Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (97 page)

So we decided to break into song. It’s amazing what meaning you can put into such songs as
Rule Britannia, Sons of the Sea
, and
Land of
Hope and Glory
if you’re in the right combative mood, and there was a moving rendering of
Kevin Barry
from some of the Irishmen present. Now, I don’t know if we were being too patriotic, or if we were disturbing the office staffs in the adjacent buildings, but quite suddenly, up from the direction of Snow Hill Police Station, our tuneful chants were interrupted by a clip-clop, clip-clop, and sure enough, there were the Cossacks – the mounted police – trotting towards us.

The patriotic singing took on a greater fervour and volume. With skilful horsemanship, the Cossacks began to manoeuvre us from the middle of the road to the pavement; then one over-zealous chap rode his horse into the pavement and hemmed a group of men against the wall. A police helmet went flying. Out came the batons, and it looked for a moment as if a major conflict was about to start.

Law and order, however, was just about restored and eventually the jury reached its verdict, acquitting the seven of the charges under Order 1305, though finding them guilty of a lesser offence according to the terms of the National Dock Labour Scheme. Released on bail, pending sentence, the leaders were carried away shoulder-high. Effectively killing Order 1305 and re-establishing the unfettered right to withdraw labour, the outcome was, according to Dash in 1969, ‘the most important post-war victory for the trade union movement’.
^7.

The next two days revealed Shawcross the pragmatist: first he withdrew the prosecution against the seven; then he announced that no action would be taken against the four young Scots who had stolen the recently surrendered Coronation Stone, on the grounds that it was best to avoid creating martyrs. Meanwhile, ‘The Dockers’ K.C.’, as he had been dubbed many years earlier, was cremated at 1 pm on Wednesday. ‘Trekked to Golders Green for Bevin’s funeral,’ recorded Gladys Langford. ‘Recognised Hore Belisha, Churchill, Morrison &Aneurin Bevan. The last reclined in a lovely car. They “do themselves well” these Labour M.P.s.’ Half an hour later, the BBC circumspectly played gramophone records instead of repeating Monday’s memorable edition of
Twenty Questions
. But for another, less temperamental star, there could never be enough repeats. ‘Girls tore themselves away from buckets, spades and earth,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford on Thursday, ‘for Andy Pandy – a film of Tuesday’s performance.’

Two days later, there was one of the period’s far from infrequent railway accidents, in this case involving a ‘Soccer Special’ on the way to the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park, Glasgow. Three died and 68 were injured, as ‘once-gay tartan scarves, tam-o’-shanters and football favours hung grotesquely among the twisted steel and splintered woodwork’. But the match went ahead – no one seems to have doubted that it would – and Celtic beat Motherwell 1–0 in front of the usual 134,000. Down south there was another cup final – the Amateur Cup Final, played at Wembley and attended by a crowd of (astonishing as it now seems) 100,000. Pegasus, formed only three years earlier as a combined Oxford and Cambridge Universities side, defeated the northeast’s Bishop Auckland 2–1 with a performance admired by the quality press for its almost Continental-style fluency. According to Geoffrey Green, the football correspondent of
The Times
who wrote with such romantic flair that he made many upper-middle-class readers take the game even half-seriously for the first time, it was an outcome that had ‘perhaps satisfied the desires of a sentimental majority’. The indefatigable Gladys Langford, though, chose the theatre that Saturday, going to the Haymarket to see
Waters of the Moon
. ‘People in the gallery,’ she noted, ‘roared at Wendy Hiller “Speak up!” which must have been very disconcerting.’
^8.

Over the weekend, it emerged that Bevan had, after much prevarication, at last decided to resign. ‘The Budget, in my view, is wrongly conceived in that it fails to apportion fairly the burdens of expenditure as between different social classes,’ he wrote on Saturday afternoon to Attlee (still in St Mary’s). Significantly, he broadened his case: ‘It is wrong because it is based upon a scale of military expenditure, in the coming year, which is physically unobtainable, without grave extravagance in its spending.’ Then in the Commons on Monday he made a resignation statement perhaps best evoked by Macmillan’s diary:

Bevan’s ‘apologia’ was certainly novel in manner, if not in matter. It was a violent castigation of his colleagues, delivered with incredible asperity, not to say malice. Up to a certain point it was well done; but he lost the House at the end. Members were shocked by his explanation of why he agreed to the 1/- contribution towards prescription and the 25,000 cut in house-building last year. He had only agreed because he knew these measures were impracticable and could not in fact be carried out. He out-manoeuvred – not to say, ‘double-crossed’ his colleagues.

‘The Socialists,’ added Macmillan, ‘are very angry at his “disloyalty” – which threatens their own seats and pockets. But really they agree with his sentiments.’

Next morning, at a special meeting of the PLP, Bevan gave an even more intemperate performance. According to Hugh Dalton, he was ‘sweating & shouting & seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown’; both Dalton and a colleague found the egocentricity (at one point Bevan referred to ‘
my
Health Service’) unpleasantly reminiscent of Oswald Mosley. In her next
T
he New Yorker
letter, Mollie Panter-Downes summed up the conventional wisdom about Bevan’s post-resignation future when she observed that some of those who had seen him as a potential Prime Minister ‘now suspect that he is less a statesman, thinking of England in the round, than a politician, thinking in terms of a game of politics with Englishmen, played with distorting Welsh violence’. For Attlee, writing to his brother a week after Bevan’s resignation (and shortly after leaving hospital), there was as usual little more to be said: ‘The Bevan business is a nuisance. The real wonder is that we kept him reasonably straight for so long. But with this and Ernie’s death I did not have as restful time as I should have liked.’
^9.

