Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (81 page)

Overall, the 1951 survey concluded that ‘antipathy to coloured people in this country is probably considerable amongst at least one-third of the population’, an attitude especially common among the elderly, the poor and those working in low-status occupations; that ‘the reactions of another third might be uncertain or unfavourable’; and that, ‘even amongst the least antipathetic, who would certainly disapprove of discrimination in theory, there would be some who might not like to go as far as meeting a coloured person socially or letting a room to one if they had one to let’.
¹⁹
Every commentator stressed – and would continue to stress – that such prejudice was the result far more of ignorance than of knowledge, but it was still a pretty dismal picture.

Given that the annual level of New Commonwealth (ie black) migration to Britain was running at only about 1,500 during the three years after the
Empire Windrush
, it was unsurprising that race remained a generally low-profile issue. Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, not content with questioning the literal truth of the New Testament, did in December 1950 describe West Indians in Britain as ‘a social burden’, but this was unusual. Nevertheless, the government did come to two important if negative decisions. The first was to accept the advice of its law officers about the impracticability of legislation against racial discrimination. Although accepting that such legislation ‘would satisfy the demands and feelings of coloured people’, these officers successfully insisted in January 1951 that it ‘would be merely gestural and empty owing to the great difficulty there would be in enforcement’.

The second decision concerned the freedom of entry of colonial subjects as established by the 1948 Nationality Act. Following a report in May 1950 by the Colonial Secretary, James Griffiths, which pointed out that even the fairly limited immigration since the war had caused certain problems (including episodes of civil unrest, as at the Causeway Green Hostel in August 1949), a ministerial committee was established to consider the possibility of limiting ‘coloured immigration’. Reporting in January 1951, it recommended that seeking to control numbers would be a mistake – above all on the distinctly imperial rather than domestic grounds that ‘the United Kingdom has a special status as the mother country, and freedom to enter and remain in the United Kingdom at will is one of the main practical benefits enjoyed by British subjects, as such’. Or, as one historian, Randall Hansen, persuasively comments, ‘The evidence from these deliberations confirms that the attachment of British politicians was fundamentally to the old Commonwealth; new Commonwealth immigrants were accepted, but only in so far as they contributed to a broader structure of subjecthood in which the Dominions’ citizens were the key actors.’
²⁰
Instead, the emphasis of the Colonial Office would continue to be on informal discouragement, principally through applying pressure on the West Indian authorities. And who knew, perhaps the thorny issue would quietly fade away.

The black experience itself in the Britain of the early 1950s was a world away from Whitehall. For E. R. (‘Ricky’) Braithwaite, a Guyanan with a Cambridge degree but only able to find a teaching job in one of the East End’s sink schools, there was a particularly upsetting episode after the death of the mother of his class’s only mixed-origin boy. The other children raised money for a wreath, but they all refused to take it to the boy’s home – for fear of being seen as fraternising with nonwhites. ‘It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English,’ Braithwaite recalled in
To Sir, With Love
(1959). ‘I turned and walked out of the classroom sick at heart.’ Another writer, Sam Selvon, arrived from Trinidad in April 1950 and in time became, in Maya Angelou’s words, the ‘father of black literature in Britain’. His key novel was
The Lonely Londoners
(1956), describing with humour but also feeling the often bruising, disenchanting immigrant experience in what was becoming London’s black quarter – its boundaries comprising the Arch (Marble), the Water (Bayswater), the Gate (Notting Hill) and the Grove (Ladbroke), and its housing conditions almost invariably crowded, squalid and overpriced. Selvon would later be attacked for his excessively male point of view, as ‘the boys’ searched unflaggingly for the joys of ‘white pussy’, but in the early 1950s it
was
almost entirely men who came from the Caribbean and settled in the land of the white.
²¹

