Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (56 page)

The people’s will was about to be expressed. Florence Speed in Brixton noted caustically on New Year’s Day how ‘for the forthcoming election, several things have been taken off points [rationing] for the period starting today’ – including ‘canned meat puddings, canned pork hash or sausage meat, boneless chicken, turkey, rabbit, spaghetti &sausages in tomato sauce, vegetable & macaroni casserole, canned tomatoes, snoek & mackerel’. Three days later, Michael Young in Labour’s research department wrote to his Dartington benefactors, the Elmhirsts. ‘What on earth am I doing hurling myself into this election organisation, thinking out ways of outwitting the Tories?’ he asked. ‘And yet I do so much want this odd, pedestrian, earthy and loveable Party to win. I am fearful of what would happen to our society if the Conservatives succeed. And they may.’ Eventually, on the 10th, Attlee formally announced that the general election would be held on Thursday, 23 February. He and Herbert Morrison would have preferred to go in May, by when it might have been possible to deration petrol, but his Chancellor, the ailing Stafford Cripps, was adamant that it would be immoral to deliver a budget just before an election – and threatened to resign over the issue. Such was Cripps’s standing in the country, even after devaluation, that Attlee felt he had no alternative but to yield to Cripps’s wishes. But as he remarked privately and with some asperity of his colleague, ‘He’s no judge of politics.’
^5.

The election was not yet in full swing when on the 26th at the Old Bailey a 29-year-old ‘company director’ called Donald Hume – in reality a spiv who specialised in aerial smuggling, of goods or people or currency – was found not guilty of murdering Stanley Setty, a used-car dealer, but was given 12 years for being an accessory after the fact. The verdict came some three months after the discovery of Setty’s headless and legless body in a parcel floating in the marshes at Tillingham, Essex. Hume was a member of the United Services Flying Club at Elstree, and while denying the murder, he admitted that he had dropped the parcel from his plane. ‘For no other reason than for money, the sum of £150,’ declared the judge in sentencing him, ‘you were prepared to take parts of a body and keep the torso in your flat [above a greengrocers’ shop in the Finchley Road] overnight, and then take it away and put it in the Thames Estuary.’ A manifestly sensational case, it received massive press coverage – and hardly suggested that the quality of the English murder was in decline. As it happened, George Orwell’s funeral took place at Christ Church, Albany Street (lesson chosen by Anthony Powell, clergyman ‘excessively parsonical’, coffin poignantly long) on the same bitterly cold Thursday as the verdict on Hume.

The case almost entirely overshadowed another murder trial earlier in the month. On the 13th, also at the Old Bailey, a mentally backward 29-year-old lorry driver called Timothy Evans – originally from near Merthyr Tydfil but for the previous two years living at 10 Rillington Place, a tiny house in a cul-de-sac near Ladbroke Grove Tube station – was found guilty of murdering his pregnant wife and one-year-old daughter. In effect the police had had to identify as the murderer either Evans or the occupant of the ground-floor flat, John (‘Reg’) Christie, a 51-year-old Yorkshireman who during the war had served for four years as a special constable based at Harrow Road police station. Perhaps inevitably, they chose to believe in the innocence of the former copper. Some five weeks after the trial, Evans had his appeal dismissed by Lord Chief Justice Goddard and his colleagues, and on 9 March, at Pentonville Prison, he was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint. His last words to his mother and sister were the same: ‘Christie done it.’
^6.

The Blue Lamp
premiered less than a week after Evans had been sent down. Starring Jack Warner as a kindly, imperturbable, home-loving, pipe-smoking, begonia-growing veteran police constable called George Dixon – attached to Paddington Green station, less than two miles from Rillington Place – it was dedicated to the British Police Service and unquestioningly endorsed its fight against crime. Early on, the maturely authoritative voice-over sets out the film’s defining context. After referring to childhoods in homes ‘broken and demoralised by war’, the male voice goes on:

These restless and ill-adjusted youngsters have produced a type of delinquent which is partly responsible for the post-war increase in crime. Some are content with pilfering and petty theft. Others, with more bravado, graduate to serious offences. Youths with brain enough to plan and organise criminal adventures and yet who lack the code, experience and self-discipline of the professional thief – which sets them as a class apart, all the more dangerous because of their immaturity. Young men such as these two present a new problem to the police.

The two in question are Tom Riley (played by Dirk Bogarde) and his sidekick. The film turns on the scene, roughly halfway through, in which, in the course of robbing a box office in a Harrow Road cinema, Riley fatally guns down Dixon. The rest of the film is about getting Riley, who is finally hunted down in a remarkable closing sequence, partly shot during an actual greyhound race meeting at the White City stadium. It is as if
everyone
– police, bookmakers, tic-tac men, the crowd itself – is united in the pursuit of not just a criminal but a transgressor. ‘Riley’s real crime has not been the killing of P.C. Dixon,’ one cultural historian, Andy Medhurst, has acutely noted, ‘but his refusal to accept his station, his youthful disregard for established hierarchies, his infatuation with American culture.’ There was, Medhurst adds, no place in the British cinema of the early 1950s for ‘charismatic, sexy, insolent, on-the-make individualists’. Instead, the film is a hymn to shared values – of decency, of honest hard work, of understated humour and emotion, indeed of the whole Orwellian ‘English’ package, minus of course the politics. Or as Dixon puts it when confronted with a difficult situation, ‘I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea.’