On the same day as Bevan’s resignation statement, two other ministers resigned: Harold Wilson (President of the Board of Trade) and John Freeman (Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Supply). Wilson’s resignation statement on the Tuesday was far more impressive than Bevan’s but the tag now given to him by Hugh Dalton, that he was ‘Nye’s little dog’, soon stuck. Indeed,
The Times
had already noted how ‘this second resignation appears to be treated by the Government and the Labour Party as a matter of no great consequence’, while the
Manchester
Guardian
observed that ‘a certain superiority of manner in debate has not helped his popularity.’ Raymond Streat, who over recent years had got to know Wilson quite well, reflected soon afterwards on what for him, as for most people, was an unexpected turn of events:

I knew he was pally with Bevan of late. Why he should turn that way baffles me. Surely Wilson’s natural role was that of the intellectual professional politician in the Socialist party. How he could possibly see himself in the class of emotional socialists or in a clique of intrigues and power gamblers within the party I cannot imagine. Latterly he had begun to fancy himself as a negotiator – high office had begun to go to his head. I am sorry in a way. Wilson is from many aspects a thoroughly nice young man. He has brains and can work fast and well.

‘I think now,’ Streat prophesied, ‘he will become just a political jobber and adventurer.’

It is pretty clear in retrospect that the motives of all three main protagonists – Gaitskell, Bevan and Wilson – were the usual mix of the pure and the impure. Gaitskell’s more critical biographer, Brian Brivati, emphasises his consistency over the issue of NHS spending and his determination that the NHS ‘would be managed like any other part of the state and subject to the control of the Treasury’, but at the same time he ‘might also have seen his chance to take a commanding lead at the head of his generation of Labour Ministers’. John Campbell, Bevan’s non-hagiographical biographer, sees ego rather than political ambition as such at work, arguing that – whatever the probably superior intrinsic merits of Bevan’s entirely sincere case in relation to both NHS financing and the unrealistically ambitious rearmament programme – he went ‘catastrophically wrong’ by ‘getting the matter out of perspective, by overplaying his hand so self-indulgently, by losing his temper and abusing his colleagues [notably Cabinet on the 19th], and ultimately in allowing himself to be persuaded [above all by his wife and Michael Foot] to resign, against the better judgement of his cooler friends’. As for Wilson, his biographer Ben Pimlott does not deny his ‘bitter determination, if possible, to block Gaitskell’s path’ or his ambition for high office should Bevan become leader after an electoral defeat for Labour, but he also notes Wilson’s growing and genuine fascination with Bevan and his left-wing politics, as well as his equally genuine ‘shrewd assessment of the likely impact of defence spending on the economy’.

For all three in April 1951, transcending the immediate verdicts on the resignation drama, there remained everything to play for. ‘It is really a fight for the soul of the Labour Party,’ remarked Gaitskell at one point as it unfolded. And soon after, he reflected, ‘Who will win it? No one can say as yet. I’m afraid that if Bevan does we shall be out of power for years and years.’
¹⁰

On the evening of Wilson’s resignation, John Arlott took the
Twenty
Questions
chair in place of Harding and had, according to the
Daily
Express
anyway, a bit of a nightmare:

Arlott was a stonewaller. When he did try to help he overdid it. Often he omitted to give the number of questions. That is a major error in this radio parlour game. It is vital to keep up the excitement.

His attempts at humour were heavy-handed. His crosstalk with the team sounded forced rather than fluent . . .

Kenneth Preston in Keighley did not listen, but the next evening, in stream-of-consciousness mood, he was stationed by his trusty wireless:

I am at present listening to an international boxing contest [at Haringay] between Don Cockell (Great Britain) and Freddie Beshore (United States) much to Kath’s [his wife’s] disgust. Harold Wilson has now resigned and duly given his reason in Parliament. Sir Hartley Shawcross (another clever devil) has been made President of the Board of Trade and [Alf] Robens has been made Minister of Labour. Parliament is now discussing the proposed charges [in the event carried easily enough] for false teeth and spectacles. It seems as though a General Election is nearer now than it was. There does not seem to be much prospect of a knockout in this fight. The American seems to be so tough that Cockell seems to be banging away at a wall. However much the Englishman hits him he still comes on. The Englishman has won on points. We have no fire tonight and now it is not very warm. It would be a good idea to go to bed before we become any colder. The U.N. forces are still having to give ground in Korea. It is being said in America that now that Bevan has gone on one side and [General] MacArthur on theirs that there is prospect of a greater measure of co-operation between the two countries than there was before. At long last an agreement on meat has been signed with Argentina and now Webb [Minister of Food] is having to pay more than he would have had to pay if he had accepted Argentina’s previous offer.

‘I think I am going to have a look at my “Dead Souls” now before I get off to bed,’ he added. ‘It really is a most amazing book.’

Two evenings later, on Thursday the 26th, the special meeting convened by the Quarry Hill Flats Tenants’ Association at last took place at the estate’s social centre. A local reporter recorded some lively exchanges:

Mrs Dove, a tenant and member of the Association, said, in her opinion, that the flats were rapidly becoming a slum and was glad that the broadcast had roused the tenants into taking action.

Then a gentleman stood up and said that the flats were ‘dumps’ – in every respect. ‘I do not want to live here at all’ he said. (‘Then get out’ came from the back of the hall.)

‘The broadcast was in very bad taste,’ cried a lady at the front, ‘and gave a disgraceful impression of our homes.’

‘The damage is already done,’ – another was on his feet, ‘and the only thing that we can do now is to prove that it was totally wrong.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’ shouted a man from the back corner.

‘By demanding a public apology from the B.B.C.’

‘And do you really think you’ll get it?’ another chap added with a that’s-what-you-think snigger.