Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (41 page)

Such assertions may demand fuller empirical testing than is possible, but any argument that gets away from the consumer as a passive, undifferentiated dummy deserves respect.

For at least two women – and their children – the New Look was not unmomentous. In 2002 an interviewer asked David Bailey (brought up ‘in a little terraced job in East Ham’ with an outside toilet) about his first strong visual memory: ‘“Going to Selfridges in 1948, where my mother tried on a New Look dress. She couldn’t afford it, but tried it on anyway. I remember her twirling around and thinking how beautiful she was, and that was my first fashion picture, I suppose.” Taken in your head? “Yeah.”’ For Carolyn Steedman, born in March 1947 and living in Hammersmith until she was four, an even more graphic early memory was dreaming about her mother. ‘She wore the New Look, a coat of beige gaberdine which fell in two swaying, graceful pleats from her waist at the back’ – and for Steedman much of the retrospective point of the dream was the fierceness of her mother’s desire for the New Look, which in real, impoverished life was too expensive to be attainable. In her memoir,
Landscape for a Good Woman
, she draws a picture of her mother (the daughter of a Burnley weaver) who in two particular respects contradicted the conventional, salt-of-the-earth wisdom about the working class: not only was she politically a Tory, but she had almost overwhelming – and guiltless – material urges, together with powerful resentments if they were not fulfilled. Steedman’s remarkable book is, among other things, a plea against the overdeterministic reduction of working-class individuals to flattened figures in a Lowry-type setting, ‘washed over with a patina of stolid emotional sameness’. The New Look was, not only for Steedman’s mother, a very real as well as symbolic goal.
¹¹

Even so, there seems little doubt that it was the middle class that
felt
a relatively greater sense of deprivation during these austerity years. In Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska’s words, ‘the staples of the middle-class lifestyle – domestic service, ample food and clothes, consumer durables, motor cars, and luxuries such as travel, entertainment and subscriptions – were squeezed by labour shortage and rationing as well as high taxation and rising prices.’ Papers like the
Evening
Standard
were full of malcontent correspondents. ‘Before the war,’ complained one in April 1947, ‘we could afford to go abroad for holidays. Last year we imposed ourselves upon relatives. We used to play golf, tennis and badminton. How can we afford them now?’ Another, a grammar-school master, was only marginally less downbeat: ‘We could give up the car; but we cling to it as a last link with comfort and luxury, having surrendered so many other things, including annual holidays, library subscriptions and golf.’ By 1948 at the latest, it had become almost axiomatic that it was the middle class that had taken the biggest hit since the war. In a radio talk given in May, four months after the
Economist
’s finding that ‘at least ten per cent of the national consuming power has been forcefully transferred from the middle classes and the rich to the wage earners’, the economic journalist (and prolific broadcaster) Graham Hutton similarly argued that ‘the well-to-do and better-off, the middle classes, have taken the biggest material cuts and sacrifices, as persons or households’, whereas ‘the less well-to-do have had their material standards raised’.
¹²

The obvious temptation – to emigrate – was manfully resisted in Evelyn Waugh’s case. At around the time of the cuts following the convertibility crisis, he explained in his diary why he had decided not to decamp to Ireland: ‘The Socialists are piling up repressive measures now. It would seem I was flying from them.’ But for the veteran travel writer H. V. Morton, the lure of South Africa was irresistible. Not only, he told a friend during the winter of 1947/8, had the Attlee government ‘put over more unpleasant measures than any other in history’, but England had become a society where ‘things moved steadily towards Communism’ and ‘everything that can be done is being done to pamper the masses and to plunder anyone with capital or initiative’. Soon afterwards, a City banker, Ernest Muriel, was similarly contemplating his sunset years in South Africa: ‘A country,’ he informed a no-doubt sympathetic correspondent in Cape Town, ‘which has many attractions as against Britain, where we are hedged around with so many restrictions and frustrations and where the retired rentier has to pay penal taxation, and, in the Socialist mentality, is looked upon as a cross between a drone and criminal.’

