Modernity Britain Read online

  Elsewhere, Florence Turtle went to the Ambassadors to see The Mousetrap (almost six years in) and recorded that ‘it was a Comedy Thriller, somewhat tripey but quite entertaining’; Anthony Heap ‘walked down to Drury Lane Theatre and back in early evening to make enquiries about First Night seats for “My Fair Lady” seven months hence’, discovering that ‘booking for the first year commences next Tuesday!’; and the third series of Hancock’s Half Hour on the small screen began at the end of September. ‘I can’t remember when I laughed so much at a comedy show on television,’ declared a viewer. One cultural phenomenon largely passing under the radar was that of the cartoon character Andy Capp getting into his work-shy, beer-swilling, cigarette-dangling groove. Created by a Hartlepool man, Reg Smythe, he had first appeared in August in northern editions of the Daily Mirror and would soon go national, becoming an emblematic, wholly unreconstructed working-class figure. ‘Look at it this way, honey,’ Andy says in one of the early strips, leaning nonchalantly against the wall as his wife Florrie sits battered on the floor, ‘I’m a man of few pleasures and one of them ’appens to be knockin’ yer about!’16

  ‘Forward with the People’ was the slogan on the Mirror’s masthead, and on Thursday, 3 October the people’s party, gathered on the south coast, experienced a day of high drama. Some six months after Muggeridge had noted Gaitskell telling him that the Labour Party was ‘hopelessly split’ over the H-bomb issue and that it was ‘impossible to have sensible or coherent policy’, and some five months after a British nuclear test in the Pacific, this was the day of decision – played out, recorded Panter-Downes with her novelist’s eye, ‘on the boarded-over ice rink of Brighton’s Sports Stadium in a haze of cigarette smoke and Asian flu heated to the combustion point by strong television lights’. The pivotal figure was Aneurin Bevan: the rebel of 1951, by now shadow Foreign Secretary and in increasingly visible, if ultimately uneasy, partnership with Gaitskell. ‘Already every inch a statesman in his dark suit, with his distinguished silvery thatch of hair,’ noted Panter-Downes, ‘he sat on the platform frowning over horn-rimmed spectacles at the Times, as though lifted intact from the bow window of a St James’s Street club.’ The quondam unilateralist also spoke, with that compelling oratory which few if any politicians of the era came close to matching:

  If you carry this [unilateralist] resolution and follow out all its implications and do not run away from it you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber. Able to preach sermons, of course; he could make good sermons. But action of that sort is not necessarily the way in which you can take away the menace of this bomb from the world.

  A minute or two later, being heckled from the floor, he was provoked into dismissing unilateralism as ‘an emotional spasm’ – at which words, reported James Cameron next day in the News Chronicle, ‘something like an emotional spasm did indeed go through that stark, crowded arena’. For Bevan’s disciple and future biographer Michael Foot, and for others on the Labour left, it was a moment of deepest betrayal. Yet, Foot would insist in later years, the widely bruited idea that Bevan had ‘entered into a cynical compact’ – in other words, that his speech was the price of becoming Foreign Secretary in a future Labour government – ‘was not merely deeply repugnant to his nature, but is utterly confounded by any study of the facts’.

  At the conference itself, the unilateralist motion was crushingly defeated, with the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Frank Cousins, unable to persuade his block-voting delegation to support it. Bevan’s stance was no doubt electorally necessary, but arguably this was the fateful post-1945 moment when Labour and radical sentiment as a whole started to become increasingly detached from each other. ‘People like himself had lost interest in the Party after Nye’s Brighton speech,’ Crossman (in 1961) would record the playwright Wolf Mankowitz telling him. ‘That was the turning point. Since then they couldn’t care less about the Parliamentary leadership or see any great distinction, indeed, between Gaitskell, Wilson and Crossman intriguing against each other.’17

