Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (42 page)

At the big football grounds, huge, almost entirely male working-class crowds continued to pour through the turnstiles – in January 1948 the highest League attendance ever, 83,360, saw Manchester United play Arsenal at Maine Road (Old Trafford being still out of commission following bomb damage). Sadly, few Lancastrians ever thought of going to watch Accrington Stanley in the Third Division North and thereby boost the seldom large crowd at Peel Park. Even so, the club by this time had just managed to pay off the mortgage on the ground, and on 10 February a ceremony took place at the Mechanics’ Institution. ‘The gathering was a happy one to celebrate a happy event,’ reported the
Accrington Observer
, ‘and the red and white motif was in evidence, from an iced cake bearing the words “On, Stanley, On” to the red and white table flowers.’ The main speech was given by Councillor S. T. Pilkington, JP, associated with the club as player, official, director and chairman (for the past 12 years) since 1906. ‘He referred to football finance at the present time as being “daft”. To pay £20,000 for one player [as Notts County, of all clubs, had recently done for Chelsea’s Tommy Lawton], he said was “absolutely silly, crazy finance”.’ The first match after the ceremony was at home to Wrexham, with a predictable outcome: ‘Bad Luck and Bad Shooting beat Stanley.’

Two months later it was the Cup Final, Manchester United versus Blackpool, billed as probably the last chance for the 33-year-old Stanley Matthews to get a winner’s medal. But United won 4–2, and years later their winger, Charlie Mitten, recalled a conversation with his opponent that did not exactly focus on the glory aspect (or lack of it): ‘I walked off the field with Stan Matthews. He said, “Look at that, Charlie? A silver medal and we get no money.” But we never gave much thought to the money side. I said, “Yes, I believe the band get more than us, Stan.” “Yeah,” he said. “Bloody disgrace, isn’t it?” I said, “They must have played better than us, that’s why.”’ ‘Anyway,’ concluded Mitten with the mellowness of time, ‘it was all a bit of a joke and a laugh.’
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There was little inclination yet to abandon cultural hierarchies. ‘A certain Professor Zweig has been doing a little mass-observation in England all by himself, has had 400 conversations with men earning between £4 10s 0d and £6 a week,’ noted Hodson in April 1948, before summarising some of Zweig’s findings. Up to half of a wage could go on tobacco; 3s a week was the usual outlay on football pools; one in five betted on the dogs; ‘real recreational spending’ was ‘small’; and ‘time after time men said, “I have no interests.”’ Hodson went on:

As a picture of Britain I find this decidedly inglorious. Every evening I see folk queued up for the cinema. Whatever picture is on, whatever drivel it is, the queues are there. Dogs, pictures, tobacco, drink, football pools, crooners – what an indifferent lot of pastimes for our people. To do a monotonous repetition job you loathe, and to use these anodynes to help you forget tomorrow’s work! If this is Western civilisation, there is a R.A.F. phrase that can be used – we’ve had it!

A few days earlier Kenneth Preston, on holiday from school, cycled with his wife and son from Keighley to Nelson. There, after inspecting the open market (‘We always think there is far more food in the Lancashire shops than here’), they went to a second-hand bookshop:

Whilst we were having a look round we heard the voices of two women in a really incredible conversation. One yelled out to another, who was evidently looking at some books, ‘Nah! then, don’t buy all e’ booiks’. The other said ‘Nay, we don’t read much at our ’ouse’. The other replied ‘No! we don’t. I’ve nivver read a book i’my life’. The other said ‘No! I often wish I’d read a bit more. You learn stuff from books, don’t you?’ It seems incredible that there could be anyone who had never read a book. The woman who said she hadn’t, Kath said, would be over fifty. These are the folk who vote!!

Attitudes were perhaps not so different in the people’s party. Some weeks later, the Labour conference at Scarborough included an eye-opening diversion. ‘Paid our first visit to a Butlin Camp [ie at Filey] where the N.U.M. were entertaining us on our last night,’ noted Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford). ‘Very efficient, organised, pleasure holiday making. Everybody agreed they would not go there!’
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Over the years, the profound cultural mismatch between progressive activators and the millions acted upon would inevitably be played out in some of the most emotive policy areas. In retrospect, two stand out from the late 1940s: crime and race. The first was already becoming the cause of major fractures – not only within elite opinion but also between elite liberal opinion and non-elite illiberal opinion – while the other, even more resonant, was poised to be similarly destructive of any forward-looking, modern-minded consensus.

‘More brutal crimes,’ recorded an unhappy, almost bewildered Gladys Langford in June 1947. ‘Have I been all wrong? Is it that these vicious criminals need flogging and harsh treatment or are they cases for a psychologist?’ There were many causes of the increased crime, brutal and otherwise, in immediate post-war Britain – most obviously the pressures and inducements deriving from the rationing of the majority of key everyday requirements – but what was undeniable was that it was happening. During the summer of 1947, the most headline-grabbing case was that of poor Alec de Antiquis, a respectable motor mechanic in his 30s who, as he rode his motorcycle down a London street, was shot dead by fleeing jewellery thieves. The culprits were quickly found (a vital clue being the clothing coupons for a discarded RAF raincoat), and two men were hanged at Pentonville, with the lugubrious Albert Pierrepoint doing the honours. When Cyril Connolly later that year weighed into the government in another disenchanted
Horizon
editorial, one of his main charges was that a regime that did not ‘even dare to propose the abolition of the death penalty’ bore ‘no relation to the kind of Socialism which many of us envisaged’. Yet the fact was that twice already in 1947 the question ‘Do you think the death penalty should be abolished?’ had been put by Gallup; and each time only 25 per cent had answered ‘yes’. Developments in 1948 were unlikely to sway this hardline majority. ‘A vast crime-wave is sweeping Britain,’ W. J. Brown noted in February. ‘And last week a policeman was killed in London.’ Indeed, over the year as a whole the number of indictable offences recorded in Britain turned out to be 522,684, almost double the total in 1937.
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Unpromising mood music, then, for the abolitionist amendment by Sydney Silverman (Labour MP for Nelson and Colne) to the Criminal Justice Bill being brought forward by Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary. On the day of the debate and vote, 14 April, Cuthbert Headlam on the Opposition backbenches was a sardonic, unsentimental observer of a deep split in the ruling party:

The H of C (free vote) decided tonight to put the death penalty for murder into cold storage for 5 years which presumably will mean the abolition of capital punishment in English law. The Home Secretary and the Cabinet advised the House that in their opinion this was not the moment to make the experiment – the police and the judges are said to be against the change – but the Comrades as a body were not convinced. Human life is sacred, hanging is no deterrent to murder, other countries have abolished it without any increase of murder – why should not we? All very plausible – all very noble-minded – but what does all the fuss amount to? Chuter Ede gave us figures to show that about 11 or 12 people are hanged every year – that a majority of murder cases are reprieved – that the chance of a miscarriage of justice is very slight . . . We are asked therefore to do away with capital punishment against the advice of responsible authority at a time when criminal violence is on the increase . . . The speeches today were good, bad and indifferent – and each speaker in turn congratulated the one who spoke before him on his high morality and sincerity. There was a deal of sob stuff which depressed me as it always does.

The majority of 23 in favour of an experimental suspension of the death penalty would have been greater if it had been a genuinely ‘free vote’. In fact, Attlee on the morning of the debate curtly told his junior ministers that, given the Cabinet’s position, they were not to vote for Silverman’s amendment. Among those who protested – and in due course abstained – was the rather incongruous pair of Evan Durbin and James Callaghan.

It proved a short-lived triumph for the mainly middle-class Labour backbenchers. Four days later, the
Sunday Pictorial
’s headline was ‘“Hanging” Vote Worries Public’, with the paper’s reporters having conducted an intensive two-day inquiry ‘all over Britain’ which found that ‘the majority of the public, while welcoming an end to hanging as the sole penalty for murder, feel it should be kept as protection from the worst criminal types’. Accordingly, ‘nine out of ten people favoured degrees of murder, with death for killers in the first degree’. The paper also quoted some representative vox pop:

Criminals will stick at nothing now they know they cannot be hanged.

(
Capt. A. E. Tarran, Shadwell, Leeds
)

With this last deterrent gone, no woman will feel safe in London after dark. (
Miss A. Bennett, Martin Way, Merton
)

It is a mistake to remove the only punishment of which armed thugs are afraid. (
Mr T. Ashton, Holloway Road, N
7)

I think Members of Parliament should have their heads examined for coming to such a decision. (
Mr H. Ronson, Deane Road, Bolton
)

How dare the Commons abolish the death penalty without hearing the views of the people they represent! (
Mr T. O’Neil, Wadham Road,
Liverpool
)

Now it was up to the Lords. But meanwhile, Gladys Langford noted in early May, ‘. . . another policeman shot – Forest Gate this time’, and later that month another Gallup poll revealed that 66 per cent were opposed to suspending capital punishment for five years and only 26 per cent in favour. The Lord Chief Justice, the uncompromising Lord Goddard, had already made clear his view that criminal law would be respected only if it remained in line with public opinion, and on 2 June (the day the Queen toured the Lancashire cotton mills) the Lords rejected suspension by a crushing 181 votes to 28. At a Cabinet meeting soon afterwards, Attlee – well aware of where public feeling lay – successfully insisted that, for the time being at least, the abolitionist game was up; Hartley Shawcross, no longer the master, left the room in tears.
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The summer of 1948 was even more of a defining moment in the centuries-old story of immigration to Britain. For many years the most widely stigmatised ‘others’ in British society had been the Jews and the Irish, by the end of the war numbering respectively some 400,000 and 600,000 (ie on the mainland). Although it is possible to exaggerate the extent of the prejudice, Jews in particular were demonised, even after the film cameras had entered Belsen and Auschwitz; shockingly, British fascism revived quickly after the war, little impeded by the men in blue. ‘I suppose it is perfectly in order for a lousy swine like Jeffrey Hamm [Oswald Mosley’s main sidekick] to get up on a street corner in the East End of London and shout, “Down with the Jews. Burn the synagogues. Kill the Aliens,” and he gets away with it, but if a person tries to pull him up, what happens?’ a concerned local person asked the Home Secretary rhetorically in October 1946. ‘The so-called keepers of law and order, the police, go up to this person and tell him he’d better move away before he gets hurt . . . These guardians of the law and order from Commercial Street Police Station openly boast about being members of Jeffrey Hamm’s fascist party.’ The following year saw anti-Semitic riots in several British cities. These were triggered by lurid headlines about the hanging in Palestine of two captured British sergeants but also involved a widespread belief that it was Jews who were responsible for running the black market – and making a killing from doing so.

There was likewise some persistent anti-Semitism in the higher echelons of society. Frederic Raphael’s schooldays at Charterhouse were famously made a misery because of it, while in the City of London the malign legacy survived of Montagu Norman, the notoriously anti-Semitic Governor of the Bank of England between the wars. ‘Mr Randell of Bank of England says he is a very pushing individual – German Jew – who established himself here in 1938,’ stated (early in 1948) an internal note of the Issuing Houses Association, to which Walter Salomon had applied for his firm to join. ‘They don’t know a lot about him, but think it would do no harm to let him cool his heels a bit more.’ And, damningly: ‘His office is full of foreigners.’ When the IHA took other soundings, no one denied that Salomon was a man of ability and energy, but – the face not fitting – he did indeed have to cool his heels.
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