Modernity Britain Read online

  Contents

  Part One

  1 Isn’ ’e Smashin’?

  2 A Lot of Mums

  3 Never Had It So Good

  Part Two

  4 Catch a Falling Sputnik

  5 Not a Matter of Popularity

  6 A Worried Song

  7 Stone Me

  8 Get the Nigger

  9 Parity of Esteem

  Part Three

  10 Unnatural Practices

  11 Morbid Sentimentality

  12 A Merry Song of Spring

  13 We’re All Reaching Up

  14 Beastly Things, Elections

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Image section

  Picture Credits

  By the Same Author

  Author’s Note

  Tales of a New Jerusalem is a projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979. The first two, A World to Build and Smoke in the Valley, are gathered together in the volume Austerity Britain; the next two, The Certainties of Place and A Thicker Cut, in the volume Family Britain. Accordingly, Opening the Box is the fifth book in the sequence, and in effect comprises the first half of the volume Modernity Britain, which is intended to cover the years 1957–62.

  This book is dedicated to Lucy

  Part One

  1

  Isn’ ’e Smashin’?

  ‘Council tenants and potential council tenants are today a much more typical section of the population at large than ever before,’ declared a junior housing minister, Enoch Powell, to the annual conference of the Society of Housing Managers on Thursday, 10 January 1957 – at almost exactly the moment that Harold Macmillan was calling at the Palace to succeed Sir Anthony Eden as the new Conservative prime minister. Later that afternoon, discussion turned to the nonconformists. ‘I find that, generally speaking, there is no cause for complaint about the standard of decoration of those tenants who “defy regulations” and do their own,’ conceded Lambeth’s director of housing, Mr C. C. Carter. ‘They carry out the decorations to a standard which is usually very satisfactory. I am not sure whether the day has not arrived when you might well let tenants do their own internal decorations.’ Next day’s main address was given by Mrs E. Denington, vice-chairman of London County Council’s Housing Committee. ‘I think that the natural way for people to live is in houses,’ she insisted. ‘I should like to sound a word of warning to authorities which are thinking of building flats. I believe that no more than 5 per cent of the population want to live in flats. Do not build them unless you have to, and if you have to then do make provision for children, because if you do not you have no right to grumble if they are a nuisance.’

  Judy Haines as usual was at home in Chingford on Saturday the 12th. ‘Fed up,’ she noted flatly. ‘Girls went to pictures, John [her husband, earlier known as Abbé] to London, and here I am. Decided to please myself and blow housework. Therefore I enjoyed some needlework – Pamela’s frock and curtains.’ Another diarist, Allan Preston, the 25-year-old son of an English teacher, went to Burnden Park in the afternoon. ‘The first half was very entertaining,’ he recorded of the home team’s First Division clash with Leeds. ‘Both sides attacked crisply and at half time Bolton were winning 4–2. The second half was more dismal. Two goals only were scored and there were one or two unpleasant incidents.’ Stay-at-homes could have watched Percy Thrower’s Gardening Club and The Lone Ranger on BBC television, while 7.30 saw another favourite, Dixon of Dock Green, back for his third series. ‘The whole family has been eagerly waiting for the return of Dixon,’ reported a viewer, ‘and judging by this edition [characteristically called ‘Give a Dog a Good Name’] this series is going to be every bit as good as the last.’ Hancock’s Half Hour by this time was on both radio and television, and on Sunday evening the Light Programme broadcast ‘Almost a Gentleman’, episode 14 of the fourth radio series: overlooked once again in the New Year’s Honours List, the anti-hero of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam is persuaded he needs etiquette lessons, with predictably disastrous results. Perhaps revealingly, Philip Larkin seems never to have evinced any interest in, let alone enthusiasm for, Tony Hancock. ‘An utterly lonely Sunday, spent indoors except for the usual excursion to the pillar box,’ Larkin wrote from his flat in Hull later that evening to Monica Jones in Leicester. ‘I have sat doing nothing since about 4 o’ clock, & am now slightly drunk on rum and honey & hot water. The usual revolting insufficient meals – an awful tinned steak pudding, like eating a hot poultice, & sausages . . . I can’t ever remember being so dead since about 1947.’1

