Modernity Britain Page 4
By this time four of the biggest concentrations of new or recent settlers from the inner city were Glasgow’s peripheral estates: Pollok, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Castlemilk. During 1957, the year of Family and Kinship, the sociologist Maurice Broady conducted a series of interviews with tenants on the huge Pollok estate, mainly members of tenants’ associations. Their general, not necessarily representative, view was that things were improving and that such blights as vandalism and sectarianism were on the decrease, though more shops would be appreciated, as well as such facilities as children’s playgrounds. Not everyone, though, was happy, among them Mrs Stewart, living in the Craigbank district:
She complained very sorely about the rough people on the buses and about the noise made by the people upstairs. There was invariably a rough family in each block. She was particularly concerned that her little boy, who goes to a private school, should not pick up bad habits by associating with the other children in the scheme. As the local children were coming out of school she took me to a window to show me what was apparently an every-day occurrence: several little boys standing urinating in a circle. Many of the local children also swore badly. If you went to see a mother to complain about the children stealing things, for instance, she would ask the children whether they had done it, and if they said no, would defend her children against you . . .
Mrs Stewart had been an active member of the Craigbank Tenants’ Association since its start in 1951, but, as she was compelled to admit about those around her, being a law-abiding tenant was one thing, being an active citizen quite another:
Two complaints particularly were made: that South Pollok should be at the entrance to the scheme, giving the area as a whole a bad reputation, and secondly that the houses were noisy. One young couple whom Mrs Stewart knew, who had been badly troubled by the noise made by a neighbour, had been told by Paton, the local factor, that if they could produce a petition with six signatures complaining about this neighbour he would be prepared to take some action. In the event however, although many complained, only one signed.8
3
Never Had It So Good
‘The first-floor gallery, known to our regular visitors as “gadget gallery”, is maintaining its high standard this year,’ reported L.E.W. Stokes-Roberts, organiser of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. ‘But because gadgets and labour-saving notions are so popular we have also originated another section for them, called “That’s a Good Idea”.’ Stokes-Roberts was writing in the Mail on 4 March 1957, the day the Queen and Prince Philip were due to visit Olympia for a special preview, and the exhibition was opening the following morning for four weeks, with visits scheduled from Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent and other house-proud royals. A highlight this year at the Village of Progress was ‘The Woman’s Hour House’, furnished by Jeanne Heal according to the results of a Radio Times questionnaire relating to her ‘Castle in the Air’ broadcasts. ‘The front has a pillared porch, wooden shutters, and a balcony reminiscent of an American colonial-style house,’ noted the Mail about this expression of listeners’ taste. ‘But inside, the rooms are modern with doors which fold back to make an open-plan living area and an eating bar which seats seven between the dining-room and the kitchen.’ The exhibition itself – some 600 stands across 14 acres as well as a range of display houses, flats and shops – was its usual roaring success, but Anthony Carson in the New Statesman could only sound a regretful note, comparing the whole thing to ‘a sort of florid uncle with endearingly excruciating taste’. As for the thousands flocking there, ‘Where do the Ideal people come from? They come from the smaller columns of the evening newspapers, from television competitions, from public libraries beyond Hither Green. They are the untroubled, the stolid backbone, the beloved floating voters.’
