open door? The testimony of Raphael Samuel – that most eclectic of historians, here recalling the years of his childhood – might easily make one think so:

Organization was regarded as a good in itself; it was fetishized in the conduct of personal life quite as much as in the office or the factory; it extended to ‘dancing in step’ in the ballroom, to organized fun in the holiday camps, to the orderly queues at the football grounds and the orderly crowds on the terraces. The 1940s constituted, in Britain, a kind of zenith of mass society . . . In London there were no fringe theatres, except for ‘Unity’, our Communist theatre in St Pancras, no alternative food shops, except for some delicatessens in Swiss Cottage and a vegetarian grocer in Tottenham Court Road. Clothes were worn as an affirmation of social position rather than as a display of personal self, and they were regimented to a degree. Skirt lengths rose or fell uniformly, above or below the knee, according to the dictates of the season; a man who wore suede shoes was morally suspect.

Those of us too young to remember the 1940s indeed look at the photographs of the massed ranks of cloth caps on the terraces, or the respectable-looking men wearing hats, jackets and ties as they watch the cricket or even sit by the sea, and assume that a uniform, collective appearance signified a uniform, collective spirit. Perhaps sometimes it did, but it was not a spirit inclined to forsake what Priestley, in his stridently communal ‘1945’ mood, lamented as ‘that famous English privacy’ responsible for ‘the apathetic herd we were in the Baldwin and Chamberlain era, when we messed about in our back gardens, ran about in our little cars, listened to the crooners and the comics, while the terrible shadows crept nearer’. Those shadows, after all, had now been banished, and for most people their
reward
was to return to their gardens and cars – cars that in time might even be a different colour than black.

This was a truth that Frederic Osborn recognised. ‘In Welwyn, where everyone has a house and a garden, we find a moderate desire for social and communal life,’ he wrote to Lewis Mumford in August 1946 from his garden city. ‘The demand has definite limits; I am more communal in my habits than most people are. I find many women dislike the idea of nursery school and crêches; they want to look after their own children. And young men and women prefer lodgings to hostels.’ How, then, was a more communally minded society to be encouraged? With great difficulty. In their pioneering account of the Labour Party and popular politics in the 1940s, Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo chart the post-war development of such largely
de haut en bas
initiatives as neighbourhood units, socially mixed housing, municipal eating facilities, popular participation in urban planning and joint production committees in the workplace, with in each instance only chequered progress being made at best. In terms of voluntary organisations like Co-operative societies, friendly societies and community associations, all their evidence points towards an essentially ‘diviminded’, instrumental use of them (whether for benefits or facilities) on the part of members, as opposed to a more socialist or ideological motivation.
^7.

Contemporary surveys flesh out the picture. In Willesden in the winter of 1946/7, more than twice as many preferred to live in a single-class street than in a mixed street; most drew a very careful distinction between ‘friends’, ‘acquaintances’ and ‘neighbours’; and 75 per cent of housewives were not on visiting terms with their neighbours, let alone going out together. Soon afterwards, a survey of Watling, an inter-war LCC estate near Edgware, found that only 30 per cent of adults answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Do you belong to any clubs, sports associations, guilds, etc., for leisure time activities, including those connected with politics and the social life of churches?’ – a figure apparently
above
the national trend. And in August 1947 an investigator in Bethnal Green heard explanations from working-class people about why they preferred to give a wide berth to clubs, societies and suchlike:

I don’t like mixing, I like keeping myself to myself.

I’m a married woman and I prefer staying in my home. I don’t want to go and mix with other people, I’ve too much to do in the house.

I’ve got too much to do in the house, I’m glad to sit at home in the evening.

No, I don’t want anything to do with that kind of thing. I just don’t like it that’s all.

I’m just not interested I suppose, there’s plenty to do without joining one of those.

Well I like going out with the hubby, and I don’t bother to mix much with others.

I’ve got these three kiddies, they take up all my time.

