Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (47 page)

The appetite for motor cars was matched by that for news and gossip about the Royal Family. ‘It looks as if Princess Margaret will one day be Duchess of Malborough,’ reckoned Vere Hodgson in December 1948. The so-called ‘Margaret Set’ was at this point aristocratic rather than bohemian in composition – with ‘Sunny’ Blandford himself and the Earl of Dalkeith (Johnny Dalkeith) as the two leading members, though there was also the very rich Billy Wallace. Margaret’s recent 18th birthday had been the cue for endless profiles, in the provincial as well as the national press. After calling her ‘a leader of youthful fashions’, typified by her beaver-trimmed coats, the
Middlesbrough
Evening Gazette
went on: ‘This Princess who loves to rumba, to wear high heels and to use lipstick, brighter and thicker than her mother really approves, is still a child in many ways. She has great poise, but sometimes a youthful nervousness breaks through.’ The following spring, ‘Princess Margaret Leaves By ’Plane for Italy’ was a front-page story for the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
, with the obligatory reference by the reporter at London Airport to how she ‘waved from the window to the crowd as the ’plane rose into the air’. A world to conquer lay before her. ‘High-spirited to the verge of indiscretion,’ a mutual friend informed the diarist James Lees-Milne soon after Margaret’s return from her four-week holiday in Italy. ‘She mimics lord mayors welcoming her on platforms and crooners on the wireless, in fact anyone you care to mention . . . She has a good singing voice. In size she is a midget but perfectly made. She inadvertently attracts all the young eligibles to her feet, which doesn’t endear her to the girls.’

Not everyone was quite as staunchly royalist as Lees-Milne, as he found one stormy afternoon in Hyde Park not long after Margaret’s birthday celebrations in August 1948:

A violent cloudburst of rain descended so I sheltered in a temple alcove. In it were two working-class men talking disrespectfully of the Royal Family. Some women driven in by the rain joined in the conversation, and agreed that the Royal Family were an unnecessary expense. All spoke without vitriol and quite dispassionately. I was surprised, and merely said that I totally disagreed. Wished them good-day and ostentatiously walked off. Got soaked.

There was no room for cynics among the patiently waiting crowd outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of Sunday, 14 November. ‘It’s a boy,’ a policeman eventually announced through cupped hands. ‘Both well.’ The word ‘boy’ quickly went round, and the crowd (mainly men) stayed on ‘to cheer, to sing and to call for the father, until asked to go home in the early hours’, while in Trafalgar Square the illuminated fountains were lit with blue lights, the pink ones being redundant. The next day saw more crowds milling round the Palace and shouting ‘Good old Philip’, the ringing of bells at Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, and the royal salute of 41 guns from Hyde Park and the Tower. But Anthony Heap was cross that the bells and guns had not been heard straight after the birth the previous evening. ‘Have the officials responsible for these things
no
sense of drama?’ he asked himself. It was not until the eve of the christening on 15 December that the public was let in on the name of the new Prince, but this time Heap gave a nod, approving of Charles for its ‘right royal ring’. A big crowd standing outside the Palace watched people arrive for the event. ‘It is,’ reflected Harold Nicolson (himself about to start work on the official life of George V), ‘the identification of natural human experience with this strange royal world that causes these emotions; one’s own life enlarged into a fairy story.’
^5.