Forty-one per cent may in a recent Gallup poll have expressed the wish to emigrate if they could (the highest figure since 1948), the Bank of England’s new £5 note may have been (in Punch’s words) ‘rather like a Victorian sampler as seen in a nightmare by the Council of Industrial Design’, but the Ideal Home Exhibition was the annual sign that spring was in the air, even in Glasgow. There, a huge municipal campaign began on 11 March, involving over the next five weeks the X-raying of 87 per cent of the city’s population in order to identify carriers of TB. ‘Wonderful new treatments have greatly improved the outlook for patients with tuberculosis,’ declared the Medical Officer of Health in an advance letter to all households, adding reassuringly that ‘there will be no undressing, and all results will be entirely confidential’. Poverty as well as disease existed in all sorts of pre-gentrified places. Later in March, the then unpublished writer John Fowles went with his wife-to-be Elizabeth to Kentish Town and Camden Town ‘to scout round for old furniture’ for their flat in Hampstead. ‘Peeling, pitted, endlessly dirty houses; children playing in the streets,’ he recorded. ‘The people all poor, or flashy; junk-shops, cheap grocers. E remarked that when she asked for half a pound of cheese they cut it and cut it again till it weighed exactly what she wanted; not as here, where nobody minds paying for a two-ounce miscalculation.’1
A month later, the Wednesday after Easter, the 22-year-old Brian Epstein – a student at RADA and living alone – was not so far away, in Finchley Road, when he found himself being arrested for ‘persistent importuning’ earlier in the evening in the public lavatory at Swiss Cottage tube station. ‘The damage, the lying criminal methods of the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me, leaves me cold, stunned and finished,’ he wrote immediately afterwards. Next morning, however, on the advice of a detective, he pleaded guilty at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court and was fined rather than being imprisoned.
For Manchester United’s ‘Busby Babes’ it was the cruellest of springs: that same Thursday they went out of the European Cup, after a pulsating 2–2 draw against Real Madrid in front of a raucous, bellowing Old Trafford crowd, prompting the Manchester Guardian’s ‘An Old International’ (Don Davies) to reflect that ‘Bedlam after this will hold no terrors.’ Nine days later, on 4 May, the unfairest, most unreconstructed of Cup Finals saw United lose their goalkeeper Ray Wood to a cynical assault by Aston Villa’s Peter McParland (‘one of those things that can happen in football’, the TV commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme reassured the nation), play most of the match with effectively ten men and eventually go down 2–1, with a brace for McParland. For one spectator, Harold Macmillan, ‘the Cup-Tie Final’ was the end of ‘a particularly tiresome week’, but 11 days later he welcomed petrol coming off the ration after five post-Suez months. Hull University’s librarian could muster at best only two springtime cheers. ‘This institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology,’ Philip Larkin wrote to a friend near the end of May. ‘The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926.’2
‘1926’ indeed, for it was a spring of industrial troubles. ‘When it’s a question of capital and labour there’s no such thing as impartiality’ was the reaction of the ‘bell-ringer’ Johnny McLoughlin to the news in late February that the Minister of Labour, Iain Macleod, was appointing a court of inquiry under Lord Cameron to investigate the dispute at the Ford-owned Briggs plant in Dagenham. McLoughlin was talking to The Economist’s ‘special correspondent’, who also listened to some of the men as they had a smoke outside the factory gates. ‘I reckon an inquiry’s what we want,’ said one. ‘What this plant needs is a dose of salts, and not just for the management either.’ Some six weeks later, Cameron came down almost wholly on the side of management: it had been justified in not reinstating McLoughlin, who was characterised as ‘glib, quick-witted and evasive’, with ‘a considerable capacity’ for ‘agitation and propaganda’. More generally, the shop stewards at Briggs were described as a Communist-influenced
‘private union within a union enjoying immediate and continuous contact with the men in the shop, answerable to no superiors and in no way officially or constitutionally linked with the union hierarchy’. Even so, if those were the headline findings – summed up by The Times’s ensuing castigation of the Briggs shop stewards as ‘a cancer on the body of trade unionism’ – Cameron did also note ‘a certain insensitivity in the mental attitude of the Company towards those whom they employ’ and ‘a desire to impose, rather than agree by negotiation’. The episode as a whole left at least one lasting legacy: McLoughlin was reputedly the ultimate inspiration for Fred Kite, the character so memorably played two years later by Peter Sellers in I’m All Right, Jack.3
That satirical film would accurately reflect the increasing national focus on the unions and labour relations, with the spring of 1957 seeing a palpable ratcheting-up. ‘The shipbuilding strike started,’ recorded Marian Raynham in Surbiton on 16 March. ‘And there are 900 million pounds of orders at stake. I think it is wicked.’ Anthony Heap agreed, and on the 20th, with the shipbuilders out and a national engineering strike imminent, he reflected that ‘Union bosses have got too big for their boots. Meanwhile the more intelligent and industrious Germans and Japanese will continue to capture our world markets by competing with manufactured goods at much keener prices – and good luck to them!’ At about the same time, Malcolm Muggeridge discussed the ‘strike situation’ with the radical journalist Claud Cockburn: ‘Thinks, as I do, that we may now really be for it – strikes becoming general strike, possibly civil war. On the other hand, perhaps not. Anyway, sooner or later, crack-up inevitable.’
