Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (45 page)

On Sunday the 4th there were two starkly contrasting speeches. A radio broadcast by Attlee, after the nine o’clock evening news, summarised and put into historical context the main changes taking place next day; emphasised that ‘all our social services have to be paid for, in one way or another’, so that only ‘higher output can give us more of the things we all need’; expressed the hope that all those who had ‘served in the past’ on a more voluntary basis would ‘still find a field for your generous impulses and public spirit’; and finished with a typically understated peroration: ‘Here then is our new scheme of social security for all. I believe that it will increase the health and happiness of our peoples and I ask you all to join in working wholeheartedly for it so that it may bring new strength and well-being to our country.’ There was nothing bipartisan about the other speech, given at a Labour rally at Belle Vue and reported thus in
The Times
:

Mr Bevan, Minister of Health, recalled what he described as the bitter experiences of his early life when he spoke in Manchester yesterday. For a time he had to live on the earnings of an elder sister and was told to emigrate. ‘That is why,’ he said, ‘no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin’ . . .

Mr Bevan referred to the launching of the new health service and said that during the next few months there would be complaint after complaint about what they were not able to do. In the past the distress was there, but the complaints were not heard.

‘After tomorrow,’ Mr Bevan said, ‘the weak will be entitled to clamour. . .’

That striking v-word made an immediate impact. ‘Had a heated political discussion in the Staff-room, arising out of Bevan’s latest exhibition of himself,’ Kenneth Preston at Keighley Grammar School noted on the 5th. ‘He has been calling Conservatives scum and vermin.’
^6.
In a prevailing culture that still prized self-restraint above all on the part of its politicians, the gifted and passionate miner’s son from South Wales had lapsed – and would never be allowed by his opponents to forget that lapse. The fact that it occurred at the very moment of an unquestionably great achievement only accentuated the piquancy.

The Appointed Day itself was littered with claims and warnings. ‘We are leading the whole world in Social Security,’ boasted the
Daily
Mirror
, adding: ‘Our State belongs to the people – unlike so many countries where the people belong to the State – and Social Security converts our democratic ideal into human reality.’
The Times
wondered whether the next generation would be able to ‘reap the benefits of a social service State while avoiding the perils of a Santa Claus State’ but insisted that ‘it would be a grave mistake to overlook the deep feelings and sense of purpose and common humanity which all the new social services are trying, however imperfectly, to express.’ A surprisingly sour note came from the
Manchester Guardian
, which – true to its nineteenth-century laissez-faire roots – feared that the state provision of welfare would ‘eliminate selective elimination’ and thus lead to an increase of congenitally deformed and feckless people. Among the diarists there was grudging acceptance from Anthony Heap (‘sounds all right on paper, but how will it work in practice?’), but Cyril Leach, who lived in Harrow and was a senior figure in the insurance world, reckoned that ‘it looks like being a fine old muddle’.
^7.

Bevan himself, by now in thoroughly benign mood, spent the day in Lancashire. The symbolic keys of a hospital in Manchester were handed over to him; he said that patients in hospitals were ‘just human beings wanting help’, not members of political parties; and in an afternoon speech in Preston he argued that progress was less ‘the elimination of struggle’ than ‘a change in the terms of struggle’. For some, this momentous day was the day of their birth. They included Lynn Creedy; half a century later, on the NHS’s 50th anniversary, she told her story:

I was a home birth. I was born in 41A Victoria Road, Deal, Kent. I was due to be born the day before, but I was born about midday on the fifth, so my father didn’t have to pay anything. The midwife was then a lady to be feared; she had a lot of authority. She instructed my father not to let the fire go out in the flat so that she could burn the placenta. Things went on for a while and my father got so engrossed in his cowboy books, which were popular at the time, that he let the fire go out.

‘The midwife was not very happy,’ she added. ‘My mother often reminded him of that . . .’

For Nella Last in Barrow, it was a typically busy, purposeful day – preparing for the WVS garden party, taking her order to the grocers, getting her hair done, sending a box of new potatoes and some onions to her Aunt Sarah, turning away a hawker selling ‘patent’ brushes – until soon after tea:

I must have shown the effects of my rush & bustle of the day. My husband said kindly ‘would you like to go to a show – have you anything yet to do?’ I said ‘yes, I’ve jam to make & fruit to bottle, but all is ready, the fruit would sterilize by itself, & the jam being raspberry only needs 4 minutes quick boil!’ . . . I said ‘I’d love to go for a little run’ &he finished ‘round Coniston Lake’. It was such a sweet fair night, the top was off the car & I felt akin to my little Shan We [her cat] who lay relaxed on my lap, stretching & flexing his paws at intervals . . . I felt the creases all fading out of my tired soul as the peace & beauty of hills & moors came into view. We paused to look at the Lake. My mind was as blank as it’s possible for a busy mind to be. I felt I was trying to be one with the rhythm & utter peace. My husband said ‘you
shall
lie here if it is in my power – I’d like the same’. I felt startled. I felt it so ‘revolutionary’. My queer ideas have so often irked & annoyed that poor dear, try as I would. We smiled at each other. Odd how a shared ‘wish’ can be so friendly. We were home by 8.30. My bottles had sterilized &my jam soon made – the fruit was ‘mashed’ with the sugar, & ready for putting on the stove.
^8.