Another happy family were the Huggetts. After appearing in the 1947 comedy
Holiday Camp
, they got the first film of their own in
Here Come the Huggetts
, released in November 1948. ‘The lively, laughing, loveable Huggetts are Britain’s very own family,’ declared the poster, with Jack Warner as the father in this middle-class suburban family and Petula Clark as one of his daughters. The fairly feeble plot turned on the visit being paid by a flashy blonde cousin (Diana Dors as a 15-year-old jitterbug queen) and the mistaken belief that the father was having a fling with her. ‘It’s an unpretentious affair and none the worse for that,’ thought
Picturegoer
, which praised the ‘requisite touch of sentimentality’, but for Anthony Heap, who saw it at the King’s Cross cinema, it was at best ‘pleasant entertainment’, handicapped by a ‘persistently pedestrian’ script. Two more films followed in quick succession –
Vote for Huggett
(revolving round a promise to construct a war memorial) and
The Huggetts Abroad
(not their kind of place, with Mrs Huggett lamenting the absence of queues) – before the series came to a more or less unlamented end. In retrospect, the films’ main interest lies in the role of the father, Joe Huggett. Often he seems to be marginalised (‘Nobody does anything I ask them round here,’ he complains) as events and misunderstandings go on around him, but in the end it is he who sorts things out and has his position of authority validated and reinforced. But if the contrast with his affectionate but scatterbrained wife Kathleen and their three daughters was stark, it raised few eyebrows at the time.

Here Come the Huggetts
was never likely to get a Royal Command performance, unlike the epic, slow-moving, intensely patriotic
Scott of
the Antarctic
, released at about the same time and starring John Mills as Captain Scott, with a suitably grandiloquent score by Vaughan Williams. ‘Such a film as
Scott
is welcome at a time when other races speak disparagingly of our “crumbling empire” and our “lack of spirit”’ was the unashamed response of the
Sunday Dispatch
. ‘It should make those who have listened too closely to such talk believe afresh that ours is the finest breed of men on this earth. And so it is.’ Above all, there was the film’s emotional continence, the very quintessence of still-prized stiff-upper-lippedness. ‘What iron discipline and self-control!’ reflected Vere Hodgson after seeing it. ‘They joked to the last, and never said one word to each other of what they really thought . . . I am sure no men but those of English race could have kept up that courtesy and nonchalance to the last, in the face of such terrible physical suffering.’ Soon afterwards, a Mass-Observation study of weeping in cinemas found that whereas men tended to weep at moments of reserve in a film, women wept at moments of parting and loss – here, when Scott says goodbye to his wife on the quay and when the ponies are shot. One adolescent male could have wept with frustration. Having taken the 15-year-old Joan Rowlands (the future Joan Bakewell) to their local picture house in Stockport and found her discouragingly unresponsive to his advances, he turned to her and declared that she was as cold as the film.
^6.

Cinema’s nemesis was still at the fledgling stage. In February 1949 the
Sunday Pictorial
(in effect the Sunday version of the
Daily Mirror
) revealed ‘The Truth About British Television’:

Are the programmes bad?

Yes. Transmission most days is only an hour in the afternoon and about two hours in the evening . . . Afternoon programmes are mainly old American films. They are terrible . . . Major sports promoters are bitterly opposed to television because they know attendances will suffer. Consequently most sportscasts are of amateur events . . . Variety programmes are poor because the big combines put a television ban on their stars.

Nevertheless, between June 1948 and March 1949 the number of television licences doubled from 50,000 to 100,000. Moreover, by 1949 there were, a BBC inquiry found, ‘unmistakeable signs of TV becoming less and less a “rich man’s toy”’ – indeed, by the start of the year, ‘although TV was still
relatively
more common in wealthy than in less comfortable homes . . . more than half the TV sets in use were in Lower Middle Class and Working Class homes’.

Mass-Observation at about this time asked its national panel (‘generally above average in intelligence and education’) for its views on television. Only 2 per cent of the 684 respondents owned a set, which had cost almost £100, but about half wanted one (‘Can stay at home for entertainment’ and ‘Educational, widens and stimulates interest’ were the two main reasons), and many tended to see it as inevitable anyway. ‘No, I won’t have television – until all my neighbours have it’ was how a 33-year-old publicity assistant put it. One-third were definitely opposed, while even those wanting one, especially the female panellists, emphasised Television’s prospective disadvantages. ‘I would very much like to have a television set in my own home,’ noted a young housewife, ‘but I’m afraid that my needlework and mending and all the jobs which normally get done in the evening, would be sadly neglected.’

