The Democratic Bombshell
Many of us find our innermost fears or hopes take arms while we sleep, ready to strike at the moment of wakening. Churchill recorded that, on the morning of 26 July 1945, he woke up with ‘a sharp stab of almost physical pain’ to find himself sure that he and the Conservatives had just lost the general election. There was a long delay for the votes to be brought back from battlefields around the world. Few people thought the war leader could lose power. Most Labour leaders assumed he would be returned. So did the apparently well-informed City experts, the in-touch trade union bosses, the self-certain press, the diplomatic observers passing back the latest intelligence to Washington and Moscow. Churchill was at the very peak of his personal triumph, outshining the King and Royal Family when he appeared on the famous balcony to wave. Never in British history has military success been so personally associated with a civilian leader – not the two great Pitts, not Disraeli at his peak, not David Lloyd George, could rival Churchill’s radio age charisma. True, 1945 had been a most unusual election. The Parliament it ended had begun in the middle of the thirties – nine years, six months and twenty days earlier, making it the longest UK Parliament ever, a Parliament of old men unused to raw party conflict. Churchill would have liked it to go on longer, at least until Japan was defeated. Never quite a party man, he had a coalition cast of mind. It had been Labour which insisted on the election. Now, no one knew what was coming: the scattered and disrupted nature of the electorate meant accurate polling was impossible. The new electoral roll was inaccurate, too, having been based on ration book records. Among those who found they had no vote because of clerical errors was the Prime Minister himself.
For those with ears to hear, there were intimations of what was about to happen. During the war a high-minded religious socialism had become fashionable at home. As the carnage ground on overseas, an almost Utopian determination to build a more Christian country took root. As early as 1940 the great wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, had called for ‘extreme inequalities of wealth to be abolished’. Going rather further, his Council of Clergy and Ministers for Common Ownership declared private ownership of industry ‘contrary to Divine Justice’. In the forces compulsory discussions about Britain after the war had been led by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, ABCA, organized by a left-leaning educationalist called W. E. Williams. Conservative-minded officers complained about the tone of the pamphlets sent round the army and that Williams had ‘smothered the troops in seditious literature’. One general burned 10,000 of the ‘wretched pamphlets’ in front of his men and warned that they were ‘rank treason’.1 To this day many Conservatives believe that socialist propaganda foisted on the troops was to blame for their defeat in 1945. In fact, the numbers do not add up; the minimum voting age was 21, which cut out many of the more malleable troops and in any case, there were fewer than two million service votes cast in a total electorate of 33 million.
The change was happening among civilians. A strong sense that it was time for a fresh beginning had been reflected in a series of by-election defeats of Tory candidates when vacancies were caused in the Commons by the deaths of sitting members. (Twenty-two MPs were killed fighting, all but one of them Conservatives.) At Maldon in Essex, the left-wing journalist Tom Driberg had won, standing as an independent. By 1943 candidates for the piously socialist Common Wealth movement, founded by our English traveller J. B. Priestley and by Sir Richard Acland, were winning upset victories up and down England. In April of that year the Battle of Britain pilot John Loveseed won a Cheshire seat; Lt Hugh Lawson won Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales. Most sensationally of all, in April 1945 in Tory Chelmsford, Wing Commander Ernest Millington, a pre-war pacifist and socialist who had then joined the RAF and turned his attention to bombing Germany, defeated the Conservative candidate. Millington, standing for Common Wealth and supported by local vicars, had fought a remarkably aggressive campaign whose tone can be summarized by a banner he put up in the middle of the market town which read, ‘This is a Fight between Christ and Churchill.’ By 1945, there was a whiff of Oliver Cromwell in the air.
The Labour conference which kick-started the election campaign one hot afternoon in Blackpool is still remembered for the youth of the delegates. Denis Healey was there, in battledress and beret, fresh from the battlefront in Italy, preaching red-hot socialist revolution. Across Europe the upper classes were ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’ he told the cheering hall. Roy Jenkins, who had helped crack the German codes at Bletchley Park, was there too, a slim and dapper soldier. There was even a socialist Rear Admiral. Labour’s manifesto, well written and snappily designed, would be distributed to nearly two million people, backed by powerful posters, 12 million leaflets and huge numbers of party volunteers. Its most popular passages could hardly have come as a shock. They relied on the blueprint for a fairer, more planned country which had been worked out by the coalition government before the war ended. Labour had the support of only a minority of the national press. Apart from the Daily Mirror and its in-house Daily Herald, the big-circulation papers were all pro-Tory and the two upmarket leftish newspapers, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle, both backed the lost-cause Liberals. Different parts of the country found very different audiences for Labour’s meetings. Attlee was rushing about in his little Standard car, rapping out around eight speeches of a terse twenty minutes apiece every day. He thought his reception was excellent. In some towns the election seemed quiet. In others, huge and attentive crowds turned up to listen and argue back. In Birmingham Roy Jenkins recalled ‘seas of faces looking up in the twilight, a mixture of exhaustion, hope, some kind of doubt. A sea of tired faces looking up in hope, that’s the best phrase I can make of it.’2
Churchill meanwhile was fighting one of the bad campaigns of his life. His theme was that Labour was a sinister socialist conspiracy. In a badly misjudged radio broadcast kicking off his campaign, he let his florid wartime language loose and struck entirely the wrong note. No socialist system, he said, could be established without some form of political police, a British Gestapo. Instead he offered a vision of bucolic good cheer which would have seemed dated in the aftermath of the Boer War: ‘Let us make sure that the cottage home to which the warrior will return is blessed with modest but solid prosperity, well-fenced and guarded against misfortune . . .’ Attlee answered him with gentle irony. The Gestapo suggestion was grossly offensive but the Labour leader disarmingly replied that it was no doubt Churchill’s way of demonstrating the gulf between his qualities as a great war leader and those of a mere party leader, and that the attack had probably been devised by the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. It was in fact all Churchill’s own work. His wife Clemmie had strongly warned him against it and his party’s chief whip had commented that ‘it is not my idea of how to win an election’. A second line of Tory attack was that Attlee was the mere frontman for extremists. The Labour chairman Harold Laski was portrayed by Conservative candidates as hell-bent on revolution. Laski did use wild language and was on the left of the party, though his father campaigned for Churchill and had recently suggested that a public fund be raised to show Churchill the nation’s gratitude. (The Prime Minister said a better monument for him would be a public park for the children of London on the south bank of the Thames ‘where they suffered so grimly from the Hun’.3 This was never followed up.)
Churchill had based himself in Claridge’s Hotel in London and used a private train and a cavalcade of cars to make his speeches around the country. Mostly he won an enthusiastic enough reception, though he was dumbfounded to find himself booed by a large section of the crowd in his final rally at Walthamstow. This was not quite the respectful British nation of myth. Despite these warning signs, the brutal rejection of Churchill for Attlee caused amazement around the world. Before the election result was declared the two men had been together at Potsdam in Germany negotiating the future of post-war Europe with Joseph Stalin and President Harry Truman. Where would Poland’s borders be? How hard should defeated Germany be squeezed? Whose was Greece? Returning to London for the results, Churchill had not even bothered to say goodbye to the Soviet dictator or Washington’s new man. He did not properly pack. He would be back.
Attlee was by then somewhat more optimistic. He thought it would be close. About that, at least, he was wrong. In 1935 the Conservatives had won 585 seats. In 1945 they won just 213. Labour won more votes that the Tories for the first time ever, giving them 393 seats and a majority of 146. When Attlee returned to Potsdam alone without Churchill, Stalin’s right-hand man, Molotov, was incredulous. He suspiciously cross-questioned the Labour leader about why he had not known the result in advance. Such democratic sloppiness would not have been tolerated further east. Churchill, brooding at home, found it a terrible personal shock. When Clemmie tried to cheer him up with the thought that it might be a blessing in disguise he grunted that, just at the moment, it seemed quite effectively disguised. Yet he quickly spirited a silver lining out from the cloud. The years ahead would be a terrible trial to the British people, Churchill believed. Might not Labour be better left to cope with the disappointments to come? At last, discovering the generosity of spirit that had gone absent without leave during his election campaigning, the old man rebuked one of his aides: ‘This is democracy. This is what we have been fighting for.’
What had Labour been fighting for? The party’s new MPs arriving in London by train, car and bus were a mixed bunch. Most were inexperienced in the ways of Parliament, as they would soon show by giving a raucous rendition of the Red Flag in the temporary chamber – the historic one having been demolished by the Luftwaffe. There were Fabian intellectuals, wartime rebels, trade unionists and civil servants such as the podgy, moustachioed Harold Wilson, soldiers and teachers, cautious moderates and – so the Communist Party believed – at least nine secret communist plants. All of them had stood on a manifesto written by Herbert Morrison and a young idealist called Michael Young who would go on to found the Consumers’ Association. It called for the establishment of ‘the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited’. It contained a long list of ideas but it was as realistic as (in private) Churchill had been about the difficulties ahead: ‘The problems and pressures of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years.’ In the years ahead this fighting bulldog tone would quickly grate.
Some of the new Labour MPs felt they had been elected to overturn the class basis of the country, others that they simply had a difficult list of domestic reforms to get through. As they introduced themselves to one another for the first time, gossiping and exchanging campaign stories, a sizeable minority also believed they had better get rid of the conventional-sounding Attlee and elect a proper leader while there was time. Herbert Morrison, a popular minister who had organized London’s defence against the Blitz, had warned Attlee that he would stand against him in a party contest. The plot gathered force in the corridors and urinals of Westminster Central Hall. At the same time, Attlee, Morrison, the burly ex-trade union leader Ernie Bevin and the party secretary met at Transport House, the party headquarters a few hundred yards away. As Morrison nipped out to make a call to another supporter, Bevin leaned across to Attlee and growlingly gave him the best advice of his life: ‘Clem, you go to the Palace straight away.’ Clem did. He took tea with his wife Vi and family at Paddington, hopped into their little car and was driven to Buckingham Palace where the King, a staunch conservative taken aback by the turn of events, duly handed him control of the British Empire. Morrison and the other Labour plotters left half a mile to the east had underestimated Attlee. Many people had. He would go on to become one of the two genuinely nation-changing prime ministers of modern British history.
Hiroshima and Keynes: the Limits of Wit
The Labour government of 1945–50 is remembered today as among the greatest British administrations ever. Some of the glory is justified. As we will see, it changed the health and welfare structure of the country, nationalized sections of the economy and managed to survive a series of terrible external shocks. But if its aim was to create a British socialist commonwealth with different values and different people in charge – to make a social revolution – then Labour failed. No significant changes to the British class system came about as a result of the work of the Attlee government. Nor was there any loosening of the ties to Washington, ardently desired by many on the left who thought Labour could deal better with Moscow on the dubious principle that ‘left can speak to left’. Labour hoped to keep Britain free and independent, going her own way between the Great Capitalism on the other side of the Atlantic and the Great Communism now in possession of half Europe. Yet under Attlee Britain became dependent on the United States. She could not match America’s overwhelming military power around the world, symbolized by an atomic bomb that Britain had helped create but was not allowed to share. The weakness of Britain’s dying imperium meant her world role would have to shrink dramatically. Attlee understood this much faster than most of his colleagues.
Britain had arrived blinking into a new world still cloaked in the archaic nineteenth-century grandeur of imperialism. The Americans were busy creating their own commercial empire, moving into markets vacated by defeated or exhausted rivals. The Soviet Union was equally busy extending its political empire, funding local dictators and occasionally lurching towards more dramatic confrontation. These two new empires were very different. America’s empire came informally dressed talking about freedom and equality. Outside its Asian wars and its support for vicious South American regimes these words did not ring hollow – but those are large geographical exceptions. Moscow, meanwhile, was busy repressing and imprisoning in the name of History and the working class, one eye always on the even more bloodthirsty tyranny of Mao’s China challenging it for Third World leadership. Against these new empires, the moth-eaten pretensions of a mild-mannered king-emperor, a few battleships and a modest number of colonial governors in baggy shorts barely seemed relevant.
Britain’s dilemma from 1945 until today has been easy to state, impossible to resolve. How do you maintain independence and dignity when you are a junior partner, locked into defence systems, intelligence gathering and treaties with the world’s great military giant? At times Britain has had real influence in Washington, above all in the talks with the Labour government which produced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, and in the first Gulf war when Margaret Thatcher urged George Bush senior not to wobble. At other times her dependence has been embarrassing, in big ways such as the Suez fiasco; and small ways, such as the American refusal to share intelligence assessments in Iraq, even when the raw intelligence was gathered originally by British agents and passed on. Yet when one country, the United States, is both leader of a large alliance of other countries, and has strong national interests which may conflict with those of her allies, there is bound to be friction. Periodic bouts of anti-Americanism inside the Foreign Office and in Whitehall generally have been the result. Anti-American feeling has been the Establishment’s secret vice. In public, successive foreign secretaries and mandarins spoke reassuringly of the British ‘punching above our weight’ and the vital importance of the Churchill-hallowed ‘special relationship’. In practice this meant sharing intelligence with the Pentagon and CIA, the intertwining of nuclear strategy, large US bases on British soil, the leasing of British bases to America, and a posture towards American presidents that is nearer that of salaried adviser than independent ally.