PART ONE

1

What Do You Say?

The world came to London on Thursday, 29 July 1948. On a swelteringly hot afternoon, a crowd of 85,000 – shirt-sleeved, lemonade-swigging, knotted handkerchiefs covering heads – gathered in Wembley Stadium to watch the opening ceremony of the first post-war Olympics. There was a special cheer for Princess Margaret as the royal party took their seats; the loudest applause during the march past of competitors was for the small countries (‘a very typical British touch’, thought
The
Times
, silent like the rest of the press about the banning from the parade of the unsightly Jack Dear love, the cox of the British VIII who had lost a leg as a boy); King George in naval uniform declared the Games open in 16 mercifully stammer-free words; and the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, played Kipling’s hymn ‘Non Nobis Domine’ before the dedication address from the Archbishop of York. The most dramatic moment was the arrival in the stadium of the Olympic Torch. The identity of its bearer had been kept secret – some even speculated that it might be the Duke of Edinburgh – and it turned out to be a little-known 22-year-old from Surbiton, John Mark. Fair-haired, 6 feet 3 inches and a recent Cambridge Blue in the quarter-mile, he cut a figure very different from Britain’s just-retired champion runner, the slight, bespectacled Sydney Wooderson. But barely three weeks after the start of the National Health Service, the fact that he was also a young doctor, at St Mary’s in Paddington, was perhaps credential enough.

Two days later, with British athletes struggling in vain for a gold medal, the Bank Holiday weekend began. Huge queues snaked back from the main London railway stations as extra trains took day-trippers and holiday-makers to the seaside: from Victoria, 25,700 people to the Kent coast and 63,287 to Eastbourne and Bognor; from Waterloo, 21,200 to Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, 27,200 to Bournemouth, Weymouth and the west of England; from Liverpool Street, 150,000 to points east; and from King’s Cross, 60,000 to the Lincolnshire coast (bracing Skegness et al). Late that afternoon, a severe thunderstorm blew up over the north-west, leading to the abandonment of the last race at Aintree amid scenes of largely cheerful chaos. But there was less goodwill in Liverpool itself that Saturday evening, as just after ten o’clock a white mob attacked the Anglo-Indian Restaurant in St James’s Street, as usual full of ‘coloured’ customers. Fighting ensued and, by the time the police arrived, the café had been wrecked. Only one person was arrested – a black seaman.

There were more Liverpool ‘race riots’ over the rest of the weekend. On Sunday evening the attack by another white mob on a black seamen’s hostel was the cue for a spate of attacks on cafés and lodging houses favoured by Liverpool’s black population, with the inevitable fighting and six arrests made (five of them black); on Monday evening there were further attacks and further arrests (32, all of them black). A series of court cases took place during the rest of August in which claims about police brutality and the planting of weapons in police cells were brushed aside; there was no questioning of the veracity of police evidence, and most of the defendants were found guilty of disorderly behaviour and assaulting and wounding police officers. Neither in court nor in the accompanying press coverage was there any serious attempt to get to the bottom of the disturbances. ‘What the trouble was about I don’t think I need go into,’ remarked the police prosecutor, while headlines included ‘Police Stoned’, ‘Whites Stoned’, ‘Had Loaded Pistol’ and ‘Screaming White Girls’. Less than two months after the
Empire Windrush
’s historic docking at Tilbury, the police claim that ‘there isn’t any colour question in Liverpool at this moment’ rang hollow at best.

But at least the brotherhood of man prevailed at the Olympics. There, the 30-year-old mother-of-two Fanny Blankers-Koen, ‘the Flying Dutchwoman’, stole the show with four gold medals, narrowly defeating Dorothy Manley, a 21-year-old shorthand typist from Woodford Green, in the women’s 100 metres final. At one point it seemed the British had finally struck gold, in the men’s 400 metres relay – but the decision disqualifying the Americans was reversed. The Games drew to an end on Saturday, 14 August, just as England crashed at The Oval to 52 all out and the legendary Australian batsman, Don Bradman, played his last Test innings. ‘Two slips, a silly mid-off, and a forward short-leg close to him,’ John Arlott burred, ‘as Hollies pitches the ball up slowly and – he’s bowled! Bradman, bowled Hollies nought. Bowled Hollies nought. And – what do you say under those circumstances?’
^1.

At any one time that day, only about 9 per cent of the adult civilian population of some 36 million was listening to the cricket commentary. Most people, battling with the obstinate twin blights of rationing and shortages, had other priorities. Nella Last, a middle-class, middle-aged housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness, spent the afternoon in Kendal:

I’d 21 points left in our four books. I felt I
must
spend them, with rumours of less points – hoped to buy marmalade. Beyond piles of pressed veal, & lots of Canadian chopped ham, not to be compared to any made in America & sold as ‘Spam’ etc & of course high pointed, there was very little in the shops, in fact the grocer where I spent my points agreed that he had never had so few points goods, or such a poor choice. We felt puzzled – & skeptical – that the rumour of so many things going off points, would prove to be true. I got dried eggs – begrudging the 2/6 & the 10 points.