To gauge the mood among the strikers themselves, the journalist John Gale went to the Cammell Laird shipyard at Birkenhead, where ‘a slim man with floppy brown hair, faint sidewhiskers and big eyes’ told him: ‘Myself, I’m dead against the strike. Honestly, 75 per cent don’t want it, but they are behind the unions . . . A lie-in for two days is all right but I’ll be definitely relieved when the strike is over. I don’t like painting the house. I haven’t got to wheeling the pram yet. My wife isn’t very pleased. All the women blame the top union men.’
As for government, Macmillan talked a tough game to himself, expressing determination not to repeat the ‘industrial appeasement’ of ‘the Churchill–Monckton regime’. But in practice, as events unfolded, he let Macleod have his head, and that highly capable minister was unwilling to fight a battle he was far from sure he could win, not least with sterling fragile and public opinion overall marginally more sympathetic to the strikers than the employers. ‘The only possibility is some form of arbitration’ had been his view from the outset, and over these weeks he applied considerable pressure on the employers, to ensure that by early April (with over six million working days already lost) it was possible to appoint a court of inquiry, to be chaired by Professor Daniel Jack. ‘The news that the grave shipbuilding and engineering strikes had been called off caused an enormous wave of public relief here,’ the writer Mollie Panter-Downes told her New Yorker readers on the 4th, adding however that ‘most people seem to feel cautiously that the situation is not as yet anything better than a truce in the bitter industrial battle – a battle of which the country as a whole is heartily weary and critical’. Four weeks later, Jack gave the unions more or less what they wanted, leaving the employers (above all the Engineering Employers’ Federation) bitterly frustrated and the government looking rather impotent. But as Macleod had already explained to Macmillan while awaiting the Jack findings, ‘there is no short cut to the problem of making men get on better with each other and there is little we can do, either by government exhortation or by legislation’.4
Another vexed area, ripe for re-evaluation, was defence. On 4 April the Evening Standard covered the continuing trial at the Old Bailey of Dr John Bodkin Adams, the Eastbourne doctor accused (but eventually acquitted) of hastening rich old ladies on their way, and slipped in an item about the retirement of a stockbroker called Herbert Ballard, known for many years on the Stock Exchange as ‘the Mayor of Tooting’ even though he had never lived in Tooting and never been a mayor. The main story, though, made a particularly direct appeal to the nation’s youth: ‘Call-Up Planned To End By 1961’. The phasing out of National Service was part of Defence: Outline of Future Policy, a White Paper presented by Duncan Sandys, son-in-law of Winston Churchill and nicely evoked by Ferdinand Mount as ‘that formidable slab of old red sandstone’. Other key elements included a general reduction in overseas forces, in the explicit context of Britain’s reduced economic means, and a pivotal role for the nuclear deterrent, with the Standard quoting Sandys: ‘Development of the hydrogen bomb and of rocket weapons with nuclear warheads has fundamentally altered the whole basis of military planning.’ The White Paper was a cardinal document, and the historian Jim Tomlinson has helpfully elucidated the driving political-cum-economic motives: not only would a nuclear strategy ‘free trained manpower for the civilian sector’ but it would ‘reduce the claims of conventional weapons development and production on economic resources which could better be used to raise the standard of living’. In short, ‘nukes would replace guns to allow more resources for butter’.