The reviews were generally positive. Gavin Lambert, the young and already unforgiving editor of
Sight and Sound
, used the film as a vehicle in his campaign against mainstream British cinema, while
The Times
suggested that its depiction of policemen was unduly indulgent. But
Woman’s Own
spoke for the majority in praising an ‘extraordinarily vivid, realistic and exciting story’. At least three London diarists saw it. Gladys Langford ‘enjoyed it’ but thought Jimmy Hanley ‘badly cast for the young policeman’; Grace Golden called it an ‘excellent film’ and reckoned Bogarde ‘very good as young crook who accidentally murders a policeman – the inevitable Jack Warner’; and Anthony Heap, an assiduous cineaste, found it ‘at least as tense and thrilling as all but the very best American gangster films – and for an all-British effort, that’s darned good going’. Some six months after the film’s release, Mass-Observation’s questioning of its panel demonstrated a similar gender pattern of reaction to that of
Scott of the Antarctic
: ‘Men weeping (or at least gulping) at moments of reserve (the Hanley character painfully breaking the news to the initially stoical but soon distraught Mrs Dixon), women at moments of parting and loss (the murder itself)’. What is surprisingly difficult, though, is to find contemporary evidence backing the conventional wisdom that
The Blue Lamp
scandalised its audiences – whether in terms of the murdered policeman or language (including reputedly the first use of ‘bastard’ in a British film) or the Bogarde character as an American-style punk. Still, it was revealing that within weeks of release Bogarde was making a guest appearance on
Variety Bandbox
as a violent criminal. ‘Now come along, Mr Bogarde,’ twittered Howerd. ‘You must take that mask off. Oh,
dear
! You have given me such a
shock
!’
^7.

According to Ted Willis, who co-wrote the story on which
The
Blue Lamp
’s script was based, the inspiration for George Dixon was one Inspector Mott, whom Willis watched in action for several weeks. ‘A middle-aged officer who had risen through the ranks’, he ‘had spent years in his East End manor, seemed to know every crack in every pavement and was instantly recognised and greeted respectfully by half the population’. He was also kindly, understood human psychology and could be tough if need be. This emphasis on local knowledge – acquired only through pounding the beat – certainly came through strongly in a study made in the early 1950s by John Mays of a police division in a working-class part of Liverpool. Not only was it ‘felt by many men that the sight of the uniformed constable constantly patrolling his beat had considerable preventive value’, but it was ‘agreed that nothing could replace the constable moving on foot in a limited area, knowing the alleys and backways where patrol cars could not penetrate, familiar with the people and knowing many of them by name and address’. Indeed, almost half the police officers interviewed by Mays revealed that they were ‘fairly often consulted by inhabitants of the district on matters that were not purely police concerns’:

The man on the beat is often asked in to help settle some family dispute or to adjudicate in an argument. Matrimonial advice is often sought where husbands and wives are at loggerheads. One of the boys may be insolent and so the policeman is asked to speak to him. One constable said he was asked to thrash a boy for his mother but wisely declined. A woman will stop a policeman on his beat and ask him how to apply for assistance or how to bring a complaint against a landlord. Does he know a club where Charlie could go to at night? Is 14/6 a week a legal rent for their sort of house?

There were signs, though, that a new, less intimate style of policing was starting to evolve. The pioneer city was Aberdeen, where since April 1948 there had been a system of so-called ‘team policing’, whereby an area of traditionally ten beats was instead policed by a single team, comprising four constables and a sergeant, with a police car with two-way radio ready to be summoned to any trouble spot. Over the next few years, this was an experiment copied in several other cities (Mays in Liverpool referred to ‘the increased use of motor patrols’) but for the most part only if a force was suffering from recruitment difficulties. The evidence is that the great majority of chief constables much preferred, if at all possible, to rely on what Bolton’s chief constable called in 1951 ‘the traditional system of beat working’. It was, in the words of a historian of the police, ‘a conception of policing that placed overriding emphasis on prevention rather than the detection of crime’ – and, crucially, it assumed close, continuous and broadly harmonious contact between the police and the policed.
^8.

‘What do you think of the police?’ was one of the questions asked in a remarkable survey of English behaviour and attitudes undertaken by the anthropologist-cum-sociologist Geoffrey Gorer in the winter of 1950/51. His sample comprised some 11,000 readers of the
People
, a Sunday paper with an almost entirely working-class and lower-middle-class readership; his expectation in advance was that ‘a very considerable number of the respondents would take advantage of the anonymous questionnaire to express feelings of hostility to the representatives of the state, of law and order, of the repressive aspects of society’.

He could hardly have been more wrong. Less than a fifth of the sample had any criticisms at all to make, prompting Gorer to conclude that (more or less equally across class, age, gender and region) ‘there is extremely little hostility to the police as an institution’; from many, there was positive enthusiasm:

I believe they stand for all we English are, maybe at first appearance slow perhaps, but reliable stout and kindly. I have the greatest admiration for our police force and I am proud they are renowned abroad. (
Married
woman,
28
, Formby
)

The finest body of men of this kind in the world. Portraying and upholding the time tested constitution, traditions and democracy of the British Way of Life combining humble patience with high courage and devotion to duty. (
Married man,
38
, New Malden
)

Underpaid and overworked in dealing with masses of petty bureaucracy. Admire them for the results they get, and also for surprisingly little evidence of ‘fiddling’ among the Police force itself. (
Unmarried
civil servant,
30
, Surbiton
)