Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (78 page)

We refute the statement of Mr Lord, when he says that the A.E.U. [Amalgamated Engineering Union] members will not operate new machinery at their disposal. Further we protest at his statement that A.E.U. members do not operate them fully. Every Austin worker knows that once the piecework price is fixed then they have to work to full capacity to get reasonable wages. The fact[s] are that operator[s] are expected to operate new machinery on price[s] which yield less wage than previously earned despite increased production.

By this time the Austin workforce was substantially unionised, and the scene was set for some titanic battles between two very determined men.

Meanwhile, for the car workers whom Etheridge represented, the daily reality was now – at Longbridge as elsewhere – immutable. Among his voluminous papers are some anonymous verses, undated but almost certainly written between 1947 and 1952:

Crash; Bang; Wallop; and with a mighty roar,

The great machine comes to life and shakes the ruddy floor.

Tick, Tack, tick tack, the whole day long, till shadow of night do fall,

The monotonous burden of its song, makes your stomach crawl . . .

They bleed us white, they squeeze us dry, they treat us like a lemon,

They little know what ire they rouse, what hatred and what venom.

And when the day of judgement comes, and we all stand on the same level,

Ratefixers will go to their proper place, and work beside the devil.
²⁰

PART THREE

10

Andy Is Waving Goodbye

On 16 March 1950, three weeks after ‘the revolt of the suburbs’ in the general election, there appeared for the first time in the
Daily Express
– Britain’s best-selling daily paper – a cartoon for middle-class middle England: the Gambols. Within 15 months, as paper rationing eased, it was being published daily, and through the rest of the 1950s and then way beyond, it never failed to appear, after 1956 in the
Sunday Express
as well. The cartoonist was Barry Appleby, working closely with his wife Dobs, and together they created an ageless couple. George and Gaye Gambol have no children; they sleep in twin beds; he works as a salesman, she looks after the home; he is practical, she is zany. The Gambols inhabited a frozen-in-time world closely mirroring the Applebys’ own in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, in the early 1950s – a world that simultaneously repelled and fascinated Colin MacInnes, who evoked it in his brilliant 1960 essay ‘The “Express” Families’ (including those of Giles and Osbert Lancaster as well):

They are, in fact, a couple of sexless sparrows in their suburban love-nest: where the major events are the annual ‘spring clean’, the summer tending of the garden and the domestic dramas in the kitchen – where Gaye ‘cooks’ largely out of tins and George ‘does the dishes’ . . . George talks in his sleep, and Gaye, who sobs easily, will emit, when afraid of a mouse (or the dark, or almost anything), a desperate cry of ‘Eek!’ . . .

George and Gaye are, of course, very
nice
people: that is undeniable. But outside their tiny world of consecrated mediocrity, nothing exists whatever.
^1.

Did anyone ever find the Gambols funny? Perhaps not. But clearly their companionable, unambitious, shuttered marriage struck a real – and abiding – chord with their readership.

A month later, on 14 April, a comic for the boys of middle England made its bow. ‘EAGLE is here!’ trumpeted the accompanying advertising campaign:

On Friday you can get your first copy of EAGLE, the new national strip-cartoon paper for children – 20 big pages, 8 of them in
full-colour
. Start sharing the adventures of EAGLE heroes, in space ships, or in the red man’s country – Read about your favourite hobbies, games and sporting stars – Laugh with EAGLE’s comic characters – Learn how things work and explore the countryside. There will be competitions with prizes to win . . . and you can join the EAGLE Club.

The ad featured pictures of ‘Dan Dare Pilot of the Future’, ‘Skippy the Kangaroo’ and ‘P.C. 49 of Radio Fame’, as well as an irresistible come-on for the first issue: ‘Pin-up for Boys: an Accurate Colour Drawing of the new British Railways Gas Turbine-Electric Locomotive’.
Eagle
came from the same stable (Hulton Press) as
Picture Post
; the latter, in an article consisting mainly of enthusiastic comments from children shown advance copies of the first issue, did include some grumbles. ‘Some things I didn’t care for much such as “Dan Dare” – I can’t get interested in a hero who does things no one has really done yet,’ said 13-year-old Giles Davison. ‘I don’t see why Bible stories should be there,’ he added. ‘They haven’t anything to do with comics, really.’ Another probably equally middle-class north London boy was similarly wary of the moral message. ‘I shall enjoy being a member of the Eagle Club,’ declared Stephen Aris, also 13. ‘The Editor’s article about its objects is all right but he ought to be careful not to make them sound too priggish.’
^2.