By now even Priestley was reluctantly coming to accept the sovereignty of the individual. ‘There seems to be far less kind and neighbourly co-operation than there was a few years ago, during the worst of the war years,’ he told his Light Programme listeners (presumably waiting impatiently for the next crooner) two months later. ‘People are harder, more selfish, more intent upon looking after Number One. They are more likely to snatch, grab, lose their temper.’ And, like a thousand intellectuals before and (especially) after him, he added, ‘Now why is this? What has gone wrong?’
^8.

Over the years, the ‘“we wuz robbed!” tendency within British Labour historiography’, as the historian Dilwyn Porter has termed it, would exercise huge influence. If only there had been more systematic economic planning, if only there had been more extensive and full-blooded nationalisation, if only private education had been abolished – in fact, if only the Attlee government had been more
socialist
, and thereby engendered an irresistible moral and political force of popular enthusiasm for its policies – then the story of post-war Britain would have been fundamentally different and fundamentally happier. That was not how the
New Statesman
’s resident versifier, ‘Sagittarius’ (a pseudonym for Olga Katzin), saw things. In ‘Let Cowards Flinch,’ a brilliant long poem imitating Byron’s ottava rima and published in October 1947, she surveyed Labour’s first two years in power. Two verses had a special piquancy:

But while they speed the pace of legislation

With sleepless ardour and unmatched devotion,

The lower strata of the population

Appear to have imbibed a soothing potion;

Faced with the mighty tasks of restoration

The teeming millions seem devoid of motion,

Indifferent to the bracing opportunity

Of selfless service to the whole community.

It is as if the Government were making

Their maiden journey in the train of State,

The streamlined engine built for record-breaking,

Steaming regardless at a breakneck rate,

Supposing all the while that they were taking

Full complement of passengers and freight,

But puffing on in solitary splendour,

Uncoupled from the carriages and tender.

Yet one can exaggerate the degree of uncoupling and indeed the breakneck steaming ahead. Precisely because the Attlee government was essentially practical and moderate in its approach, faithfully reflecting Attlee himself, it managed to create a settlement that in operational practice had – above all on the welfare side – considerable direct appeal. Crucially, it was an appeal not only to the working class, thankful (more or less) to consolidate its wartime gains, but also to significant elements of the middle class, who for all their lack of political gratitude were understandably reluctant to look an apparent gift horse, albeit a rather threadbare one, in the mouth. People may not have been as communally minded as Priestley and Labour’s other cheerleaders might have wished, but they were for the most part perfectly willing, at this stage anyway, to look to collective provision in order to satisfy individual needs and wants. Put another way, the fact that BUPA started in 1947 did not mean that the majority of people were not welcoming the prospect of a national health service free at the point of delivery.

Moreover, for many of those who had lived through the worst of the inter-war years – the bleak ‘Jarrow’ version of those years rather than Margaret Thatcher’s more upbeat ‘Grantham’ version – there was a deep satisfaction in the very fact of a government no longer run by the old gang. There might be serious economic problems, there might be miserable austerity, but at last the awful spectre of mass unemployment had seemingly been banished. One afternoon in April 1946, Florence Speed, an inveterate Conservative voter, was gazing at a shop window in Brixton:

There were lovely fabrics on display & streamlined wooden carvings &furniture which doesn’t appeal to me.

As I looked a friendly little man in a cap, but neat & respectable, said to me, ‘Beautiful stuff there’.

‘Yes,’ I agreed slightly sardonically.

‘But it
is
good.’

‘Yes it is, but I like curves, not all these straight lines.’

‘I like Victorian mahogany,’ he said then. ‘More homely. But this stuff is good.’

‘British craftsmen are the best in the world – if they’d work.’

‘Digging that old one up’ the man retorted contemptuously, & in a few seconds the friendliness had changed to fanaticism as bottled up hate, poured out in a spate of sing song Welsh.

He had been a miner . . . ‘Won’t work? I’d have walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats to get work. Every man’s entitled to a job. I’ve had nothing in a day but a cup of tea . . .’