Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (46 page)

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Oh, for a Little Extra Butter!

‘What do you consider to be the six main inconveniences of present-day living conditions?’ Mass-Observation asked its regular, largely middle-class panel in autumn 1948. The male replies tended to terseness – ‘Lack of Homes, Food Rationing, High Cost of Living, Insufficiency of Commodities causing Queuing, Crowded Travelling Conditions, Expenses of Family Holidays’ was an engineer’s top six – but the female responses were more expansive. ‘1. High cost of living,’ declared a housewife. ‘This means a constant struggle to keep the household going and there is very little left over for the “extras” that make life. 2. Cutting-off of electric power in the morning (usually just before 8 o’clock). 3. Shortage of some foods, particularly butter, meat and sugar.’ For a doctor, ‘queues at food shops instead of ordering by phone and having things sent’ vied with ‘lack of gardener’ and the laundry problem: ‘Reduced times of collecting (fortnightly only) means doing a lot of it at home.’ Another housewife, aged 52, let herself go:

1. Not being able to plan (and purchase) dinners ahead. The housewife wastes an immense amount of time in small-scale shopping, and money also when rabbit and offal appear at the weekend when she has the week’s meat ration.

2. Absence of delivery service. Having to carry home the food, cleaning materials etc means an incredible amount of labour. She must go out every day in order to cope with it and is literally a beast of burden.

3. Absence of counter-space for her shopping basket. She has to grovel on the floor among fellow-shoppers’ feet in order to re-arrange wet or fragile foods. Allied to this is the absence of chairs which means that women have to stand and stand. We are the voiceless, submerged half of the population, unable to organise or to strike.

4. Clothing coupons, because of one’s liability to forget to carry them when off duty. Hence when unexpectedly seeing some article (while perhaps going to a theatre, visit a friend, or jaunt of some kind) one cannot buy it. The greatest disaster is the inability to buy a handkerchief if one has sallied forth without one.

5. Paper shortage. While flowers are wrapped in large white sheets of it, and even boot repairs are put into a large paper bag, food is put into newspaper which has been goodness knows where. The small print used in order to cram in the maximum amount of news is a great eye strain.

6. Fuel shortage, because it entails poor lighting on railways, in waiting rooms etc, with consequent eye strain and depression.

M-O also asked if attitudes to clothes had changed since the end of the war. ‘Yes,’ replied one jaundiced housewife. ‘I used to look upon “making do” and renovating as a national duty and make a game of it. Now it is just tiresome necessity.’

In fact, though it would remain ‘austerity Britain’ for the rest of the decade and into the 1950s, there was some significant easing by 1948/9. ‘Clothes rationing gradually becoming less stringent,’ the minor civil servant Anthony Heap noted the day after the Olympics began. ‘36 coupons “on tap” for next six-month period beginning Sept 1. All footwear off ration from tomorrow. Men’s suits down from 26 to 20 coupons. Women’s from 18 to 12. And so on.’ Even so, ‘prices continue to rise to such an extent that all clothes now cost at least three times what they did before the war.’ In early September, in her regular, shrewdly observed ‘Letter from London’ to the
The New Yorker
, Mollie Panter-Downes accepted that despite the current shortage of Virginian cigarettes (an issue that was being ‘debated seriously at Cabinet level and furiously in the queues, often hundreds strong, that form up daily outside the tobacconists’), rationing and shortages were generally less prevalent. ‘It is again possible to go into a shop and buy a loaf of bread [off the ration since July] or a pair of shoes or a package of corn flakes without tendering a coupon.’ The supply of nylon stockings was severely curtailed by an October fiat but, between November 1948 and March 1949 a series of so-called ‘bonfires’ of controls led to abolitions and relaxations in relation to many goods and commodities, culminating in the end of clothes rationing. ‘On Sat I bought 2 shirts – 17/3 each (utility) – & & 2 semmits [ie undershirts] – 16/2 each; 2 white handkerchiefs – ½ each – & a rain coat – £5.6.2,’ exalted Colin Ferguson, a pattern-maker in Glasgow, after an instant ‘clothes spending spree’. He also called in at Burtons to see if his new suit was ready. ‘They have the 2 extra pairs of trousers, but not the suit. I’ll be post-carded.’ 1