For there was another reason for Britain’s new dependency politics. The country was broke. Attlee’s government had little time to contemplate all this. The military and economic weaknesses of the country were tested with devilish symmetry just a fortnight after the new government was formed. On 14 August 1945, eight days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and five after the attack on Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. A week after that President Truman reached across and briskly placed his signature on a paper ending the wartime Lend-Lease agreement with Britain and other countries. Lend-Lease, which dated from 1941, had allowed the US government to lend, sell, lease and give countries fighting Germany and Japan whatever they thought was needed. Britain was by far the largest recipient, getting more than $30 bn of the $50 bn spent. She had become dependent on the huge pipeline of aid, and not only for fighting. About a fifth of people’s food needs came from America. When the pipeline was suddenly cut off, and a bill presented for whatever was still being used, it was brutal cold turkey indeed. Truman, acting in strict accordance with American law, stopped Lend-Lease without warning his allies and without, it seems, realizing the implications of what he was doing.
The effect on Attlee’s new government was instant. Britain did not have enough dollars left to feed the country. Nor was there any way to earn the money quickly. The shattered economy was exporting only around a fifth of what it had before the war, yet non-military imports were five times higher than in 1938. In the words of one historian Britain had by now declined into ‘a warrior satellite of the United States, dependent for life on American subsidies’ and had, by waging total war, destroyed the basis of her economy on which she had flourished for the previous hundred years. Through the war years America had been open-handed but Britain, fighting also to prevent a German victory which would have threatened the global influence of the United States, spent proportionately far more of her energy on the common struggle. The official historians of the wartime economy, writing in the dark post-war years, allowed their feelings to show: ‘In a war allegedly governed by the concept of the pooling of resources among Allies, the British had taken upon themselves a sacrifice so disproportionate as to jeopardise their economic survival as a nation.’4
In his memoirs Truman said he had learned the lesson from his signature of the ending of Lend-Lease ‘that I must always know what is in the documents I sign’. But the economic crisis which the action caused in Britain in many ways served American interests. At the time, with the victory celebrations a recent memory and patriotic films pouring from the British cinema industry, pessimism about the future would have seemed outlandish to most people, a kind of moral treason. This after all was the Britain of – to quote Labour’s 1945 election manifesto – ‘scientists and technicians who have produced radiolocation [radar], jet propulsion, penicillin and the Mulberry Harbours’, the Britain whose Empire had mostly survived, the Britain occupying swathes of Germany and Italy, the Britain whose leaders sat with those of the new superpowers, apparently shaping the world.
The historian Correlli Barnett summarized the situation with brutal clarity: the post-war British people had ‘the psychology of the victor although their material circumstances approximated more to those of a loser’.5 That was a perception gaining ground in Whitehall at the time, where they had the figures. In August 1945, the economist John Maynard Keynes told Attlee that the country ‘is virtually bankrupt and the economic basis for the hopes of the people non-existent’.
Attlee’s cabinet duly sent Keynes, the world’s most famous economist, to Washington to get help. What followed was as important in the history of modern Britain as any minor war to be fought in the decades to come. As beggar, Keynes may not have been a good choice. He was over-optimistic about his powers of persuasion, indeed startlingly arrogant, a trait not unknown among Bloomsbury intellectuals. He sailed off assuring Attlee that he believed he could get a free gift of some $6 bn from the Americans, a large proportion of what was left in the Federal Reserve. Once in Washington, he ran into a stodgy defensive line of conservative bankers, bolstered by public opinion which was 60 per cent against giving the British a loan, never mind a gift. Keynes responded by dazzling but also irritating the American negotiators with wit, high-minded arguments and occasional mockery. One US banker retorted, ‘He is too brilliant to be persuasive with us Americans . . . how many trust him? How many will accept his sales talk? No one.’ Up against Keynes, who arrived ill via a troopship to Canada, was William Clayton, a gangling cotton manufacturer from Texas, and Fred Vinson, a former professional basketball player and lawyer. For four solid months, based in his Washington hotel and supported by the British ambassador Lord Halifax, Keynes haggled and chiselled. Keynes’s biographer said this of their marathon argument: ‘The Kentucky lawyer and the Bloomsbury intellectual were like chalk and cheese . . . Vinson and Clayton were no match for Keynes in argument. But they always held the whip-hand. It was a case of brains pitted against power.’6
London had a completely unrealistic notion of what might be won. Attlee’s cabinet refused the early US offers and held out, vainly, for better ones. Keynes, ill with a heart complaint and surviving on icepacks and sodium amytal capsules through a sweltering autumn, was trapped by the exuberance of his earlier self-confidence. He described the mood as ‘absolute hell’. The core of the trouble was that the Americans did not quite believe how broke the British Empire really was. Nor did they much care. Powerful players in Washington may have been sentimental about the common struggle that had just ended but were unsentimental about empires and the new world that must now be built. This was not a game of equal players. Every time the British turned down an American offer, the next offer was worse. An angry Keynes wrote back to his mother: ‘They mean us no harm but their minds are so small, their prospects so restricted, their knowledge so inadequate, their obstinacy so boundless and their legal pedantries so infuriating. May it never fall to me to persuade anyone to do what I want, with so few cards in my hand . . . I am beginning to use up my physical reserves.’7
Eventually, though the effort would contribute to his death early the following year, Keynes’s hoped-for gift or interest-free loan of around $6 bn had shrunk to a 50-year loan of $3.75 bn, at 2 per cent interest. In addition, the Americans required that within a year of the loan starting, pounds should be freely exchangeable for dollars, so removing a traditional protective wall from London. Alongside British agreement for the new Washington-dominated international financial system, this placed the country firmly under the economic control of the United States, which through the later forties and early fifties would also be steadily advancing into former British markets round the world. It was a moment of truth for the country as stark as the fall of Singapore, or Dunkirk. The loan was not finally paid off until 2006, well into Tony Blair’s time at Number Ten. So part of the story of post-war Britain was set. The new financial system made future financial crises inevitable and they duly followed under Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson and Callaghan. Each time, Britain’s weak economy meant another ‘run on the pound’ as the world, and particularly the United States, sold Sterling, causing inflation and a slump in investment. Neither the starkness of the crisis nor the inevitable long-term repercussions were ever fully grasped by the country. This was the moment when the British government could have honestly explained to the people how grave the country’s situation really was.
Instead, Attlee and his ministers hid their dismay about the underlying weakness of Britain’s hand – the brutal treatment of Lord Keynes in Washington and, later, the equally brutal repudiation of Britain’s claim to nuclear cooperation. War-trained, and proud, they put on a good face. The new Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, claimed that he valued the settlement ‘very highly’ and instructed MPs to ‘welcome’ it. The Economist, generally the most pro-American British publication, retorted: ‘We are not compelled to say we like it. Our present needs are the direct consequence of the fact that we fought earlier, that we fought longest, and that we fought hardest.’ But in Parliament, after the devastating events of the past few years, it seemed there was little energy left for outrage or debate.
One action was taken immediately. Within months of the end of the war the characteristic sounds of the Royal Navy changed. The thunder of guns and the pounding of turbines gave way to a great clanging, from Portsmouth to the Clyde, a smashing of hammers and hissing of flame, the thud and the sparks of destruction as, one by one, the great ships were destroyed. By 1946, when the Russians were beginning to build an even bigger surface and submarine fleet than they had had during their ‘Great Patriotic War’, 840 British warships had already been struck off the Navy List, and a further 727 in various stages of construction had been abruptly cancelled.8 By the time the new Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fraser, took over in 1948 a total of 10 battleships, 20 cruisers, 37 aircraft carriers, 60 destroyers and 80 corvettes had been sent to the scrapheap. This was an extraordinary rate of destruction. Fraser, who had worked with the US Navy in the Pacific and survived a kamikaze attack and who therefore understood the need for modernization, now had to deal with a demoralized and stunned Royal Navy. Battleships whose names read like a history lesson – Nelson, Rodney, Valiant – were broken up. New battleships and aircraft carriers whose names read like an optimistic prospectus for a revived empire, which had been ordered to project British power around the world into the sixties, ships such as Lion, Malta, New Zealand, Eagle, Gibraltar and Africa, were abruptly cancelled. Britain’s very last battleship, HMS Vanguard, was completed on the Clyde. Too late for the war, she survived to take the King and future Queen Elizabeth to South Africa for an unsuccessful Commonwealth-boosting trip, and then functioned as a training ship before she too was towed away and broken up.9 Ninety British warships were towed out to sea and used for target practice until they broke up and sank. Hundreds more were taken to the breakers’ yards and painstakingly disassembled back into piles of torn, rust-softened steel.
Some were sold to small countries which had hardly had navies before. The US Navy had proved that aircraft carriers were an indispensable part of modern global war, but Britain could afford only a few, relatively small ones. So one British carrier was given to the French as a free loan until they could pay for her. Another was loaned to the Dutch and two were offloaded at half price to the Australians. The inaptly named Terrible ended as an uncompleted hulk sitting in the Gare Loch, near Glasgow. Some smaller ships were ‘mothballed’ – shrouded with nets, which were then sprayed with plastic and treated with electrolysis to stop their bottoms rotting. Initially, seagulls proved worryingly keen to eat the plastic. Meanwhile, inside their cocoons, the ships’ poor-quality wartime steel rotted anyway.10 Vessels which had protected the convoys which helped keep Stalin’s Russia fighting, or shepherded food and fuel convoys across the Atlantic, or had rescued the British army from Dunkirk, or which had been in at the kill in the Pacific, ships whose names went back to Nelson’s navy and whose captains came from West Country families which could trace their service just as far – almost all of them went, and very quickly. This is little remembered. It is as if the nation engaged in a giant act of smashing, the quiet murder of its nautical self, out of sight, out of mind. Of the 880,000 men and women serving in the Royal Navy towards the end of the war, nearly 700,000 had left two years later.
The admirals fought back. ‘If we are to hold our world position, we must maintain our sea power,’ said the Admiralty. Using an argument already hopelessly out of date, the deputy director of naval planning, Captain Godfrey French, protested that a force of two major fleets, with battleships and carriers, was vital to sustain the British Empire’s status as ‘a first class power’. Battleships, he said, were needed to counter the Soviet fleet and, in the future, rather more bizarrely, the French. The Labour government was not impressed. Attlee argued forcefully that Britain was no longer America’s rival on the high seas and could not maintain large fleets. Hugh Dalton, his Chancellor, ordered the dockyards to give up the electricians and woodworkers he needed for the post-war home-building programme. By 1948 the defence statement said that it was necessary for manpower to be brought down as quickly as possible, even though this meant ‘a degree of disorganisation and immobility’. Naval campaigners in the Commons were horrified to discover that the Home Fleet was down to a single cruiser and a few lesser ships.
Reports came into the Admiralty of ‘strangely apathetic crews’ and occasions of ‘outright disobedience’. In time, of course, the navy readjusted to a far smaller role, particularly once the nuclear deterrent was based in its submarines, not on the RAF’s airfields. But finally, the 336-year history of the Admiralty itself ended, when it was swallowed up by the Ministry of Defence. On 31 March 1964 the Queen saved a salary by becoming her own Lord Admiral. The Admiralty’s historian expresses institutional hurt as eloquently as it can be told:
No department of state survived so long, through so many metamorphoses and vicissitudes, as the Admiralty. When most of the great departments of state were born, it was already ancient . . . Monarchs and dynasties, statesmen and ministers, came and went, the tides of war and revolution washed over and around, constantly altering but never submerging the Admiralty, and it survived them all, counter, original, spare and strange to the last.11
It was the last act in the ruthless liquidation of the organization that had been central to British identity for as long as Britain had been a single nation.
Falling behind in military technology and without the strength to keep hold of her empire, the Royal Navy’s time had gone. What might have happened without the extremity of the financial crisis after the American cancellation of Lend-Lease is unknowable. The government’s failure to involve the country in the full grimness of the situation was made more palatable two years later with the generous American Marshall Plan aid, as Washington finally realized how far Soviet Communism might advance over bankrupt and demoralized Western European nations. Britain got the largest share of that, and the immediate crisis eased. The Marshall Plan helped put all Europe back on its feet. It is still remembered as Washington’s ‘most unsordid act’.
Optimism about the British economy’s ability to export its way back to health returned. There was a great national drive for more exports at the expense of consumption at home. The post-war world, in which so many industrial countries had been devastated, was starved of goods, so it was not hard to find export markets, even for outdated British cars and unsuitable British clothing. But the politicians’ habit of embarrassed deception about how things really stood would continue. Successive British prime ministers treated the country’s weakness as a personal failing which could be hushed up.