  ‘Top People Take The Times’ was a new poster from Monday the 14th, as the PM sought to finalise his administration. ‘Many considerations had to be borne in mind,’ the Old Etonian (like his predecessor) would reflect after a difficult process. ‘The right, centre & left of the party; the extreme “Suez” group; the extreme opposition to Suez; the loyal centre – and last, but not least, U & non-U (to use the jargon that Nancy Mitford has popularised), that is, Eton, Winchester, etc. on the one hand; Board school & grammar school on the other.’ Top people also had to face the cameras, and Macmillan on the 17th found himself on fraught terms with the new-fangled teleprompter as he gave a ministerial broadcast. Reactions were mixed. ‘In its extremely clear intimation that we were neither a second-rate power nor a satellite [i.e. of the USA], it gave me a lift of the heart such as I had never hoped to experience again,’ wrote the once-Marxist novelist Patrick Hamilton to his brother. But a 67-year-old housewife in Barrow, Nella Last, was appalled to read next morning in her Daily Express about Macmillan’s apparent promise to move decisively towards what she called ‘free trade with Europe’: ‘I’m not either clever or well read, I don’t – can’t – decide the issues of such a step, BUT I do disagree utterly with one man coming to a T.V. screen, & calmly announcing such a step . . . As I tidied round I thought that many cleverer heads than mine would feel the same sense of “shock”!’ Labour’s television guru Anthony Wedgwood Benn was abroad, but heard disturbingly favourable reports on his return. ‘His television performance was evidently a very dramatic one,’ Benn noted. ‘His call for an “opportunity state” has created interest and discussion just when things looked so soggy in his own Party.’ The Edwardian actor-manager was indeed not someone to underestimate, though Malcolm Muggeridge soon afterwards had a bit of fun in Life. ‘The lean, sinewy neck pulsates,’ he told his American readers, ‘the tired grey features wear a smile; the voice, soft and sibilant, emerges from the drooping moustache. A publisher? No. A civil servant? No. A Prime Minister.’2

  Modelled on the Parisian jazz club Le Caveau, the Cavern opened in Liverpool the evening before Macmillan’s broadcast. Nearly 2,000 people queued outside, only 600 were able to get in, and (reported a local paper in a brief story about ‘Liverpool’s New Jazzy Club’) ‘dressed in jeans, skirts and sweaters, they filled every corner of the club, standing packed between the bricked arches’, as they listened to ‘various jazz bands’ plus the Coney Island Skiffle Group. The foreign influence was spreading. ‘The snack bar near Kew Gardens station was crowded out,’ noted the solipsistic, emotionally impenetrable civil servant Henry St John on Saturday the 19th. ‘There seem no times or seasons for anything now; people seem to fill cafés day and night, whereas they used to be almost deserted except at meal times.’ The old insularity was also starting to go in football, with Manchester United the first English team to take part (in defiance of the football authorities) in the European Cup and soon afterwards – on 6 February – beating Bilbao 3–0 to reach the semi-finals. Next day’s Listener reviewed Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine, the first volume of what would become an exotic literary phenomenon, The Alexandria Quartet. ‘Less fiction than incantation,�
� reckoned Ronald Bryden, ‘beautifully conceived, only too consciously beautiful in the writing.’ Durrell himself lived in Provence and was fond of calling England ‘Pudding Island’, a view that in certain moods the young American poet Sylvia Plath (recently married to Ted Hughes) shared. ‘It is often infuriating to read the trash published by the Old Guard, the flat, clever, colorless poets here,’ she wrote back home a few days earlier. Little was as unashamedly English as At the Drop of a Hat, the musical revue by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann playing since 24 January to packed houses at the Fortune Theatre. ‘None of their songs are very melodious and not all of them are really amusing,’ grumbled Anthony Heap, local government officer in St Pancras and inveterate first-nighter, but Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times relished the ‘kindly satire’ and ‘the crisp, neat, elegant, cultured jokes about gnus, bindweed, the monotonous lot of the umpire in the Ladies’ Singles at Wimbledon, the very contemporary furniture of his flat, and the disastrous season of 1546 in the English theatre’. Flanders (bearded and in a wheelchair) had, Hobson added, ‘an inner merriment which, when he is not speaking, communicates itself to the audience’.3

  The day after Flanders and Swann opened in the West End, five shop stewards at Briggs Motor Bodies, the Ford Motor Company’s body-making plant at Dagenham, were suspended – one of them, an extrovert, free-speaking Cockney from West Ham called Johnny McLoughlin, indefinitely. His offence was that, during working hours, he had defied the wishes of his foreman by ringing a handbell in order to call a meeting in his toolmaking ‘shop’ to discuss possible strike action, following the suspension of two fellow shop stewards for unauthorised absences. Within days the ‘bellringer’ incident had led to a walk-out by some 8,000 employees. ‘The workers of Briggs know very well that the Company is trying to exploit the situation of unemployment and short time which exists in Dagenham at the present time,’ declared the Strike Committee, in the larger context of continuing post-Suez petrol rationing causing problems for the motor industry as a whole. ‘They are trying to force a return to the bad old days when “Fordism” was a by-word for non-trade unionism, low wages, and bad working conditions.’ Talks to reinstate McLoughlin broke down, with the man himself declining to look for another billet. ‘What chance would I have after all the publicity this has brought me?’ he explained on 12 February to the Daily Mail. ‘Wherever I go I am known as “the man who tolled the bell”.’ That same day, the Tory MP for Hornchurch, Godfrey Lagden, told the Commons that Briggs had ‘the most unfortunate collection, above-average collection, of shop stewards who are practically Communists’, adding that generally for the workers there ‘it is extremely dangerous not to come out when they ring the bell’. Dagenham’s Labour MP, John Parker, spoke of how at Ford (including Briggs) ‘no attempt is made to treat individuals as live men and women, but to just take them as industrial cogs’. Two days later, Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) members at Briggs voted decisively for further strike action, though leaving time for government intervention. Through it all, there had been something else on the collective Briggs mind: the home tie (on 9 February) for the company’s football team against the Amateur Cup holders, mighty Bishop Auckland. At a packed Rush Green, the visitors squeaked home by the only goal – ‘very lucky’, according to the Barking Advertiser’s ‘Onlooker’, against ‘the motor boys . . . firing smoothly on all eleven cylinders’.4

  Almost everywhere, whether in Dagenham or County Durham, the shared daily reference points were shifting from sound to vision. ‘Mrs Atkinson keeps asking when we are coming in to see the Television,’ Nella Last noted on the last Wednesday of January about her persistent neighbour, ‘& I’d a rather difficult task of explaining how my husband would never stay up to see any play.’ Radio that evening included a road-and-housing-development storyline in Educating Archie and some typical by-play in Take It From Here. Standing outside the house he shares with his father, Ron Glum is kissing his girlfriend Eth goodbye when he realises he is locked out. He rings the bell to wake up Mr Glum senior, who opens the door:

  Mr Glum: Eth? What you coming round this time of night for?

  Eth: I’m going.

  Mr Glum: You mean you got an old man like me out of a hot bed just to tell me you’re going? Oh, I dunno what’s come over this generation. It’s all them Elvis Parsley records.

  Most people’s focus that Wednesday, though, was on Double Your Money, in particular whether Lynda Simpson, a 13-year-old schoolgirl from Sutton Coldfield, would take the £500 she’d already won through her spelling prowess or try to double it. ‘It’s your decision, my girl,’ her father was reported in the Daily Mirror as having told her, while Lynda herself calmly announced at the start of the programme, ‘I think I’ll disregard everybody’s advice and go on.’ So she did, entering the see-through box and successfully spelling five words: manoeuvre, connoisseur, reconnoitre, chlorophyll and hypochondriac. ‘What are you going to do with the money?’ asked compère Hughie Green. ‘I’m going to buy a tape recorder and put the rest in the bank,’ Lynda replied. ‘I hope to go to a university and it’ll help to pay for that.’5

  Lynda had presumably passed her 11-plus, but that was not the case for the majority of the nation’s children. Two days later, on 1 February, the BBC showed a largely reassuring television documentary about the exam, presented by the Canadian political analyst Robert McKenzie and featuring a secondary modern in north London. A chemist noted disapprovingly that ‘there appeared to be no expense spared in this school to buy every bit of modern equipment possible’, but a teacher’s wife preferred to accentuate the positive: ‘How wonderfully the children behaved. There was no glancing at the cameras, etc, which is so apt to distract the viewer.’ This proved a relatively uncontroversial programme – unlike the following Monday’s Panorama, which included a clip from a film by Dr Grantly Dick-Read (whose work had inspired the recently founded Natural Childbirth Association, later National Childbirth Trust) showing a natural childbirth through relaxation. Only two people rang in to complain, but the headline in the right-wing tabloid Daily Sketch was ‘REVOLTING’, its columnist ‘Candidus’ condemning the film as ‘part of the exhibitionism that is the growing weakness of our day and age’.6