Most stuck it out, including the indomitable ‘ladies’ for whom Derry & Toms was almost a second home. ‘Quite a number of the original upper middle class Kensingtonians survive,’ noted the writer John Brophy (father of Brigid) in April 1948:

All over sixty, now, some over eighty. Most of the men are bewildered and defeated. The old ladies are invincible. Neither rationing, queues, the disappearance of servants, nor heavy taxation and the lowered purchasing power of money gets them down: the unforeseen bad times give them something to talk clichés about. They wear long, rustling skirts, flowered hats, and carry reticules and, in summer, silk sun-shades with long handles. The ‘New Look’ has for the first time in forty years brought them almost within range of contemporary fashion.

These old dears mainly ate their meals in restaurants, where ‘they talk[ed] to each other across the small tables as though from mountain top to mountain top. And all banality . . .’ They were also, Brophy observed with grudging admiration, ‘quite unscrupulous’: ‘They were born to privilege, and in the days of their decline they fight for it. Given half a chance, any one of them will sail in ahead of the longest bus queue.’
¹³

In general it is clear which political party stood to benefit from an increasingly aggrieved middle class. ‘Two villages in the Home Counties have each subscribed about £500 for Lord Woolton’s Tory fund to fight the next General Election,’ Hodson had already noted in January 1948, adding that ‘the middle class are rising up.’ And that summer, a memo from the Conservative Party’s research department set out what it hoped would be the next election’s battleground: ‘The floating vote is mainly middle class (incomes £700–£1,200 per annum). These people are now finding it impossible to live. The chief fear of the middle-class voter is being submerged by a more prosperous working class. Our whole appeal must be in this direction.’ How would Labour respond? Manny Shinwell may have infamously declared in May 1947 that his party did not care ‘a tinker’s cuss’ for any class other than ‘the organised workers of the country’; Cripps in his April 1948 Budget may have indulged in a one-off capital levy; but for one of Labour’s more thoughtful MPs, Maurice Edelman (sitting, like Richard Crossman, for a Coventry seat), there was a key distinction to make. ‘Morrison has spoken of Labour’s concern for the “useful” people,’ he wrote in the
New Statesman
in June 1948:

Among the middle class the description ‘useful’ applies from the white-collar clerk to the working director; it includes Civil Servants, teachers, working shopkeepers, technicians, managers, doctors, journalists and farmers . . .The useful middle classes are an integral part of the Movement.

But there are others among the middle classes whose prosperity and advancement is tied up with a
laissez-faire
economy. Every measure of a planned economy is to them a poisoned draught. Often they owe their careers, started in the working class or the lower middle class, to the competitive nature of business, which has given their commercial aptitude opportunity, and their aggressiveness scope. They include company secretaries, commercial travellers, sales managers and small business men. These, then, are the irreconcilables among the middle classes. Labour’s victory is, by definition, their defeat.

In the latter category, Edelman did not even bother to mention the rentiers of Kensington and Cheltenham, of Bournemouth and Budleigh Salterton, the ultimate irreconcilables.

The increasing middle-class sense of being somehow muscled out of the picture by the working class was nicely caught by Gladys Langford. ‘It is very noticeable that nowadays the well-fed, well-clad, sweetly smiling bourgeoisie male & female have disappeared from poster and advertisement,’ she reflected in May 1947. ‘It is the broadly grinning and obviously unwashed “worker” who appears in more than life size on our hoardings and Tube stations.’ The chances are that hostility flowed mainly in one direction, at least to judge by the experience of a friend of Hodson who spent that summer in a hospital ward. ‘I hadn’t been so close to the working class before,’ he told the diarist. ‘I didn’t find a trace of class antagonism. The chap in the next bed was a Cockney who had three tricks, imitating pheasants, imitating the nurse when she asked “Have a cup of tea?” and creating a rude noise.’
¹⁴

