Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (30 page)

He had no teeth & spoke so vehemently, & rapidly, that he sprayed my face with spit.

He told me of a friend who had fought in World War I . . . On his return he could find no work, & died from malnutrition. When he was dying he called his sons, & told them, ‘If there’s another war, don’t fight. I did & I’ve starved.’ Two of his sons were conscientious objectors in the last war.

The Conservatives in a 100 years had done nothing but keep down 70% of the population & let them starve. There had been starvation in every town in the country. They would never be in office again. In fifty years time there would be no bloody dukes & no parasites. Everyone would have to work.

A mild pleasant sociable old man, no one would have guessed at the deep-down burning hatred. The Labour Government are doing fine of course! – at least they haven’t had time yet . . .

He had so obviously suffered that I couldn’t help sympathising with him.
^9.

PART THREE

8

Christ It’s Bleeding Cold

New Year’s Day 1947 was a red-letter day. ‘The MINES HAVE BEEN NATIONALISED TODAY,’ noted a somewhat sceptical Vere Hodgson in west London. ‘All is fun and games at the pits . . . The worst of it is these remedies for the troubles of life never turn out so well as you expect!’ Certainly that Wednesday and over the next few days there were some stirring scenes at Britain’s 970 pits, employing some 692,000 miners. The National Coal Board (NCB) flag was hoisted (often by the oldest employee at the colliery), speeches were made, songs were sung, banners were unfurled, brass bands played. They were all now ‘one family’, declared the NCB’s chairman Lord Hyndley at celebrations at Murton Colliery on the Durham coalfield, adding that ‘if they all worked hard and worked together they would make nationalisation a great success’. At nearby Thornley Colliery the main address was given by Hubert Tunney, former chairman of Thornley Miners’ Lodge and now assistant labour director of the coal board at Newcastle:

Thirty years ago a lot of us saw in a far distance a dream of the public ownership of the mines. Now we have realised that ownership we have the important duty of making that venture a success. You are now privileged to work for a model employer. You have had holidays recently with pay and without conditions attached to them, the Board taking the view that there is a value in stressing and expressing the human side of the industry. The responsibility is now upon the management and the men to recognise that they must also play their part as far as production is concerned. Absenteeism must be reduced, lightning strikes must be cut out. There is no necessity for these things.

Fine words, and at one Durham colliery they duly celebrated Vesting Day by burying a symbolic hatchet. But for Sid Chaplin, at the Dean and Chapter Colliery that dominated Ferryhill, it was a case of sitting in the canteen and hearing the sound of music in the distance, as lodge and colliery officials marched behind band and banner. ‘We had been working all night to install a new conveyer,’ he recalled. ‘It had been a long shift and we were tired. But the conveyer was ready for coal-work, and we were satisfied.’
^1.

For a glimpse of the distinctive mentality and culture of the miners in the immediate post-war years, our best guide is the indefatigable Ferdynand Zweig, who travelled around the main English and Welsh coalfields between July and October 1947. ‘While talking to the miners,’ he found, ‘one is continually struck by the fact that the past is deeply ingrained in their minds’ – above all the 1926 coal strike. ‘Twenty years in the miner’s life,’ he added, ‘is probably like a year for others.’ Events between the wars had also led to a widely shared, deeply ingrained pessimism, which full employment and better wages since the early 1940s had done little to remove. ‘The great majority of miners are not politically minded,’ Zweig reckoned, ‘but all of them have an enormous – I would say an overwhelming – class consciousness.’ Outside working hours, miners’ favourite pastimes included watching games (especially football), going to the cinema, going dancing and gambling (dog and horse racing, football pools, sweepstakes). ‘In a village in West Yorkshire the people could name me nine bookies with their offices, and on racing days those places are simply besieged by the patrons, who want to know the latest results coming in on a teleprinter.’ As for reading habits, Zweig noted how ‘lately a great wave of cheap, rubbishy stories has invaded the mining villages, and at the stalls in any market you can see these booklets in exciting paper covers with glaring titles, changing hands like hot cakes . . . mostly second-hand, and very dirty.’
Dangerous
Dames, Moonlight Desire, White Traffic, The Penalty is Death, Corpses
Don’t Care, The League of the Living Dead
: ‘glaring’ indeed.

Inevitably, to Zweig’s silent but still palpable regret, ‘some welfare institutes and clubs have closed their reading and library rooms because they were not used and turned them into games rooms’, while ‘even in South Wales, where the traditions of cultural interests cultivated by the institution of “Eisteddfod” were very high, I was told that the choirs, dramatic societies, poetry and musical clubs are not as popular as they used to be.’ Zweig enquired why. “The buses have done that,” someone told him. “You can move freely for a few pence and get any amusement you want outside the village.” Zweig also went into miners’ homes, finding ‘a great contrast between the unpleasant appearance of the houses from outside and the nice appearance inside’:

The rooms are kept very tidy and clean, and the housewives take immense pride in keeping their houses spotless. Most miners go to considerable pains to have a yearly re-decorating of their living-room, which is always larger than any of the others. The living-room is often furnished with a leather suite, including an armchair and a couch. In general, miners prefer brass fire-irons to wooden or other modern ones, and they still have very large fire-places of the metal type, with large set-pots. Another noticeable sight are the gaily decorated mantel-pieces, with brass and other ornaments. Hand-made rugs and carpets are the feature in nearly all mining houses . . .
²

For all the gambling and lurid paperbacks, for all the enhanced physical mobility, the pit villages were still deeply respectable, ultimately home-centred worlds of their own.

What at the start of 1947 did their inhabitants really expect from nationalisation? Clearly it was a moment not without high hopes. ‘Nationalisation appears as the final and the only all-embracing security,’ a Mass-Observation investigator had concluded in 1942 after lengthy stays in Blaina and Nantyglo on the South Wales coalfield; on Vesting Day itself that coalfield saw many scenes of excitement and enthusiasm, including more than a thousand miners gathering at Park Colliery to sing ‘Cwm Rhondda’. Yet did the rank and file, as opposed to some union leaders and activists, truly see nationalisation as ushering in, either actually or potentially, fundamental changes in working conditions and employer/employee relationships? Unfortunately, we have no contemporary surveys, ie at the point of nationalisation. But Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s 1980s interviews with a range of retired miners from four collieries (Oakdale, Park and Dare, Penrhiwceibr, Seven Sisters) in South Wales – significantly, a more radical coalfield than most – broadly confirm the low-key assessment that a South Yorkshire colliery manager had offered to James Lansdale Hodson some seven months before the event. The recollections she heard were of a solid but essentially narrow, pay-oriented trade unionism in these early post-war years. Bob Crockett ‘never took it into [his] head’ to go to union meetings, and ‘once I came out of that pit I came home and I never thought about the pit . . . until I had to go back there’; Cliff Price frankly conceded that he was ‘only interested in things appertaining to myself, my own work’; and according to Eddie Bevan, the men were solely interested in union affairs ‘when it hit their pockets, when something within the pit happens’. Few recalled the work itself with any fondness. ‘The worst occupation in God’s earth,’ declared Stanley Warnes; ‘as long as I was getting a wage at the end,’ was Bevan’s view; or, as Glan Powell put it, ‘wages, that’s what everybody is going down the pit for, to earn money’. Perhaps inevitably, such men tended to see the prospect of nationalisation as something which in itself did not particularly concern them. A ‘pie-in-the-sky sort of thing,’ remembered one, another that he ‘didn’t much think about it, to be honest’, a third that ‘[I]wasn’t really bothered myself.’ If it brought tangible, bread-and-butter benefits, well and good; if it did not, too bad; but either way, there were no ideological hopes invested.

Other oral evidence, from Midlands coalfields where there had been a long, pre-1947 history of harmonious industrial relations, predictably presents an even less politicised picture. Coventry Colliery, for example, was held up by one miner as having had ‘great sports grounds, great pavilions, they spent money on providing silver bands, a very good cricket team, parks, leisure, it’s all part of village life as I was brought up’. At the time of the changeover, his main hope was that benign paternalism under private ownership would continue under public ownership.
^3.
Overall, a range of expectations and non-expectations obtained at the start of 1947, but few miners seemed to equate nationalisation with workers’ control, whatever that might mean.