Aris had a point. ‘There are really only two kinds of people in the world,’ declared the editor’s letter in this first issue:

One kind are the MUGS. The opposite of the MUGS are the Spivs – also called wide boys, smart guys, hooligans, louts or racketeers.

The MUGS are the people who are some use in the world; the people who do something worth-while for others instead of just grabbing for themselves all the time.

Of course the spivs snigger at that.
They
use the word Mug as an insult. ‘Aren’t they mugs?’ they say about people who believe in living for something bigger than themselves.

That is why someone who gets called a MUG is likely to be a pretty good chap. For one thing, he’s got to have guts because he doesn’t mind being called a MUG. He
likes
it. He’s the sort who will volunteer for a difficult or risky job and say cheerfully, ‘Alright, I’ll be the Mug’.

Notwithstanding which,
Eagle
’s first issue was a sell-out (more than 900,000 copies), and for the rest of the year it achieved weekly sales of more than 800,000. Hulton soon launched three companion comics:
Girl
in 1951,
Robin
(for under-sevens) in 1953 and
Swift
(for preteens) in 1954. The main man behind this remarkable success story was an Anglican clergyman, Marcus Morris, helped by his assistant Chad Varah (the future founder of the Samaritans) and a brilliant strip cartoonist, Frank Hampson. Morris, the comic’s first editor as well as initiator, consciously saw
Eagle
as a riposte to the extraordinarily popular American comics – ‘most skilfully and vividly drawn’, he conceded, but all too frequently offering content that was ‘deplorable, nastily over-violent and obscene, often with undue emphasis on the supernatural and magical as a way of solving problems’. Instead, Morris wanted to use the medium of the strip cartoon ‘to convey to the child the right kind of standards, values and attitudes, combined with the necessary amount of excitement and adventure’.
^3.

Morris must have been aware of the contrast between what he was trying to do and the extremely popular comics that had been coming out of the austere but far from moralising D. C. Thomson stable in Dundee since before the war.
^4.
By the early 1950s its comics included
Beano, Dandy, Hotspur
and
Wizard
(starring the phenomenal athlete Wilson, a more purist figure than
Rover
’s Alf Tupper, ‘the Tough of the Track’), with
Topper
following in 1953 and
Beezer
in 1956. The jewel in the Thomson crown was undoubtedly
Beano
, featuring from March 1951 a stand-out star in Dennis the Menace. The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx breezed in soon afterwards. No doubt a child’s choice in the end usually came down to a mixture of social class and parental input.
Eagle
provided wholesome adventure, digestible chunks of knowledge and moderately well-disguised moral uplift;
Beano
offered a recognisably urban setting for insatiable naughtiness and an attitude to learning encapsulated by the depiction of ‘Softy’ Walter (bow tie, private school, ghastly earnest parents) as the invariable anti-hero. Such was
Eagle
’s soaring ascent, in the somewhat anxious moral climate of the early 1950s, that it seemed possible its high-minded formula would better stand the test of time.

Elsewhere in the magazine market,
Woman’s Own
was serialising all through the spring of 1950 the reminiscences of Marion Crawford (generally known as ‘Crawfie’) – a gambit that put half a million on its circulation. Crawfie was the former governess of Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and her account was also published as a best-selling book. ‘I have been reading the Story of the Princesses [in fact called
The Little Princesses
] by Crawfie,’ noted Vere Hodgson in May. ‘I think the early part about their education is very good, but I think she says too much about the Prince Philip business and Princess Margaret doesn’t figure too well.’ Indeed she didn’t, for Crawfie not only portrayed Margaret Rose in childhood as (in a biographer’s apt words) ‘spoilt, petulant and mischievous’ but implicitly drew the 19-year-old version as ‘an exacting, ill-organised and inconsiderate young woman’. Crawfie was never forgiven by the Royal Family, losing her grace-and-favour home and generally being cast into the outer darkness. But after all, what could she have expected? ‘She sneaked’ was how Margaret in later years reputedly justified the total ostracism.

