Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (38 page)

That October, at the party conference in Brighton, the progressive-minded, thoroughly non-grandee (son of an actuary) Reggie Maudling, prospective candidate for Barnet and one of the bright young things on the research side, moved an amendment that the
Charter
be accepted by the party as a whole. Sir Waldron Smithers, the entirely unreconstructed MP for Orpington, protested that ‘the party must not allow itself to become infected with the Socialist bug, and it must stick to its principles or perish’. But amid soothing words from Butler (including the phrase ‘private initiative in the public interest’) and a certain amount of well-rehearsed procedural legerdemain, the Maudling amendment was carried with only three dissenters. It was, the
Spectator
reflected with overall satisfaction, ‘a responsible act’ that demonstrated ‘a positive will to govern on the part of the rank and file’.
¹⁵

In reality, the Tories were not in quite such ideological retreat. Not only did
The Industrial Charter
consistently identify private enterprise as the rightful mainspring of economic activity, but the language almost throughout emphasised the individual at the expense of the collective. ‘The ultimate restoration of freedom of choice’ for the consumer, ‘status as an individual personality’ for the worker, and ‘a personal incentive to reap a greater reward for greater responsibility’ for the manager: all were contrasted, in ‘a free and resourceful nation’, with Labour’s belief that ‘the men and women who fought and worked together in the war can now be exalted, controlled and regimented into producing goods, building houses and rendering services in time of peace’. Variety as against uniformity, ‘humanising’ as against nationalising, giving people ‘opportunity’ as against orders – this was to be the new, distinctive rhetoric of post-war Conservatism, a rhetoric far removed in the late 1940s from Labour rhetoric, even right-wing Labour rhetoric.

Moreover, although no one in the Tory leadership imagined that there could be a return to the minimalist, ‘nightwatchman’ state of the nineteenth century, it was far from clear that old-fashioned economic liberalism had been totally banished. ‘I do not agree with a word of this,’ Churchill memorably told Maudling after being given a five-line digest of the newly endorsed
Charter
; the next most senior Tory, Sir Anthony Eden, was already pushing hard for ‘a property-owning democracy’ despite the fact that public housing was poised to expand as never before; and a possible Tory Chancellor, Oliver Lyttelton, a hard-money man from the City, was privately contemplating the radical free-market solution of floating the pound. In short, the ‘pinks’ like Butler (who himself plugged ‘co-partnership’ essentially as a tactical antidote to nationalisation) and Harold Macmillan (author of
The
Middle Way
in the 1930s) were far from having captured the party. A few weeks after the Brighton conference, the somewhat puzzled thoughts of Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a backbencher instinctively sceptical of Keynes et al, were probably representative of much of party opinion:

I find that this pinkish portion of our party are more prominent but less popular with the rank and file than they used to be. People instinctively dislike their economic planning and plotting and yet can see no alternative to some policy of the kind in present conditions. In this I fancy they are right – the great thing, however, is not to emphasize the necessity for controls so much – if and when we come back into power, it will be time enough to decide how much Govt. intervention in the conduct of industry is required.
¹⁶

There was still, in sum, much to play for – both within the party and, notwithstanding Labour’s partial retreat from planning, between the parties.

Not that most people were fussed either way. ‘A very large number of people know little about party politics and care little,’ declared a Mass-Observation report in the summer of 1947 about public reaction to the
Charter
. ‘Any effort at all to obtain interest in a particular political party or policy is immediately confronted with a solid wall of disinterest and disbelief in at least a third of the people of this country’ – a state of mind co-existing with ‘extreme confusion on any subject even remotely concerned with party politics’. Asked about the differences between the two main parties, most of the survey’s respondents were unable to identify any; as for those who did, the analysis rarely went beyond the personal or the non-political. ‘The Labour are out for themselves and don’t care about the people, but the Conservatives are wonderful, Mr Churchill should be sitting on the throne of Heaven’ was a not untypical reply, in this case given by a 55-year-old charwoman. Less than a fifth of the sample, shown copies of the
Charter
and other recent political pamphlets, confessed to having ever seen or even heard of any of them. Among those willing to engage with its policies, a worker’s charter was generally seen as irrelevant and profit-sharing as impractical. ‘It’s all right on the outside but it’s the inside that counts’ was how a Labour-voting baker summed up his response to the pamphlet. ‘I just don’t trust them, that’s all.’