  In any case, another event – also science-related – quickly stole Bevan’s thunder. ‘Russians first to launch satellite,’ noted Judy Haines on Friday the 4th, in an increasingly rare mention of current affairs. ‘It is circling the earth at a fast rate and emitting signals.’ This was Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite and, amidst considerable popular enthusiasm, tracked from Britain by the new Jodrell Bank observatory. As early as the 5th the FT placed a dot by the globe on its normally staid front-page news summary; that same day Frances Partridge on behalf of ‘Bloomsbury’ welcomed the satellite as a news story for once ‘something purely interesting and pleasant’; and Doris Lessing was one of many staying up all night hoping ‘to catch a glimpse of it bowling past overhead’. On the 7th the Evening Standard’s headline was ‘Thousands See The Blip’, which had passed over London that morning at just after 7.07 a.m., and by the 11th the FT’s dot had transmuted into a satellite-like shape.

  What were Sputnik’s implications? ‘The satellite is not an isolated breakthrough on a narrow front,’ claimed the New Statesman. ‘It merely crowns the growing pyramid of evidence that over a wide sector of scientific knowledge the Russians are advancing further and faster than the West.’ Bevan agreed, asserting in Tribune that the satellite was evidence of Russia’s ‘technically dynamic society’. For Churchill ‘the disconcerting thing’, as he told his wife, was not ‘the satellite itself’ but ‘the proof of the forwardness of Soviet Sciences compared to the Americans’. Gallup duly sounded public opinion: 36 per cent felt an increased respect for the Russians, 27 per cent could not understand why the Americans had been beaten to it, and only 14 per cent said that Sputnik had made them more frightened of Russia. Inevitably, the fascination eventually abated. ‘As the week progressed and the satellite continued, after a panicky interval of doubt and speculation, to transmit its signals, the BBC allowed a note of boredom to creep into its bulletins,’ Bernard Hollowood was recording in Punch by the 23rd. ‘The satellite became “it”. “Well,” the announcer began, “it’s still up there and going strong.” The thing was proving rather a disappointment: it hadn’t burned itself out, it hadn’t landed on Washington, it wasn’t quite playing the game. It was threatening to clash with the royal visit to Canada.’18

  Six days into Sputnik’s flight – and seven months after the announcement by the Paymaster-General, Reginald Maudling, of the tripling of the civil nuclear power programme – it was discovered that one of the nuclear reactors at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) was on fire. That was early on Thursday the 10th. Over the next two days, as makeshift hoses delivered water into the reactor, enormous bravery was displayed, above all by the deputy works manager Tom Tuohy. ‘I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out,’ he recalled. ‘I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully, but if you’re staring straight up the core of a shut-down reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.’ Or, as he also put it, ‘I’m glad I was there, but I’d rather not do it again.’ From the start the official line was to downplay the seriousness of the situation and its potential dangers: the BBC’s six o’clock radio news bulletin on the 11th stressed that no public hazard was being caused because the wind was blowing from the east and carrying radioactivity out to sea, while next day the ban on the sale of locally produced milk covered only 14 square miles. Nevertheless, reflected Nella Last that Saturday after reading about the fire, ‘I often have wondered about “fall” of atomic tainted dust from Windscale, or Calder’; she called the prospect of it being blown down the coast to Barrow ‘not a happy thought’.

  Monday saw the ban being significantly extended – to 200 square miles, thereby including a further 500 farms – but the Atomic Energy Authority was adamant that ‘people in the new area need have no apprehension about milk they have already drunk’. As for the undrunk milk, thousands of gallons were now being tipped into the sea, but it was t
oo late to prevent what Panter-Downes soon afterwards described as ‘a wave of national disquiet’ not only about the ‘alarming leak of radioactive iodine’ into west Cumberland’s milk supplies but, more generally, about ‘what went wrong, why the Atomic Energy Authority was so slow in saying that anything had gone wrong, why the safety measures were fumbled – and slow off the mark, too’. This was probably an accurate assessment, to judge by Nella Last’s chat on the 17th with her friend Mrs Higham. ‘Like myself she has had “qualms” about these big atomic works,’ Last noted, adding they were both agreed that ‘there’s bound to be downright ignorance of effects & results, with something so utterly new’. In fact the government had already commissioned an inquiry by the AEA’s Sir William Penney, but on its completion later in the month Macmillan – deeply concerned not to endanger Anglo-American nuclear collaboration – was willing to release only a relatively anodyne version. ‘On the whole, reassuring,’ was the News Chronicle’s response to the ensuing White Paper on the accident, though in regard to Britain’s ambitious atomic energy programme, the paper highlighted the ‘radiation risks about which we still know far too little’, plausibly asserting that ‘it is this mystery, this sense of vague and ill-understood menace, which worries the public’.

