Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (55 page)

‘Very serious dollar situation,’ noted Hugh Dalton, senior minister and former Chancellor, in his diary for 15 June 1949, less than two years after the convertibility crisis. ‘Cripps says that the danger is that, within twelve months, all our [gold] reserves will be gone. This time there is nothing behind them, and there might well be “a complete collapse of sterling”.’ Over the next three months there was a curious disjunction: the balance-of-payments position remained dire; international (especially American) confidence in the British economy steadily deteriorated; the country’s threadbare reserves continued to drain away; Sir Stafford Cripps authorised a new round of cuts in imports, ie trying to reduce dollar expenditure while formally denying that he intended to devalue sterling; the financial markets operated on the tacit understanding that the currency (long thought to be overvalued at $4.03 to the pound, the rate agreed at the outbreak of war) would be devalued sooner rather than later; and
The Times
published many letters that sought to diagnose the causes of Britain’s economic problems. Yet, perhaps because it was summer, there was no great sense of crisis felt by the mass of the population. ‘Any visitor hoping to discover what the ordinary Londoner is thinking about the dollar crisis could wear his ear off laying it to the ground, and get no result,’ Panter-Downes rather plaintively remarked at the start of September. ‘What he is currently talking about is his holiday or the drought or the new price cuts in utility clothing.’ She went on:

Short of the Prime Minister coming to the microphone and saying, ‘Sorry, no rations next week,’ it is hard to see how the worker can be made to realise that things are critical when, from his angle, they are looking nothing less than prosperous. Though Britain’s vital dollar exports are down, their industry is still managing to show every sign of lively good health, to judge by the full employment and increased productivity. Some luxury lines, always the first to feel the pinch, are feeling it, but on the whole the industrial picture is so surprisingly, if deceptively, bright that there is every reason for workers to believe that if this is a crisis, it’s the most comfortable crisis they ever took a ride in.
¹⁷

It was enough, she might have added, to make a
Times
letter-writer despair, let alone a government exhorting ever-greater efforts.

The eventual decision to devalue was a slow, painful and at times muddled one, not helped by Cripps being in a Swiss sanatorium for part of July and most of August. The process included a perceived act of double-crossing, a heated discussion about bread, and a critical if predictable non-decision.

In Cripps’s prolonged absence, the three ministers left in day-to-day charge of economic matters were Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and Douglas Jay. Gaitskell and Jay were pro-devaluation, viewing it as preferable to deflation and likely to enhance competitiveness, while Wilson was seemingly of a similar mind. But at a crucial meeting at Chequers, he appeared to be covering his back, leading on Gaitskell’s part to a permanent attitude of mistrust towards him. ‘What emerged during the summer of 1949,’ Wilson’s straight-as-a-die adviser Alec Cairncross recalled, ‘was Harold’s fondness for keeping his options open, his disinclination to say unpalatable things to his colleagues, his tendency to see economic issues in purely political terms (in this case, the date of the next election) and, most of all, his deviousness.’

On 12 September, just over a fortnight after the Cabinet had reluctantly concluded that there was no alternative to devaluation, Cripps and Ernest Bevin were both in the British Embassy at Washington, where together they decided what the new fixed value of sterling should be. Among those present was the Treasury’s Sir Edwin Plowden:

There were two rates put forward, $2.80 and $3.00, and I think the majority of us felt that $2.80 was the right rate. When we went upstairs to a meeting in Ernie Bevin’s sitting room, he’d been ill and he was still in his dressing gown and pyjamas. Stafford was there and his view was that $3.00 was the right rate and we argued for the lower rate. Ernie then turned to me and said, ‘What effect will this have on the price of the standard loaf of bread?’ Fortunately, thinking he would ask this, I’d sent a cable to the Treasury asking what effect it will have. It was a penny. We put that forward and he said, ‘Oh all right, but I hope we can have a whiter loaf. It makes me belch, this stuff.’ So it wasn’t the $2.80 argument that was decided, it was the price of bread that decided it.

So, $2.80 it was – but in the event, without (to Bevin’s regret and Cripps’s nutritional satisfaction) going back to the pre-war white loaf. ‘When they looked into the cost,’ Cairncross subsequently explained, ‘it turned out that there would be more dollars involved because they would have to buy offal and throw it away and need more flour, so to speak, than otherwise and that caused the Treasury to oppose it.’