A Meeting of Remarkable Men
Keynes’s deal bought Labour time. Yet the Attlee government was not well prepared to use it. In London in 1945 there was nobody with experience of how to take over and then organize a peacetime economy. Ministers agreed that central planning was the way to create a more efficient economy but the way British administration was structured made efficiency a distant dream. There was a vast sprawl of overlapping Whitehall committees which meant slow decision-making and fudged choices. By one count the Attlee administration employed just ten fully qualified economists – and this from a government which promised ‘rule by experts’. It is often and rightly said that the problems Labour had to grapple with were awesome and so they were – the demolished housing and the archaic economy, the demand for swift Indian independence, the crises in Palestine and Greece, the need to demobilize so many people, the danger of starvation on continental Europe and the need for some kind of new world order, even as the first intimations of the Cold War began. But the eventual failure of New Jerusalem’s architects and orators, remarkable men and women that they were, was also caused by their inability to agree what it was they really wanted to do.
The people who took charge of Britain in 1945 were as mixed a bag as any democratic government has seen. First comes Attlee himself, the model of suburban Pooter, speaking so little and so tersely it drove everyone around him mad. He was the butt of some often retold Churchillian insults: ‘an empty taxi drew up at the House of Commons, and Attlee got out’ (though Churchill later denied that one) and ‘a modest little man with much to be modest about’. Yet if Churchill had been formed by imperial dreams and his grand family history, Attlee was just as determined a product of Edwardian England. He had merely taken a different course, good works and mean streets, not cavalry charges and country houses. His father was a hard-working lawyer of advanced Liberal views. He grew up surrounded by prayers and poetry. After his rough public school, Haileybury near Hertford, he studied law but was diverted by the chance of being asked to help out at the Haileybury boys’ club in the sooty, impoverished east London borough of Stepney. He stayed and eventually joined the Independent Labour Party. Never a great speaker he was a dogsbody and organizer, cutting up bread for children, helping suffragettes, distributing leaflets and carrying banners on marches. After brave service in the First World War, he returned as Major Attlee and threw himself into London politics again, becoming Mayor of Stepney and then an MP. He became Labour leader in 1935 almost by accident. There were so few other plausible candidates in the wake of Labour’s shattering election defeat of four years earlier, he was almost the last plausible leader left standing – a stopgap.
He would become the most effective stopgap in British political history. No intellectual, he was a man who held things together, the ultimate chairman. He was reassuring, thoroughly English, addicted to the Times crossword, cricket and as fond of his old public school as Churchill was of his. Before the war he had steered the Labour Party towards moderation and away from pacifism. During the war he tolerated Churchill’s long-winded egotism and quietly directed the civilian ministries. After it he became the watchful ringmaster for elephantine egos roaring and bellowing around him. He was never a charismatic character – one sympathetic historian judges him to have had ‘all the presence of a gerbil’12 – but that was part of his attraction. He defended himself against the charge that he was too moderate, quietly insisting that practical measures to boost employment, share resources fairly and plan the economy were as socialist and radical as any revolutionary could wish. Yet he was weak on economics, and when his cabinet was arguing over deep practical problems, such as the troubled programme for steel nationalization, he had a tendency to pull back and let ministers struggle without his support. He had shafts of clear analytical insight, into Britain’s overstretched military commitments, and the importance of house-building. But his analysis of domestic change, above all what nationalization was really meant to achieve, was pretty thin.
He did not offer the cheering-up that ministers sometimes require and his put-downs became legendary. When one hapless minister was summoned to be sacked and asked, appalled, what on earth he had done wrong, Attlee looked up, pulled out his pipe and remarked, ‘Not up to the job.’ Interviewed at the start of the 1951 election campaign, he told the journalist just that he hoped to win and now was off to a committee meeting. The interview finished thus: ‘Interviewer: Is there anything else you’d like to say about the coming election? Attlee: No.’13 This was an entirely characteristic exchange and there are literally hundreds of similar examples. Yet despite all this, Attlee has gone down as a great man, loved for his limitations, not despite them. He was a staunch believer in the monarchy and if he had misgivings about the class system he rarely voiced them. His political conservatism is well described in a touching limerick he wrote long after losing office. Though he embodied the opposite of spin, sleaze, self-importance or swank, he did allow himself a famous pat on the back:
Few thought he was even a starter
There were many who thought themselves smarter
But he ended PM
CH and OM
An earl and a knight of the Garter.
What is touching about this is, of course, that it could equally well have been written by a hostile satirist. Clement Attlee was a strange mix of radical and paternalist; he would have made a good Liberal reformer under Gladstone. Yet half a century on, he was the right man for the time. Wartime magnifies some personalities. Similarly, peace discovers its own people. Attlee was the chairman of the peace party, but what about the rest?
There were the class rebels. Sir Stafford Cripps was an intensely religious vegetarian, brilliant lawyer and sometime Marxist. Obstinate, politically naive and worryingly convinced that he was, at any given time, doing God’s work, he was the most controversial upper-class socialist until the heyday of Tony Benn. In the thirties Cripps had fallen under the spell of the charismatic leader of Britain’s Communists, Harry Pollitt. A colleague said of him that he started to go wild in 1931. Then stimulated by attacks from the Tory press ‘and by eager cheers from our own lunatic fringe, he went wilder and wilder’.14 He had advocated emergency powers to deal with the coming ‘capitalist dictatorship’ and zigzagged over whether rearmament would be a betrayal of the workers. In 1939 he was thrown out of the Labour Party for advocating a Popular Front with the Communists. Yet a year later the same Cripps was sent as Churchill’s special envoy to the real Communists in Moscow. He was brought into the war cabinet, then put in charge of aircraft production, sent to negotiate the end of British rule in India and by the end of 1947 was Chancellor – a job he performed with great grit, patriotism and determination. It was about as strange a change as any in natural history. Throughout the war, as a former rebel, he was not even in the Labour Party but was already famous for his rimless glasses, regime of cold baths and doctrinaire views. He got the Churchill treatment too, famously in the cutting remark, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.’ In ruder mood, Churchill was said to have been approached while in the toilet by an official, knocking on the door and nervously insisting that Cripps, then Lord Privy Seal, needed to see him immediately. The Prime Minister is said to have replied: ‘Tell Sir Stafford I am in the lavatory and can only deal with one shit at a time.’15 He may have been affected by rumours that Cripps was plotting to replace him, the war being at a low ebb then; Cripps would later go on to suggest to Attlee that he too should quit as Prime Minister but was quickly bought off.
Then there was the loud, haw-hawing Hugh Dalton, a useful reminder of how small and interwoven Britain’s political class was in the middle of the twentieth century. He was the son of the canon at Windsor, a clergyman so ferocious he was said to have terrified even Queen Victoria. He tutored the King-Emperor, George V. His son, George VI, loathed Dalton and begged Attlee not to make him Foreign Secretary. This was probably a service to the nation because of the extreme nature of Dalton’s anti-German feelings but the King saw merely Dalton as a turncoat, an Etonian who rebelled against his class and monarch. Dalton had started out as a Tory and switched, partly as an act of rebellion against his father. He was sexually repressed and easily depressed. The poet Rupert Brooke had been one of those he adored. ‘My love’, he said much later, ‘is the Labour movement and the best of the young men in it.’ Beyond anything, though, Dalton loved conspiracies. As Chancellor he paused on his way to deliver the crucial 1947 Budget and told a lobby correspondent some of its key points, allowing a London paper, the Star, to scoop his speech. This indiscretion – in Dalton’s customary ear-splitting whisper – led instantly to his resignation, a blow from which he never really recovered. But Dalton had had a difficult and unsettling day until he leaked the Budget, having just come from unpleasant and confrontational talks at the Palace about how much money Philip and Elizabeth, the new Royal couple, should get from the Civil List. Perhaps he simply saw the journalist concerned – a man he knew very well – as the first friendly face of his day.
The silent, anti-intellectual Attlee, the Christian ex-Marxist Cripps and the confused Dalton do not sound like the core of a coherent vision for the new Britain of 1945. But alongside them were some remarkable figures who had known rather more of life at the coalface. Attlee apart, nobody was as important in the new government as the hulking figure of Ernest Bevin, the most influential man British trade unionism has ever produced. Orphaned at eight, ‘Ernie’ began as a Somerset labourer and worked his way up to become the organizer of dockworkers, until in 1921 he helped merge those men into the new Transport and General Workers’ Union. A powerful figure in the General Strike, he ran the union until he was brought into the Churchill cabinet in 1940, a parliamentary seat being hurriedly found for him in Wandsworth. As the most powerful trade union leader of the inter-war years, Bevin was a passionate anti-Communist and a patriot who believed ‘my boys’ in the T & G were the very best of Britain. In the wartime government he had almost dictatorial powers to direct workers into factories, mines and fields. If total war consisted in gathering together a country’s total human and physical resources and then directing them at the enemy, Bevin was the Great Director. Described by one newspaper of the time as ‘a bad mixer, a good hater, respected by all’, he could be rude enough, even to Stalin who once hilariously whined that Mr Bevin was ‘no gentleman’.
In the post-war government Bevin ruled almost in alliance with Attlee, both of them describing the other in fond, almost devoted terms. Attlee called it ‘the deepest relationship of my political life’. Bevin chortled about Attlee, after he had shrewdly seen off another attempted coup against the Prime Minister, ‘I love the little man.’ After cabinet meetings, they would stay on together, charting the government’s course. He always mistrusted intellectuals, particularly socialist ones. Reportedly, when he bumped into the famous Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, after the 1945 victory celebration, he greeted him: ‘Ullo gloomy, I give you about three weeks before you stab us all in the back.’ When Bevin died right at the end of the Attlee years, the loss was more than symbolic. He was probably the only person who could have stopped the party splitting over the rows which engulfed it because of the Korean War and military expenditure, but by then he was too sick to help.
His achievements as Foreign Secretary were enormous and controversial. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, founded in 1949, depended on America’s military power to provide a shield against Stalin for the shattered European democracies. Something like it would have happened, given the United States’ growing fear of Soviet expansion, but the timing, precise form of the treaty and its basic principles owed a lot to Bevin. In 1948 he began calling in private letters for ‘an Atlantic approaches pact of mutual assistance’. Its purpose was clear: ‘to consolidate the West against Soviet infiltration and at the same time inspire the Soviet government with enough respect for the West to remove temptation from them and so ensure a long period of peace.’16 And so it would be. Now, it all seems inevitable but at the time Bevin was particularly clear about the nature of the Soviet threat and withstood a storm of bitter attack from the USSR and its allies at home. More than a hundred Labour MPs abstained when the Commons voted first on NATO, and only a year before Bevin’s first proposal Cripps, for instance, had been telling officials that ‘we must be ready at any moment to switch over our friendship from the US to Russia.’
Bevin is less happily remembered for his role in the bitter arguments and fighting that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Most unfairly, he is still traduced as an anti-Semite. He had in fact been numbered as a friend of Zionism during the war, until faced with the impossible contradictions in Britain’s position in the Middle East afterwards. There, the UK was both in charge of Palestine under international mandate, and had wider links to surrounding Arab countries. British officers ran the Jordanian Arab Legion, one of the instruments of Arab anger against Jewish migration; yet British officials were in charge of the Jewish homeland too. There is no doubt that the desperate migrations of Jewish refugees were handled very badly by Britain, determined to try to limit the settlement to a level that might be acceptable to Palestinian Arabs. The worst example was the turning-round of a refugee-crammed ship, Exodus, as she tried to land 4,500 people in 1947, and the eventual return of most of them to a camp in Hamburg, an act which caused Britain to be reviled around the world. This was followed by the kidnap and murder of two British soldiers by the Irgun terrorist group, which then booby-trapped their bodies. But Bevin was pressed very hard by the United States, which wanted far larger migration, and his instinct for a limited two-state solution now seems sensible. The British forces in Palestine were entirely ill equipped for the guerrilla and terrorist campaign launched against them by Jewish groups; in the circumstances of the later forties, Bevin’s position was entirely impossible. It is worth recalling, if only for a bleak balance, that Bevin was reviled by Arab opinion as vigorously as by Jewish opinion.
The key to Bevin, from NATO to directing the British fight against Communist insurgents in Greece, was that he believed in liberty as essential to the building of a fair society. He believed in a welfare system to keep the wolf from the door, and full employment for unionized workers, which could be delivered by taking some of the economy into public ownership. Because of his huge wartime powers, he was a great believer in the State. He once told some American correspondents that he believed it was possible to have public ownership and liberty: ‘I don’t believe the two things are inconsistent . . . If I believed the development of socialism meant the absolute crushing of liberty, then I should plump for liberty because the advance of human development depends entirely on the right to think, to speak, and to use reason, and allow what I call the upsurge to come from the bottom to reach the top.’17 He was a wonderful man, on a huge scale. He had faults too, of course: he was as easily entranced by the old Britain of smooth mandarins and Palace receptions as anyone.