  And the locals? ‘As an inhabitant of West Cumberland, the accident at Windscale has naturally been an unpleasant shock,’ a woman wrote to a local paper in the almost immediate aftermath. ‘The fact, however, that heightens the shock is that we were given no warning until the situation was under control. Why not? Suppose the situation had “run away”? What then? Surely people have a right to be given enough warning either to move their children out of the vicinity, or, at least, to keep them indoors if any severe accident is expected.’ Accordingly, ‘until we can rely on a more immediate warning of irradiation or even a threatened explosion, we shall remain dissatisfied and anxious’. Even so, the most authoritative historian of the episode, Lorna Arnold, reckons that ‘Cumberland remained remarkably calm’, and she points to the fact that Windscale, since the start of its construction ten years earlier, ‘had brought employment and considerable prosperity to a severely depressed area’.

  Jenny Crowther (later Uglow) was at school next to the plant and lived three miles up the coast at St Bees. ‘People were told not to eat anything from their allotments,’ she remembers. ‘But the allotments were their pride and joy, and as the word “fallout” was used they assumed the ban only applied to vegetables above ground, as if rain had fallen on them, not radiation. They just ate the carrots and beetroot and potatoes without giving it a thought.’19

  ‘I have discovered another August pleasure in London, and that is to walk in the evening light around the new council estates,’ John Betjeman announced in his Spectator column a few weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech.

  Some of the latest are magnificent, and when one compares their openness, lightness, grass and trees, and carefully related changes of scale from tall blocks to small blocks, with the prison-like courts of artisans’ dwellings of earlier ages, one realises that some things are better than they were. ‘The awful equality of it all is frightening,’ a friend said to me. And that is true. If you are lucky enough to have one of these new workers’ flats, there is not much chance of showing individuality . . . But there are compensations. There are light and air, and the shrieks of children, instead of echoing against brick walls, are dispersed in open space.

  Betjeman singled out for praise Brixton’s Loughborough estate (‘tall concrete and glass blocks turn out to be two-storey houses built on top of one another’), the Cremorne estate near World’s End (‘provides a quiet walk among grass and houses which are of pleasant texture and to human scale’) and in particular the vast Churchill Gardens estate by the river. ‘It is hygienic, egalitarian and frightening, but it has a beauty and can never deteriorate into the squalor of the parts of Pimlico it has replaced,’ he declared. ‘Maybe it has no place for someone like me, but it gives one hope for modern architecture.’

  Increasingly, though, Betjeman was in embattled mode about the forces of modernity. In October, soon after he had lamented how ‘the majority of building projects today in Britain are ones of vast bulk’ (as typified by the City of London’s Bucklersbury House, ‘that monster now dwarfing everything between the Monument and St Paul’s’), he was campaigning vigorously to save John Nash’s Regent’s Park terraces from the wrecking ball. And in December, responding to an MP who wanted to see Tower Bridge demolished, he argued in his column that ‘the reason why people dislike the word “planning” and those connected with it is not because they object to new towns or to flowering cherries and civic centres, but because in their minds planning is associated with destruction’. ‘Bombing we can take,’ he went on. ‘It is part of the fortunes of war. Fire may be carelessness. But the deliberate pulling down of a familiar street or building with associations, the felling of timber in a village and the destruction of old cottages is really playing about with part of ourselves. They are roots and home to somebody.’ He ended with a caustic personal observation: ‘I have always noticed that progressive architects and planners and, no doubt, the chief shareholders in those sinister development trusts which are buying up London and ruining it with oblong-ended packing cases, live in old houses and go to a good deal of trouble to protect their views.’20