For those who actually had a set, the biggest problem was often where to put the thing. ‘Make Room for Television’ was the title of a spring 1949
House and Garden
article, reckoning that ‘for winter viewing, a good place for television is near the fire where chairs are usually gathered’. It seemed the obvious solution in an era before central heating became ubiquitous; yet, given the huge emotional baggage attached to the domestic hearth, the very essence of homeliness, there existed an understandable anxiety about the newcomer supplanting the time-honoured fireplace. ‘Most of the day your set will sit lifeless in the room, so its looks are important,’ warned the magazine. ‘As the cabinet is bulky and creates special problems of accommodation, its position shouldn’t be obtrusive. Your room must be re-arranged for its new function.’ In addition, curtains or Venetian blinds were recommended in order to divide up a living room in which ‘the viewers need less light (especially round the set), while the others may be distracted by the performance’.
^7.
The domestic ecology, in short, was starting to change.

In virtually every household the wireless was still the principal source of home entertainment and, arguably, imaginative life: between 1948 and 1950 the total of radio licences climbed from just over 11 million to a record 11,819,190. For Marian Raynham, living in Surbiton, there were some trying times in September 1948:

17
September
. Settling down this evening to the return of Eric Barker [star of the comedy show
Waterlogged Spa
, with its catchphrase ’Ullo, cock, ’ow’s yerself?’] on radio when radio went off & fused lights. Robin fixed lights but the radio smelt awful. It has had nothing done to it since we had it about 9 years. Been wonderful . . . It is going to be terrible without it, no news, no fun, no In Town Tonight.

20
September
. Electrician came. New transformer needed in radio. They will try & get one & let me know . . .

It is awful without wireless. I go in to hear Mrs Dale at 4pm next door. Without there seems no time & no news & it is miserable. Must try & hire one . . . My world has gone to pieces without it.

23
September
. Missing first of Tommy Handley tonight.

30
September
. No sign of wireless being fixed.

Eventually, Raynham got a temporary radio, by which time the latest series of Tommy Handley’s catchphrase-rich comedy vehicle, the renowned and still hugely popular
ITMA
, was well into its stride. At the end of October there was the 300th show since the first series shortly before the war, with Princess Margaret and a party of friends in the audience.
ITMA
number 310 was broadcast on Thursday, 6 January 1949, as usual at 8.30 p.m. Tommy had become manager of a tea and coffee stall (‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’), and among those paying him a visit were Basil Backwards (‘Sir – morning good! Coffee of cup. Strong too not. Milk have rather I’d.’) and Sophie Tuckshop (played by Hattie Jacques), while Mona Lott declined to cheer up after her election as Miss Waterworks of 1949. ‘In fact,’ recalled the show’s scriptwriter Ted Kavanagh, ‘it was just an ordinary
ITMA
saga of craziness.’

Three days later, at noon on Sunday the 9th, Handley had a stroke while stooping down to pick up a dropped collar stud and died in hospital at ¾5. He was 56. The news reached the BBC just as the 5.30 repeat of Thursday evening’s transmission was going out on the Light Programme. ‘I’d washed up & was clearing away, when the 6 o’clock news began,’ Nella Last in Barrow wrote in her diary that evening. ‘I was putting some spoons in the drawer of the side board, & heard Tommy Handley’s death announced. My husband heard me say sharply “oh No” & hurried in. I felt I could hardly say “Tommy Handley is
dead
” & saw his face whiten, & we sat down silently to hear the scanty details.’ ‘I heard it on the wireless, & I didn’t believe it,’ one man told Mass-Observation a day or two later. ‘I sat for a while, & then went in & told my daughter. She just looked at me &burst into a flood of tears.’
^8.

For two young scriptwriters, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, the news came at a particularly ticklish moment. From 4.00 to 8.00 that day, their recently launched comedy programme,
Take It From Here
, was in rehearsal at the BBC’s Paris studio in Lower Regent Street, with recording due to take place from 8.30 to 9.00 for transmission on the Tuesday evening. The original typed script survives, together with the frantic pencilled amendments: