Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (39 page)

Not everything fell victim to the government’s – above all Sir Stafford Cripps’s – determination to achieve a relentless drive for exports and reductions in unnecessary personal consumption. Cigarettes, for example, stayed off the ration: although their price had gone up sharply (from 2s 4d to 3s 4d for a packet of 20) in Hugh Dalton’s penultimate Budget, no minister dared tamper with the working man’s inalienable right to smoke, a right barely yet connected with lung cancer. ‘All we need to do,’ Dalton had reassuringly boomed, ‘is to smoke a little slower, make our cigarettes last a little longer, throw away our stubs a little shorter, knock out our pipes a little later; and all this might be good for our health.’ Nevertheless, in a thousand and one ways, everyday life remained difficult, perhaps typified by the qualitative as well as quantitative problems involved in that indispensable necessity for almost every household – coal supplies. ‘There seems to be more coal dust in the delivery nowadays,’ one housewife, Mrs Mary Whittaker, complained in October 1947 on
Woman’s Hour
. ‘I know we’re asked to make briquettes of it, but can you tell me why we get so much of it?’

Housing remained a continuing, high-profile worry, though at least the much-disparaged prefabs (described by Mary King in her diary as ‘a blot on the lovely English scenery’) were for the time being still going up. Neil Kinnock’s family moved in November 1947 to a new two-bedroom prefab on a council estate at Nant-y Bwch. ‘It was like moving to Beverly Hills,’ he recalled. ‘It had a fridge, a bath, central heating and a smokeless grate . . . and people used to come just to look at it.’ As for clothing restrictions, Anthony Heap’s experience a few weeks earlier was probably typical:

Hopefully hied up to Burton’s branch at The Angel, to order one of the fifteen ‘made to measure’ suits that comprise their present weekly ‘quota’. Wanted a grey tweed, but as luck would have it, they hadn’t any in this week’s ‘allocation’ of patterns – only blue worsteds. They would, however, try and get me a length next week. In which case, the suit would be ready in about nine months’ time! And with that dubious prospect I had to be content.

It was probably even more frustrating for women. ‘Proceed early to Marshall & Snelgrove,’ Grace Golden noted in January 1948, ‘only to learn that they do not change utility garments – I almost burst into tears.’
^5.

Gallup revealed that spring that as many as 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 per cent immediately after the end of the war. But soon afterwards there were merciful signs that Cripps’s strong medicine was starting to work, with a modest petrol ration for pleasure purposes being reinstated from 1 June, together with 12 extra clothing coupons. And in her
The New Yorker
letter a week later, Mollie Panter-Downes optimistically reckoned that such concessions would be ‘uplifting in their effect on the public, who are apt to accept controls as a sort of evil forest that has grown up around them and become a tedious but quite natural part of their lives’. Still, Tennessee Williams probably had the right of it. ‘I guess England is about the most unpleasant, uncomfortable and expensive place in the world you could be right now,’ he wrote not long afterwards to his agent in New York. It was a Sunday, he was staying at the Cumberland Hotel, and on going hopefully to the bar at 2.10 in the afternoon he had discovered that ‘there wasn’t a drink to be had in all of London until seven’.

Whatever the problems, whatever the sense of monotony and restricted choice, most people
coped
. Take Marian Raynham in Surbiton on a Wednesday in July 1947: ‘Had a good & very varied day. Went to grocers after breakfast, then on way home in next door, then made macaroni cheese & did peas & had & cleared lunch, then rest, then made 5 lbs raspberry jam, got tea & did some housework, listened to radio & darned, wrote to Jessie Gould. In bed about midnight.’ A key coping mechanism for many women, especially working-class women, was the bush telegraph. ‘Round about us we have got a good shopping centre, so we are very fortunate,’ explained a miner’s widow when asked that year about the effect of rationing on her family budget, ‘and I find in getting about you pick up windfalls and swop ideas and hints (for I am not too old to learn).’ There was also the indispensable safety valve of humorous grumbling.
Punch
as usual had its finger on the pulse of Middle England, typified by these more or less amusing snippets between October and December 1947:

‘Excellent meals
can
be obtained if you know where to go,’ says a correspondent. He claims to have found a restaurant where food is fully up to war-time standard.