For the British aircraft industry this was a major hit, leading to the cancellation of many projects and much downsizing, while more broadly the White Paper fitted into a post-Suez narrative of national decline. ‘England is now too olde to have reason to be merrie’ was the motion put before the Cambridge Union a month later, though the undergraduates voted defiantly against, 96 to 68. Not long afterwards, Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, asked Sir Oliver Franks, distinguished civil servant and now chairman of Lloyds Bank, whether he was gloomy about the future. ‘I think the period 1945 to 1975 may be like 1815 to 1845,’ Franks replied.
We have a good many old men at the top living in the past. Macmillan tells how he was in Darlington in 1931 at the time of mass unemployment, and he was horrified by what he saw. There is a Labour leader [presumably Frank Cousins of the Transport and General Workers’ Union], too, who says bitter things to the TUC because for ten years his father was out of employment, and tramped up and down the Great North Road, looking for a job. They think more about this than of the last war. Nothing much will happen until a new generation takes over; we need younger men who are not obsessed with the past, men who are thinking over where they want to go.5
Six days after the Sandys White Paper saw a notable opening night. It was a sell-out, so when (recalled Colin Clark, Alan’s younger brother and PA to the star) Princess Margaret arrived late demanding the best seats in the house, ‘some unfortunate couple had to be kicked out’. During the interval, ‘a large red-headed actress’ sat naked on the stage ‘draped in a Union Jack, with a trident and a helmet, in the pose of Britannia on a penny coin’ – of course ‘not allowed to move a muscle, otherwise the theatre would be shut down’ (i.e. by the Lord Chamberlain). Inevitably, Anthony Heap was there:
Those of us who went to the Royal Court tonight to scoff at John Osborne’s successor to the excruciatingly boring and ridiculously over-rated ‘Look Back in Anger’ had, perforce, to rapidly revise our opinion of this controversial young actor-playwright and stay to bray as ‘The Entertainer’, with no less distinguished a play jockey than Sir Laurence Olivier up, romped home an easy winner . . . It has wit, irony, humour and pathos in plenty and, despite Tony Richardson’s much too slow production, the acting to match. Olivier’s vital virtuoso performance as the flashy, facetious, irrepressible and irresponsible music hall comic dazzles and delights at every turn.
‘I shall, in sooth,’ he concluded, ‘be very surprised if “The Entertainer” doesn’t prove to be the play of the year, and Olivier’s the performance.’
The audience agreed, but most of the critics were less wholeheartedly enthusiastic, with few bringing out the state-of-the-nation character of the play, above all the clapped-out music-hall comedian Archie Rice as symbol of the declining power that Suez had so star
kly revealed. The partial exceptions were Kenneth Tynan and John Wain: the former, in the Observer, acclaimed Osborne’s ambition (‘the big and brilliant notion of putting the whole of contemporary England on to one and the same stage’); the latter, in a review on the Third Programme, emphasised the play’s theme of surrender to ‘the transatlantic invasion’, quoted Archie’s vaudevillian father looking back on the great Edwardian days (‘We were English – and we spoke English’), and noted that ‘crudely daubed’ on the ‘hideous backcloth showing three blousy nudes’, against which Archie performed, was ‘not, as it used to be, the Eiffel Tower and the Seine but New York harbour’. Of course, The Entertainer was also notable because of Olivier, the greatest living English actor, now so publicly embracing the theatrical new wave – an astonishing moment. Yet for Olivier himself it was au fond a marriage of convenience. Within two days of the opening he was demanding cuts to ‘all that anti-Queen shit’, and after Richardson demurred he successfully insisted, as part of his contract for the West End transfer, that the most offensive line (‘the gloved hand waving at you from the golden coach’) be taken out, along with some others. ‘They didn’t make that much difference to the play,’ Richardson would reflect, ‘but Larry felt he’d bravely defended the Queen.’6