That cheerful chappie was lucky not to be waiting to catch a train from Hungerford station on Tuesday, 6 January 1948. ‘A number of prosperous, well-dressed families were collected, who talked loudly about their personal affairs, ignoring the rest of the world and making me ponder the phenomenon of Class, and ask myself how the war had affected it.’ Frances Partridge (translator, diarist and member of the Bloomsbury Group) went on:

When the pressure was on us all, it had seemed as though the relation between master and man, for instance, was suffering a sea-change, and it was a common sight to see a Colonel in a good but worn suit almost cringing to a waitress as he pleadingly enquired ‘Do you think I might have a little water?’ Today I felt we were in the presence of ‘conspicuous padding’ – that is to say I was aware that the gentry had reassumed their right to the privileges and support that money gives. Two elderly ladies got into our carriage in the train and drew back their lips from their yellowing teeth with identical snarls of concentration as they pecked about in their handbags. ‘Thought for a moment I’d forgotten my handkerchief,’ said one. ‘
Very
nosy day, isn’t it?’

The previous day had featured the start, at 4.00 on the Light Programme, of
Mrs Dale’s Diary
. Directly replacing the more down-market
The Robinson Family
, each day it told the story of the Dales, a family living in a comfortable house in an outer suburb, Kenton in Middlesex, though soon moving to a fictitious London locality (Virginia Lodge, Parkwood Hill). Dr Jim Dale had been a GP for 25 years; their son Bob had recently been demobilised from the army; their 19-year-old daughter Gwen worked in an office in town; and there was a cat, called Captain. As for Mrs Mary Dale herself, she enjoyed the services of a domestic help (Mrs Morgan, who seldom stopped talking) and before long came up with a catchphrase – ‘I’m a little worried about Jim’ – that over the years seeped into the middle-class collective consciousness.

Certainly the two cultures – middle-class and working-class – seldom mixed happily. In the autumn of 1947 the Bristol Empire, situated in the city’s east, decided as an experiment to put on eight plays. Those chosen were hardly highbrow, including
Arsenic and Old Lace
and Ivor Novello’s
I Lived with You
, but the experiment proved a resounding flop. ‘Simply,’ explains that theatre’s chronicler, ‘the Empire audiences did not expect or want to see this type of production, while keen playgoers from other areas of Bristol were not willing to visit the Empire, seen as a working-class home for variety and revue.’ Going legit was not a mistake that the London Palladium ever made, though as everywhere the quality could be mixed. ‘It was a rotten variety bill, with far too many acrobatic affairs – some of which were positively obscene,’ a just-demobbed Kenneth Williams noted in January 1948. ‘Sid Field was marvellous, and received terrific and well-merited applause – what camping! I simply roared!’

Field, particularly celebrated for his ‘Slasher Green’ spiv sketch, was probably
the
variety performer of the late 1940s, but younger ones still had it all to do. A glance at the line-up at the Aldershot Hippodrome a month later reveals Dave and Joe O’Gorman (‘celebrated comedians’) as top of the bill, with other attractions including Arthur Dowler (‘The Wizard of Cod’), Peter Sellers (‘Bang On’), Wimpey (‘Acrobatic Novelty’), and Cynthia and Gladys (‘A Juggling Delight’). Sellers, at this stage an impressionist, was paid £12 10s for his week of twice-nightly appearances, which his friend Graham Stark remembered as a disaster. But on 5 April a star
was
born. ‘Wisdom’s the name,’ the
Daily Express
proclaimed. ‘He Woke to Find he had Joined the Star Comics.’ Such was the enthusiastic reception for Norman Wisdom’s first-night performance at the London Casino. The paper described his act: ‘His face is mobile, can be twisted into any shape. He tumbles on the stage, shadow-boxes, tries to play the piano, pulls out a clarinet, tires of it and turns his attention to . . . a vast sandwich. Then he pleads with his audience to follow him in an Eastern song – in gibberish. His props? A stringy tie, an old shirt, and a baggy evening suit, several sizes too large.’
¹⁵
Wisdom was 33 (though billed at the time as 27), a former shop assistant, and, like so many of his contemporaries, had begun entertaining while in the army.