The non-decision was the failure to give serious consideration to the economic merits of floating the pound, so that it no longer had a fixed value that had to be defended at nearly all costs. But for the instinctively
dirigiste
Cripps and his fellow-ministers, such a market-oriented policy was almost beyond the bounds of rationality. ‘If by a floating rate its sponsors mean to imply that all our exchange and import controls should be taken off and the pound allowed to find its own level,’ he told the Commons soon after devaluation, ‘we could not possibly think of such a course.’
¹⁸

Cripps announced devaluation to the nation on the evening of Sunday, 18 September. After an explanation of what he was doing and why, together with a ‘most earnest’ appeal to manufacturers and exporters to ‘redouble their efforts’ and an insistence that ‘this is a step that we cannot and shall not repeat’, there was one passage in his broadcast that had a particular resonance:

We have decided upon these steps because we are determined not to try and solve our problem at the cost of heavy unemployment, or by attacking the social services that have been expanded over the last few years. This drastic change is the only alternative and it offers us a chance of a great success, but only if we all play the game and do not try to take advantage of one another; if we take fair shares of our difficulties as well as of our benefits.

Different listeners reacted in different ways. ‘Cripps very parsonical in an evangelical sort of way,’ thought Malcolm Muggeridge, while for Vere Hodgson it was ‘a lot of meaningless soft soap’, though she added that ‘he was upset to announce it’. The unforgiving Kenneth Preston in Keighley recorded grimly that ‘Cripps has had to eat his words’ and reflected that ‘the dollar has come to assume such an importance in our lives at present that, as Vallance [his local vicar] said this morning [ie in church], the dollar bill, in the minds of some people, has come to take the place formerly occupied by God as the universal provider’. For one diarist, as no doubt for many other listeners, the global seamlessly merged into the local. ‘It sounded like a schoolmaster explaining citizenship to young people,’ noted Gladys Langford. ‘I cannot believe people will respond to his plea for more and more effort. They have been offered nothing but disappointment for so long. I wonder how long before Mr Lee raises our rents?’

In her next letter to the
The New Yorker
, Panter-Downes described the wider impact:

The devaluation of the pound went off like a bomb that you can hear coming but that makes you jump just the same. The public is still rocking from the startling effects of the explosion, unsure as to whether things will be looking better or worse when, eventually, the smoke clears. Certainly a good deal of the shock proceeded from the fact that the Chancellor had become identified in most people’s mind with the maintaining of the precious pound sterling. All his utterances on the subject had given the impression that he intended to stand or fall with it. Though making allowances for the necessary lack of frankness preceding the operation, even those Britons who expected devaluation seem somewhat astonished by the briskness with which he has bent the pound, not to mention its staggering new angle.

The morning after, Cripps himself held a large press conference, at which, according to Panter-Downes, he ‘looked far more a spruce figure at a wedding, come to give away a cherished daughter, than a coroner sitting on the facts of a sensational demise’. Indeed, ‘the assembled journalists hadn’t a chance against a fascinating performance that crackled with good humor and vigor’. Nevertheless, whatever the economic arguments in its favour, the very fact of devaluation inevitably had powerful connotations of volte-face and humiliation. These were not connotations that any political party would want to be associated with twice in living memory.

The day that Panter-Downes wrote her letter, Thursday the 22nd, saw the staging at Wembley of the first World Speedway Championship since the war. No fewer than 500,000 cinder-track fans applied for the 85,000 tickets on sale in advance. It was a sport that had been invented only in the late 1920s, gates in the current season were already up by more than a million on the previous year, and 16 riders were due to compete for speedway’s greatest honour, never previously won by a home rider. The
Daily Mirror
headline the next day celebrated a triumphant outcome: ‘93,000 Cheer The New Speed King – An Englishman!’ Tommy Price had won all five races, and for ‘a wildly cheering crowd’ the question of a new exchange rate was, for a few hours anyway, neither here nor there.
¹⁹