The Government policy of encouraging large families is emphasized by a recent statement that only in households of six or over is it worth while collecting the new bacon ration weekly.

‘What could be better than a comfortable old arm-chair, a cosy little fire, and a good book?’ enthuses a reader. We don’t know; but no doubt some Ministry or other will soon be telling us.

Since caterers’ supplies were cut we hear many people have taken to rations to eke out their eating out.

‘Fry your whalemeat with an onion to absorb the oil,’ advises a chef, ‘and throw away the onion.’ As well?

Anyway, there was remarkably little hard, objective evidence to back up the Tory claim that the unappetising austerity diet was actually leading to malnutrition. When the Hunterian Society debated the question in November 1947 at the Apothecaries Hall, nutritionists demonstrated that it was extremely difficult to detect even limited malnutrition. ‘The biological system of man was infinitely adaptable to circumstances,’ insisted one of them, Magnus Pyke. They did not perhaps go quite as far as Michael Foot had in a recent parliamentary debate – claiming that the children of 1947 were ‘healthier, tougher, stronger than any breed of children we have ever bred in this country before’ – but their central point was not disproved.
^6.

Things looked pretty good to one outsider. Enid Palmer was in her late 20s when in April 1948 – after military nursing service in India and Burma followed by a lengthy stay with her parents in Kenya – she disembarked at Liverpool and caught the train to London. ‘The sun shone most of the way – & England looked very pleasant,’ she wrote home soon afterwards. ‘Little green fields full of apple trees in blossom – sheep and white lambs gambolling about. Children everywhere – dogs all over the place – particularly wire haired terriers like Whiskey. We passed farms – with great English Carthorses pulling loads – and of course the rows and rows of tiny houses with their front and back gardens, washing hanging out.’ That Friday evening she reached Addlestone in Surrey, where she was staying with her uncle George, aunt Beattie, cousin Joan and her baby Graham, and ‘The Granny’. Uncle George took her on Saturday afternoon to the shops in Woking. ‘They are full of nice things,’ she reported. ‘I eventually bought a pair of blue leather shoes at Dolcis – they cost only 51/- and are beautifully made with a crepe sole. I had to give 7 coupons for them. We walked round Woolworths, it was packed with people.’ That evening a trip to the Weybridge Odeon (‘comfortable plush seats’) was followed by supper back home of ‘sardines, tomato & lettuce, bread & margarine & coffee’. All in all, she told her parents, she was impressed:

I have decided that England is not such a bad place after all. As for the stories one hears about it – they are quite untrue! Everybody looks very well – the children with beautiful rosy cheeks – and what numbers of children – there are crowds of them everywhere. The People are cheerful & happy – everybody is kind & polite & they smile – all the bus drivers & conductors, the railways officials, taxi drivers, porters etc, are polite & pleasant & helpful.

The shops are full of flowers & fruit, sweets, cigarettes, clothes, shoes, everything one could possibly want. The only snag about clothes &shoes is the lack of coupons – one cannot buy them without. Fruit one can buy. There are fine apples, Jaffa oranges, South African grapes. The apples & oranges are 9d a lb. Daffodils are 24 for a shilling. Sweets are rationed – each person is allowed ¾ lb per month. Cigarettes are expensive, and not always easy to get. Other things are plentiful &everything is so much cheaper than in Kenya.

Nor was that all. ‘Everybody is well dressed – far better than you or I even are – they may be old clothes but they are smart and well cut . . . Few people wear hats or stockings. The commonest working man looks smart in his utility clothing.’

