Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (82 page)

But if
In the News
was ahead of its time – arguably by more than half a century – two other new programmes in the summer of 1950 were unmistakably of theirs. ‘We see Archie as a boy in his middle teens, naughty but loveable, rather too grown-up for his years, especially where the ladies are concerned, and distinctly cheeky!’ envisaged the producer of
Educating Archie
. This radio comedy, scripted in part by Eric Sykes, began on the Light Programme on 6 June and proved such a massive hit that by the end of the year it had won the much-coveted Top Variety Award in the
Daily Mail
’s first-ever National Radio and Television Awards. Archie was a dummy; the ventriloquist Peter Brough was his stepfather; and the original cast featured Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived and to prove it I’m here!’) as the cockney handyman and

Hattie Jacques as the overweight, excessively amorous Agatha Dingle-body. In the second series the unenviable role of Archie’s tutor fell to Tony Hancock (‘Flippin’ kids!’), who was reputedly so freaked out by the 3-foot dummy – dressed as a schoolboy and with wooden mouth wide open, hanging from a coat hook in Brough’s dressing room – that he had recurrent nightmares.
²⁷

The other new programme was on television:
Andy Pandy
. It was first shown on 11 July – six days after Judy Haines, trying to watch Wimbledon, had noted how ‘the Children’s Programme, including Prudence, The Kitten, interrupted a set which went to 31–29’ – and it was launched against a background of the BBC somewhat self-consciously gearing up its service for children, more than three years after the introduction of the popular puppet Muffin the Mule. A BBC memo earlier in 1950 had set out the objectives:

Television Children’s Hour aims to enrich children’s lives and to foster their development by the stimulus and enjoyment of what they see and hear. This aim seems to have several elements:

-to entertain and to be liked by the children;

-to satisfy the parents that the programme is fostering children’s development in ways of which they approve;

-to satisfy instructed professional opinion that programmes are soundly conceived and well executed. This refers both to the entertainment value and aesthetic competence, and to the educational and psychological judgement which the programmes will reflect. So far, Television has to some extent not come under the vigilant gaze of psychologists and educationalists.

There could hardly have been a more explicit nod to the enhanced importance of the outside expert.

In the new daily children’s service,
Andy Pandy
was to be the programme explicitly targeted at pre-school children, something that had not been done before. Writing in
BBC Quarterly
, the person with overall responsibility for children’s programmes, Mary Adams, hoped that its viewers would not just ‘watch the movements of a simple puppet, naturalistic in form and expression’ but also ‘respond to his invitations to join in by clapping, stamping, sitting down, standing up and so forth’. Poignantly enough, Andy was alone in his basket for the first few weeks, until joined by Teddy and Looby Loo. From the start, there seems to have been something mesmerising about the programme: the all too visible strings; Andy’s endearingly jerky walk; his strangely androgynous outfit; and at the end, those plaintive yet reassuring sung words ‘Time to go home, time to go home / Andy is waving goodbye, goodbye’. Much depended on Maria Bird, who was both scriptwriter and narrator. ‘The techniques of the motherly voice and gaze, the imaging of the insularity of the domestic space, the presentation of a pre-school world of play and nursery rhymes, and the silencing of the characters were all constituted within a discourse concerned with the production of the
mother as supervisor
,’ argues one television historian, David Oswell. He adds that ‘these techniques, although pleasurable to the child audience, were framed within a particular set of relations which constructed television as safe, maternal, and homely’.

Leaving nothing to chance, the BBC persuaded 300 households (with 459 children aged between two and five) to return questionnaires giving their responses to the early programmes. ‘Andy Pandy himself was taken to by most viewers, although it seemed he was as yet not such a popular favourite as Muffin,’ noted the subsequent report. ‘The most frequent complaint made by the children themselves was that he “couldn’t talk”.’ Overall reaction was broadly if not uniformly positive, with at least a hint of an incipient generation of couch potatoes:

My children (ages five and three) regard the television as entertainment and are not prepared to get down from their chairs even when invited. They look on Andy as a younger child, to be watched and even tolerated, but not as an equal to be played with.

A little coloured girl watching with us thought that Andy should have a coloured friend to play with.

It seems that slow inconspicuous movements on the screen, unaccompanied by commentary, will quickly lose child’s attention.

The most popular song, with all ages, seemed to be ‘Andy’s hands go up – Andy’s hands go down’ – and this was often remembered afterwards in play.

The respondents also expressed their attitude to children’s television as such. ‘One very general argument, which seemed to many parents to be the most important factor, was that children, however young, were almost invariably fascinated by the screen and determined to watch it, so that it was only sensible to offer them something of their own.’ From mid-September
Andy Pandy
settled down to every Tuesday (initially at 3.45) and it did not finally leave the screen until the 1970s. Amazingly, only 26 actual black-and-white programmes were ever made; we got to know them well.
²⁸

On the day before the clown suit’s first public outing, the England cricket selectors announced that neither Norman Yardley (the then captain) nor George Mann (a recent captain) would be available to skipper the forthcoming winter tour of Australia. Over the next fortnight, there was intense press speculation about who would get the job. From his influential pulpit in the
Daily Telegraph
, E. W. Swanton reckoned that the two most plausible candidates were Freddie Brown, an amateur, and Tom Dollery, a professional. As it happened, they were the respective captains in the time-honoured annual encounter at Lord’s between the Gentlemen (ie the amateurs) and the Players (ie the professionals), starting on 26 July. On the first day, Brown made a superb century, reaching three figures with a straight six into the pavilion. ‘The more elderly were reminded of how cricket used to be played,’ noted an admiring Swanton, ‘and especially how the ball used to be driven before the game’s descent, as many would lament, to an age of over-sophistication and a dreary philosophy of safety first.’ Next day, Dollery himself scored an admirable century, but within minutes of his declaration and the Gentlemen leaving the field, Brown had been invited to take the side to Australia. Given that there had never yet been a professional captain of England, it was hardly a surprising choice. And, in the eyes of many cricket followers, the appointment was a welcome indication that the amateur spirit of adventure was still alive and well.

Even so, at county level there were clear signs by the 1950 season that – whatever the continuing determination of county committees not to appoint professional captains – the traditional two-class system in the first-class game was only just hanging on. Most of the counties had captains who were either ‘shamateurs’ (including Brown at Northamptonshire) or, if they could afford to play as genuine amateurs, were far from being worth their place in the side as cricketers. Somerset’s Stuart Rogers was an army officer with a disciplinarian streak – but did not bowl and averaged only 25.12 with the bat; Nottinghamshire’s William Sime, an Oxford-educated barrister, managed a mere 17. 78. The only two professionals in charge were Warwickshire’s Dollery and Sussex’s James Langridge, the latter after a ferocious pre-season row, as members revolted against the committee’s plan to appoint joint captains – both of them amateur, with one in effect a stand-in until the end of the Cambridge term. There was also this season, in early July, an emblematically antediluvian episode at Bristol. The Glouces-tershire captain was Basil Allen, an amateur who had captained the county before the war and was determined to uphold the established social order. Coming off the field for an interval, he overheard one of his young professionals, Tom Graveney, say, ‘Well played, David’ to an opposition batsman, Cambridge University’s David Sheppard (the future Bishop of Liverpool). A few minutes later in the pavilion, Allen went over to Sheppard. ‘I’m terribly sorry about Graveney’s impertinence,’ he apologised. ‘I think you’ll find it won’t happen again.’

There was, too, a strongly hierarchical flavour about the composition of the touring party to accompany Brown. In particular, there was the inclusion of three young, palpably inexperienced, Cambridge-educated amateurs: Sheppard and J. G. Dewes had made a pile of runs on a university wicket widely recognised to be a batsman’s paradise, while the quick bowler J. J. Warr, likewise still an undergraduate that summer, had bowled well enough but unsensationally, coming 55th in the national averages. Significantly, their county affiliations were respectively Sussex, Middlesex and Middlesex again – socially very acceptable. That winter, for all Brown’s gallantry, England lost heavily. Sheppard and Dewes managed 74 runs between them in seven innings; Warr took one wicket for 281 runs. ‘Will one ever know what the Selectors were thinking of?’ lamented the novelist Rex Warner. And, writing to a moderately sympathetic Australian friend, he reckoned that ‘the abolition of the dictatorship of the M.C.C.’ was the only thing that might save English cricket.
²⁹

It was just before Brown presented his calling card at Lord’s that
Picture Post
asked the question: ‘The Shop round the Corner: Does it Deserve to Survive?’ Against a background of ‘the small independent shop’ – numerically representing up to 90 per cent of retail-trade outlets, albeit little more than half the retail trade’s total turnover – coming under increasing pressure from the ‘chain stores and multiple shops’ that ‘had become almost household words’, the magazine’s Ruth Bowley entered an almost passionate plea for the defence. On the basis of spending several months travelling round Britain and talking to both shopkeepers and their customers, she was convinced that it would represent a huge loss ‘if all shopping was centralised’, even if it did clip a few points off the cost of living. ‘There is an informality about the small shop,’ she argued. ‘Tired housewives can pop in, dressed in kitchen aprons, men in dungarees call in on their way home from work. One customer I know regularly fetches his newspaper wearing his dressing-gown; another sends his dog. And always there is a welcome for the children, an intelligent interpretation of scribbled shopping lists, and a touching interest in child welfare.’ To clinch her point, she quoted the proprietress of a village shop: ‘That’s the third ice today, Billy. I’ll not sell you any more until I hear from your Ma.’

It was not a case that impressed one reader, ‘K.P.B.’ from London SW15:

Living on a housing estate which is almost entirely served by small shopkeepers, I would emphatically deny the small shopkeepers’ right to survive.

Indeed, such services as are rendered by the local butcher vary according to his estimate of the affluence of the customer. It is nauseating to perceive the fawning manner in which prompt and favourable treatment is bestowed on the ‘lady’ from the mansions surrounding the estate in preference to the housewives from the estate. And the newsagent, the baker, the greengrocer and the cobbler, ‘small men’ all, behave similarly.

‘How different it is,’ this reader declared, ‘to do business with the multiple stores and the co-operative societies who know nothing of one’s social or financial status and dispense their services impartially and with dispatch and civility.’
³⁰

Unsurprisingly, Bowley did not mention the word ‘supermarket’; though the first British usage occurred at least as early as 1943, the term did not become general until the 1950s. Even so, by the late 1940s there were a few pioneers of American-style self-service – and in July 1950, Sainsbury’s put down a major marker by opening (in Croydon) its first self-service store. ‘Not everyone liked it,’ records the obituarist of Alan (later Lord) Sainsbury. ‘One customer threw a wire basket at him and a judge’s wife in Purley swore violently at him when she saw she was required to do the job of a shop assistant.’ It would be many years before ‘Q-less shopping’ (as Sainsbury’s liked to call it) became anything like the norm.

For the time being, the more typical shopping experience was much more like that wonderfully evoked by Margaret Forster (born 1938) in her memoir of growing up in Carlisle. Once a week she and her sister would smarten up, put on clean clothes and with their mother catch a double-decker Ribble bus to go shopping ‘up street’. The mother carrying a large leather bag, her daughters flimsy but capacious string bags, they invariably got off at the Town Hall. There were five main staging posts in a wearing process that the young Margaret knew full well was a daughter’s duty quite as much as a mother’s: