Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (4 page)

As for Anthony Heap, he more or less repeated his ‘programme’ of the day before, this time on his first leg getting a glimpse of the Royal Family as they set out for their tour of the East End. In the evening it was ‘once more unto the West End’, where he found ‘the same good humoured crowds, the same high spirited skylarking, the same awe inspiring floodlighting’, though it ‘wasn’t perhaps
quite
so overwhelming an occasion’. He finished with ‘a last enchanting eye-full of the floodlit splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral, Houses of Parliament etc from Waterloo Bridge’ before catching ‘what must have been the last 68 bus to Euston Rd which was completely illuminated from end to end with its full pale-blue peace-time lighting’. After seemingly interminable blackouts and no street lighting, this did indeed ‘seem the most amazing thing – this prodigality with light’, as Alan Bennett would express it when describing his VE memories (improbably enough of Guildford, to where his parents had moved briefly from Leeds). Heap concluded his diary entry without ambiguity: ‘And so we came to end of two perfect days. They couldn’t have furnished a happier set of memories to look back on in my old age.’
¹¹

Kenneth Tynan might not have agreed. A precocious schoolboy in his last year at King Edward’s, Birmingham, Tynan had spent VE night watching his girl (Joy Matthews) go off with someone else, only not coming to blows because he realised that his rival was stronger. ‘But Wednesday night capped everything,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I have never felt nearer to murder than I did then and do now.’ Ken and Joy were among a party – of fifty to a hundred strong – that spent most of the evening first at a ‘Jazz Jamboree’ at the Midland Institute and then at the Birmingham University Students’ Union, before heading towards Moseley:

We walked along in a colossal line spread out across Bristol Rd – all except Joy and Bernard, who walked ecstatically in front, embracing each other every few yards. Then I got mad. I went completely berserk and walked bang into the headlights of a car approaching along Priory Rd. I was utterly, utterly despondent . . . I dashed off after Joy, croaking in a reedy hoarse treble that I was taking her home and that I would slit both their throats if they didn’t stop. Of course, they didn’t. They stopped,
laughed at me
(O Christ) and proceeded to neck in front of me in the middle of the road.

It took eight of them to stop me from strangling the filthy bitch and that low bastard.

A provincial wannabe being laughed at: a terrible moment, but he would soon enough be on the fast track to exact cosmic revenge.

About the same time as Tynan’s humiliation, the Chelsea-based Mass-Observation investigator was returning home. She had spent the evening in the West End, mainly outside Buckingham Palace watching the crowds waiting for a balcony appearance and eventually getting it at about 10 p.m.: ‘“Doesn’t the Queen look lovely?” says F35C. “The princesses were among the crowd last night, only nobody recognised them,” says somebody else.’ The gates were closed at both Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations, so she walked home. Her report finished with a post-midnight vignette: ‘On a piece of waste ground in Flood Street ten or twelve children are silently gathered round a bonfire. They look tired but happy and absorbed. One says in a low voice, “It’ll last a long time yet.” A man at the end of the street is striking matches and says he is looking for a shilling he has dropped. Throws match away angrily, saying, “They don’t last long enough.”’
¹²

2

Broad Vistas and All That

Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains. Woodbines, Craven ‘A’, Senior Service, smoke, smog, Vapex inhalant. No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash day every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry. Central heating rare, coke boilers, water geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common. Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home,
Housewives’ Choice
or
Workers’ Playtime
or
ITMA
on the air, televisions almost unknown, no programmes to watch, the family eating together. Milk of Magnesia, Vick Vapour Rub, Friar’s Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno’s, Germolene. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no ‘teenagers’. Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.

For the policy-makers, the planners, the intelligentsia, the readers of Penguin Specials, everyone with an occupational or emotional stake in ‘the condition of the people’, there was no shortage of problems to be tackled.
¹
Some flowed directly from the war – three-quarters of a million houses destroyed or severely damaged, huge disruption to public services, Britain’s debt a record £3.5 billion – but others were of longer standing. Life expectancy had increased from some 50 years in the Edwardian era to about 65, and classic killer diseases like tuberculosis, scarlet fever and typhoid were almost under control; yet access to the medical services remained for many far from free or equitable, and considerable suffering resulted from an unwillingness or (more usually) financial inability to use them. Despite a reasonably energetic slum-clearance programme between the wars, there were still many appalling Victorian slums in the major cities and large pockets of overcrowded, inadequate-to-wretched housing almost everywhere. About seven million dwellings lacked a hot-water supply, some six million an inside WC, almost five million a fixed bath. Above all, there was the profound emotional as well as practical legacy of the economic slump between the wars – at its worst from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, causing widespread poverty and destroying or at best stunting millions of lives. The resonance of ‘Jarrow’, the ‘murdered’ north-east shipyard town that famously marched against unemployment, or indeed ‘the thirties’, would last for half a century. Even a Prince of Wales had once murmured that something had to be done; it had become a less than revolutionary sentiment to agree.

Wartime developments had – at least in retrospect – a seemingly irresistible momentum. As early as January 1941, while the bombs were falling,
Picture Post
outlined in a celebrated special issue (complete with six naked, presumably impoverished small children on the cover) ‘A Plan For Britain’. The magazine recalled the sudden end of the war in November 1918: ‘The plan was not there. We got no new Britain . . . This time we can be better prepared. But we can only be better prepared if we think now.’ Accordingly, a series of articles (including ‘Work for All’, ‘Plan the Home’, ‘Social Security’, ‘A Plan for Education’, ‘Health for All’ and ‘The New Britain Must be Planned’) offered an initial blueprint for ‘a fairer, pleasanter, happier, more beautiful Britain than our own’.
^2.

Over the next 18 months or so, the concept began to be accepted that the British people, in return for all their sufferings in a noble cause, deserved a new start after the war. December 1942 saw the publication of the Beveridge Report, drawn up by the eminent economist and civil servant Sir William Beveridge. In it he set out proposals for a comprehensive post-war system of social security, in effect laying the foundations for the ‘classic’ welfare state – an attack upon what he memorably depicted as ‘the five giant evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – and in so doing caused such a stir that an extraordinary 630,000 copies of the report (mainly the abridged, popular edition) were sold. Then, in 1944, as the war began to draw to a close, there were two major ‘reconstruction’ moments: in May the publication of a White Paper that committed the British government to the pursuit of full employment as the highest economic objective; and in August the arrival on the statute book of R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler’s Education Act, which, among other things, created free, non-fee-paying grammar schools.

To all appearances the reforming, forward-looking tide was running fast.
Who Else Is Rank
was the symptomatic title of an unpublished novel co-written the following winter by a 22-year-old Kingsley Amis and a fellow Signals officer. ‘We must see to it after we’re demobilised,’ the Amis figure (a sensitive young lieutenant) says at one point, ‘that these common men, from whom we’re separated only by a traditional barrier – we’re no more than common men ourselves – benefit from the work that has been done, and if the system won’t let that happen, well, we shall just have to change the system.’
^3.

In April 1945, as Hitler made his last stand in Berlin, the Labour Party issued its manifesto for the election that was bound to follow the end of the war. Called
Let Us Face the Future
, it demanded decisive action by the state to ensure full employment, the nationalisation of several key industries, an urgent housing programme, the creation of a new national health service and (in a nod to Beveridge) ‘social provision against rainy days’. The tone was admirably lacking in bombast but distinctly high-minded. ‘The problems and pressures of the post-war world,’ the fairly brief document declared, ‘threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace. It calls for hard work, energy and sound sense.’ The manifesto’s principal author was Michael Young, not long before his lunch with Hugh Dalton. Aged 29, he had been educated at the progressive Dartington Hall and been director of a newish organisation, Political and Economic Planning (PEP), before in February 1945 moving to the Labour Party’s research department. Young in later life was self-deprecating about the manifesto: ‘The mood was such that second-class documents were going to be thought first-class with a star.’
^4.