4

A Decent Way of Life

‘I was sorry myself to miss Wilfred,’ Nella Last in Barrow noted in her diary on 14 October 1949 (ten days after her sixtieth birthday) about missing that Friday evening’s edition of
Have a Go
, starring the great Pickles – probably the most popular man in the country. ‘It’s not just that I like his handling of people, it’s the “genuine” feeling I get – of homely every day people, with humour, courage & ideals as steadfast as ever, in spite of all the talk of “decadence”, slacking, problem youth, etc, etc, which seems so insistently brought to sight nowadays, in press, books & cinema.’ The next afternoon, 37,978 squeezed into Meadow Lane to watch Notts County trounce the visitors Bristol City 4–1. Tommy Lawton at centre forward was ‘his usual brilliant self’, according to the local reporter, A. E. Botting, and scored County’s fourth after ‘a typical solo burst’. One watchful presence in the exultant crowd was probably Alan Sillitoe, who transmuted the experience into a short story, ‘The Match’, with County going down to a bitter defeat. As the mist rolls in from the Trent and it becomes impossible to see the advertising boards above the stands ‘telling of pork pies, ales, whisky, cigarettes and other delights of Saturday night’, one of the characters bites his lip with anger. ‘“Bloody team. They’d even lose at blow football.” A woman behind, swathed in a thick woollen scarf coloured white and black like the Notts players, who had been screaming herself hoarse in support of the home team all the afternoon, was almost in tears: “Foul! Foul! Get the dirty lot off the field. Send ’em back to Bristol where they came from. Foul! Foul I tell yer.”’ Still, whatever a weekend’s ups and downs, there was always
Variety Bandbox
on Sunday evening, with some 20 million regularly tuning in. ‘Now, ah, Ladies and Gentle-
men
,’ began the star turn’s ‘lion tamer’ monologue on the 16th. ‘Harken. Now – harken. This is, no – harken! Now har-
ken
!
Har-ever-so-ken!
Now, that’s the life: the circus! What? That’s the life! If you live. I know! What? I’m telling you this.
Liss-en
! There’s one phase in my life, there’s one phase – and I never forget a phase! Ha ha ha ha! Every gag fresh from the quipperies!’
^1.
The script was by Eric Sykes, and for the intense, insecure man delivering his lines, Frankie Howerd, these were golden days.

It was a month since devaluation. ‘Everybody is waiting to hear what cuts & changes the Gov. will make on Mon.,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on Saturday the 22nd. ‘Attlee will speak. It is supposed to be drastic & touch us all. People fearing clothes rationing have been buying a lot.’ Two days later did Attlee indeed speak to the nation, outlining expenditure cuts amounting to some £250 million and emphasising that his government had ‘sought to make them in such a way as not to impair seriously the great structure of social services which has been built up and which we intend to preserve’. The package included reductions in capital (including housing and education) and defence expenditure, but one listener, Judy Haines, naturally saw it from the point of view of a Chingford housewife trying like everyone else to make ends meet. ‘More austerity to cope with devaluation of £,’ she recorded. ‘Drs prescriptions 1/ – or what they’re worth if less; dried egg dearer; decontrol of fish prices.’ The most controversial aspect was the new intention, barely 15 months into the life of the NHS, to charge for prescriptions. A swiftly taken Gallup poll revealed that although 44 per cent were opposed to this policy shift, as many as 51 per cent agreed with it. Overall, reckoned Anthony Heap in St Pancras, the expenditure cuts – ‘anxiously awaited’ for the previous two or three weeks – were ‘in no way as alarming as we’d been led to expect’. Given that a general election was due within the next nine months, it would have been surprising if they had been.