It was anyway a propitious moment for pragmatism rather than ideology, given that by the time of Vesting Day the government was in serious difficulties over the production of coal – responsible for more than 90 per cent of Britain’s energy requirements – and in no great position to resist the implementation of union demands for improved pay and conditions. The previous spring the National Union of Mine - workers had drawn up the ‘Miners’ Charter’, a broad-based wish list (including the modernisation of existing pits, the sinking of new ones, proper training for young miners, and improved social and welfare provision) that had at its core several key demands: average wages not to fall ‘below those of any other British industry’; a five-day week without loss of pay; and miners to receive two consecutive weeks’ paid holiday. Over the rest of 1946, the response of Manny Shinwell, Minister of Fuel and Power, was essentially to give way – over holidays, the principle of a guaranteed weekly wage and, above all, the five-day week, to come into operation by May 1947. In so doing he overrode the wishes of the fledgling NCB, though such was the parlous state of the industry that arguably he had little choice: not only was there a shortage of manpower (14,000 down on August 1945), but absenteeism rates were still high (running at about 15 per cent) and much-exhorted productivity improvements were barely coming through. Strikingly, the prospect of nationalisation – forced through by the government with what one historian has called ‘almost indecent haste’ – did as little to improve the situation in the closing months of 1946 as did Shinwell’s concessions to the Miners’ Charter, so that by the end of the year many factories in the Midlands and north-west were on short-time working because of the lack of coal.

Shinwell himself, for all his bluff and bluster, was a disastrous minister at this difficult time. Hugh Gaitskell, who had drawn the short straw as his Parliamentary Secretary, would observe that ‘he walks alone one feels because he has never been able fully to trust anyone’, that his usual traits were ‘suspicion and aggression’, and that ‘as an administrator’ he was ‘hardly a starter’ – all fair charges. Working-class and left-wing, Shinwell felt an intense allegiance to the miners, who for so many years had enjoyed a unique position in the labour movement, and he obstinately believed that somehow they would see things through. ‘Prime Minister,’ he blithely remarked at one point to a sceptical Attlee, ‘you should not allow yourself to be led up the garden path by statistics. You should look at the imponderables.’
^4.

On Thursday, 23 January 1947 – the day after Anthony Heap noted that ‘more and more shops and offices seem to be going in for the new pale blue “fluorescent” system of electric lighting’ – snow began to fall in the south-east. It was the start of Britain’s most severe and protracted spell of bad weather during the twentieth century. Florence Speed was one of millions who shivered:

24
January
. I was frozen today, gas is on at such low pressure. Worked with scarf over my head, mittens on my hands, & a rug round my legs.

25
January
. Open spaces look as if sugar has been dredged over them.

28
January
. Freeze up continues . . . Thermometer been at freezing point all day. Waste pipe in the bathroom & the geyser frozen.

29
January. Even colder
the forecast for tonight, so I’ve borrowed a balaclava helmet from Fred [her brother] to wear in bed!

30
January
. The cuts last night put lights out in the streets. Hyde Park was closed because there were no lights there.

On Sunday the 26th, as the big freeze started to tighten its grip, the annual meeting was held of Oakdale Navigation Lodge, the miners’ lodge for Oakdale Colliery in South Wales. ‘It was regrettable to hear over the Wireless that Factories were closing down for lack of coal,’ remarked the chairman, Sam Garland. ‘This was not the fault of the Miners.’ Was the importation of Polish miners the answer? Not according to Garland: ‘We are in dire need of coal and previously it had been Miners’ sons that had filled the pits, changes had come and Miners’ sons were looking for a larger life, there were other people’s sons who could well do their share before the introduction of foreign labour.’ Three days later, the coldest day for more than 50 years, the lights went out not only in London but all over the country; the electricity was off for long spells; gas in most big cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure; and amid huge snow-drifts transport virtually ground to a halt. ‘Wearing my snow boots and fur-lined coat I was not once warm,’ grumbled James Lees-Milne. ‘All my pipes, including w.c. pipes, are frozen, so a bath or a wash is out of the question. W.c. at the office frozen likewise . . . And we live in the twentieth century. Even the basic elements of civilization are denied us.’
^5.