Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (54 page)

Broadly speaking, it was from the intelligentsia and the trade unions that the bulk of the British Communist Party’s fewer than 50,000 members came. Mervyn Jones, a young writer in the late 1940s, recalls how, despite spreading doubts about Soviet Russia, it was the very ‘ferocity’ of the Cold War that held the party together, with the ‘incessant onslaughts’ from the press and two main parties including ‘some home truths’ but also ‘a torrent of distortions and slanders’. As for himself, he stayed a member because he could not yet find in the Labour Party an alternative ‘focus of dissent’. For Lawrence Daly, a young Fife miner who was also a part-time National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) lodge official and, from 1949, chairman of the Scottish TUC Youth Advisory Council, there was not a sliver of inner doubt as he stood that spring as a Communist candidate in the Fife County Council elections. ‘“Vox” and “Anti-Humbug” may talk as much as they like about “Police States” and “Ruthless Dictatorships”,’ he wrote defiantly to
The Times for Lochgelly,
Bowhill, Dundonald, Glencraig and Lochore
, ‘but I prefer to accept the opinions of the founders of the Labour Party, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who, in their monumental work, “Soviet Communism”, described it as a new civilisation and as the greatest democracy on earth.’ Gratifyingly, two days later, the
Daily Herald
called him Fife’s ‘chief Communist orator and theorist’, but Daly still went down heavily to Labour.

Generally, what sort of culture prevailed in the British CP? The evidence, cumulatively, is not flattering. For all the seriousness and noble intentions of many of the members, there was an almost unwavering allegiance to the Stalin line (at times descending into Stalin worship), and from the leadership an aggressive unwillingness to allow any dissent or deviation. ‘That time produced one of the sharpest mental frosts I can remember on the Left,’ the historian E. P. Thompson would recall from personal knowledge of the CP in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ‘Vitalities shrivelled up and books lost their leaves.’ The stultifying, repressive flavour comes out well in a 1948 internal statement by the party’s cultural commissar, Sam Aaronovitch. ‘There are still too many of you,’ he told the writers’ group, ‘who are not making a serious study of Marxism as a science. Because of that there are tendencies to compromise on basic principles, tendencies which lightheartedly reconcile, for instance, materialism and idealism . . . To engage more actively in the ideological struggle, our ideological workers must become Communists.’ It was an atmosphere that could not but encourage intellectual dishonesty, notoriously so when in 1948/9 the CP’s most famous scientist, J. D. Bernal, endorsed the wretchedly fraudulent ‘proletarian science’ of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s pet scientist and proponent of the Marxist theory that genes have no independent existence or influence.

In February 1949 Penguin published
The Case for Communism
by one of the CP’s two MPs, the veteran Scottish activist Willie Gallacher. Naturally it came with a heavy health warning: ‘As publishers we have no politics . . . Whether we like it or not Communism is one of the major political forces in the modern world . . . Readers must judge for themselves how far his case is based upon objective analysis, and how far coloured by partisanship.’ At one point, in his chapter ‘Advancing Socialism – Declining Capitalism’, Gallacher considered Russia’s satellite states – countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary – and discussed whether they were democratic:

The parties in the countries of east Europe, where the Communist parties are exerting a decisive influence, are all working together in the Governments to reconstruct their countries. But what about the opposition? What opposition? The parties in the Government bloc represent the people, and carry forward a policy in the interests of, and for the welfare of, the people. Those who want to put the clock back are enemies of the people. There can be no toleration for such.

‘In the democratic countries of east Europe they give no scope to the enemies of the people, and their nationalised industries have workers’ participation at every stage, from top to bottom,’ he added. ‘That’s the Communist idea of democracy, a new and far better type of democracy than the slow, dragging, Parliamentary sham of fighting that goes on in this country.’
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In the early summer of 1949, there arrived from Salisbury, Rhodesia, a Communist sympathiser (though not yet a party member). ‘High on the side of the tall ship,’ Doris Lessing recalled, ‘I held up my little boy and said, “Look, there’s London.” Dockland: muddy creeks and channels, greyish rotting wooden walls and beams, cranes, tugs, big and little ships.’ She came with her two-year-old son, little money and the manuscript of her first novel,
The Grass is Singing
. The London she found ‘was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs . . .’ It got worse:

No cafés. No good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’ from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty. The Dining Rooms, subsidised during the war, were often the only places to eat in a whole area of streets. They served good meat, terrible vegetables, nursery puddings. Lyons restaurants were the high point of eating for ordinary people – I remember fish and chips and poached eggs on toast . . . The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people’s minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place.

For Lessing, a redeeming feature (in addition to London’s overwhelming lack of provincialism in comparison with her hometown) was the general lack of affluence. ‘Nobody had any money, that’s what people don’t understand now,’ she told Sue MacGregor in 2002. ‘Nobody had anything. We didn’t bother about it . . . It wasn’t a question of suffering in any way. Nobody went hungry or anything like that, or went without clothes – it’s just that we weren’t suffering from this itch to possess more and more and more.’

