Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (49 page)

It was in many ways a profoundly illiberal vision. The creation of a so-called ‘great tradition’ was in effect a grandiose, self-serving collective mask to justify Leavis’s choice of five favourite novelists; the puritanical moralising barely concealed his disdain for everyman’s desire for material progress; as for popular culture, he saw himself in absolute black-and-white terms fighting on behalf of taste and sensibility ‘against the multitudinous counter-influences – films, newspapers, advertising – indeed, the whole world outside the class-room’. Nevertheless, its very dogmatism was a strong part of the Leavis appeal, especially by the late 1940s. With the Cold War intensifying and Communism losing much of its appeal to those in search of intellectual direction, Leavis offered to his followers what John Gross has acutely described as ‘a doctrine which sees the established order as hopelessly corrupt but in no way pledges them to try and replace it’. Put another way, the sage of Downing College filled a vacuum while the old left of the 1930s died and the new left was as yet unborn.

Unlike Leavis, T. S. Eliot was interested – at least notionally – in real people doing real things in the modern world. ‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar’ ran his celebrated list in
Notes
of ‘the characteristic activities and interests of a people’, demonstrating ‘how much is embraced by the term
culture
’. That did not mean, however, that Manchester United versus Blackpool at Wembley was equal in value to a Pugin church. ‘What is important,’ declared Eliot in a treatise imbued almost throughout with a pessimistic strain, ‘is a structure of society in which there will be, from “top” to “bottom”, a continuous gradation of cultural levels’, adding that ‘we should not consider the upper levels as possessing
more
culture than the lower, but as representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture’. Indeed, ‘to aim to make everyone share in the appreciation of the fruits of the more conscious part of culture is to adulterate and cheapen what you give’, for ‘it is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture’.

Eliot did not mention by name the Butler Act, which four years previously had significantly expanded access to secondary education, but he did express his unhappiness about the way in which education had recently been ‘taken up as an instrument for the realisation of social ideals’. In particular, he dubbed as ‘Jacobinism in Education’ the notion that education should be the means of achieving equality of opportunity in society – a notion he dismissed as ‘unobtainable in practice’ and which, ‘if we made it our chief aim, would disorganise society and debase education’. After a swipe at how the purveyors of ‘the Equality of Opportunity dogma’ had derived spurious ‘emotional reinforcement’ through citing the unproven example of ‘the mute inglorious Milton’, Eliot finished by solemnly warning that ‘in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards’ and, in sum, ‘destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans’.

To at least one ambitious educationalist, Eric James, head of the prestigious Manchester Grammar School since 1945, Eliot’s strictures against the dilution of elite culture came as valuable ammunition. In ‘The Challenge to the Grammar School’, a
Times Educational Supplement
piece subtitled ‘Attack upon Standards and Values’, James had already condemned the idea of the common (or comprehensive) school on the grounds that it would inevitably lead to ‘grave social, educational and cultural evils’ – in contrast to the grammar school, whose fundamental purpose was to provide ‘an education of the fullest kind for the academically most gifted section of the population’. There followed in 1949 James’s more detailed, and very influential,
An Essay on the
Content of Education
, which argued along similar lines. Admittedly, James and other advocates of a strict hierarchy in secondary education conveniently ignored Eliot’s caveat that ‘the prospect of a society ruled and directed only by those who have passed certain examinations or satisfied tests devised by psychologists is not reassuring’, but Eliot’s staunch defence of the culture of the governing elite, even if in his own mind it was not a grammar-school elite, was clearly grist to their mill.
¹³

It was not only the culture wars that left one visitor cold during the winter of 1948/9. For almost four months the American film star Ronald Reagan spent his working days at Elstree Studios, making an instantly forgettable movie,
The Hasty Heart
, set in a hospital compound in Burma. ‘You won’t mind our winter outdoors – it’s indoors that’s really miserable,’ an Englishman had helpfully warned him, and – wearing either pyjamas or shorts for the entire picture – Reagan froze most of the time. His otherwise determinedly cheerful memoirs recall a series of gloomy images and episodes: an appalling London fog that ‘was almost combustible, so thick was it with soft-coal smoke’, lingering for almost a week ‘until a kind of claustrophobia threatened to drive everyone stir-crazy’; the only outdoor illumination coming from ‘dim and inadequate street lamps’; the ‘severe limitation on food’; and a hotel in Cardiff where Reagan in the small hours ran out of shillings for the gas fire and ‘finished the night wrapped in my overcoat’. At Elstree itself he was also unimpressed by the contrast between the ‘tremendously talented, creative people’ he was working with and the ‘incredible inefficiency that makes everything take longer than it should’, not helped by union restrictions on the hours available for filming.

A jocose Christmas letter to Jack Warner in Hollywood suggested disenchantment with Britain (‘what they do to the food we did to the American Indian’, while ‘cheerio’ was ‘a native word meaning good bye – it is spoken without moving the upper lip – while looking down the nose’), but it was in the New Year that he had a serious conversation with the film’s director, Vincent Sherman. ‘They had,’ according to Reagan’s most intimate biographer, ‘some long arguments over the Labour government’s so-called Welfare State. As far as Reagan could see, nobody was well, and everybody fared badly. If this was socialism – stoppages, six-hour hospital queues, mile after mile of slate-roofed council houses – what price the New Deal?’ Reagan himself wrote in the 1970s that this trip to Britain had marked a defining stage in his political journey. He had seen the consequences of the natural economic order being turned upside-down, with civil servants becoming civil masters; accordingly, ‘I shed the last ideas I’d ever had about government ownership of anything’.

In the Dorset parish of Loders and Dottery, the focus on the second Thursday of 1949 was very much on the parish party held at 7.30 in the Ex-Service Men’s Hut. There were prizes for fancy dress, plenty of refreshments and an overall profit of almost £11. ‘Believe it or not, some people are troubled lest the ham they ate at the party might have been eaten illegally!’ recorded the recently installed vicar, Oliver Willmott, in his wonderfully readable parish notes. ‘It is unlike Loders to be sensitive to the nice points of the Law, but so like Loders not to have doubts before the ham was digested. Tender consciences should be relieved to know, on the authority of the Bridport Food Office, that the giving away of one’s own ham, killed under permit, does not offend the Law.’ Soon afterwards, Willmott reflected on how vicars like himself were enjoying a newfound social popularity. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the cause of this wondrous transformation that the clerical collar should be sought after?’:

A revival of religion? Alas, no. The answer is ‘Forms’. It is they that have made the clerical collar popular, because its wearer is privileged to testify that the form filler is what he makes himself out to be. Forms are much sworn at, but it may prove their passport to heaven that they gave many a dejected parson an agreeable sense that his people needed his services, and that he was able to do a thing for which they were grateful. But, you form-fillers, be not zealous overmuch! The cleric who was called out of the Bridport sausage queue to sign a form, never retrieved his place in the queue.
¹⁴

In August 1948, living on the Isle of Jura and struggling against mortal illness to complete a novel to be called either
The Last Man in Europe
or
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, George Orwell assessed for an American magazine where the Labour government stood after three years in power. There did not exist, he insisted at the outset, ‘any positive desire to return to capitalism’, despite the ‘disproportionately vocal’ noise being made by ‘the big capitalists and the middling entrepreneur class’, eager to convey the impression of a country ‘groaning beneath bureaucratic misrule’. Rather, ‘the great majority of people take it for granted that they will live on wages or salaries rather than profits, welcome the idea of birth-to-death social insurance, and do not feel strongly one way or the other about the nationalisation of industry’. As in July 1945, allegiance to Attlee and his colleagues was far from ideologically rooted: ‘The change-over to national ownership is not in itself an inspiring process, and in the popular regard the Labour party is the party that stands for shorter working hours, a free health service, day nurseries, free milk for school children, and the like, rather than the party that stands for Socialism.’ Not that Orwell ignored the physical downside of life in Attlee’s Britain: ‘The housing situation is extremely bad; food, though not actually insufficient, is unbearably dull. The prices of cigarettes, beer, and unrationed food such as vegetables are fantastic. And clothes rationing is an increasing hardship since its effects are cumulative.’ Would the government be more popular if its publicity was more effective? Orwell did not deny that ‘the housing shortage, the fuel shortage, bread rationing, and Polish immigration have all caused more resentment than they need have done if the underlying facts had been properly explained’, but the fact remained that, with the exception of the
Daily Herald
, ‘all that matters of the British press is controlled either by Tories or, in a very few cases, by left-wing factions not reliably sympathetic to a Labour government’. In spite of everything, he still expected Labour to win the next election, given that ‘the mass of the manual workers are not likely ever again to vote for the Conservative party, which is identified in their minds with class privilege and, above all, with unemployment’.

It was in many ways a typically persuasive piece – but one question that Orwell did not confront was whether Labour, having completed its welfare reforms and most of its promised nationalisation programme, would decide to undertake a major new wave of public ownership. On that vexed front, there was one important piece of unfinished business: the iron and steel industry. The bill to nationalise it was put forward in October 1948, and it proved a significantly more divisive issue across the political spectrum than previous nationalisation measures. ‘It is not a plan to help our patient struggling people,’ the Conservative leader Winston Churchill declared during a notably heated Commons debate, ‘but a burglar’s jemmy to crack the capitalist crib.’ There was never any doubt that the measure would get through parliament, but it took a long time, and in the end it was agreed that the first properties would not be transferred to the Iron and Steel Corporation before 1951.

Nevertheless, by the start of 1949 the question was being insistently asked: what would Labour’s nationalisation programme be if it retained power? One Tory backbencher, the veteran Sir Cuthbert Headlam, probably called it right when he reflected in his diary in January that ‘the Government side are out of breath – have over-strained themselves – don’t quite know what to do for the remainder of the Parliament – whether to go on nationalizing or to try and consolidate what they have already nationalized – what course is calculated to gain votes . . .’
¹⁵
In the light of opinion polls, by this time consistently showing a majority against further nationalisation, the answer might have seemed obvious.

After a fierce right/left tussle within the party’s National Executive, Labour in April 1949 published its policy statement
Labour Believes in
Britain
, in effect a draft manifesto. The relatively few parts of the economy that were put forward for second-term nationalisation included sugar-refining and industrial and life assurance, and there was a clear commitment to the mixed economy, ie a mixture of public and private industry. The hand of Herbert Morrison, the Cabinet’s chief ‘consolidator’, was almost visibly on the document. Then in June, against a background of recent poor local election results, the party assembled in Blackpool for its annual conference. All eyes were on Nye Bevan.