For such it was. And not only white but white indigenous: the 1951 census revealed that a mere 3 per cent of the population had not been born in Britain. Moreover, of that immigrant 3 per cent, the overwhelming majority were white Europeans. These included more than half a million Irish, who undoubtedly suffered from prejudice – notably from landladies reluctant to open their doors to them – but nothing on the scale of the black immigrants at the hands of the insular, reserved, suspicious natives. Crucially, it was a prejudice more covert – and therefore far more anxious-making – than that endured by blacks in, say, the American Deep South. ‘The most striking thing about the colour bar in Britain with regard to inter-group relations is its uncertainty,’ observed Banton on the basis of his study of relatively tolerant Stepney:

Some individuals are friendly, some are not, and when a coloured man goes to see an official he never knows quite what sort of reception he will receive. This leads many immigrants to claim that the colour bar is worse in Britain than in the United States; they say that there the discrimination is open and honest, the whites tell you what their policy is and you know what course to take, but in Britain the whites are hypocritical because they will not tell you to your face and ‘prejudice is deep in their hearts’.

Most of these black immigrants – usually consigned to unskilled, often rebarbative jobs, whatever their qualifications – proved survivors. Among them was the indomitable figure quoted in the remarkable semi-autobiography, semi-anthology
Journey to an Illusion
by Donald Hinds (who himself did not come over from Jamaica until 1955). This man in 1950 was sharing a basement room (and large bed) in Ladbroke Grove with five other men, until one day their Czech landlord discovered two of the ‘black boys’ in bed with prostitutes and threw them all out. That evening, the man returned from work to find his possessions scattered in a nearby alleyway. There followed a night of tramping round London:

In those days police did’n even bother to pick up a black man, because the jail would be a night shelter out of the rain and the cold. That day when I finish work I was feeling so rusty and tired that I drag myself to Charing Cross an’ pay a penny an’ got into the toilet determined to have a roof over my head that night. I remember that it was a small island man cleaning up the lavatory, I think he was a Bajan. I did’n pay him no mind, I decided that I would curl up on the toilet seat and go off to sleep. I was jus’ droppin’ off into a sweet sleep when I hear the door breaking down, bam, bam! When I look up the black man climb over the top and see me sleeping on the seat. Man, that Bajan man carry on, you hear. ‘Get outa there, man! Is guys like you come to the white people them country and spoil it up. You should be ashamed of you’self, man. You lettin’ the race down, man!’ So I come out and just look him over from head to toe and back again and said to him: ‘Is not me carrying down the race, boy! You see me come to England goin’ around cleaning up people’s shit?’
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‘The new curate seemed quite a nice young man, but what a pity it was that his combinations showed, tucked carelessly into his socks, when he sat down.’ Such was the less than multicultural opening sentence of Barbara Pym’s debut novel,
Some Tame Gazelle
, published in May 1950. Its atmosphere was, in her biographer’s words, ‘very much that of 1930s rural churchgoing, something taken for granted, even-tenored, definitely middle of the road’, and it won glowing reviews, typified by Antonia White in the
New Statesman
(whose back pages carried considerable literary weight): ‘Miss Pym, working in
petit point
, makes each stitch with perfect precision.’ For Pym, 37 shortly after its publication, the book’s success meant that, while continuing to work at the International African Institute in London, she could with reasonable confidence press on with writing further novels imbued with what Philip Larkin would define as her ‘unsensational subject matter and deceptively mild irony’. This was no doubt a relief, all the more so coming only a few months after the magazine
Women and Beauty
had rejected two of her short stories. ‘We like your writing very much and you handle the situations most delicately, but in both cases they are only “situations” – not plots,’ gently explained its fiction editor, Anita Christopherson. And she went on: ‘When we choose our fiction we are rather thinking about pleasing our readers as well as ourselves, and many of them are young romantics, anxious to be caught up in the life of the stories. I think therefore that you are just a shade too objective, too watchful . . .’
²³