This was not, on the whole, the weakness of the next of the extraordinary men who made up the 1945 government. Aneurin, or Nye, Bevan was wild, rebellious, radical, and above all, Welsh. Not since the days of Charles James Fox, champion of the French Revolution, had the British public been confronted by a minister as divisive and flamboyant as Bevan. Like Bevin, he had been a trade union leader. Born in Tredegar in South Wales into a mining family, he too was largely self-taught, in his case mopping up thrillers and Marx in workmen’s libraries and at college in London. Like Bevin, he had been an excellent organizer during the 1926 General Strike. But there the comparisons between the two near-namesakes end. After entering Parliament a few years later, Bevan established himself as one of the few truly great orators of the time, rare in being a worthy opponent of Churchill – who Bevan described as ‘suffering from petrified adolescence’. Unlike Attlee, Cripps, Bevin or Dalton, he had been outside the wartime coalition government and on many issues had seemed like a one-man opposition to it. Partly because of this, he had a far fiercer attitude to the Tories than his colleagues, and a clearer determination that Labour must build a completely new world. The nationalization and public control of almost the whole economy was his aim.
Nye Bevan spoke for the grassroots of the Labour Party, the people who expected a genuine socialist takeover of Britain. He did not believe there could be any compromise between capitalism and ‘democracy’. The Commons was ‘an elaborate conspiracy to prevent the real clash of opinion which exists outside from finding an appropriate echo within its walls. It is a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent.’18 Unlike most of the other leading figures, Bevan was, at least in theory, dangerous to the established order, even if in office he would turn out to be shrewder and subtler than his ranting public performances suggested. People prejudiced against him often came away from a first meeting seduced and bewitched. Like Bevin, he showed that a trade unionist could turn into a successful national leader. Unlike Bevin he had a vision of what Britain ought to become which went far beyond better pay and free spectacles. He would eventually be destroyed by the hard choices and compromises ahead, resigning when spending cuts were needed and dividing himself from most of his natural supporters over the issue of nuclear weapons. Beautifully dressed, witty, sibilant, wide-ranging, sarcastic, poetic and at times very alarming indeed, Nye Bevan represented everything that the old upper classes most feared after the 1945 election.
The final great shaper of post-war Labour Britain is Peter Mandelson’s grandfather. Herbert Morrison was a Cockney policeman’s son, the third working-class boy to set against the Labour ‘aristocrats’. Like Gordon Brown he was blind in one eye and an obsessive reader. He started out working in a shop, weighing out the tea and sugar. His devotion to politics took him up through the London party machine until he eventually became the minister in the first Labour government, responsible for the capital’s early integrated transport system. Had he not lost his seat in 1931 he would probably have become leader instead of Attlee (and hence Prime Minister), a loss he never ceased to regret. Instead he went on to become the first Labour leader of the London County Council and the most prominent voice of the rising new class of public servants, small traders, teachers and shopkeepers who would become key to Labour’s successes. This meant that he was a moderate – enough of a moderate for the young Tory MP Harold Macmillan to suggest that he lead a new Centre Party in the late thirties. None of this, and his long career as an organizer and fixer, endeared him to the romantics in the party. Nor was he exciting. He lived a quiet suburban life with a quiet wife he rarely spoke about and pootered around in a small car. Michael Foot described him as a ‘soft-hearted suburban Stalin’. In government Morrison was responsible for directing the astonishing torrent of legislation – seventy bills in the first year alone. He was not, however, a great economic planner and was far too obsessed with his reputation in the press, keeping great piles of cuttings to complain about when he met editors. He was also, like his grandson, a rotten intriguer, the boy always spotted and called to the front of the class the minute he starts whispering. Yet he was popular, passionate about his voters and hugely admired by Labour members. Had Morrison become Prime Minister, he might have been a good one.
Patriots First, Socialists Second
These were the six men who set Britain on its post-war course, a chaotic platoon, sentimental, reactionary, revolutionary, patriotic, moderate and extreme all at once. A small book could be devoted just to the disobliging things they said about each other. They believed in a socialist society but few of them seemed able to agree in detail what that meant – whether widespread nationalization was really needed, what should be done about the public schools, whether rationing was basically a good thing or a bad thing. Marching behind them was an equally divided crowd of intellectual socialists, practical middle-class people who believed in planning, trade unionists who thought it was time for the workers to get their share, and a few committed Marxists. And behind them, watching, there were millions of Labour voters who merely hoped for a better life. This meant, in practice, welfare plus nationalization, a consolidation and extension of the wartime directed economy and the ‘fair shares’ of the previous few years. Labour would apply the lessons of the war to the peace. After so many later disappointments it is hard to recapture quite the sense of hope that was clearly present in the mid-forties. Nor is it easy to recall how openly and passionately proud of Britain people were.
This was a government of patriots first and socialists second. In this Attlee set the tone. The historian Peter Hennessy said of him that he was ‘certainly the most understated and, perhaps the most deeply, almost narrowly, English figure ever to have occupied Number Ten’. Bevin, rooted in his union and its members, ran Attlee close. He had a deep understanding of British political history and his predecessors in government, as the American Secretary of State Dean Acheson later recalled:
He talked of them as slightly older people whom he knew with affectionate respect. In listening to him, one felt strongly the continuity and integrity of English history . . . ‘Last night’, he said to me, ‘I was reading some papers of Old Salisbury. Y’know, ’e had a lot of sense.’ ‘Old Palmerston’ too came in for frequent and sometimes wistful mention . . . With George III he was very companionable. When sherry was brought in, he would twist around to look at the portrait. ‘Let’s drink to him,’ he would say. ‘If ’e ’adn’t been so stoopid, you wouldn’t ’ave been strong enough come to our rescue in the war . . .’19
Like Dalton, Bevin hated the Germans and thought little of the Russians and, though no imperialist, profoundly believed that Britain should take a lead role in the post-war world. The rulers of post-war Britain were far keener on the Empire than one might expect of socialists. While Attlee was sceptical about the need for a large British force in the Middle East, his government thought it right to maintain a massive presence sprawling across it, in order to protect both the sea-route to Asia and the oilfields Britain worked and depended on. Restlessly active in Baghdad and Tehran, Britain controlled Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and, at the tip of the Red Sea, the world’s second-busiest port after New York, Aden. Throughout the forties and fifties, British conscripts and professional soldiers baked and sweated to little purpose in garrisons which bled the British Treasury. When they finally went home, they left behind an unstable, unhappy part of the world, with borders like wounds scored across it.
When it came to Indian independence the whole government agreed there was no holding back. Beyond that, the Labour ministers felt strong kinship with Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders and assumed that most of the African colonies were decades away from self-government. They were dubious about European integration, above all because it might compromise Britain’s freedom to set her own political destiny. Attlee, in characteristically terse mode, later explained his feelings about Western Europe coming together: ‘The so-called Common Market of six nations. Know them all well. Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from attacks by the other two.’ Herbert Morrison, for his part, declared that the new socialist government of Britain was ‘friends of the jolly old Empire; we are going to stick to it’.
Such views were widely shared. The left dreamed of a distinctly British socialism which would in turn become a beacon to other nations, a fantasy almost imperial in its ambitious assumption. It falls oddly on the ear now but it touched great writers such as George Orwell, fine journalists like the young Michael Foot and many idealistic Labour footsoldiers. Virtually all the Labour family, from Attlee to the radicals at Tribune believed that the Empire should be eventually be turned into a free association of democratic countries; but they assumed this could become the basis for a different kind of British power. The sterling area of countries using the pound included about 1,000 million people and was therefore seen by Whitehall as roughly equivalent to the areas of the world under American influence. There was talk of a new Commonwealth airways system, linking the social democratic worldwide web of the future. (An echo of this lost dream can be found in the writings of the fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, who speculated about a liberal, anti-racist British commonwealth linked by huge fleets of airships.)
The question was how aggressively socialist was the government’s post-war agenda to be? After 1940, many local Labour branches had wanted to retain robust party politics in pursuit of class war. Even as the German armies drilled on the coast of Normandy, the Labour conference had a unanimous motion sent to it from the Halifax branch calling for a negotiated peace with Germany because this would be less disastrous ‘for the workers’ than a military victory ‘by this or any other capitalist government’.20 Such sentiments were mostly squashed by the mood of national crisis, but there was a lively debate about what should happen after the war which could not be subdued. The centrist PEP (Political and Economic Planning) pressure group said with evident pleasure that wartime conditions ‘have already compelled us to make sure, not only that the rich do not consume too much, but that others get enough . . . new measures for improving the housing, welfare and transport of the workers . . . the end of mass unemployment.’ In the debate about the country’s war aims in 1940, the generally understated Attlee complained that while the Germans were fighting ‘a revolutionary war for very definite objectives’ Britain was fighting a conservative war: ‘We must put forward a positive and revolutionary aim admitting that the old order has collapsed and asking people to fight for the new order’ – a view much modified by the time he came to power. But he was not alone in 1940 in thinking that the stronger government needed for fighting total war could usefully lead a peacetime revolution afterwards. As the New Statesman put it, ‘We cannot actually achieve socialism during the war, but we can institute a whole series of Government controls which after the war can be used for Socialist ends.’
For Labour, there had been no conflict between the inspiring story of an old nation rallied against Hitler, and the rational organization of a future society; they were the same thing. As Orwell had written in 1941, in a famous essay describing England as a family with the wrong members in control, ‘This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.’ But it would not become Russianized or Germanized: ‘The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal . . .’21 Orwell put it far more beautifully and persuasively than most others and of course the Stock Exchange, the Eton match and the country houses survived. But his dream of a third way, building on British parliamentary traditions, plus a national instinct for restraint and fair play to make a new kind of socialist society, unknown in Russia or elsewhere, was widely shared among Labour supporters.
A vision of Britain as an almost ungoverned, self-regulating place, whose people got on with their lives without interference, had survived from the eighteenth century, through Victorian liberalism to the instincts of many of the National government politicians of the thirties. But by 1945, in a Britain of identity cards, ration books, regulations and high taxation, it seemed to be dead. The mood was for big government, digging deep into people’s lives to improve them. Yet the extraordinary thing was that, within a couple of years, Attlee’s ‘peacetime revolution’ had lost momentum too. The optimism shrivelled under economic and physical storms, and though much of the Attlee legacy survived for decades, it was nothing like the social transformation Labour socialists had hoped for.
On the morning of 11 December 1941 over the Gulf of Siam, a stretch of sea between Malaya and Vietnam, a single Japanese torpedo-bomber flew out of the cloudless sky. Piloted by Lieutenant Iki, it dipped down towards the waves and dropped not a bomb but a single wreath of leaves and flowers, left floating amid the oil stains and debris. Nothing like this would happen again in the bloody Far East war. The wreath was a rare sign of Japanese respect for nearly a thousand dead British sailors, blown to pieces or drowned when two great warships, the ‘unsinkable’ new Prince of Wales and the rather more elderly Repulse, had gone to the bottom in less than two hours, thanks to brilliantly precise and lethal torpedo attacks by the Japanese. The defeat had shocked Britain and plunged Churchill into despair. These ships were, in the words of one naval historian, ‘symbols of the men and nation that had dominated the sea lanes of the Pacific since the days of Anson and Cook’.22 The fall of Singapore, the psychological death-blow to the British Empire and the single worst defeat in the war for British forces, followed swiftly. But Lt Iki’s gallant action was not simply a tribute to the sunken ships, the Royal Navy generally, or even to that expiring British Empire the Japanese had long admired. It was also a tribute to an Aberdeenshire aristocrat, William Francis Forbes, the Master of Semphill.
Semphill is one of those Britons forgotten here, remembered over there. He had been a pioneer aviator who served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and made a once-famous early solo flight to Australia. When the two warships were sunk he was serving with Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. A child of the British Establishment, the son of an aide to George V, Sempill would live on until 1965, honoured as a veteran of air warfare. So why the Japanese wreath? A quick inspection of the honours Semphill received after the war would have turned up the Order of the Rising Sun. The fact was that Semphill can be blamed or credited for some of Japan’s awesome skill in destroying warships with torpedo-carrying aircraft, not only off Malaya but at Pearl Harbor. He had been sent to Japan on a British mission in the twenties to help build the Japanese naval air force, teaching the latest torpedo bombing techniques and advising on the design of aircraft carriers. Another British engineer had obligingly helped design one of the aircraft, which eventually developed into the feared Mitsubishi Zero. Semphill was impressed by the determination of the Japanese pilots and was thanked by the then Japanese Prime Minister who called his work ‘almost epoch-making’. By 1942 it certainly was. When Semphill had trained his Japanese friends the two countries were linked by a treaty of friendship. More recently it has been revealed that Semphill went on to spy for the Japanese as well. He was not a one-off, nor was the passing over of a vital technology from Britain a rare event. Repeatedly in the past century Britain was involved in the early development of a breakthrough in military or industrial thinking which went straight to enemies or rivals who developed it further and used it better. The sinking of those battleships should have caused even more soul-searching than it did.