Life, though, remained difficult enough in the last autumn of the 1940s. ‘Wanted: A Housewives’ Strike’ was the provocative title of a
Picture Post
article in late October, detailing the high prices of everyday items compared with pre-war and producing a predictable flood of supportively indignant readers’ letters. ‘One of the biggest rackets at the present time is the high price of sanitary towels, surely an absolute necessity,’ wrote Mrs Laurel Garrad from Weston-super-Mare. ‘Is it possible to organise a real nation-wide housewives’ strike?’ Joan Comyns from Carshalton, for all her similar anger, thought not: ‘Pans have to be bought to cook for one’s family; darning wool must be paid for, or children go sockless to school; string is necessary to tie up parcels to send to loved ones. I have tried to strike about face towels, and have cut up every conceivable bit of garment which might do for them. Tell me, how can we strike, except by continually placing worried heads in gas ovens?’ The middle class, as ever, was at the cutting edge of the masochism that accompanied austerity’s trials and tribulations. ‘Excellent women enjoying discomfort – one bar of a small electric fire, huddled in coats,’ the soon-to-be-published Barbara Pym, still living in Pimlico, suggestively jotted in her notebook in November. For that questionably excellent man, Henry St John, it was not so much self-abnegation as grumbling that remained a way of life. ‘I had a poor lunch in Lyons’ cafeteria at Hammersmith,’ he recorded about the same time, ‘where a clearer-up told me trays were to be put in a “rack”, by which she meant a trolley.’ Not long afterwards, on 8 December, a young Czech woman arrived in England, staying in the capital for a few days before travelling north:

There were still bombed-out ruins all over London, and the post-war drabness was far worse than that in Prague. The English women I saw walking about London seemed to me sloppily dressed, with scarves tied round their heads and cigarettes hanging from their lips. The shops, too, were a great disappointment to me. I had expected wonderful shops, but most of what I saw in London shop windows seemed to me to be shoddy stuff, with little attempt to display it elegantly.
^2.

These recollections belonged to Olga Cannon, recently married to the determined, high-minded Les Cannon, Lancashire’s representative on the executive of the Electrical Trades Union and still a fully committed Communist.

For some 6,000 people, most of them young, 1949 was the year of being struck down by polio – in 657 cases fatally. Ian Dury was seven when in August he contracted it in the open-air swimming pool at Southend: ‘I then went to my granny’s in Cornwall for a couple of weeks’ holiday, an incubation period, and it developed. I spent six weeks in an isolation hospital in Truro, because I was infectious. I was encased in plaster, both arms and both legs. My mum came down on the milk train and they said I was going to die but I rallied round after six months in the Royal Cornish Infirmary. They took me back to Essex on a stretcher.’ His left side remained paralysed for a time, and thereafter he walked with a pronounced limp. Another victim, Julian Critchley, was eighteen when one Saturday morning in early November he ‘set out to walk to John Barnes, the department store next to Finchley Road tube station, but felt so ill I was compelled to turn back and make my way home’. By Tuesday, after three feverish days in bed and with his left leg much the weaker, it was clear that he had what his anxious parents had not brought themselves to say aloud. ‘It is hard to exaggerate how frightened people were of polio,’ he recalled many years later about a disease of which for a long time from 1947 there was a serious outbreak every summer:

In August, swimming-pools would be closed [but presumably not in Southend] as a precaution; the press would be full of speculation as to its cause; at one time it was believed that the virus was spread by excrement deposited on railway lines by passing trains. There was no cure; no way in which the paralysis, which occurred once the fever diminished, could be halted; it could lead to death by suffocation or, even worse, a life imprisoned in an iron lung. I was fortunate; the paralysis stopped at my right buttock, robbing me of the ability to run (I could not stand on tip-toe on my right leg) and withering the calf and thigh.

Critchley was back from hospital by Christmas, but for many there were long weeks (or more) in the dreaded iron lung – a huge, fearsome contraption that made the patient feel he or she was being buried alive – followed by almost punitive physiotherapy, with little or no allowance made for human frailty. ‘I’m not having any bent cripples going out of this ward’ was how one specialist put it to a young sufferer, Marjorie Crothers. ‘You will go out vertical if it kills both of us.’ Across in the United States, whose greatest President had been stricken by polio, the race was on to produce an effective vaccine, but no one knew when or if that might happen.

Mercifully, most children were polio-free. For Judy Haines’s two little girls, late November brought the novelty of a double pushchair. ‘Joy of joys!’ their mother wrote (on the same Tuesday as St John’s unsatisfactory meal at Lyons):

My dear Mother-in-law came round & minded children, washed up, prepared vegetables & did ironing while I went to Percival’s, High St & bought cream and fawn folding car for £7.15. 8d. It’s just what I’ve dreamed of (except colour, which was all they had). I can tuck babes up in travelling rug & use the cushion-covers I embroidered & take them out in all weathers. Oh I’m so thrilled ! It’s coming tomorrow.
Do
hope it does.

It did. ‘Oh happy day! Lucky me!’ she gleefully recorded. For small children everywhere that winter, there were two new delights that between them would go a long way to defining a whole era of childhood. Enid Blyton’s latest creation, hard on the heels of the Secret Seven, included (in her explanatory words to her publisher) not only ‘toys, pixies, goblins, Toyland, brick-houses, dolls houses, toadstool houses, market-places’ but also ‘Noddy (the little nodding man), Big Ears the Pixie, and Mr and Mrs Tubby (the teddy bears)’. First up in the series was
Little Noddy Goes to Toyland
, seductively illustrated by a Dutch artist, Harmsen Van Der Beek; it and its rapidly produced successors were soon selling by the million. Then on the third Monday of 1950, at 1.45 p.m. on the Light Programme, were heard these even more seductive words: ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ There followed a quarter of an hour of stories and deliberately rather pedestrianly sung songs – a hit from the start. ‘First reports indicate that
Listen with Mother
, the programme for “under fives”, is being received with enthusiasm by little children,’ noted BBC audience research in March. ‘We know of one small boy who said to his mother at breakfast, “Aren’t you e’ sited when
Listen with Mother
comes on?” and of another who fairly pushes his mother out of the room at 1.44 each day on the grounds that the programme is not for her!’
^3.

On 17 December, almost exactly a month before
Listen with Mother
’s debut, the great childminder of the future had taken another big step forward. ‘Television Marches On’ declared the
Listener
in an editorial to mark the opening at Sutton Coldfield of ‘the world’s biggest and most advanced television station’ – the BBC’s first high-power transmitter outside the London area, bringing television into the orbit of much of the Midlands. Advance local reaction was distinctly nervous. ‘Change in our habits television will certainly bring,’ reckoned one Birmingham paper. ‘Let us hope, however, that the change will be less drastic than is feared.’ Another expressed only quasi-confidence that ‘if it is necessary in some households to exercise some form of disciplinary restraint, it should be possible to do this without overmuch wrangling’ – in which regard ‘the setting aside of a television room may be advisable’. Unsurprisingly, the press was out in force on the opening evening, a Saturday. ‘No more snooker at the club for me if there’s sport or opera being televised,’ declared Mr H. A. Catton of 63 Silhill Hall Road, Solihull; over in Warwards Lane, Selly Oak, not only did Mrs M. Walker profess herself ‘absolutely amazed’ and predict that ‘this will be the death knell of the cinemas,’ but in the next-door house six-year-old Martin Woodhams resolutely refused to budge from his seat until ten o’clock. For the moment at least, Norman Collins spoke in vain as Controller of Television: ‘Please don’t let the children view too much. At least send the little beasts to bed when the time comes.’

The new transmitter marked a significant stage in the television audience becoming more representative of society as a whole, but the fact remained that by the end of March 1950 there were still only 343,882 sets in the country, in other words in fewer than one home in 20. Nevertheless, given that the total number of sets a year earlier had been a mere 126,567, there could be little doubt that television was the coming medium. Writing not long before the Sutton Coldfield opening in the
BBC Quarterly
(a revealingly self-important title), the director-general, Sir William Haley, fondly anticipated the time when television would result in something ‘which, working with all the other beneficent influences within the community, will have the capacity to make for a broader vision and a fuller life’. The
Listener
, in its by now well-accustomed role as cultural watchdog, naturally agreed: ‘That the extended service now opening will bring a fresh pleasure to thousands is hardly to be doubted. That television, as it spreads, may bring about a keener, more sensitive, and more intelligent appreciation on the part of all who see it of the world about us – this is a hope that cannot be too often emphasised.’ Early in the New Year, the BBC’s newly established Television Panel (of about 2,500, from almost 25,000 applications) started watching programmes in order to provide the Corporation with feedback. ‘A very high proportion of sets,’ reported the first bulletin on its activities, ‘are switched on for the main Light Entertainment show on Saturday nights’, notably
Vic Oliver Introduces
– not quite what Haley had in mind. In one home in Chingford, all such concerns were purely academic. ‘The girls draw up their chairs for a Hopalong Cassidy film,’ noted Judy Haines on 9 January, ‘but the Demonstration Film (with a visit to the zoo) remains their favourite.’
^4.