Over the next few weeks, while Palmer waited to go to a maternity home in Colchester to continue her training as a nurse, the honeymoon did not quite last. ‘England’s countryside is beautiful,’ she wrote, ‘but there are too many restrictions – everything is crowded & there are queues everywhere.’ And: ‘Life is narrow and bound by documents.’ And again: ‘There is one standard topic of conversation in England – “coupons”, “food”, “clothes”.’ She was also rather dismayed by the lack of hygiene, and one day in London, finding herself near Victoria station, she did the enterprising thing:

I found a public Baths building – after queuing for an hour got a good hot bath for 6d. It was most enjoyable as it was 6 days since I had had one. They are short of coalite here. Today Uncle George said, ‘You may have a bath today’. I am afraid he runs this house. I was rather amused at being told when I may have a bath. Nobody else seems to have a bath except Uncle George who has one on Sunday night. Other nights I have a kettle of hot water, heated on the gas.

She also in her letters stopped extolling the abundance of food.

But whatever the objective truth about that, or indeed about the malnutrition question, the crucial, all-pervasive
subjective
reality for most people was that morale generally, and food morale in particular, was low. In the same month that Palmer arrived in England, an official survey asked a representative sample of the population whether they felt they were getting sufficient food to stay in good health. Fifty-five per cent answered ‘no’, with another 7 per cent doubtful; when a similar survey was conducted two months later, the respective figures were 53 and 9 per cent. ‘“Something tasty” is the key-phrase in feeding,’ Richard Hoggart would memorably write about the working-class Hunslet of the 1950s – but in reality of the 1930s when he was growing up there. ‘Something solid, preferably meaty, and with a well-defined flavour.’
^7.
Given the shortages of anything tasty, especially with the low ration of fats, it was little wonder that almost half of a weary, put-upon population wanted to try pastures new.

Meanwhile, the sense of social malaise if anything deepened. Thirteen million pounds’ worth of property was stolen during 1947, more than five times as much as in 1938. ‘Newspapers are sprinkled with stories of rascals at work,’ noted Hodson in December 1947 – stories that included the
Barnsley Chronicle
’s report of how the town’s market had been invaded by ‘strapping young men dressed in gaily ribboned slouch hats; the loudest and latest Yankee ties (nude figures painted with luminous paint); fancy overcoats with padded shoulders; highly-polished pointed shoes’. And all rounded off with ‘David Niven ’tashes, cultivated with the aid of a black pencil’. These spivs, ‘driven from their holes and corners in London by the manpower hunt, the closer attentions of the police, and income tax officials’, attempted to sell toy balloons at 2s 6d, paper flowers at 5s a bunch, and ‘worthless glass trinkets at 10s’ – ‘“All very speshull” they whined in their best Cockney accent.’ But they got little joy from the Barnsley housewives. ‘Why should such fit young men be allowed to carry on like that,’ demanded one, ‘while my husband is at the coal face risking his life to get coal to keep the likes of those comfortable?’

Soon afterwards, in early 1948, the black market was the subject given by Mass-Observation to its regular panel. ‘Do you know of any such dealings in your area? If so, please describe them. (No identification, please.)’ More answers than not emphasised their prevalence:

Yes, I do know of such dealings locally. Eggs are sold at from 6d to 1/-each; dead birds at much above the controlled price; milk at 1/- per pint and moreover if one leaves a little extra each week in the empty bottles more milk is forthcoming. Conversely if one stops the tribute the milk stops immediately. No words are used in this little comedy . . . Black market dealings pervade every sphere of life and every commodity. (
Grocer
)

If the Black Market exists as it seems to in the minds of Fleet St then I’ve not come into contact with it. There’s a hell of a lot of a sort of barter going on. Which is very different. (
Commercial traveller
) My aunt (otherwise a scrupulously honest woman) gets extra supplies of eggs, butter, cheese and fruit from her regular grocer – at fabulously high prices. (
Designer
)

From my experience the focal points in my neighbourhood centre in the local Conservative Clubs. The people who, day in and day out, pour rancorous abuse upon the Government’s restrictions are, I find, the very folk who dabble dirtily in this sort of anti-social business. (
Local
government officer
)