Needing somewhere to live, Lessing spent six weeks ‘tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards’. These were weeks of ‘interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses’ with ‘pale faces peering up from basements, innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness’. Eventually she met a jeweller’s assistant called Rose, who found for Lessing and her small boy a garret in the working-class lodging-house in Denbigh Road, Notting Hill, where she herself lived. ‘I don’t care who gets in, I’ll get a smack in the eye either way’ was Rose’s view of politics. ‘When they come in saying “Vote for Me”, I just laugh.’ But Lessing, soon if not already aware of how the pervasive Cold War climate had sent many intellectuals running to (as she later put it) ‘The Ivory Tower’, was determined to keep a political edge to her life and writing.
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Walking in the Shade
, Lessing’s compelling autobiography about her first 13 years in England, periodically includes brief sections on ‘the Zeitgeist, or how we thought then’. Included in the one relating to her early impressions is this quartet:

Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all – best. The British Empire, then on its last legs – the best.

Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts.

In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority.

Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite – civilized – Britain was.

The evidence suggests that in the late 1940s there was not invariably hostility towards black people. Mass-Observation, for example, reported that among young white factory girls in the cavernous dance halls there was ‘great competition to dance with the blacks’ on account of ‘their superb sense of rhythm’. But at least as often as not, there does seem to have been some degree of prejudice against the 25,000 or so (more than half living in either Cardiff’s ‘Tiger Bay’ dock area or the rundown streets of Liverpool’s South End) ‘coloured’ people in Britain, including Africans, Somalis and Sudanese Arabs as well as West Indians.

A Ministry of Labour survey in early 1949 found that in the Midlands black male workers were placed ‘in firms like Lucas, BSA, and Singers on dirty and rough finishing work’, but that ‘as regards vacancies in building, Post Office, transport, coalmining, railways, clerical, and draughtsmen’s work, coloured labour would not be accepted’. As for the employment, just starting, of West Indian women in NHS hospitals, a Home Office memo in March noted that ‘it has been found that the susceptibilities of patients tended to set an upper limit on the proportion of coloured workers who could be employed either as nurses or domiciliaries’. Soon afterwards, Harold Nicolson was prevailed upon by his friend Jimmy Mallon, Warden of Toynbee Hall, to give a lecture to the Citizens Council in Whitechapel. ‘I dined with him first at the Reform Club, and then we took a taxi to the East End,’ Nicolson related to his wife Vita Sackville-West. ‘My audience, I regret to say, consists very largely of West Indian negroes, who, it seems, have flooded into London in the hope of high wages. All they get are rude remarks, the denial of white women and a sense that they are shunned.’ ‘I do not think,’ he added, ‘that many of the Jamaicans, Haitians and Trinidadians who were present quite understood my elaborate explanation of tolerance and the democratic State.’
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By July it was just over a year since the
Empire Windrush
had docked at Tilbury, and during that time there had been only a trickle of further West Indian workers arriving in Britain, perhaps about 600. Even so, there existed sufficient tension for a Colonial Office working party on Britain’s black Caribbeans to suggest that month that ‘dispersal of these aggregations would lessen the special social problems which result from their presence’, thereby enabling them to ‘be trained in the British way of life’. At the same time, ‘Is There a British Colour Bar?’ was the question asked by
Picture Post
’s Robert Kee. He concluded, broadly speaking, that there was – ‘invisible, but like Wells’ invisible man it is hard and real to the touch . . . and it is when you get lower down the social scale that you find it hits the hardest’. It was, for instance, ‘often extremely difficult’ for a black man to find a furnished flat or room, and Kee quoted the classic landlady line: ‘I wouldn’t mind for myself. But there’s no telling what the other lodgers might say.’ As for getting a job, ‘the coloured man meets prejudice in connection with his employment from all classes’, including ‘the white workers themselves’. Kee’s article inspired some supportive letters, including one from the black British athlete McDonald Bailey, but D. R. Smith of Bramham Gardens, SW5, attacked his ‘drivelling cant’ and asked how he would feel about his daughter marrying a Negro: ‘While I am quite prepared to admit that there are many good people in the coloured races, we cannot recognise them by inter-marrying with them or by introducing them into our social life.’ G. Carter from Croxley Green, Herts, agreed: ‘One can hardly imagine the British people becoming a mulatto nation . . . I believe the best solution is to prevent any large number of coloured people taking up permanent residence in this country. Why import a social problem where one did not previously exist?’

Soon afterwards, in early August, there was an unpleasant episode in the West Midlands when 65 Jamaicans were expelled from Causeway Green Hostel near Oldbury, following attacks on them by the more numerous Poles staying there. ‘It is no good arguing about the matter’ was the response of one of those expelled, Harold Wilmot, an ex-airman who had been six years in England. ‘We are black men, and must bear the black man’s burden.’ Another, Horace Halliburton, a skilled metal turner who was still looking for work 15 months after arriving in England, wrote an eloquent article for the
Birmingham Gazette
. ‘What really annoys my countrymen,’ he emphasised, ‘is the constant baiting and jeering which is directed at the coloured man. He is unrepresented and invariably victimised.’ As evidence, he quoted what an Employment Exchange manager in Birmingham had said to him: ‘I am sorry for you. It is talent wasted, but the factories will not employ coloured men. Do not blame us. Blame the management – and they in turn will blame their employees. British workmen do not like sharing their benches with a coloured man and that is an end to it.’ ‘Even the landladies at boarding-houses will not have us as lodgers,’ Halliburton added in confirmation of Kee’s finding, before ending on a wrenching, even pitiful note: ‘I am heartbroken when I hear mothers point out a coloured man to their children and say: “I’ll set the black bogy man on you if you are not well behaved.”’
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