The man responsible for these gratifying conflagrations was the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, still in his early 30s. It is clear that there was an element of opportunism on his part – like the Chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, all his deep-rooted administrative instincts lay in the direction of planning and controls rather than the market and the price mechanism – but he was well aware of the favourable personal publicity that his ‘bonfires’ would attract. He could also talk a good game. ‘A Housewife Argues with Harold Wilson’ was an encounter set up by
Picture Post
at the start of 1949, as Mrs Lilian Chandler of Bexley Heath, Kent, complained on behalf of women generally about shortages, high prices and the lack of quality in essential goods such as shoes, clothes, sheets, towels, saucepans and furniture. ‘I’d like to point out that I’m a father myself’ was how Wilson began his able, detailed defence. ‘I’ve got two small boys – one five years old and the other only seven months – and I assure you that my wife wouldn’t let me go for long without learning about the difficulties the mother and housewife has today.’ In March, not long before he was photographed tearing up a clothes-ration book, he sat next to the Liberal grandee Violet Bonham Carter at a dinner at the American Embassy, with the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, on her other side. ‘I started off with Harold Wilson, who didn’t attract me at all,’ she noted. ‘He is short, fat, podgy & rather pushing & seemed anxious to be “in” on every conversation that was going – & to tell his own stories instead of listening to Bevin’s when Bevin turned to me.’ By contrast, she found Bevin ‘absolutely natural, solid, 3-dimensional’.

It was still a drab, drab world. ‘Dreariness is everywhere,’ lamented Gladys Langford, a schoolteacher in north London, on a Sunday towards the end of 1948. ‘Streets are deserted, lighting is dim, people’s clothes are shabby and their tables bare.’ The drabness pervaded small things as well as big – ‘We miss very much the coloured and decorated crockery we used to get before the war,’ Mrs Chandler told Wilson – but it was rumbling stomachs and unsatisfied tastebuds that really lowered spirits. ‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ wailed Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London, in March 1949, just after it had been announced that the meat ration was to go down again. ‘Then I should not mind the meat. I want half a pound of butter a week for myself alone . . . For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration, and I am fed up. I NEVER enjoy my lunch . . .’ The immediate result of the further cut in the ordinary meat ration was lengthening queues at horse-meat shops, while soon afterwards disgruntled butchers were reported as saying that they needed not scales but a tape measure to do their job.

At least the lights in shop windows and electric signs were by now going on, while also in April there was another bright moment when sweets at last came off the ration after seven long years. ‘It’s wonderful to see all children munching sweets,’ declared mother-of-two Judy Haines in Chingford, but in the event the demand proved so great that in August they returned to the ration. Accompanying the deep, widespread, natural desire to get back to pre-war abundance (relatively speaking) was an instinctive reluctance to try newfangled ways of countering the shortages. That summer, one of the Ministry of Food’s regular consumer surveys discovered that more than 73 per cent of households were finding the present ration of soap insufficient – and that well over two-thirds of working-class households were unwilling to experiment with soapless detergents. ‘Ten years ago the war started,’ Rose Uttin, a Wembley housewife, noted bluntly on 3 September 1949, ‘& we are still on the rations.’
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With every peacetime day that passed, the ‘fair shares’ rationale seemed that much less compelling.