  Yet for the planners themselves – but not the architects or developers – the unpalatable truth in 1957 was that their high tide had already passed. ‘One of the expressions of bewilderment that is most commonly heard in the profession,’ the once highly influential town planner Thomas Sharp told his peers that spring, ‘is that to most people planning has now become just a colossal bore and that to many others it is something actually to dislike with an active hostility.’ He added, not implausibly, that ‘what is most disliked about us, I think, is that control which we exercise over other people’s activities with so little obvious and acceptable result’. Peter Self of the Town and Country Planning Association tended to agree: ‘Town planning questions . . . seldom figure in party manifestos or wireless debates, and they arouse hardly any political controversy – more as a result of indifference than agreement. Planning controls are coming to be viewed as necessary evils, rather than as instruments for forging lasting benefits. A dead hand grips the spirit of planning.’

  In late July the Institute of Contemporary Arts staged a highly charged meeting on the subject of ‘planning controls’ in London. Among architects speaking, Lionel Brett insisted that the case for control was ultimately to prevent ‘the spivs’ (i.e. presumably the developers) from wrecking the environment; the ultra-modernist Peter Smithson was for complete abolition of aesthetic controls; and the equally modernist Ernö Goldfinger concurred. For the planners, Hertfordshire’s County Planning Officer E. H. Doubleday spoke in unashamedly paternalistic vein about the value of planning control for ‘arrogant young architects’. In a subsequent Third Programme talk, Brett astutely identified how on the part of younger architects there existed an increasing feeling

  that the post-war planners are out of touch with the real world of 1957, that our New Towns, neighbourhood centres, shopping precincts, national parks, etc, are not what is wanted and lack some essential thing that our old towns and neglected counties had, presumably spontaneity, so that nobody would ever want to paint a picture in Harlow or Bracknell . . . planners waste their time controlling elevations in Watford and Redhill when they should be concentrating their minds on Liverpool and Glasgow.

  1960s-style urbanism, in short, was where the exciting future action lay, not 1940s-style planned dispersion. Brett added that, at the recent ICA meeting, ‘the people on the platform in favour of planning control wore suits and ties and the people against it wore open shirts or turtle-necked jerseys’.21

  In Liverpool itself, as in other major cities, the key players by this time were neither planners nor architects, nor yet developers or construction companies, but instead loca
l politicians. ‘It is already apparent that the eleven-storey blocks now going up are really insignificant when considered against their backgrounds and we are investigating very closely the possibility of going much higher,’ stated Alderman David Nickson, Labour chairman of the Housing Committee, in early September, in the context of tower blocks rising on Everton Heights. ‘This form of development is obviously the only answer to sprawl.’ Later in the month he continued to insist that ‘the Housing Committee take the view that there is no reason why the 20-storey mark should not be passed’, adding that ‘we regard this as important a step in the construction of domestic dwellings as was the breaking of the sound barrier in the world of aeronautics’. Soon afterwards the Liverpool Echo’s Municipal Correspondent wrote suitably portentously of time and the city:

  Slowly but surely the face of Liverpool is changing and its terraced skyline, so familiar to travellers by sea arriving in or leaving the Mersey, is gradually taking on new features. Already Everton Brow is crowned with a mammoth block of flats [i.e. the ten-storey Cresswell Mount, opened in 1956], the symbol of the new Liverpool, and just below it, on the sweeping seaward slope, new twin blocks [i.e. The Braddocks], with the skeleton fingers of mammoth cranes reaching for the sky in close attendance, are fitting themselves into the landscape.