Catherine Cookson, six years older than Pym, would never have any difficulty getting her readers caught up in her plots and characters. By the late 1940s she was living in Hastings (where her husband taught maths at the local grammar school) and trying to get over a severe, almost suicidal state of depression, the result in part of a series of miscarriages. At one point she had hoped to adopt a child through a Catholic adoption society, but they struck her off the list on discovering that she had stopped being a practising Catholic. She turned to writing as a form of therapy, and in June 1950 her first novel,
Kate Hannigan
, was published. Based heavily on her own Tyneside childhood – in particular the maze of grim streets between Tyne Dock and East Jarrow – it told the story of a young woman who, like Cookson’s mother, conquered the stigma of having an illegitimate child. The book sold well, though not staggeringly so; Cookson’s mental health slowly recovered; and, crucially, she had discovered in what would become known as ‘Catherine Cookson Country’ – usually that of the past – a terrain that could be mined almost endlessly.
²⁴
For her fellow-Geordie, T. Dan Smith, the point of the past was merely to provide lessons for the future, but for Cookson and her faithful readers, the past had – despite or perhaps because of all its horrors – its own all-absorbing authenticity and purpose.

Angus Wilson had not yet published any novels and still had a day job as a librarian in the Reading Room of the British Museum. But in July 1950, only 16 months after his first, very successful collection of short stories (
The Wrong Set and Other Stories
), he brought out a new collection,
Such Darling Dodos
, that made an even bigger impact. As with reviews of Cooper’s
Scenes
earlier in the year, admiration for Wilson’s robust satire was mixed with a certain discomfort. ‘Part-bizarre, part-macabre, part-savage and part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it upon the contemporary scene,’ asserted C. P. Snow (himself girding up as a novelist). ‘It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the human party, and was surveying it, half-enviously, half-contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to strip off the comfortable pretences and show that this party is pretty horrifying after all.’ As a result, ‘sometimes the effect is too mad to be pleasant’.

Wilson’s biographer, Margaret Drabble, claims that the book was an exercise in iconoclasm: he saw the British as self-congratulatory, smug victors in war and proceeded to reveal them to themselves as ‘a nation of beggars, snobs, bullies, black-marketeers and hypocrites, ill-dressed, plain, timid, and adventurous only in pursuit of selfish ends’. Was there any humanity in the writing? The critic, poet and sporting journalist Alan Ross thought not, describing Wilson as ‘a contemptuous ringmaster’ in relation to his characters, who were no more than ‘dead corpses’. But for Wilson, Drabble emphasises, there was a larger game afoot: ‘questioning all “progressive” principles, be they adopted in the name of liberalism, humanism or socialism’, as well as probing issues of ‘public and private morality’.
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It was a big enough agenda.

On the small screen, still a cautious and respectful BBC monopoly, there were as yet virtually no hints of any sociopolitical satire. Even so, the Corporation did in May 1950 (on the same Friday that petrol rationing ended) launch – amid some internal disquiet – a topical discussion programme,
In the News
, with a significantly sharper edge than its
Any Questions?
radio counterpart. By the autumn the programme was going out weekly with a regular panel: Robert (Bob) Boothby, the incorrigibly rebellious Tory MP; Michael Foot, the strongly pro-Bevan left-wing Labour MP; W. J. Brown, the increasingly right-wing journalist who had lost his seat as an independent at the recent election; and A.J.P. Taylor, still a far from well-known Oxford history don. Under the urbane chairmanship of the crime writer and broadcaster Edgar Lustgarten, they produced each week what Grace Wyndham Goldie – a talks producer in the early 1950s and one of the BBC’s bolder spirits – recalled as ‘a remarkable effervescence of wit, common sense, intellectual honesty and political passion’. It was, of course, too good to last. Even by the end of 1950, a nervous BBC was coming under pressure from the parties to field panellists from the solid, uncontroversial centre of British politics, and although viewing figures remained high (at around half the viewing public), Auntie in the course of 1951 gradually began to insist on panels carefully vetted for balance and acceptability.
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