Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (83 page)

1
. The covered market.
Here the ritual began, as it ‘always had done all my mother’s life and her mother’s before her’. First stop was the butchers’ stalls (Cumberland sausage, potted meat, black pudding), followed by the fruit and vegetable stalls. ‘Nothing exotic, no pineapples or melons – I hadn’t yet seen such fruits – and no fancy foreign vegetables, just huge cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks and onions and millions of potatoes, millions.’ Last came the ‘butter women’, who ‘sat behind trestle tables, their butter and cheese arranged in front of them, the butter pats each with an individual crest’. It was invariably cold – stall-holders struggling to weigh things ‘with hands wrapped in two pairs of fingerless mittens’ – and ‘on the many wet days rain would sweep in and trickle down the main cobbled entrance until it became a veritable stream and puddles were hard to avoid’.

2
. Lipton’s.
This was the mercifully warm port of call to buy tea and sliced cooked ham, involving ‘two different counters in the same shop’ and therefore ‘two different queues’. During the endless waiting, ‘everyone watched to see what others bought and whether any preferential treatment was being given by the assistants’. And when at last one got to the counter, the system of paying was still the time-consuming, pre-1914 method of ‘putting the money in cans which whizzed overhead to the central cash desk and then back again with the change wrapped in the bill’.

3
. Binn’s or Bullough’s.
Going into either of Carlisle’s two prestigious department stores was usually the best bit of the trip. ‘We only bought small items there, things my mother knew were the same price everywhere. Reels of thread, press-studs, sometimes stationery, never anything expensive. The whole point was just to have a reason for going into Binn’s and savouring its graciousness. We never bought even the cheapest item of clothing there.’

4
. The Co-op.
A large, depressing stone building in Botchergate, with drab-looking goods poorly displayed and poorly lit, this was in her mother’s eyes the only place to go for clothes. ‘The experience of shopping at the Co-op was dismal and there was no joy in our actual essential purchases – vests, knickers, socks and liberty bodices.’ Least of all in the bodices, which were ‘akin to a corset for the young’ but in whose ‘protective values against cold’ her mother ‘placed great faith’.

5
. The baker’s.
This final stop, halfway along Lowther Street, was principally to buy bread (including ‘a special kind of treacle loaf and delicious teacakes’), but occasionally the girls were treated to cream doughnuts or chocolate éclairs ‘as a reward for enduring the Co-op’.

Then at last it was time to catch the bus home. ‘That was it for another week. We’d been “up street” and my mother was exhausted, mainly with the stress caused by seeing so many things she wanted and couldn’t afford to buy.’
³¹

The summer of 1950 was also holiday time. For Colin Welland, 15 going on 16 and growing up in Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire, it was the opportunity for his first holiday independent of his parents, as he and two mates went to Butlin’s in Skegness. ‘Butlin’s holiday camps were a Valhalla for working-class kids,’ he recalled. ‘They were just like big schools, really. You had your houses, your discipline, your dining hall, your social activities, competitions – I remember getting to the final of the crown green bowling competition.’ In retrospect, he was struck by his naivety. ‘For instance, three girls asked us back to their chalet for a drink and we said, “No, thank you, we’re not thirsty.”’ Up the coast from Skegness was Cleethorpes, where another future actor and writer, the 17-year-old Joe Orton (still living with his parents on the Saffron Lane council estate in Leicester), went in August. ‘This confirmed all I ever thought about
day trips
and I am certainly not going again in a hurry,’ he complained to his diary. ‘The tide was out and I was hungry. We couldn’t swim and the camp was rotten and Mum played up.’ One diarist, Florence Speed, was probably happy enough to be spending August at home in Brixton. ‘I was glad I wasn’t one of the queued-up holiday-makers,’ she reflected after calling in at a ‘packed’ Victoria station a week or so after Orton’s lament. ‘The people about to start on holiday displayed no holiday gaiety. Just stood huddled & depressed, & some of them with babies in arms, tired before the journey began.’
³²

Indeed, though one imagines otherwise as one looks at the period photos of the mainly happy, smiling faces on the packed British beaches, life’s problems did not go away just because it was the holiday season. The papers of the John Hilton Bureau citizens’ advisory service – dealing with up to 5,000 cases weekly – include ‘Extracts from Letters’ dated the last day of August 1950. Cumulatively they present a grim, if not necessarily representative, picture of mainly domestic misery in a hostile world:

She would lock herself in the scullery if she couldn’t have her own way and then turn on the gas. I was hardened to her after a time and instead of pleading with her I just turned off the gas at the meter.