Still, whatever its limitations in terms of popular appeal, there is no doubt that the
Charter
played an important part – if probably more by language than content – in making the Tories once again electoral contenders. For one septuagenarian, obstinately unwilling to stand down even as his finest hour passed into the history books (at this stage mainly being written by himself), this was a gratifying development. ‘She told me that her father was very elated by the municipal election results, and was now confident that his party had a following in the country,’ Lees-Milne noted in November 1947 after dining with Sarah Churchill. ‘Already people in the streets were more respectful to him.’
¹⁷

11

Ain’t She Lovely?

The forces of conservatism were not to be underestimated. In March 1947 Bishop Barnes of Birmingham set out in
The Rise of Christianity
a theology that rejected the evidence of the Virgin Birth, the Miracles and the Resurrection. Over the next year his book sold more than 15,000 copies and generated a huge, wildly varied postbag. ‘It is such a brave book,’ the actress Sybil Thorndike wrote to him, ‘and coming from a priest of the Church it is more than brave. It has been a releasing for me, and I am sure it must have been for many people.’ The controversy came to a head in October 1947 when, at a meeting of Convocation, Geoffrey Fisher – Archbishop of Canterbury and uncomfortably aware that a majority of bishops were itching to pass a vote of censure for heresy – explicitly disavowed Barnes. ‘If his views were mine,’ he added, ‘I should not feel that I could still hold episcopal office in the Church.’

Soon afterwards, the
Sunday Pictorial
, noting that ‘at the very least the fundamental beliefs of millions are called into question’, asked its readers to send in their views. The upshot was a torrent of words (more than three-quarters of a million in one week), with 52 per cent of letters supporting Barnes, 32 per cent against and the rest neutral. Tellingly, his opponents highlighted hypocrisy at least as much as doctrinal impurity. ‘Dr Barnes should be expelled from the Church of England for denying the very truths he is paid a large salary to defend,’ declared P. G. Thurston of Waterworks Road, Hastings. Ruth B. Hall from Ashford, Middlesex, agreed: ‘Resign, man! And at least be honest. At the moment you are taking money under false pretences, in my opinion.’ There was, as Mass-Observation’s
Puzzled People
survey had shown, a widespread dislike for the established church, seen by many – in a way that had little or nothing to do with theology – as smug and excessively privileged. Barnes himself did not step down. But it was clear that within the church leadership the liberals were in a distinct minority, a minority that did not include Archbishop Fisher, a man of ‘benign authoritarianism’ (in the phrase of his
Times
obituary) who had earlier been a public-school headmaster and intended to run the Church of England along similar lines.
^1.

A few weeks later, Fisher was solemnising the first post-war royal marriage. It had been a contentious choice of husband on Princess Elizabeth’s part. In January 1947, before the engagement was announced, a
Sunday Pictorial
poll found that although 55 per cent were in favour of a marriage between her and Prince Philip of Greece (with the stipulation ‘if the Princess and Prince are in love’), 40 per cent were against. Many readers felt that she ought to marry a commoner, one declaring that ‘the days of intermarriage of royalty have passed’; others saw the marriage as frankly ‘a political move’; and plenty echoed the xenophobic view of one household in the Euston Road: ‘We, the Russell family – a father and two sons who have served in both wars – say, “Definitely no!” to a marriage with a foreign prince.’ Lord Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, was already sufficiently rattled that he had asked the editors of the hostile Beaverbrook press whether they thought opinion would soften if his nephew were naturalised. They had agreed it might help, and Prince Philip of Greece in February duly became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN.

In July the engagement was at last announced. ‘Any banqueting and display of wealth at your daughter’s wedding will be an insult to the British people at the present time,’ the Camden Town branch of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers immediately warned the King, ‘and we would consider that you would be well advised to order a very quiet wedding in keeping with the times.’ Amid a generally warm press response, the reaction of Florence Speed was probably representative. ‘Princess Elizabeth is engaged (official),’ she noted, ‘& judging from the laughing photographs of her taken after a dance at Apsley House last night it is the “love match” it is claimed to be & we are all glad about it.’ As for Philip, she added that he was ‘the type “easy on the eye”, which any young girl would fall in love with’. Although a poll taken soon afterwards revealed that 40 per cent professed indifference to the prospect of the royal wedding in November – typical remarks including ‘Feel? What should I feel?’, ‘I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me’ and ‘It’s not my business, it’s up to them’ – by October those actively approving of the marriage were up from 40 to 60 per cent. Even so, James Lees-Milne recorded some disturbing news on 18 November, after dining with Simon Mosley of the Coldstream Guards: ‘Says that 50 per cent of the guardsmen in his company refused to contribute towards a present for Princess Elizabeth. The dissentients came to him in a body and, quite pleasantly, gave him their reasons.
One
, they said the Royal Family did nothing for anybody, and
two
, the Royal Family would not contribute towards a present for their weddings.’ Moreover, ‘when Simon Mosley said that without the Royal Family the Brigade of Guards, with its privileges and traditions, would cease to exist, they replied, “Good! Let them both cease to exist.”’

Thursday the 20th was not a public holiday – deemed inappropriate, in the economic context – but there was still enormous interest in the wedding (flower arrangements by Constance Spry). ‘How we love the Crown and a wedding!’ wrote James Lansdale Hodson next day:

Our work in the office was put quite out of gear by all the staff listening-in. A newspaper records that Trafalgar Square was so crowded that not a pigeon could find foothold, and I’m told you could shop comfortably in the remoter streets, rows of tempting iced cakes lying untouched. Overnight Londoners brought out their blitz mattresses and blankets and lay on the kerbstone route; hard lying for pleasure now instead of for Jerry, and in the morning women washed in warm water from vacuum flasks before putting on their new make-up.

Not everyone was
quite
bowled over. Finding himself close-up to the happy couple on their way to Waterloo and their honeymoon (at Broad-lands), the journalist John Clarke privately thought that ‘she looked to have a great deal too much make-up on’, while ‘he’ (that morning created the Duke of Edinburgh) was ‘rather grey-faced and already long-suffering’. The following Monday, dining at the Beefsteak, Sir Cuthbert Headlam was told by the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan (‘Tommy’) Lascelles, ‘that Philip Mountbatten is a “nice boy”, but not much educated – should do all right he thinks for his job’. Later that week, the commercial artist Grace Golden went to a news cinema to see the film of the wedding and observed that ‘Princess Elizabeth’s charm must lie in her expressions.’ But by the New Year there was still undimmed, mainly female enthusiasm to see the wedding dress and presents that had been on display since November. ‘Mrs C. and I dragged ourselves out of bed at 7 a.m.,’ Vere Hodgson, a staunch royalist, recorded in mid-January, ‘and on a cold, wet and windy morning found ourselves in a long queue outside St James’ Palace at 9.15 a.m. It was none too soon. At 10 o’clock we were let in with the first thousand.’
^2.

There is the odd quasi-intimate diary glimpse of Elizabeth herself. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally,’ reckoned Hugh Gaitskell in April 1948 after a quarter of an hour’s conversation with her. Soon afterwards, Violet Bonham Carter went to a ball at Buckingham Palace for the King and Queen’s silver wedding. ‘I have
never
seen Pss E. look better,’ she told her son Mark. ‘She looked really
pretty
. . . She strikes me as being rather “delié” by marriage – with fewer “stops”.’ The report went on: ‘Pss Margaret on the other hand has
none
– as you have always said. Talking to her is not like talking to a “royalty”.’

Not long afterwards, on 2 June, the princesses’ mother paid a visit to the Lancashire cotton industry. It turned out to be ‘a wet day, thoroughly wet, with a raw cold wind’, in the words of Raymond Streat, one of the party that met the Queen at Blackburn station and then followed her in the second car of the procession. Early on she visited a mill and talked to the weavers, with Streat struck by ‘the positive rapture indicated on the faces of those to whom she spoke’. Lunch at Rochdale Town Hall followed, and afterwards she appeared on the balcony ‘and the vast crowd in the Town Hall Square cheered her mightily’. The procession then made its way to Oldham and from there, with the rain still pelting down, to Manchester. During those 7 miles there were ‘people all the way on both sides of the road’, and ‘they surged off the pavement to get a close view of the Queen’. For Streat, it was the culmination of a rich anthropological experience:

Through the windows of our car we heard the voices of the crowd as they looked with fond affection on the receding car of the Queen and expressed their reaction to their immediate neighbours. Many hundreds of times that day I heard the phrase ‘Ain’t she lovely?’ . . . That was the comment of more than three-quarters of the onlookers – just that and nothing more. They had come in curiosity to see a Queen, some no doubt for the first time and wondering what majesty did to a woman: they had seen a sweet and kindly face and shining friendly eyes, a wave of the hand and a little bow in their direction: that was all and their outstanding thought was that ‘she’ was lovely.