For the Princess, however, there was a more pressing concern. Peter Townsend – decorated Battle of Britain pilot, married, 16 years older – was equerry to her father; on the basis of a Rolls-Royce Phantom number plate (PM6450), it has been claimed, with some if not total plausibility, that 6 April 1950 was the date on which she and the Group Captain became lovers. Irrespective of that, there were no signs during the rest of 1950 that Crawfie’s revelations had diminished Margaret’s popularity, especially with the young. ‘Is it her sparkle, her youthfulness, her small stature, or the sense of fun she conveys, that makes Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret the most sought-after girl in England?’ asked
Picture Post
’s Mima Kerr that summer after several weeks of watching her fulfil engagements. ‘And this not only amongst her own set of young people, but amongst all the teenagers who rush to see her in Norfolk and Cornwall, or wherever she goes.’ Kerr added, ‘In spite of all the elaborate precautions, the general public always has the feeling that Princess Margaret’s about to do something unpredictable.’ 5 Or, put another way, she had the potential – though the plot had yet to thicken, at least in public – to turn the Royal Family into a soap opera. More than just a precedent, the Crawfie episode revealed the extent of the public’s appetite for that type of drama.

The Little Princesses
was the book of the season in one sense, but literary historians will always accord that honour to William Cooper’s
Scenes from Provincial Life
, published in March. A wonderfully fresh and funny novel, imbued with liberal humanism and as unabashed in its treatment of homosexuality as of pre-marital sex, it was the work of someone who, under his real name of Harry Hoff, made his living as an assistant commissioner with the Civil Service Commission. His background was lower-middle-class – the son of elementary-school teachers in Crewe – and so was that of his hero, Joe Lunn, a young science teacher at a boys’ grammar school somewhere in the Midlands, in fact in Leicester. Irreverent and anti-elitist, perceptive about human foibles, profoundly modern in feeling but without any modernist baggage –
Scenes
ought to have won Cooper fame and fortune but only partially did so.

Almost certainly he was ahead of his time, if only by a few years. His book had, the
Times Literary Supplement
thought, ‘an original, if not altogether agreeable, flavour’, leaving the reader ‘with an uncomfortable sensation that reality has been grossly distorted’. The
Spectator
’s reviewer was less critical but similarly uneasy: ‘Jaunty in mood and all but dadaistically casual in style, peppered with disarmingly shrewd and truthful observations about life, literature and other matters,
Scenes
from Provincial Life
compelled a fair degree of reluctant admiration from me.’ An unequivocal admirer was Philip Larkin, who that summer got Kingsley Amis (by now teaching English literature at University College, Swansea) to read it, tactlessly suggesting that it achieved what his friend was striving for in his as yet unfinished novel ‘Dixon and Christine’. Amis took umbrage. ‘I got hold of
Scenes life
a couple of weeks ago and read it with great attention,’ he reported in October. ‘I found it, on the whole,
very good
, but not particularly funny . . . I liked it rather [for] the exact transcription of an environment.’
^6.
Still, something may have stuck; Cooper himself would come to think so.

The provincial novel with attitude was quickly followed by the provincial politician with ambition. ‘I did not come from a much-travelled family,’ Dan Smith (invariably known in his later years as T. Dan Smith) recalled somewhat sardonically about growing up in a ground-floor flat of a Wallsend terrace, near Newcastle. ‘A hundred yards for shopping, a couple of hundred yards to the church, made up much of my world. It was a place where the majority of the families who survived the 1914–1918 war were born, reared, worked, married, grew old and died.’ Wallsend’s main occupation was shipbuilding, but Smith’s father was a coal miner. Smith himself, born in 1915, became a painter and decorator when he left school, soon working in Newcastle, but before and during the war, this autodidact devoted most of his energies to the cause of revolutionary socialism (but not the Communist Party), becoming a fluent, locally well-known speaker in such forums as the Market Place at Blyth or the Newcastle Bigg Market.

His politics changed after 1945. Not only did the revolution become an ever more distant prospect each year, but he himself started a painting-and-decorating business that was soon employing up to 200 people. It was probably not long after the local Labour Party had lost control of Newcastle City Council in May 1949, following four years in power, that Smith complained bitterly to a local Labour MP, Arthur Blenkinsop, that pathetically little had been achieved in that time. Blenkinsop challenged him to do better, and, with the MP’s help, Smith was accepted, amid considerable misgivings, into the local party and found a winnable ward (Walker, a rundown shipbuilding district of Newcastle). ‘I am deeply conscious of the appalling housing conditions which exist in the city and am far from satisfied that anything of note is being done to alleviate these conditions,’ he declared in his election manifesto, adding that ‘my purpose is to SERVE’. He was duly elected on 11 May 1950, his 35th birthday.