In the early years of the twentieth century the Royal Navy had been well ahead of the Germans, Americans and French in developing a modern submarine with guided torpedoes, despite the objection of one admiral who found it ‘underhanded, unfair and damned un-English’. The Second Sea Lord, Jack Fisher, a brilliant, restless, terrifying man, widely rumoured to be half-Asiatic himself, pressed ahead. Yet it was Germany, first under the Kaiser and then under Hitler, which developed the U-boat to its logical and lethal conclusion, coming very close to starving Britain into submission in both world wars. Again, it was a Royal Navy engineer and a British company, Fosters, who produced the first workable tank in 1915 (they were originally called ‘landships’ but to keep their purpose secret, factory workers in Lincoln were told they were mobile water-tanks for the desert and this was shortened to simply, tank). Yet it was the Germans who turned the tank two decades later into an instrument of a new kind of warfare, by which time British tanks were comparatively outdated. As Semphill demonstrated, Britain had also once been ahead with torpedo-attack aircraft. In the mid-forties Britain was far advanced with jet engines, too. But again and again, deploying the new idea, actually getting it to work, was something that foreigners seemed better at.
The greatest example of all is the atomic bomb. We now know that Hitler’s scientists were working hard on this new doomsday weapon, and hoped to test it as early as 1944. Scientists from Italy, France and Hungary were struggling with the physics throughout the thirties. The anguished private warning of Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in a letter of 1939 about ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’ has gone down in history. Less well known is the work of two émigré scientists a year later in a laboratory at Birmingham University. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were working on the effects of using the isotope uranium 235 for a nuclear weapon. They made the theoretical breakthrough for building an effective bomb and in 1940 hurriedly typed out a memo for the British government, an obscure paper which has been described as one of the most significant documents of the century. The government, as governments will do, set up a committee of scientists and military advisers and reported back that ‘the scheme for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war.’ This was shrewd enough. Thanks to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews Britain had the know-how to get ahead of Germany. But this was the year when the Blitz was at its height and the threat of invasion very real. Britain’s economy was already vastly overstretched. The huge effort needed to create a nuclear industry, to turn the mathematics into metal, was beyond the country’s technical and economic strength. So the news about the bomb was passed to the Americans. Out in the New Mexico desert, they soon leapt ahead. A new world order would swiftly follow.
For a short while after the war it looked as if Britain would stay out of the nuclear race, which seemed to the Attlee government expensive and difficult. Key ministers argued against trying to join it. Had Ernest Bevin, Britain’s post-war Foreign Secretary, not been a prickly patriot, perhaps Britain would have stayed non-nuclear. But after being patronized by his American opposite number, Bevin told his colleagues that he wanted no British Foreign Secretary to be treated that way again. It was a matter of national status, said Ernie. ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’23 This was an agonizing struggle, far harder than was admitted. Churchill had had a private wartime deal with President Roosevelt. Both countries would seek the other’s permission before using nuclear weapons. Information would be shared. Britain would not develop civil nuclear power without Washington’s agreement. This was effectively torn up by the Americans in 1946 with the McMahon Act, which prohibited the sharing of nuclear information or technology. When Attlee tried to revive nuclear cooperation after the war, the White House ignored his letter and the US copy of the secret Churchill–Roosevelt agreement was conveniently lost in the wrong file. A few years after that early breakthrough by the refugees in Birmingham, Britain was far behind the Americans, without access to their work.
The decision to develop the first A-bombs had been a secret even from Churchill in opposition, who later told the Commons: ‘I was not aware until I took office that not only had the Socialist Government made the atomic bomb as a matter of research, but that they had created at the expense of scores of millions of pounds the important plant necessary for its regular production.’ Though private assessments of the threat posed by the Soviet Union were drawn up within months of the end of the war, right from the start in the cabinet committee papers there is the curious and unmistakeable fact that the Soviet menace is rarely at the top of the argument about the British bomb. It is all about the Americans. First, in the Bevin years, it is about status and old-fashioned bulldog pride.
Then it becomes a matter of global strategy, something needed as leverage to influence US policy. Answering the appeal of the defeated Admiralty after the war, the mandarins bluntly admitted: ‘The UK has ceased to be a first-class power in material terms. The United States and Russia already far outstrip us in population and material wealth, and both have vast untapped resources. Canada, India and China, to name only three . . . in time will certainly outstrip us.’ But, they pointed out, the much more powerful hydrogen bomb was transforming the military situation around the world: ‘If we possess these weapons, the Americans will be prepared to pay attention to our opinions in a way they would otherwise not. The same applies to our standing in the eyes of other countries, such as Germany. And our lesser potential enemies, such as Egypt, will feel that we might, if pushed too far, use nuclear weapons against them.’ ‘These’, concluded the mandarins rather chillingly, ‘are great advantages . . .’24
From early on, Whitehall intelligence reports to ministers identified the peril of war being triggered by a pre-emptive strike from America, hitting the Russians, before they had devised their own nuclear systems at a level which would allow them to properly retaliate. With British troops on the vulnerable front line in Germany, Britain would be thrown into the midst of the new war for which she was not prepared. Persuading the Americans to stay their hand might be easier, the British policy-makers suggested, if Britain was herself an independent nuclear power. In the summer of 1947 work began in deepest secret to build a plutonium-producing plant at Windscale, a little place on the coast of Cumbria, and work started on designing a bomb under the guidance of one of the British scientists who had been at Los Alamos, William Penney. A few years later, the tiny Berkshire village of Aldermaston, with its twelfth-century church, brick labourers’ cottages and ancient Roman defences, which had been looking forward to quieter times with the closure of an airbase, was chosen as the site for Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. More money spent on defence and status was of course less money available for a New Jerusalem.
A Winter Landscape
The winter of 1947 has gone down in history and personal memory as a time of almost unendurable bleakness. For three months, Britain seemed more like one of the grimmer scenes in a medieval Flemish painting. It was not only the shortages of almost everything in the shops, and what was described as a virtual peasant diet, heavily based on potatoes and bread – though by then even the bread had now been rationed, and potatoes ran short. It was not only the huge state bureaucracy still interfering in so much daily life, controlling everything from how long you could turn your heater on, to what plays you could see and whether or not you could leave the country. It was not the 25,000 regulations and orders never seen in peacetime before, administered by a government which though anti-Communist, still urged people to learn from the ‘colossal’ industrial achievements of Soviet Communism.25 It was not the smashed and broken homes. It was not even all those war dead – for this war had involved far fewer soldiers than the First World War, and far fewer dead – 256,000 as against nearly a million, as well as the 60,000 British civilians who had died in air-raids. Relief at the final victory was still strong across the country, and pride in Britain’s part in it. No, the crisis of 1947 was set off by that most humdrum of British complaints – the weather.
At the end of January with an efficiency the Red Army could not have mustered, a great freeze had swept across from Siberia and covered the country in thick snow, a bitter cold which brought the exhausted British very nearly to their knobbly, ill-clad knees. The country still ran on coal. But at the pits, the great piles of coal froze solid and could not be moved. The winding-gears ceased to function. Drifting snow blocked roads and closed the rail lines. At the power stations, the remaining coal stocks ran swiftly down until, one by one, power stations began to close. Lights flickered off. Men dug through snowdrifts, tramping for miles to find food to carry back to their neighbours and homes. Cars were marooned on exposed roads. With shortages of power, factories across the South and Midlands of England had to stop work and within a week two million people were idle. Attlee suspended that still unusual middle-class diversion, television. Much worse, electric fires were banned for three hours each morning and two each afternoon.26 Everywhere, people shivered, wrapped in blankets in front of barely smoking coal fires, or those rationed electric ones. Around London, commuters were completely unable to reach the capital. Scotland was cut off from the rest of the country. Then things deteriorated further. It was the coldest February for 300 years. Another half million people had to stop work. One young office worker from Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt, recorded herself sitting in her house, the water in washbasins frozen, looking out at the ice-blue sky: ‘I am wearing thick woollen vest, rubber roll-on, wool panties, stockings, thick long-sleeved wool sweater, slacks, jacket, scarf and two pairs of woollen socks – I am just about comfortable.’27 The sun was so little seen that when it came out briefly, a man rushed to photograph the reassuring sight for the newspapers. Green vegetables ran out in the shops. ‘CHRIST ITS BLEEDING COLD’ howled the future novelist Kingsley Amis to the poet Philip Larkin, from his Oxford student rooms.
After a short thaw March had brought terrible storms and snowdrifts thirty feet high. People talked about snowflakes the size of five-shilling coins. There were ice-floes off the East Anglian coast. Three hundred main roads were unusable. Still to come were the worst floods in memory, cutting off towns, inundating huge areas of low-lying England, and destroying the crops in the fields. On the hills the sheep were dying. Their carcasses would be piled into pyres, causing foul-smelling smoke to hang over rural Wales, a precursor to the foot-and-mouth and BSE episodes of later decades. It was, in short, about as near as this country has been to experiencing at first hand a truly Siberian winter, though without the sturdy boots, furs and vodka that help the Russians get through. It would be followed by the real political storm – the run on the pound made inevitable by the Keynes deal in Washington, and a balance of payments crisis. As people were digging out frozen vegetables from fields and despairing of the empty shops, the Treasury was finally running out of dollars to buy help from overseas. This was the moment when the optimism of 1945 shivered and died among many voters.
Summer did come, as summer does, and it was a good summer. The sun shone, cricketers blazed away at Lords and a nation sweltered. Economically, though, Hugh Dalton’s year of misery continued. The clauses negotiated by Keynes insisting that sterling should become freely convertible to American dollars were triggered, and the inevitable happened. The world rushed to change pounds into greenbacks, and such was the outflow that convertibility had to be hurriedly stopped. The economy was simply too weak – a message that echoed round continental Europe’s finance ministries too. British housewives might have been more worried still had they known of a secret plan during the sterling crisis drawn up by the civil servant Otto Clarke (father of the later New Labour minister Charles Clarke). With Britain running out of dollars to buy food from America, Clarke drew up preparations for a ‘famine food programme’, including taking children out of school to help in the fields.28 It never came to that but the rationing of bread, which had not been necessary during the war was now in place. There was not enough cash left to buy wheat supplies from the United States, yet British ministers had to ensure there was no actual famine in other parts of the world for which they were responsible, including India and defeated Germany.
The answer, bread rationing at home, was hugely unpopular and long remembered. Along with the sterling crisis and the subsequent devaluation of 1949, a further but necessary humiliation, it gave Churchill’s Tories the essential ammunition they needed to turn Attlee out. Their manifesto would later remind voters that ‘In 1945, the Socialists promised that their methods of planning and nationalization would make the people of Britain masters of their economic destiny. Nothing could be more untrue. Every forecast has proved grossly over-optimistic. Every crisis has caught them unawares. The Fuel Crisis cost the country £200 millions and the Convertibility Crisis as much.’
The next year, though, the government did try to cheer the country up, holding the 1948 London Olympics. Cost over-runs were trivial. Security was barely an issue. The games were a triumph of determination in a war-scarred, rubble-strewn city, during which the athletes were put up in old army camps and hospitals, and the Union Jack was missing for the opening parade. And though the medal toll for British competitors was very meagre, holding the games was a genuine sign that Britain was back. For all its weaknesses, this was still a country that could organize itself pretty well.
The Sun Also Sets
The deep nostalgic vision of Empire was dented too in 1947. The King ceased to be Emperor. The jewel in the imperial crown, India, was moving towards independence long before the war. Gandhi’s brilliant insight that through non-violence the British could be embarrassed out of India more effectively than they could be shot out, had paid off handsomely in the inter-war years. London was dragged to the negotiating table despite the attempts by Churchill and others to scupper every deal from the thirties to the late forties. The war delayed independence but showed how much goodwill there was on the subcontinent, if Britain was wise enough to withdraw gracefully. During the conflict some two million Indians fought on Britain’s side or served her forces directly, their contributions being particularly strong in the campaigns in North Africa against the Italians and defeating a pro-German regime in Iraq. Gandhi himself was sentimentally fond of Britain and saddened by the Luftwaffe attacks on London. While Nehru was in prison, he kept a picture of his old school, Harrow, in his cell.
Yet many Indians had become frustrated by endless delays and the watering-down of plans for more autonomy. Leaders out of jail organized a massive wartime protest involving the burning of police stations, the beating of British residents, the cutting of telegraph lines and the blowing up of a railway line. For a while, British control of India hung in the balance, though the true story of what was happening was kept out of newspapers at home. Less dangerous if more spectacular, was the formation of an anti-British Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose, armed and supported by the Japanese. Indians were used to guard captured British troops, a humiliation designed to spread the Japanese line that this was essentially a war of Asian people against colonial Westerners. When the pro-Japanese Indians returned home after the defeat of Japan, Britain wanted them prosecuted as traitors but they were greeted as heroes by Gandhi’s Congress Party.