Since starting my studies I have put some mental strain on myself which is doing my health no good . . . They asked me to learn LOGARITHMS which I have never even heard of . . . I can’t see where it is all leading to.

Now my wife never comes into my bedroom to see whether I am dead or alive and my nerves are greatly perturbed by this ordeal . . . I have been treated worse than a lodger.

I had to give up my job in insurance and take a job where I could have milk and biscuits at 2-hourly intervals so I took over a public house.

Me and my husband can’t understand why we can’t get no pension. My husband is no scholar.

The most eloquent, desperate letter was the least punctuated: ‘No hope nothing to live for Only rude Man at Assistance Board’.

There was as well – however little spoken about amid the sandcastles or in the problem pages – something else brewing that August, though it did not always command undivided attention. ‘The expected birth this week-end of Princess Elizabeth’s second baby,’ noted Speed on the 13th, ‘has pushed Korea into second place in the headlines this Sunday morning.’ Princess Anne duly arrived on the Tuesday; the day before, Nella Last in Barrow had another of her conversations with her husband:

I’ve wondered if he worried about ‘outside’ affairs. I said today ‘it’s so worrying to hear so little definite progress of the Americans. A major war seems to be developing under our eyes, as if soon we will see it’s not a matter of “principle”, a gesture, but an out in the open war between Russia & the rest of the world.’ He said impatiently ‘you worry too much about what doesn’t concern you, & with all your worrying, you cannot alter or help things’.
³³

11

The Heaviest Burden

‘His vital energy, his good looks, his mellifluous voice, his vivid phraseology, make him a delight to listen to,’ reflected Sir Raymond Streat, chairman of the Cotton Board, after dining with Aneurin Bevan a few weeks before polling day in February 1950. In the ministerial car before dropping Streat off at his club, the conversation turned to the controversial centrepiece of Labour’s nationalisation plans:

I talked of steel and said I was convinced it was folly. He spoke of the need for higher output: I said I thought it would all too soon be a case of excess production of steel in the world: he said the State would create outlets for steel by investing in great developments in the colonies and so forth: when I said we had to have surplus income before we could invest capital, his reply was something general and vague about the State being entitled to anticipate returns of investment. I spoke of the psychology of the business world whose technical skills were needed by society and how the steel case might destroy their ability to use their skills by snapping their faith in the future. Here he countered with a spate of eloquence. Steel represented the culmination of phase one of Labour Rule: if Labour blenched at the difficulty and held back, it would show its lack of faith in itself and its doctrine: no, steel must go on, or Labour would lose its very soul.

‘I found when I crept into bed that I was frightened,’ concluded Streat’s graphic account. ‘I don’t think I particularly want to see him again. No good is done. The experience seems pleasantly stimulating whilst it is taking place, but afterwards you feel you have been in a void where there are no morals or faiths or loves.’

A month later, in early March, Bevan attended his first Cabinet meeting after Labour’s disappointing electoral performance. ‘Bevan was pugnacious and in a minority of one,’ noted another diarist, his fellow-minister Patrick Gordon Walker, about Bevan’s insistence that the implementation of steel nationalisation be in the forthcoming King’s Speech. ‘Morrison spoke strongly of the need for common sense and realism – this was what the country expected. It was no good “dressing up as revolutionaries” and pretending we had a great majority.’ The atmosphere, as evoked by Gordon Walker, was palpably uneasy:

Bevan was very isolated and unpopular.

Bevin looked ill.

MPs and Ministers seem to be strongly against Bevan – attributing our setback to ‘vermin’.
^1.

Bevan did get his way on steel, but otherwise the King’s Speech was notably short of substantive content.

With Herbert Morrison for his part continuing to press the case that ‘consolidation’ should be the order of the day, attention soon turned to a weekend meeting in May (at Beatrice Webb House, Dorking) of the Cabinet, Labour’s National Executive Committee and the TUC. ‘It is, I think, quite clear that the majority of the electorate are not disposed to accept nationalization for the sake of nationalization,’ argued Morrison in a pre-meeting memo pouring scorn on the notion that electors would become enthusiastic about a new nationalisation programme ‘if we only bang at them hard enough’. But at Dorking there was stalemate, with Morrison at best winning by default, and it was clear that the question of nationalisation was far from settled.

That autumn, Gallup sounded out public opinion. Only 32 per cent approved of the nationalisation of the steel industry (set for 15 February 1951); in terms of other industries (insurance, chemicals, cement, sugar, meat) where Labour in theory was committed to some form of nationalisation, approval ratings varied between 31 and 22 per cent, with in each case at least one in two disapproving. As for the existing nationalised industries, only health (overwhelmingly) and coal (45 per cent for, 39 per cent against) received approval, with gas and electricity, the railways and road transport all being viewed by a majority as having suffered under nationalisation.
^2.
These were striking figures, but they did little or nothing to undermine Labour’s by now deeply ingrained belief – not only on the left – that public ownership was integral to the party’s ‘very soul’.

It was in mid-April, a month before Dorking, that the ailing Stafford Cripps presented his last Budget. Explicitly Keynesian, with its stress on fiscal policy as the best way of attaining economic goals, it was understandably viewed as the culmination of the Labour government’s shift (in progress since 1947) away from central planning and towards demand management. ‘A graveyard of doctrine’ was how
The Times
almost gleefully described the party at last learning the lessons of almost five years in government, and Cripps in his speech emphasised his aversion to using ‘the violent compulsions that are appropriate to totalitarian planning’.

Even so, despite earlier ‘bonfires’, there remained on the part of Labour ministers a stubborn attachment to direct economic controls as indispensable to the maintenance of full employment. Only weeks after the budget, the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, warned his colleagues that there was ‘an acute danger of Keynesian ideas dominating our thinking so much that we shall be driven into a Maginot-like dependence on purely financial methods of preventing a depression’. Or, put another way, the arrival of full-flowering Keynes-ianism did not mean that Britain changed overnight from being a significantly controlled economy – whether in terms of building licensing or exchange control or rationing or food subsidies or government control over raw materials such as coal or import controls. Labour’s
instincts
, moreover, remained essentially interventionist. When one moderate junior minister, James Callaghan, made a speech in May accepting that nationalisation should not go beyond the existing fifth of the economy in public ownership, he was at pains to spell out that the other four-fifths could remain in private hands only if it fulfilled stringent, government-ordained requirements in such areas as investment, earnings and the distribution of dividends.
^3.

Nor on the other side of the political divide was the Keynesian centre ground unequivocally embraced. One influential Tory, Richard Law, argued forcibly in his 1950 book
Return from Utopia
that a strong and free economy would remain unattainable so long as exchange controls were still in place, while from that July the bankers and brokers of the City of London found an economic pundit they could trust – and, just as importantly, understand – in the financial journalist Harold Wincott, who began a regular column in the
Financial Times
espousing a passionate pro-market economic liberalism and soon acquired a considerable following. ‘Capitalism here is in a parlous state,’ he declared in his first piece (entitled ‘Rediscovering Capitalism’). ‘Some members of the Government abuse it with blind, unreasoning hate; others realise the mischief they have done and are doing but are prevented by the psychological barriers they themselves have built up from putting right past wrongs. The Opposition apologises for capitalism – and steadily emasculates it.’
^4.

Generally, the political temperature was surprisingly low during the immediate post-election period. Labour concentrated on nursing its small majority, while the Tories were broadly content to wait on events. Inevitably, the main day-to-day storm clouds concerned the most controversial figure in British politics: Bevan. Justifiably proud of his creation of the NHS and still Minister of Health, he had been engaged since the previous autumn in a determined guerrilla campaign to keep the service free. Prescription charges had been theoretically introduced after devaluation, but he had managed to stop them coming into operation. Now, in the spring of 1950 and in the uncomfortable position of being the principal scapegoat for Labour’s electoral near-disaster, he prepared for a more protracted scrap as the issue returned to the fore.