The Firm did not rely on just waves and smiles. Less than a week later, Harold Nicolson went to Buckingham Palace to be sounded out by Lascelles about writing an official life of George V. ‘He said that I should not be expected to write one word that was not true,’ Nicolson recorded. ‘I should not be expected to praise or exaggerate. But I must omit things and incidents which were discreditable.’ Nicolson agonised but in the end agreed. And privately he conceded, shortly before getting down to work on the commission, ‘I quite see that the Royal Family feel their myth is a piece of gossamer and must not be blown upon.’
^3.

For royalty and subjects alike, at least in theory, there was no getting away from continuing austerity. When Gallup in 1947 asked people what would be their ideal, no-expense-spared meal for a special occasion, their lovingly detailed answer – sherry; tomato soup; sole; roast chicken with roast potatoes, peas and sprouts; trifle and cream; cheese and biscuits; coffee – belonged in large part to the realms of fantasy, certainly in terms of assembling it all on any one domestic table at any one time. By the autumn of that year, following the convertibility crisis, not only had the butter and meat rations been cut again, including the bacon ration halved, but potatoes were on the ration for the first time. In early December, from the vantage point of a Wembley housewife, Rose Uttin summed up a year that had been ‘depressing in all ways except the weather’:

Our rations now are 1 oz bacon per week – 3 lbs potatoes – 2 ozs butter – 3 ozs marge – 1 oz cooking fat – 2 ozs cheese & 1/- meat – 1 lb jam or marmalade per month – ½ lb bread per day. We could be worse – but we should be a lot better considering we won the war. Cigarettes are 1/8 for 10 our only luxury except for 1 drink on Bridge evenings. Dora [her daughter] became engaged to Mac in October – we did manage a party, but I am wondering how long it will be before they can afford to marry with prices high as they are. One bag coal last week cost 4/10. America & the Labour government say we are producing more – what a joke. They forget to count the lumps of slate & stone in it. Used all the points up by last Wed on oats & mashed potato powder. Hard frost last two nights. Fog yesterday. My dinner today 2 sausages which tasted like wet bread with sage added – mashed potato – ½ tomato – 1 cube cheese & 1 slice bread & butter. The only consolation no air raids to worry us.

Nor was eating out, assuming one could afford it, necessarily a panacea. ‘It used to be a treat to have a meal there,’ commented Florence Speed in September after a dismal experience at Peter Jones. ‘Our lunch costing 3/- was a waste of money,’ with the lowlight being ‘half-cold at least just tepid fish au gratin’. Or as Lees-Milne, speaking for everyman, put it two months later, ‘The food in England is worse than during the war, dry and tasteless, even at Brooks’s.’

One food above all became a byword for these straitened, unappetising times. ‘A new South African fish on the market – snoek!’ noted Speed in October 1947. ‘Fred expressed a desire to taste it, so I got a tin when I saw it in Collins. Not cheap – 2/9 a tin.’ Fred’s reaction went unrecorded, but from the first there seems to have been little enthusiasm for this vaguely mackerel-type fish, seen by the government as the ideal replacement (largely because it came from within the sterling area) for Portuguese sardines. Ten million tins were due to reach Britain, and when in May 1948 there arrived the first large consignment the Ministry of Food celebrated by putting up snoek posters and publicising eight snoek recipes, including a concoction to go with salad immortally called
snoek piquante
. By this time a tin cost only 1s 4½d and took only one point (five less than household salmon) – necessary inducements with so many half-pound tins to get rid of. ‘If you have not yet tried the new allocation of snoek, you may be wondering what it is like,’ Marjorie Huxley wrote encouragingly soon afterwards in her ‘Recipes for the Housewife’ in the
Listener
. ‘It is rather like tunny fish in texture, but with snoek, it is best not to try serving it as it is, but to break it into flakes and moisten it with some kind of sauce, dressing or mayonnaise.’
^4.