As soon as Attlee took power, his government organized talks on withdrawal. Anti-imperialism had been a genuine strand in Labour thinking since the party’s formation, but now there were other motives too. There was gratitude for Indian support for the Empire at its worst moment. There was also fear – the clear evidence that delaying independence would result in mass and probably uncontrollable protest. Attlee wanted a united, independent India, Muslims and Hindus in one vast state connected by trade and military agreement with Britain. Apart from anything else, he believed this would function as a major anti-communist bulwark in Asia, at just the time when the Russians were looking south and China was in revolutionary turmoil.
Attlee would get some of what he wanted, but not all. Sir Stafford Cripps led the first Labour delegation to post-war India but it was not socialist politicians who negotiated the end of British control in India. That job was begun by Field Marshal Wavell, a veteran of the Boer and First World Wars who had served with the Czarist Russians before fighting the Italians (successfully) and Rommel (less so) in the desert. He had come to India as commander-in-chief just ahead of the most decisive Japanese advances, and had succeeded as Viceroy in time to free the Congress leaders from prison. But this poetry-loving and mildly pessimistic soldier was unsuccessful in trying to reconcile Hindus and Muslims. Sectarian mobs began to attack one another, the first flickers of the communal violence which would soon ravage the subcontinent. Early in 1946 there was a major mutiny by the Royal Indian Navy, when about a quarter of its strength aboard ships off Bombay, Calcutta and Madras raised Congress flags. It was put down, with hundreds dead, but trouble spread to the Royal Indian Air Force and the police, and it looked as if authority was finally crumbling. Wavell’s last-ditch plan involved British withdrawal without any political agreement, evacuating whites from the country and handing it over to local state governments. This was regarded in London as likely to lead to civil war and fundamentally dishonourable.
Attlee passed the job to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had been supreme commander in South-East Asia, organizing the reconquest of Burma. It was a wily choice. Mountbatten was a member of the Royal Family and his nephew, a naval officer, Prince Philip of Greece, was about to marry the young Princess Elizabeth, so he was a hard man for the imperialists at home to attack. Dashing and arrogant, he shared Attlee’s determination to get a swift deal with the leaders of the Muslim and Hindu peoples, which meant with Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League and Nehru’s Congress Party. Jinnah was always hard for the British to deal with or like, and was by now close to death; but Nehru proved an easy partner, forming a famously close attachment to Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina. Partitioning the subcontinent was by now inevitable. Muslims would not accept overall Hindu domination and yet across most of India the Hindus or Sikhs were in the majority. British India was duly split into Muslim Pakistan (a made-up name, an anagram of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan, the key provinces) and Hindu-dominated India. The line was drawn up by a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, and kept secret until after the handover of power.
Mountbatten announced to widespread surprise and shock that independence would happen ten months earlier than planned, on 15 August 1947. Churchill was so appalled that his former Foreign Secretary and friend Anthony Eden had to keep him away from the chamber of the Commons. Having listened to the parliamentary statement, Enoch Powell was shattered enough to wander the streets of London all night, squatting in doorways with his head in his hands. No doubt millions of other British people felt equally that their familiar world was coming apart. And while the speed of British withdrawal may have been a political necessity, the consequences were appalling. By some counts a million people then died, many of them women and children as Muslims and Hindus caught on the wrong side of the new border fled from their homes. Sikhs rose against the Muslims in the Punjab, Muslims drove out Hindus. Rather as in Yugoslavia after the collapse of Communism, it turned out that the old central power had merely frozen and held in suspension older religious and ethnic rivalries which revived at a moment of crisis. As some 55,000 British civilians returned home, the Indian Army was hurriedly divided into two. Mountbatten had hoped for a close military alliance to continue and Karachi had even been earmarked as a base for British atomic bombers to use in attacking Russia. But no military deal could be agreed. Eventually, Pakistan broke up, with Bangladesh declaring herself independent, and succumbed to a history of coup and dictatorship. Today India and Pakistan face each other with nuclear weapons and large armies across their Kashmiri frontier.
Britons have been told that as compared to the war in Algeria which tore post-war France apart, or the Americans’ desperate war in Vietnam, Britain managed decolonization rather well. It is too comfortable a conclusion. Who was to blame for the horrifying number of Indian deaths – far more, for instance, than have died during the mayhem in Iraq? British post-war weakness probably meant that it would have been impossible to impose a single state at the time of independence. Yet Jinnah’s Muslim League and Congress had been nearer to a mature deal before the war; had Churchill and others not stymied independence in the thirties by cynically supporting the cause of the semi-independent Indian princes, then perhaps the slaughter would have been averted. Against that, the story of the Second World War would have been very different too. And today’s India, linked by English and a growing democratic superpower, stands as one of the more successful of Britain’s old imperial possessions. Indian independence was a trauma to some, a relief to many more.
Labour ministers were less enthusiastic about dismantling the Empire in Africa. Officials wrote minutes to Attlee’s ministers informing them it might take many generations before some of the colonies were ready for independence. Herbert Morrison, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, agreed. He said that to give the African colonies their freedom would be ‘like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun’. Attlee himself speculated about creating a British African army, on the lines of the lost Indian one, to help project British power around the world. The Colonial Office described Africa as the core of Britain’s new world position, from where she could draw economic and military strength. In the early fifties, the Colonial Office itself grew in numbers and was even hoping for a large new headquarters opposite Parliament Square, promised to it by Churchill. There was a grand scheme for growing groundnuts in Tanganyika, to provide cheap vegetable oil for Britain – though that was a swift and embarrassing failure. For a while it seemed that the Raj would be transplanted, in fragmented form, to Africa.
White People
Back in the mother country in 1947, who were those people who were just beginning to adjust to a post-imperial world? They were sparser and whiter. In the years after the war Britain contained about ten million fewer inhabitants than live here today. The thirties had seen a fall in the birthrate and there was much official worry about another kind of national shrinkage. In William Beveridge’s famous 1942 report launching the modern Welfare State, he suggested that a bit of fast breeding was needed: ‘with its present rate of reproduction, the British race cannot continue.’ To Beveridge and his generation ‘the British race’ meant white natives of these islands. Before the war, around 95 per cent of people in Britain had been born here, and the other 5 per cent was mostly made up of white English and Scots whose parents had happened to be serving the Empire in India, Africa or the Middle East when they were born. There were black and Asian people in Britain but very few. In the thirties the Indian community numbered perhaps 8,000 at most – a tenth of them doctors, intriguingly – and there were a few Indian restaurants and grocery stores in the biggest cities. There had been a tiny West Indian presence. No detailed surveys were done, but there were at most a few thousand, many of them students. Black sailors and mixed-race Lascars, along with Chinese, had been settled in dockland areas of Liverpool, Cardiff, Bristol and London for a long time. Again, though, the numbers were small.
During the war, men from the Caribbean began to arrive, serving with the British forces. There was a Jamaica Squadron and a Trinidad Squadron in the RAF and a West Indian Regiment in the British Army. Others came to work in factories, in the countryside and on radar stations. But once the war was over, most were sent straight home leaving an estimated permanent non-white population of about 30,000. It had been the 130,000 black American troops who made the most impact on British public opinion during the war. Despite official worries about ‘fraternization’ with coloured soldiers, they were widely welcomed and lionized. There are well-attested incidents of white GIs who tried to apply the American colour bar being mocked and challenged.29 After the war, almost unnoticed by the general public and passed in response to Canadian fears about the lack of free migration around the Empire, the 1948 British Nationality Act dramatically changed the scene. It declared that all subjects of the King had British citizenship. This gave some 800 million people around the world the right to enter the UK. Though it seems extraordinary now after so many decades of new restrictions on immigration, this was uncontroversial at the time for a simple reason – it was generally assumed that black and Asian subjects of the King would have no means or desire to travel to live in uncomfortable, crowded Britain. Travel remained expensive and slow. Why would they want to come, anyway? Until the fifties so few black or Asian people had settled in Britain that they were often treated as local celebrities and officially it was not even considered worth while trying to count their numbers.30
There were other immigrant communities. A Jewish presence had been important for a long time, in retailing, the food business and banking – everything from Marks & Spencer to Rothschild’s Bank. But in the five years before the war, some 60,000 more Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe arrived here, many of them highly qualified, helping transform the scientific, musical and intellectual life of forties Britain. When Hitler came to power in 1933 it was agreed at cabinet level to try ‘to secure for this country prominent Jews who were being expelled from Germany and who had achieved distinction’ in science, medicine, music and art. Beveridge himself helped set up an organization to help Jewish refugees, the Academic Assistance Council, which, using public donations, helped 2,600 intellectuals escape. No fewer than twenty of them later won Nobel prizes, fifty-four were elected Fellows of the Royal Society, and ten were knighted for their academic brilliance.31 In their invasion plans for 1940, the German SS reckoned the Jewish population of Britain to be above 300,000, and hugely influential.
Then there were the Irish, a big group in British life after a century of steady immigration, the vast majority of it from the south. It continued through the war, despite government restrictions, as Irish people came over to fill the labour shortage left by mobilization. Ireland’s stony neutrality and her expression of sympathy at Hitler’s death at the end of the war, had made Eire very unpopular with the British. Popular prejudice against the Irish continued, as it always had, and would for a long time to come. Yet none of this seemed to affect immigration, which carried on at a great rate through the forties and fifties, running at between 30,000 and 60,000 during any given year. Whenever cabinet committees turned to the issue of migration, the Irish were excluded from debate because they were regarded as effectively indigenous. There were other more exotic groups. By the end of the war, Britain was home to 120,000 Poles who had fled the Soviets and Nazis, many of them then serving in the British forces, notably the RAF. Most chose to stay on and by the end of 1948, with the energetic help of government settlement officers, 65,000 had jobs, in everything from coal-mining to factory work. Similar tales can be told of Czechs and many other nationalities. All these, of course, were white.
It would be wrong to portray Britain in the forties as relaxed about race. Despite the horror of the concentration camps, widely advertised in the immediate aftermath of the war, anti-Semitism was still present. The assumption that ‘they’ dodged queues or somehow got the best of scarce and rationed goods, erupts from diaries and letters of the time. After Jewish terrorist attacks on British servicemen in Palestine in 1947, there were anti-Jewish disturbances in several British cities, including attacks on shops and even the burning of a synagogue, mimicking the actions of Nazis in the thirties. More widely, trade unions were quick to express bitter hostility to outsiders coming to take British jobs – whether they be European Jews, Irish, Poles, Czechs or Maltese. The government itself spoke without self-consciousness or embarrassment about the central importance of ‘the British race’.32 The multilingual, multi-hued Britain of today, with its greengrocers selling baskets of yams and its scents of turmeric and incense, in which more than 90 per cent of us do not think you have to be white to be properly British, would have left a visitor from the immediate post-war years utterly astonished. Then, Jews and passing American servicemen apart, the composition of the country in 1945 was not much different from late medieval times.
Proper Drains and Class Distinction
Patriotic pride cemented a sense of being one people, one race, with one common history and fate. But to be British in the forties was to be profoundly divided from many of your fellow subjects by class. By most estimates, a good 60 per cent of the nation was composed of the traditional working class – that is, they were factory workers, agricultural labourers, navvies on the roads, riveters, miners, fishermen, servants or laundrywomen, people in a thousand trades, using their muscles; and all their dependents. The workers were paid in cash, weekly – cheque-books were a sign of affluence. People did not move, much. War aside, most would spend all their lives in their home town or village, though the thirties had produced modest migrations such as from industrial Scotland and Wales to the English Home Counties. The sharp sense of class distinction came from where you lived, how you spoke; and it defined what entertainments you might enjoy. The war had softened class differences a little and produced the first rumblings of the coming cultural revolution. Men and women from widely different backgrounds found themselves jumbled together in the services. On the home front, middle-class women worked in factories, public schoolboys went down the mines and many working-class women had their first experiences of life beyond the sink and the street. In uniform or in factories, working-class or lower middle-class men could find themselves ordering former well-spoken toffs around. ‘Blimps’ – the older, more pompous upper-class officers – became a butt of popular humour, a symbol of dying old Britain.
With skill shortages and a national drive for exports, wages rose after the war. The trade unions were powerful and self-confident, particularly when the new Labour government repealed the laws that had hampered them ever since the General Strike of 1926. Three years after the war, they achieved their highest ever level of support. More than 45 per cent of people who could theoretically belong to one, did so, and there were some 8.8 million union members. In other European countries at this time, trade unions were fiercely political, communist, socialist or Roman Catholic. In Britain, they were not. The Communist Party, deprived of any real part of parliamentary politics, spent much of its energy and money building support inside the unions, and was beginning to win elections for key posts, but in general British trade unionism remained more narrowly focused on the immediate cash-and-hours agenda of its members. This did not mean British trade unions were quiet. Because so many of their most experienced and older shop stewards and organizers had effectively gone to work for the government during the war, or had joined up to fight, a new generation of younger, more hot-headed shop stewards, men in their twenties or even teens, had taken control of many workplaces. The seeds of the great British trade union battles of later decades were sown and watered during the forties.