The essence of the case put forward by the Treasury (where Hugh Gaitskell had become Minister of State and was soon effectively deputising for Cripps) was simple: the NHS was continuing dramatically to overshoot its spending estimates and could not be afforded unless charges were introduced – charges which Gaitskell believed to be right in principle as well as financially necessary. Bevan was adamant that the level of NHS spending would soon start to stabilise of its own accord, a view that most historians have endorsed. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the crucial fact was that by the summer, after several months of disputation, two of Labour’s outstanding talents were at bitter loggerheads. ‘He’s nothing, nothing, nothing!’ declared Bevan to a colleague about the apparently super-rational Wykehamist whom he could barely bring himself to believe deserved to be a member of the party, while Gaitskell, though genuinely appreciative of his opponent’s parliamentary oratory, reckoned him a ‘slippery and difficult’ customer.
^5.
The NHS remained, for the time being, free.

None of this had much of a message for Michael Young in Labour’s research department, as he continued to explore what he saw as his party’s shortcomings in government. At the end of March, he gave a paper entitled ‘The British Socialist Way of Life’ to a Fabian conference in Oxford. Declaring that it was ‘no longer possible to look forward with confidence to steady progress towards the Socialist Commonwealth’, and arguing that it had been a serious mistake to concentrate so much during the election on the nationalisation issue, Young suggested an alternative, less dogmatic emphasis:

In trying to express the basic idea that should underlie our new policy he had been driven to use the word ‘brotherhood’ for want of a better. His ideal for society was based on the model of the good family, in which the governing principle was that needs should be met by holding all resources available for use where they were needed most . . . The basis of social life was in the family; but the family needed a good deal of outside support if it were not to be in danger of disruption under the impact of modern forces.

‘How wealthy do we really
want
to be?’ Young asked. And, after rejecting the American model (‘not achieving happiness by multiplying people’s wants’) and stressing the importance of mental as well as physical health, he turned to what, along with the family, would become the key concept of his life’s work: ‘One essential was to get back for people the sense of community, for which there was no proper basis in the life of modern cities. Those who become isolated in family homes, without close contacts with their neighbours, have no foundation for a satisfactory way of life.’ Young concluded with an almost mystical appeal to ‘the democratic Socialist way’ as the best alternative – in the context of the decline of religion – to the dangers of fascism and Communism: ‘A more satisfactory emotional life based on the sense of brotherhood will react to produce a better family life, based on the mutual love of parents and children. On this basis it is possible to build a new religion to fill the void left in men’s minds by the collapse of the old beliefs.’

Almost certainly Young by this time was in a mood of growing disenchantment. ‘It was obviously impossible to carry through the major proposals in the watered-down but still substantial version of
Let Us Face the Future
[the 1945 manifesto] contained in
Labour
Believes in Britain
[the 1949 policy statement], but why nothing was done on such matters as insurance, public buying and consumers’ advice, not even committees of enquiry set up, is still a mystery,’ he would write in 1953 about the aftermath of ‘the pyrrhic victory of 1950, which condemned the government to passivity’. He was especially disappointed by the failure of the government – in particular Wilson at the Board of Trade – to set up a consumer advisory service that would provide comparative testing of products on behalf of the public. The chronology is uncertain, but it seems that Young stopped day-to-day work at the research department in May, though he received party funding to write ‘a report on the means of giving ordinary people, whether workers, consumers or citizens, a bigger part in running a socialist democracy’. Later that year, in search of inspiration, he set off on a world tour, encompassing Israel, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Malaya and Singapore. He planned to return in 1951 not only to fulfil his commission but also to continue work on the thesis he had already begun at the London School of Economics (LSE) on how Labour and the other parties operated at a local level.
^6.
He still had, in other words, an essentially
political
orientation, but the signs were clearly visible of a growing impatience with the parameters of conventional politics.

Anthony Crosland, getting used to life in the Commons, was similarly impatient but took some comfort from having been quickly recognised as one of Labour’s rising young stars. Barely three months after the election, he was chosen to deliver a reply on the Home Service to what he called ‘the unending bellyache of the prophets of woe’ – a ‘dreary chorus of gloom’ pouring forth ‘in the City columns of the newspapers, in
The Times
and the
Economist
, in the speeches of company chairmen and Conservative politicians, in broadcasts by orthodox financial experts’. The bulk of his talk was devoted to a sober, authoritative-sounding and predictably positive assessment of the current position, before concluding that, for all the irrationality of some of Labour’s inveterate opponents, there was ‘no reason why some of us should not remain sane and normal, and admit that a fully-employed economy reaching record levels of production, exports, and capital investment must be in a pretty sound and healthy state’.