  Between those two programmes, on the evening of Sunday the 3rd, Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll star, Tommy Steele, and his band were giving two performances (each lasting barely 20 minutes) in Leicester. ‘The act itself is simple enough,’ wrote Trevor Philpott in Picture Post. ‘It’s ninety per cent youthful exuberance. There is not a trace of sex, real or implied. The Steelemen, bass, drums, saxophone and piano, all writhe around the stage with their instruments – even the pianist doesn’t have a stool. All the antics they, as professionals, freely admit have nothing to do with music. As Tommy would put it: “We do it for laughs.”’ As for the audience, it was ‘happy – hysterically so’, reported the Leicester Mercury. ‘They were saying (in rock ’n’ roll jargon): “Isn’ ’e smashin’?” “Isn’ ’e a luvly colour?” “Isn’ ’e berrer than that other feller?” and “Aren’t you glad you came, Elsie?” Others didn’t say a word. They just shouted.’ In fact not everyone was entirely happy. ‘I felt rather ashamed of my sex on Sunday night,’ an 18-year-old from Kibworth wrote to the paper: ‘I’m no square, but it was shocking. Silly girls go to make fools of themselves by screaming and shouting, the whole of the show through. I attended the show but have no idea what he sang. I’m a great fan of Tommy’s, but I like to listen not scream.’ An immediate riposte came from Diane, Judy and Pat of 212 Wigston Lane, Leicester: ‘We think he is the mostest and the best recording artist Britain has ever produced. THE WAY HE DIGS ROCK ’N’ ROLL SENDS US ALL SCREAMING WITH DELIGHT.’

  In spite of the attendant noise and hysteria, there was little dangerous about the 20-year-old Steele – a former merchant seaman called Tommy Hicks who was, in Philpott’s words, ‘an ordinary, likeable British kid who obviously gets a kick out of life’ – nor was there about the appreciably older, rat
her podgy Bill Haley, who arrived in England with his Comets two days later. Besieged by fans at Waterloo station, Haley remarked, ‘I’d rather the kids would show more restraint.’ Over the next few weeks, for all the audiences’ jiving in the aisles, his underlying middle-of-the-roadness was epitomised by his regular, benign refrain to journalists that ‘all young people have a certain amount of vim and vigour and they like to let off steam and I really don’t see too much harm in that’. Still, especially with Steele, something – just for a moment – was going on. ‘There was a croak in his voice like he meant the words,’ recalled Ray Gosling about walking down East Street market in south London around this time, as his latest hit, ‘Singing the Blues’, sounded out from the record trestles on the market stalls, ‘and there were photographs of him bulldog-clipped to the stalls and Tommy Steele looked like us – cheeky British youth with tousled hair and pouting lips and a cockney so-fucking-what look.’7

  There would be all too few market stalls in the Stepney–Poplar Comprehensive Development Area (CDA). ‘Poplar will have its 19-storey skyscraper’ was the East London Advertiser’s main headline on 8 February, having learned that the Minister of Housing, Henry Brooke, had just given his approval to the London County Council’s scheme for Tidey Street – thereby overriding the wishes of the local council, whose leader had recently described the scheme as a ‘monstrosity’. Indeed, the considered view of the council was that high blocks of flats were ‘just a load of trouble’. The Architects’ Journal in its next issue disagreed: ‘Tidey Street is unlikely to prove the best advertisement for tower blocks: but it is a great deal the better for having one, and may even convince the Poplar Borough Council that some of the objections of their tenants to high blocks can be overcome by improved design.’ Brooke’s was not the only approval, for on the 8th the Secretary of State for Scotland signalled the green light for the Hutchesontown/Gorbals CDA. ‘That guarantees an end to the dingy squalor that is Gorbals’ was the unambiguously welcoming response of the Glasgow Herald. Accompanying photographs showed on the one hand a model of the new Gorbals with its ‘spacious layout’ and on the other a squalid back court in Florence Street, ‘an example of the conditions which will be eliminated by the Glasgow Corporation plan’.