The core of the old working class which had depended for jobs on coal, steel and heavy manufacturing would eventually have a grim time as these industries first struggled, and then failed, in the decades to come. But this was not obvious after the war. The shipyards of the Clyde, Belfast and the Tyne were hard at work, the coalfields were at full stretch, London was still an industrial city, and the car-making and light engineering areas of the West Midlands were on the edge of a time of unprecedented prosperity. We were a nation of brick terraces. It was not until the next two decades that many of the traditional working-class areas of British cities would be replaced by high-rise flats or sprawling new council estates. The first generation of working-class children to get to university was now at school, larger and healthier than their parents, enjoying the dental care and spectacles provided by the young National Health Service. But for the most part working-class life was remarkably similar to working-class life in the thirties. No televisions, cars, foreign holidays, fitted kitchens, foreign food, service sector jobs had yet impinged on most people’s lives. Politicians assumed most people would stay put and continue to do roughly the same sort of job as they had done before the war. Rent acts and planning directives were the tools of ministers who assumed that the future of industry would be like its past, only more so – more ships, more coal, more cars, more factories.
The class who would do best out of the wartime changes was be the middle class, a fast growing minority. Government bureaucracy had grown hugely and would continue to do so. Labour’s Welfare State would require hundreds of thousands of new white-collar jobs, administering national insurance, teaching, running the health service. Even the Colonial Office vastly expanded its staff as the colonies disappeared, giving one of its officials, C. Northcote Parkinson, the idea for ‘Parkinson’s Law’ – that work expands to fill the time available. Studies of social mobility, such as the major one carried out in 1949, are notoriously crude and have to be taken with a pinch of salt. But they suggest that while working-class sons generally followed their fathers into similar jobs, there was much more variation among middle-class children. Labour might have intended to help the workers first, but education reform was helping more middle-class children get a good grammar school education. A steadily growing number stayed at school until fifteen, then eighteen.
So, perceptibly, the old distinctions were softening. The culture was a little more democratic. Increasing numbers would make it to university too, an extra 30,000 a year by 1950. The accents of Birmingham and Wales, the West Country and Liverpool would challenge the earlier linguistic stamp of middle-class respectability. The culture of public radio would bring literature and music to much wider audiences; the post-war humour of Tommy Handley and Round the Horne would be as enjoyed by the suburbs as by the palaces. Churchill himself had told Harrow schoolboys that one effect of the war was to diminish class differences. Sounding almost like a New Labour politician, he said to them as early as 1940 that ‘the advantages and privileges that have hitherto been enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many.’
The Old Order
But not quite yet. The ruling class was still the ruling class. Despite the variety of the 1945 cabinet, Britain in the forties and fifties was a society run mostly by cliques and groups of friends who had first met at public schools and Oxbridge. Public school education remained the key for anyone hoping to make a career in the City, the Civil Service or the higher echelons of the Army. Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only some 5 per cent of the population, but they still provided the majority of political leaders, including many of Labour’s post-war cabinet. Parliamentary exchanges of the period are full of in-jokes about who was a Wykehamist and who an Etonian. Briefly, it had seemed such schools would not even survive the war: boarding schools had been in enough of a financial crisis for some to face closure through bankruptcy. Churchill’s own Harrow was one, along with Marlborough and Lancing, though all struggled on. More generally there was a belief that public schools had contributed to failures of leadership in the thirties and right up to the early defeats of the war. When the Tory minister R. A. Butler took on the job of education reform during the war, he contemplated abolishing them and folding them all into a single state school system. Had that happened, post-war Britain would have been a very different country. But Butler, intimidated by Churchill, backed off. A watered-down scheme would have seen Eton and the rest obliged to take working-class and middle-class children, paid for by the local authorities, but this quickly fizzled out too. The public schools stayed. Attlee, devoted to his old school, had no appetite for abolition. Grammar schools were seen as a way of getting bright working-class or middle-class children to Oxbridge, and a few other universities, so that they could buttress the ruling cliques. One civil servant described the official view as being that children were divided into three kinds: ‘It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’33
The problem for the old ruling order was whether the arrival of a socialist government was a brief and unwelcome interruption, which could be sat out, or whether it was the beginning of a calm but implacable revolution. The immediate post-war period with its very high taxation was a final blow for many landowners. Great country houses like Knole and Stourhead had to be passed over to the National Trust. It was hardly a revolutionary seizure of estates, yet to some it felt that way. Tradition was being nationalized, with barely a thank-you. In 1947 the magazine Country Life protested bitterly that the aristocratic families had been responsible for civilization in Britain: ‘It has been one of the services of those currently termed the privileged class, to whom, with strange absence of elementary good manners, it is the fashion not to say so much as a thank you when appropriating that which they have contributed to England.’ Evelyn Waugh, an arriviste rather than a proper toff, sitting in his fine house in the Gloucestershire village of Stinchcombe, struggled with the dilemma. In November 1946 he considered fleeing England for Ireland (many richer people did leave Britain in the post-war years, though more often for Australia, Africa or America). Why go? Waugh asked himself. ‘The certainty that England as a great power is done for, that the loss of possessions [he is talking of the colonies], the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty . . . this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive.’
A day later, however, he was having second thoughts. ‘What is there to worry me here in Stinchcombe? I have a beautiful house furnished exactly to my taste; servants enough, wine in the cellar. The villagers are friendly and respectful; neighbours leave me alone. I send my children to the schools I please. Apart from taxation and rationing, government interference is negligible.’ Yet the world felt as if it was changing somehow. Why, he wonders, is he not at ease? Why does he smell ‘the reek of the Displaced Persons Camp’?34 Many more felt just the same; Noël Coward said immediately after Labour’s 1945 win, ‘I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable in the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty.’35 These shivery intimations of change would have some substance, though it would happen more slowly and have little to do with Attlee or Bevan. The old British class system, though it retained a medieval, timeless air, much exploited by novelists, depended in practical terms on the Empire and a global authority Britain was just about to lose. ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ would soon become shorthand for the returnees from Malaya or Rhodesia. A pervasive air of grievance and abandonment would hang about the right of British politics for decades.
Meanwhile, old society events like the ‘Varsity’ rugby match, the Boat Race, the Henley Regatta and Ascot, quickly returned after the war and indeed reached the height of their popularity. Young Conservative dances were where the better-off went to find partners. The most famous actors and actresses were able to carry on a lavish lifestyle, hidden from the taxman. London clubland carried on almost as in the twenties. The capital’s grandest restaurants, some which are still going, such as the Savoy Grill and the Ivy, were again crowded with peers, theatrical impresarios, exiled royalty and visiting American movie stars. In the upper-class diaries of the day there are complaints about a rising tide of ‘common’ behaviour, the end of good taste and the regrettable influence of Americans and Jews.
Under Attlee, Britain remained a country of private clubs and cliques, ancient or ancient-seeming privileges, rituals and hierarchies. In the workplace, there was a return to something like the relationships of pre-war times, with employers’ organizations assuming their old authority and influence, at least some of the time, in Whitehall. Inside the new nationalized industries the same sort of people continued to manage and the same ‘us and them’ relationships reasserted themselves remarkably easily. In the City, venerable, commanding merchant bankers with famous names would be treated like little gods; stiff collars, top hats and the uniforms of the medieval livery companies were still seen, even among the grey ruins of post-Blitz London; younger bankers and accountants deferred utterly to their elders. Newspaper owners would sweep up to their offices in chauffeured Rolls-Royce cars and be met by saluting doormen. The Times was soon full of advertisements for maids and other servants. Lessons in speaking ‘the King’s English’ were given to aspiring actors and broadcasters; much debate was had about the proper way to pour tea, refer to the lavatory and lay the table. Physicians in hospitals swept into the wards, followed by trains of awed, indeed frightened, junior doctors. At Oxford colleges, formal dinners were compulsory, as was full academic dress, and the tenured professors hobbled round their quads as if little had changed since Edwardian times. All of this was considered somehow the essence of Britain, or at least of England.
Gnasher George and his Girls
So too was the last grand monarchy in Europe, the only remnant of the extended family of former German princelings which had once enjoyed power from Siberia to Berlin, Athens to Edinburgh. After the national trauma of the Abdication crisis, George VI had established a reassuringly pedestrian image for the family which now called itself simply the Windsors. In private the King expressed fiercely right-wing views, falling into rages or ‘gnashes’ at the pronouncements of socialist ministers. In public he was a diffident patriarch, much loved for his tongue-tied stoicism during the Blitz, when Buckingham Palace received several direct hits. There had been cautious signs of Royal modernization, with Princess Elizabeth being used to make patriotic radio broadcasts and later joining the ATS, photographed in battledress and even mingling anonymously with the crowds on VE Day. The King and Queen, though, ran what was in all essentials an Edwardian Court well into the fifties. Every March teenage virgin girls from aristocratic or merely wealthy families would be presented to the Queen wearing three ostrich feathers in their hair. Then they would begin ‘The Season’, a marathon four-month round of balls and dinners during which, it was hoped, they would find a suitable man to marry. These debutantes would often have been sent to ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland where they would have learned how to walk properly, speak French and run a household according to the old manner. The Royal presentation dated back to 1780 and would eventually be ended by the Queen in 1958: Prince Philip opined that it was ‘bloody daft’ while Princess Margaret complained: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ It continued at a nearby hotel where, in eccentric British fashion, the girls still arrived to curtsy to a six-foot-tall birthday cake, rather than the monarch.36
Initially, it was unclear how well the monarchy itself would fare in post-war Britain. The leading members of the family were popular and Labour ministers were careful never to express any republicanism in public – indeed, there is almost no sign of it in their private diaries either – but there were many Labour MPs pressing for a less expensive, stripped down, more contemporary monarchy, on Scandinavian lines. Difficult negotiations took place over the amount of money provided by cash-strapped taxpayers. Yet the Windsors triumphed as they would again, with an exuberant display which cheered up many of their tired, drab subjects. The wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth and the then Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in 1947 was planned as a public spectacle. Royal weddings had not been so organized in the past. This was an explosion of colour and pageantry in a Britain that had seen little of either for ten years, a nostalgic return to luxury. Presents ranging from racehorses to cigarette cases were publicly displayed, grand cakes made and a wedding dress by Norman Hartnell created out of clinging ivory silk ‘trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa, and rose-like blossoms,’ encrusted with pearls and crystals.
There had been interesting arguments before the wedding about patriotism, complaints about the silk having come from Chinese worms, and a rather over-effusive insistence on Philip’s essential Britishness. The nephew of Lord Mountbatten was sold to the public as ‘thoroughly English by upbringing’ despite his being an exiled Greek prince, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and having many German relatives. In the event, Philip’s three surviving sisters were not invited to the wedding, all of them being married to Germans. He showed himself wryly prepared to accept all this, though he was reported to have annoyed the King by curtsying to him at Balmoral when he saw him wearing a kilt.37 The wedding was a radio event, still, rather than a television one, though newsreel films of it packed out cinemas around the world, including in devastated Berlin. In its lavishness and optimism, it was an act of British propaganda and celebration for bleak times, sending out the message that despite everything Britain was back. The wedding and the later Coronation reminded the club of European royalty how few of them had survived as rulers into the post-war world. Dusty uniforms and slightly dirty tiaras worn by exiles were much in evidence: the Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret remarked that ‘people who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe suddenly reappeared’.
The Look of the Forties
History is mostly written about wars and politics and then, after that, about the lives of people as expressed through schools, employment and so on. Outside official history are the lives we actually lead, more marked by births, love affairs, illnesses, deaths, friendships and coincidences, than by public events. Those are the personal histories depicted in novels, films and poems. But something is missing, because we also live surrounded by stuff – rooms, chairs, plates, curtains, bags of pasta, bowls, televisions, and beyond that, offices, shopping centres, roads cluttered with signs, adverts and cars – all of which changes constantly and colours or shapes the world in which our smaller histories happen. For the consumer society, changing brands and ads are the scents which suddenly bring back a moment in childhood or later: we walk through life marking it off with a new rug, or the tune for a drinks commercial.
In the forties, there were far fewer brands and a glaring insufficiency of ‘stuff ’. There was a shortage of furniture, cups, plates, lights, curtains, towels, bicycles, radios – you name it, you couldn’t find it. The famous brands from before the war, whether for soap, cooking materials, clothes or cars, were rather desperately still reminding people that they would return, as soon as possible. There was a natural tug back to the lost world of pre-war Britain, the designs and flavours people had been familiar with – art deco moulds from ten years earlier were pressed back into manufacturing service; old pot and pan designs were given a lick of cheerful paint and put back on sale; the vacuum cleaners and toasters which did arrive in shops had a sturdy, clunky, almost defiantly ugly look. But there was a strong push in the other direction, towards a new Britain that would look and feel brighter, cleaner, more rational, more open. This was partly driven by politics. Ministers wanted the slums replaced by airy communal housing and schools which would be three-dimensional expressions of a less fusty, cluttered nation. Labour believed in the public sphere and in planning; that meant straight lines and big spaces. In these years, public housing far outpaced private housing; and taste followed the money.