Two crucial questions suggest themselves, however. How by 1945, at the apparent birth of a new world, did the ‘activators’ – politicians, planners, public intellectuals, opinion-formers –
really
see the future? And how did their vision of what lay ahead compare with that of ‘ordinary people’? The overlaps and mismatches between these two sets of expectations would be fundamental to the playing out of the next three or more decades.

There would be no fly-pasts in its honour, but arguably 1940 was the British state’s finest hour, as the nation – under the iron-willed direction of Ernest Bevin as Minister of Labour in Churchill’s coalition government – mobilised for total war more quickly and effectively than either Germany or Russia. The state, in other words, proved that it could deliver, as it also did by introducing wide-scale rationing in a way generally seen as equitable. Simultaneously, the first half of the war saw the creation of a plethora of new ministries: not only Labour but Economic Warfare, Food, Home Security, Information, Shipping, Aircraft Production and Production. By 1943 there were, not surprisingly, well over a quarter of a million more civil servants than there had been before the war. It was soon clear, moreover, that all the work of these ministries, as well as of the traditional ones, was now predicated upon assumptions of co-ordinated central planning – an utterly different mindset from Whitehall’s customary approach and propagated by some exceptionally talented temporary recruits there, often operating at a very high level.

How, if at all, might this translate into peacetime economic policy? Relatively early in the war, the great economist John Maynard Keynes had more or less won the battle within the Treasury to persuade that deeply conservative institution to accept at least a substantial measure of demand management as the principal way of regulating the economy in order to keep the level of unemployment down. Thereafter, the real intellectual conflict among radically minded ‘activators’ was between Keynesians and those whose ideal was wartime-style (and Soviet-style) direct physical planning. For the former, there was still a significant role – at least in theory – to be played by the price mechanism of the market; for the latter, that role was fairly surplus to requirements. By the end of the war, it seemed that the force was with the out-and-out planners, with their emphasis on investment planning and, through direct controls over labour, manpower planning.

Indeed, such was the temper of the times that even most Keynesians had, in a visceral sense, little real faith in, or any great intellectual curiosity about, the possible economic merits of the market or of supply-side reforms. Hence the largely stony academic-cum-intellectual reception accorded in 1944 to
The Road to Serfdom
(dedicated ‘To the Socialists of All Parties’) by the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, who was based at the London School of Economics (LSE). ‘His central argument was that a modern economy was a vast system of information flows which signal to everyone indispensable facts about scarcity and opportunity,’ a latter-day follower, Kenneth Minogue, has helpfully summarised. ‘The vitality of modern Western economies, and the best use of scarce resources, rested upon the workers and entrepreneurs having these signals available to them. No planning committee could possibly plug into them. Central direction could lead only to poverty and oppression.’
^5.
Such was the loss of confidence among economic liberals following the events of the previous 20 years – the inter-war slump, the lessons of the war (including the apparent Russian lessons) – that it would be a long time before a critical mass of politicians began to make a full-bloodedly coherent or attractive case on Hayek’s behalf.

Unsurprisingly, then, the inescapable necessity of a substantial portion of the economy being in public ownership was hardly questioned for many years after 1945. Indeed, such had arguably become the prevailing activator consensus from well before the war. The BBC (1922), Central Electricity Board (1926) and BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation, 1939) were all examples of important new organisations being set up on a public rather than private basis, while Harold Macmillan, the rising force on the Tory left, called in
The Middle Way
(1938) for a programme of nationalisation at least as ambitious as that then being advocated by the Labour Party. To many, the arguments seemed unanswerable: not only were there the examples of major, palpably enfeebled industries like coal mining and the railways as clear proof that private enterprise had failed, but in economies of scale, especially as applied to utilities (the so-called natural monopolies), there was an even more powerful siren call, very much reflecting what the political economist John Vaizey would term the prevailing ‘cult of giganticism’. During the last year of war, a quite sharp leftwards shift in the Labour Party – identifying public ownership with both economic efficiency and, in an ominously fundamentalist way, socialist purity – resulted in a fairly ambitious shopping list in
Let Us Face the Future
, featuring the Bank of England, fuel and power, inland transport, and (most contentiously) iron and steel, though with the high-street banks, heavy industry and building all excluded.