Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (48 page)

Joy Nichols
: I’m worried about Jimmy [Edwards]. He should be here.

Dick – do you think he’s met with an accident?

Dick Bentley
: There you go – day-dreaming again.

Joy:
Dick, how can you talk like that? Poor Jimmy, he may be stretched out somewhere, stark and cold. [Last six words deleted, and instead, ‘locked up in prison, broken a leg or something’.] Think of it, Dick.

Dick
: Yeah. (LAUGH) Yeah! What a terrible thing! (LAUGH)

Joy
: It’ll mean that only you and I will be left to carry on the TIFH tradition.

Dick
: There, there, little woman, we can do it. The two of us, pulling together. It just means changing the title. We’ll call it the Teen-age Show. I’ll take care of
all
the funny lines now. After all, Tommy Handley [crossed out, and ‘Charlie Chester’ inserted] does, and I’m as good as he is.

Joy
: Are you, Dick?

Dick
: Well,
half
as good.

Joy
: Half?

Dick
: Well, a quarter as good. [‘as T.H.’ inserted]. Well, an eighth . . . well, a sixteenth . . .

Not everyone mourned Handley’s passing. Anthony Heap noted that he had ‘hardly ever listened’ to
ITMA
, ‘because like all the other ostensibly comic features the BBC doggedly inflicts on us week after week, its humour was of a stereotyped, repetitive, machine-made variety that didn’t appeal to me in the least’. Kenneth Preston (an English teacher at Keighley Grammar School) and his wife had been similarly indifferent to the programme’s charms, with Preston reflecting that ‘apparently Handley earned £10,000 a year – a sad commentary on the times’. But these were far from the sentiments of Marian Raynham (‘How can we do without him? It’s almost a personal loss . . .’) or Nella Last (‘The very way he said “Hallo folks” seemed the warm greeting of an old puckish friend’) or Vere Hodgson (‘It has haunted me that we shall never hear his “Hullo, folks” again’). Or, as a young housewife on Mass-Observation’s panel put it, ‘other people I’ve met feel exactly the same – the sense of losing part of their life almost’.
^9.

Then came the funeral (as described by Kavanagh in his ‘instant’, evocative biography of Handley):

Six deep they lined the streets; they were of all ages and of all classes, many were in tears. Slowly our car nosed its way through the thousands who milled round the Private Chapel in Westbourne Grove and, at the other end of the route [ie Golders Green Crematorium] ten thousand and more awaited the arrival of the hearse. Through slum streets, through squares that had seen better days, on through more fashionable districts, past blocks of expensive flats, everywhere it was the same – the crowds had come to pay a last tribute to one whose voice had cheered them through the years, to one who had indeed been part of their very lives.

Later in January there was a memorial service at St Paul’s. The doors had to be closed before the start, many thousands waited outside to hear the service relayed to them, the broadcaster John Snagge read ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, the Bishop of London praised Handley as one whose ‘raillery was without cynicism and his satire without malice’, and naturally many millions listened on the radio.

The sheer depth of the popular grief suggests that it was not only about a much-loved comedian but also about something else – perhaps about Handley’s death as symbol of the inevitable fading into the past of the wartime spirit, or anyway what was remembered as the wartime spirit. ‘He shares with Mr Churchill the honour of keeping us going during the War,’ reflected Vere Hodgson, a notably level-headed diarist. Yet only a year later, in January 1950, a survey of Londoners found that although everyone knew who Handley was, and 31 per cent thought that
ITMA
remained unique, as many as 35 per cent declared that
Take It From Here
was better than
ITMA
had ever been.
¹⁰

Muir, Norden and the others were by this time labouring under considerable constraints. ‘Programmes must at all cost be kept free of crudities, coarseness and innuendo,’ insisted the
BBC Variety Programmes Policy
Guide For Writers & Producers
(generally known as ‘The Green Book’), a long-lived document assembled and taking force during the second half of 1948. ‘Humour must be clean and untainted directly or by association with vulgarity and suggestiveness. Music hall, stage, and to a lesser degree, screen standards, are not suitable to broadcasting . . . There can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut.’ The following were the subject of ‘an absolute ban’:

Jokes about –

Lavatories

Effeminacy in men

Immorality of any kind

Suggestive references to –

Honeymoon couples

Chambermaids

Fig leaves

Prostitution

Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on

Animal habits, e.g. rabbits

Lodgers

Commercial travellers

Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about –

Pre-natal influences (e.g. ‘His mother was frightened by a donkey’)

Marital infidelity

Good taste and decency are the obvious governing considerations.

The vulgar use of such words as ‘basket’ must also be avoided.

Religion, politics and physical infirmities were all heavily restricted areas, though ‘references to and jokes about drink are allowed in strict moderation so long as they can really be justified on entertainment grounds’. As for expletives, ‘they have no place at all in light entertainment and all such words as God, Good God, My God, Blast, Hell, Damn, Bloody, Gorblimey, Ruddy, etc, etc, should be deleted from scripts and innocuous expressions substituted’. Any jokes that might be taken to encourage strikes or industrial disputes were to be avoided, while ‘the Corporation’s policy is against broadcasting impersonations of elder Statesmen, e.g. Winston Churchill’. Altogether, it was Auntie at her most auntie-like. For a ‘blue’ comedian like the great Max Miller, with his roots in the old music hall, it made radio appearances almost an impossibility, but for others like Frankie Howerd, with a career still to forge, the answer (in his biographer’s words) ‘was to make the audience – via the use of a remarkably wide range of verbal idiosyncrasies in his delivery – hear the sort of meanings in certain innocent words that no English dictionary would ever confirm’. Or, as Howerd himself later put it, ‘To say “I’m going to do you” was considered very naughty, yet I got away with the catchphrase: “There are those among us tonight whom I shall do-o-o-o.”’
¹¹

The inhibitions of popular radio were complemented, at the other end of the cultural spectrum, by the constipation – or, put more kindly, narrow parameters – of the prevailing literary culture. If there was a quintessential mandarin of the late 1940s, it was perhaps the distinguished literary critic and Oxford don renowned for his aristocratic manner, distinctive voice (‘like a crate of hens being carried across a field’, according to Isaiah Berlin) and marriage into the Bloomsbury circle. A
Vogue
profile in July 1948, accompanied by a soulful Cecil Beaton portrait, practically said it all:

Lord David Cecil possesses a mind as elegant, in the best sense of the word, as his long fingers. In an age when style in everything is fast becoming as extinct as the dinosaur, his fastidious prose touches the mind and heart with its grace and beautiful precision. He is Tutor of English at New College, Oxford, and his weekly lectures are as remarkable for their perfect delivery as for their content. He is famous for his life of Cowper, and has just published ‘Two Quiet Lives’, a study of Dorothy Osborne and Thomas Gray . . . The values which shine through his work are prized by those who look for brilliance without false glitter, balance without dusty academicism.

For the young, lower-middle-class Kingsley Amis, briefly assigned Cecil as his BLitt supervisor, he was ‘that POSTURING QUACK Cess-hole’, as he informed Philip Larkin two months after the
Vogue
piece. Later that autumn, when Amis actually tried to make contact with Cecil in order to discuss his thesis, he found it impossible (‘Oh no, sir,’ chuckled the porter. ‘Lord David? Oh, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to get hold of him. Oh dear, oh dear. Lord David in college, well I never did’) and decided to switch to another don, F. W. Bateson (‘A bit leftie in a sort of Bevanish way, which was all right with me at that stage,’ he recalled some 40 years later). The defection did not dismay Cecil, who two years later enjoyed failing the thesis. And when in 1953 the veteran American actress Ruth Draper visited Oxford, she took special delight in seeing him. ‘Of course,’ she told her sister, ‘David is one of the most rare and quaint and distinguished young men [in his early 50s by this time] to be found anywhere –
such
brains –
such
race – such sensitivity, but a darling person.’

It is hard to avoid the e-word. A trio of 1948/9 snippets from Lees-Milne’s diary accurately reflect a prevailing elitism, reinforced rather than subdued by Labour’s 1945 landslide and the ensuing legislative programme of the Attlee government. Walking in Hyde Park one summer evening, the diarist ‘had an uneasy feeling that the proletariat, sunning themselves so happily, truly believe that all is well with the world and themselves just because they are richer than ever before and work less than ever before’. At the annual meeting of the National Trust, the Bishop of London (in his capacity as chief speaker, not admirer of Tommy Handley) ‘said that the social revolution we were going through would prove disastrous if this country did not preserve for the masses the culture which had been lost to France during the French Revolution’. And at dinner one evening, the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, talking ‘of the uneducated English masses’, said that ‘hitherto England had come out on top because she had been pushed along by the educated few,’ but ‘now that there was open competition between nations England must go down owing to her standard of education being lower than that of every other European country’ – with which Lees-Milne agreed, adding that ‘the situation seemed to me even more serious in that the educated few were being pushed around by the uneducated many’.
¹²

Near the end of 1948 there appeared, within a few weeks of each other, two important, influential books, both of them predicated upon strictly hierarchical cultural assumptions:
The Great Tradition
by F. R. Leavis and
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
by T. S. Eliot.

It is absurd, on the face of it, to call Leavis an elitist. Born in 1895, he was the son of a piano dealer in Cambridge, spent most of his adult life there as an English don fiercely at odds with the university establishment, and never lost his visceral hatred of what he saw as a malign metropolitan literary clique, above all the Bloomsbury Group. By the late 1940s he was in the process of becoming the most influential English literary critic of the century – an influence that owed at least something to his striking appearance and take-no-prisoners personality. ‘Leavis was a familiar figure in the Cambridge streets,’ Peter Hall recalled:

He rode an absurdly old-fashioned tall black bicycle. His shirt collar was always wide open, even in the worst weather, and he was the original corduroys-and-open-sandals man. He wore socks with his sandals. His delivery at lectures was dry and witty, with an in-built sneer in virtually every phrase. We attended in order to be shocked and outraged by his judgements, though actually we were delighted to hear all the great reputations overturned.

In schools, in adult-education colleges, in other universities, even in the wider world, successive generations of Leavisites would spread the stirring, unambiguous word: only five novelists (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence) belonged to ‘The Great Tradition’; these writers mattered supremely not only for their art’s sake but also for how they promoted ‘awareness of the possibilities of life’; only through nurturing the right relationship between life and literature might it be possible to return to the organic society destroyed by modern industrial civilisation.