The day’s work done, listening figures really picked up in the evening. Whereas the most popular programme during the day had been
Housewives’
Choice
(12 per cent), the top three on the Home Service between 8.15 and 10.45 were
Henry Hall’s Guest Night
(25 per cent, ie some nine million listeners), the news (28 per cent) and
Saturday Night
Theatre
(26 per cent), with
Saraband for Dead Lovers
.

Over the next week, the sporting round continued. The Don departed the Test arena shortly before noon on Wednesday the 18th, with Australia winning by an innings and plenty. Less than two and a half hours later, the first race at Haydock Park was won by The Chase, a 10–1 shot ‘stylishly handled’, according to
Sporting Life
, ‘by the trainer’s son, L. Piggott, who is only 12 years of age’. It was the first winner for a prodigy soon to be described as having ‘the face of a well-kept grave’. Saturday the 21st saw the start of the football season. Darlington and Gateshead won 3–0 in the Third Division North against Accrington Stanley and New Brighton respectively, while in the First Division Derby County beat Manchester United, Arsenal drew at Huddersfield, and 57,885 packed into Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea beat Middlesbrough 1–0. There the visitors were without their England star forward Wilf Mannion, fit and well but in a bitter, protracted dispute with his club over its unwillingness to supplement his maximum wage (£12 per week). None of which vitally affected Princess Margaret, still often known as Margaret Rose: eighteen that day and already a head-turner, her picture was in almost every paper, amid rumours that she was about to announce her engagement to the young Marquess of Blandford, heir to the Duke of Malborough and, befitting a Guards officer, currently staying at Balmoral.

Henry St John, a pernickety civil servant who in his diary made grumbling an art form, was staying with relatives in Shackleton Road, Southall. Having left the Westbourne Hotel in Bristol on the 9th and started work a week later at the Ministry of Food (room 93A on the fifth floor at 15 Portman Square), he was now looking for somewhere to live in west London. On Saturday the 28th – a pleasantly warm afternoon that across the country attracted a record aggregate crowd at League matches of 1,160,000, including 64,000 at Newcastle to see Preston North End run out 5–2 winners – St John first ‘proceeded to Ealing Common’:

I walked to an address in Creffield Rd, where I was told a single room had been let.

I walked to a hotel in North Common Rd, where no single room was immediately available and where, if it had been, the cost would have been at least 4 guineas a week.

I walked to South Ealing, proceeded to Boston Manor, and set out to walk to a certain road where an official address had been notified. I had not the courage to walk so far in such a district, so proceeded to South Ealing, and walked to 41 Woodville Gardens.

Here I was shown a large bedroom with a gas fire, but breakfast was timed for 7.50 am, there were 6 guests and no facilities for washing in one’s room, although there were said to be 2 bathrooms.

A hard man to please, St John ‘walked to Ealing Common, and proceeded to Southall’.
^2.

It was still the holiday period, and five days later one of the Labour government’s junior ministers, Evan Durbin, was with his family at Strangles Beach, south of Bude. There was a heavy sea, one of his daughters got in difficulties, and he drowned while managing to save her. To a more senior minister, Hugh Gaitskell, he had been mentor as well as close friend; in his heartfelt tribute in
The Times,
Gaitskell identified Durbin’s ‘clarity of purpose’, his ‘very well defined set of moral values and social ideals’, and his ‘rocklike quality when dealing with either personal or social problems’. Gaitskell added that Durbin ‘insisted in applying the process of reasoning unflinchingly and with complete intellectual integrity to all human problems’ – typified by his adamant hostility (even when it was fashionable to profess otherwise) to the Soviet dictatorship, for ‘he would not sentimentalize about tyranny, which seemed to him equally odious everywhere’. Altogether, it was not an excessive tribute, for in his writings as well as his person Durbin had pointed the way to a realistic social-democratic future for the Labour Party, a future that might plausibly run
with
the grain of human nature and desires. A ‘lost’ leader? Probably not. But he was, as Gaitskell sadly and privately reflected, an irreplaceable guide ‘on the most fundamental issues’.

St John, after more trudging, at last found adequate lodgings (at 18 Acacia Road, Acton) on Wednesday, 8 September, the day that Gaitskell’s tribute appeared. Summer was almost over, and on Saturday the 18th there was the final performance at the Spa Theatre, Scarborough, of
Out
of the Blue
, a variety show that, in the staid local press, enjoyed the more dignified term of a ‘concert party’. It had been playing since June and its stand-out turn was the young comedian Norman Wisdom. In the course of the run he had developed, with the help of the conjuror David Nixon, a distinctive character that would enjoy huge appeal and resonance over the years. This was the seeming simpleton, invariably wearing a scruffy, undersized check suit with a check peaked cap to match – in other words The Gump, that most unwittingly subversive of post-war figures, ensuring without apparently meaning to that the best-laid plans of his social superiors never came to fruition.
^3.
The rigid hierarchies might remain in place, but every now and then the underdog would have his day: a consoling if illusory thought in what was still a deeply stratified society.