Inevitably, the black market remained in robust existence, if not quite so ubiquitous as in the immediate post-war years. In January 1949 a much-publicised judicial inquiry (the Lynskey Tribunal) found that John Belcher, a junior minister, and George Gibson, a former chairman of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) who was now chairman of the North-Western Electricity Board, had granted favours in return for what Panter-Downes summarised as ‘the pathetically minor rewards of a few good dinners, a few bottles of Scotch, and a few free suits of clothes’ – their road to ruin in what she called ‘a fantastic fairy story of human frailty lost in a jungle of spivs’. The spiv himself remained a far from universally loved figure, not least the super-spiv of this particular scandal, a high-living, smooth-talking Polish immigrant calling himself Sydney Stanley who was condemned by the judge for his ‘reckless disregard of the truth’. ‘He looks the SPIV type,’ Gladys Langford in her Highbury hotel sniffed at the end of 1948 about the new occupant of the next-door room, ‘small, dark, sallow in silver grey rather shoddy suit – like a recent bridegroom’. And when in September 1949 Joyce Grenfell’s husband was assaulted by a young man in Piccadilly in a dispute about a taxi, her lengthy account to a friend referred to him throughout as ‘the spiv’, though in fact he was a bookmaker’s assistant. ‘The bland smoothness of the little man
was
maddening,’ she added in justification of her husband pressing charges after ‘the spiv denied the whole thing with the innocence of a new born baby’.

Nevertheless, as had already started to become apparent during 1948, attitudes to the black market were softening significantly as the passive acceptance of the patriotic-cum-socialist necessity of rationing and shortages steadily dwindled. The emblematic figure was Arthur English, a house painter from Aldershot who made his debut at the Windmill Theatre in March 1949 and by the end of the year was a radio star on
Variety Bandbox
. Wearing a white suit with huge shoulder pads (‘I ’ad to come in the swing-door sideways!’) and a flowery kipper tie down to his knees (‘Keeps me knees warm in winter!’), he would invariably start his routine with a conspiratorial opening line, ‘’Ere, Tosh’, before launching into a mixture of catchphrases (‘Sharpen up there – the quick stuff’s coming’) and high-speed patter. Almost instantly he became the archetypal – and loveable – cockney spiv, ‘The Prince of the Wide Boys’. The verse with which he rounded off his first broadcast unerringly presaged the end of austerity as a source of social unity:

Shove on the coal, blow the expense,

Just keep the ’ome fires burning.

Perhaps I’ve made you larf a lot,

I ’ope I’ve brought yer joy,

So ’ere’s mud in yer eye from the end of me tie,

Good night – and Watch the boy!
^3.

‘Fancy coming home from the Motor Show and kicking our poor old car,’ said the wife to her husband in a Giles cartoon in October 1948, as he clutched his foot in agony. The frustration was understandable. At what the
Daily Express
called ‘the biggest “Please-do-not-touch” exhibition of all time’, 32 British car manufacturers were showing more than 50 models at a time when, because most of the motor industry’s production was compulsorily reserved for export, the delivery dates for the home market ranged from 12 months to two and a half years. Such was the hunger for almost anything on four wheels that that painful circumstance did not stop huge crowds coming to the first post-war Motor Show at Earls Court, over the ten days a total of 562,954, almost double the previous record.

The Vauxhall Velox and the Jowett Javelin both drew many admirers, but without doubt the star attraction was Alec Issigonis’s Morris Minor, an attempt to create a British counterpart to the Volkswagen Beetle. Having been dismissed at the drawing-board stage as ‘a poached egg’ by Lord Nuffield, founder-owner of Morris Motors, it was in fact a brilliant design: no chassis but an all-in-one body shell; independent front suspension; and rank-and-pinion steering that made the car easy to drive. ‘Women loved the Morris Minor,’ recalled one car salesman, John Macartney. ‘It was very light, it was very responsive – there was a saying that if you drove over a penny in a Morris Minor you knew whether you’d gone over heads’ or tails’ side up.’ Not every alpha male approved of women drivers, but for Barbara Hardy, a married woman who acquired her Morris Minor in the 1950s, it was as if the distinctive, jelly-mould shape became an emblem of emancipation. ‘I could fit five in the back and put two on the seat beside me,’ she remembered about her time as leader of a cub pack. ‘There were no seat belts in those days, and there weren’t the cars on the road. I did my own thing in those days.’
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