Changes in technology and the shortages of traditional materials like wood after the war drove architects and designers to express those political beliefs through brick and concrete, steel-framed windows and flat roofs. The prefab homes being hastily built in former aircraft factories may have been a stop-gap, but something about their simplicity chimed with the mood; it was the coming, cut-price British version of the modernist architecture, sculpted from the new concrete and steel-rod systems developed on the continent before the war, and brought here by refugee, generally left-wing, architects. But what would go into these flats and houses? The designer Robin Ray, a key figure at the time, noted that the Council of Industrial Design had been formed in 1944, but its power remained until the early fifties, partly because of tax incentives: ‘We naively felt that modern town planning and enlightened design of buildings and products would transform the environment and enhance the lives of people. Progress was made in many areas, helped by the socialist government.’38
This meant a stream of new-looking furniture, fabrics, crockery and rugs designed to fill the new-looking homes. There was not a surplus of much after the war, but there were surpluses of materials intended for warplanes or landing-craft, or indeed troops. So perspex, developed for gun-turrets in bombers, was tried out for table tops and even women’s shoes. Royal Air Force uniform material was dyed green or brown and used to cover sofas and armchairs. There was a great amount of aluminium which could be effectively used for lightweight chairs and tables. Laminated wood techniques, steel rods and latex became popular. After the drab colours of wartime, there was a yearning for brightness; designers responded with abstract, whimsical and cubist patterns in primary colours.
Better-looking cooking pots, mugs, lights and cutlery were advertised, the first of them in the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which had been emptied of its treasures during wartime. The show was quickly nicknamed ‘Britain Can’t Have It’ by disgruntled citizens but its design work was hugely influential, not least on Scandinavians, who returned home and started manufacturing similar designs which would be bought in large quantities by the British over the next decade – a less familiar version of a story that would be repeated with cameras, motorcycles and aircraft. The result of the new designs, on show again in the Festival of Britain in 1951 at the end of Labour’s era, was to decorate austerity with a sharp-edged, spindly, brittle and optimistic look, one that is now as securely of its era as lava-lamps or beanbags stamp the seventies. Some of the design now looks rather cold; perhaps it never truly caught on. But some of it, from the Roehampton flats overlooking Richmond Park, to the famous Jason stacking chairs, just like some of the young designers, including Terence Conran, would last.
What Did We Look Like?
Study photographs or film of a reasonable number of Britons of the mid-forties, and you are likely to notice striking physical differences; above all, bulky, creased clothes, tired-looking faces and bad teeth. From working-class women with great gaps and sharp edges in their smiles, to landed politicians with buck-toothed smirks, this was not a country able to take care of its appearance in the modern way. For good practical reasons, the male ‘short back and sides’ was almost universal. Women struggled to put on a show. American troops coming over here during the war had been warned that English girls would be a bit grubby and ‘often cannot get the grease off their hands or out of their hair’. Women were advised to rub their hair with dry towels when they could not get shampoo, or to steam it over boiling water. Spongeing with lukewarm water had replaced regular baths for millions of people. To put it bluntly, many British people in the forties would, by our sensitive standards, have smelt a little. Cosmetics were hard to get, too. Women had used everything from cooking fat and shoe polish to soot and baby powder to make themselves up – though bought cosmetics were still regarded as a little racy by many older women and men.39 Others put up with squints, semi-blindness or ugly, heavy-rimmed spectacles, which were not yet free. Buck-toothed, squinting and not overly clean: we were, in the mid-forties, very far from the scented, freshly dressed and sometimes surgically enhanced narcissists of modern Britain. People looked older at any given age than they would today – except the children who, dressed in shorts, dresses and buckle shoes, looked younger.
The dirtier air of coal-fuelled city life, and long traditions about respectability meant coats and umbrellas were much more often worn. In the City, on the football terraces and among women shopping, hats were almost universal. Photographs are a vivid reminder of how creased and rumpled the clothes of even quite well-off people looked. It was not only the war. These were still the days before easy dry cleaning and almost universal washing machines at home. In a country whose workforce was overwhelmingly manual, men’s clothes were a straightforward marker of class and occupation; heavy jackets, thick wool trousers, leather boots for most; three-piece suits, also heavy by today’s standards, with detachable collars, for the middle classes. Leisurewear was hardly known for most – simply a matter of using an older shirt, or swapping a suit jacket for a tweed one. Clothes had to last longer, so were inevitably patched and mended more frequently. During the war, most of the civilian clothes produced were so-called ‘utility clothes’, with special labels, and designed to save material; they had fewer pockets, seams and buckles. Turn-ups on men’s trousers, then fashionable, were banned. The result of utility designs could be seen on every British street well into the fifties. Richer people still had their well-made clothes from before the war, but for the working classes, clothing rationing, which arrived in 1941, meant a struggle to stay warm and decent.
Because rationing affected the quantity of clothes you could have, but not their quality, it hit the poor harder. Government campaigns about how to reinforce or reshape old clothes, ranging from well-meant advice about reinforcing ‘underarm areas’, to unravelling old woollens and re-knitting them as something else, did not improve the mood. For women, faced with an almost impossible struggle to replace laddered stockings or underwear, the wartime fashions felt boxy and unattractive – service-style caps, or flat bonnets, with short skirts and masculine jackets, what was called ‘man-tailored’. The dominant colours were dull, greys or dark blues or dark browns. On their feet women wore the heavy soled, heavily-strapped ‘wedgie’, or laced-up black leather shoes, endlessly repaired. If pregnant, they were encouraged to adapt their ordinary clothes – the ethos of ‘make-do and mend’. Their children, they complained, tended to grow far too fast for the coupons. It was a time of ankles protruding from short trousers, jackets that would barely do up, mottled wrists hanging from outgrown jerseys. It wasn’t that the post-war British did not know how to look smart. The imported American films showed immaculately dressed icons and the newspapers showed the richest, flashiest Britons, from Anthony Eden to the King, still beautifully tailored. But they could not afford to look smart. Some men found themselves avoiding invitations to drinks parties because they were ashamed of the state of their clothes. Women avoided brightly lit restaurants when their stockings had gone, and been replaced with tea-stains and drawn-on seams.
Under the hats or umbrellas, below the coats and suits, the British of the forties were also considerably leaner. Wartime rationing had actually increased the health and strength of the working classes whose diets had been nutritionally dreadful before it. By 1945, children were growing measurably taller. Fair and effective rationing of food and clothing was a prime domestic achievement of the wartime government. Organizationally, it was as complex and difficult as moving armies around the world, building instant harbours and invading Europe. Though there was some experience from the very end of the First World War to recall, it had been done almost from scratch, replacing the market with the queue and the ration book, distributing the same amounts of protein and starch to families on hill farms, in industrial Northern terraces and in Home Counties villages. If wartime opinion-polling is to be believed, it was even popular in the first few years. Some 44 million ration books, in buff, green or blue, were distributed. Regional offices were set up across the country and 1,400 local food control committees were organized. Everyone had to register with a local shopkeeper, who would get supplies of the rationed meat, ham, sugar, butter, margarine and the rest from centrally bought supplies accumulated by the newly formed Ministry of Food. With more people working away from home, more people ate out too, though in a frugal and strictly controlled way. There was a huge expansion of school meals; children were allocated free orange juice and codliver oil; works canteens and ‘British Restaurants’ were opened throughout urban Britain, serving plain and limited but nourishing food. A system of ‘points’, which allowed people to get tinned foods, dried fruits and other extras when they were available, had proved one of the great successes of wartime rationing.
For socialists, of course, this was more than sad necessity. It showed what could be done to achieve a fairer country. Yet if Labour thought rationing provided any kind of popular lesson for peacetime this would soon seem a great mistake. For though rationing was fair, it was also dull, monotonous, time-consuming and by the end infuriating. A portion of meat each week little larger than an iPod was not an existence the beef-eating British could endure for ever. During the war people had resorted to all sorts of bizarre concoctions to keep up their interest, everything from haricot beans flavoured with almonds making do as marzipan, to mashed parsnips masquerading as bananas, ‘mock goose’ made of potatoes, cooking apples and cheese, or jam made from carrots. The rich, particularly in London or when they had access to country estates, managed to avoid some of the effects of rationing: Boodles Club in London, for example, enjoyed a steady supply from hunting-and-shooting members of venison, hare, rabbit, salmon, woodcock and grouse – none of these things was rationed – though it failed to sell many portions of a stuffed and roasted beaver served on one occasion.40 For most, rationing was the prime example of the dreary colourlessness of wartime life. After the guns had stopped, it went on unbearably long. It was still biting hard at the end of the forties. Meat was still rationed until 1954. And though the poor were better fed, most people felt hard done-by. Many doctors agreed. Shortly after that horrific 1947 winter was over, the British Medical Press carried a detailed article by a Dr Franklin Bicknell which argued that available foods were 400 calories short of what women needed each day, and 900 calories short of what men required: ‘In other words, everyone in England is suffering from prolonged chronic malnutrition.’41 This was angrily disputed by Labour politicians, keen to point out the effect of all that free juice, codliver oil and milk on Britain’s children. But people were on the side of Dr Bicknell.
Under the Skin: Belief
Below the skin, though, were the British of the forties fundamentally different to the British of today? This was then a religious society, though less so than in any previous time. In surveys people overwhelmingly described themselves as Christian, but communal worship and knowledge of the Bible was falling away. The Church of England saw one of the sharpest declines in membership in the decade from 1935 to the end of the war, losing half a million communicants, down to just under three million. (Another half million would be lost by 1970 and more than a million by 1990.) The Roman Catholics rose in numbers after the war, perhaps because of Polish, Irish and other European immigration, while the Presbyterians and the smaller churches also suffered decline. Though the first mosque in Britain had been built in Woking, Surrey as early as 1889, there were few Muslims or Hindus. North of the border, the Church of Scotland, which had only finally won full independence from the British State in 1921, was more popular than the English established church, and continued to grow until the early sixties. In the absence of a Scottish parliament, debates at the Kirk’s ruling body, the General Assembly, had an authority and produced a level of newspaper interest unthinkable today. Scotland’s higher religiosity – for the Catholics were strongly represented too – had its darker side in the persistence of Orange marches, bigotry and mutual suspicion on a scale which almost matched that of Northern Ireland. To the visitor, Britain would have seemed a very obviously Christian nation, with its State and Royal ceremonies, its famous and often controversial bishops, its religious broadcasting and above all its spires and towers in every suburb and village. The churches below those spires were at least thronged for marriages, funerals and the special services such as Christmas and Easter. Girls and boys were likelier to be in the Christian Scouts or Guides; schools had prayers at morning assembly; Sunday schools were busy; the Army had its Sunday parade.
Some of the most eloquent cultural moments in the life of post-war Britain had religious themes, from the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, with its tapestries by Graham Sutherland, to the popularity of Benjamin Britten’s wartime choral work A Ceremony of Carols. Perhaps Britain’s best-loved serious painter was Stanley Spencer, who was turning out work in the forties and fifties based on his own idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical events – the Resurrection, Christ calling the Apostles, the Crucifixion. John Piper was famous for his watercolours and etchings of medieval churches; John Betjeman celebrated later, Victorian ones. Post-war Britain’s major poet, the American-born T. S. Eliot, was an outspoken adherent of the Church of England. His last major book of poetry, Four Quartets, is suffused with English religious atmosphere, while in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral he addressed an iconic moment in English ecclesiastical history. He would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. C. S. Lewis had become a nationally known Christian broadcaster during the war, with his Screwtape Letters, and for children there was soon to be the religious allegory of the Narnia books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared in 1950. It could fairly be said that in this period, there still existed an Anglican sensibility, a particularly English, sometimes grave, sometimes playful, Christianity, with its own art and thought. It may have been wispy and self-conscious but it was also alive and argumentative, as it is not today. It was of course a limited and elite movement. Already, saucy revelations in the Sunday papers were where most people turned when they thought of immorality, not to sermons.
Were the British of the forties any more moral, or at any rate any more law-abiding, than the modern British? This is one of the hardest questions to answer. Conventions and temptations were just so different. On the surface, it was certainly a more discreet, dignified and rule-bound society. Divorce might have been becoming more widespread, but it was still a matter for embarrassment, even shame. Back in the early thirties, the average number of divorce petitions filed was below 4,800 a year. During the war, it jumped to 16,000. By 1951, with easier divorce laws, it was more than 38,000. In the forties and fifties, it still carried a strong stigma, across classes and reaching to the highest. As late as 1955, when Princess Margaret wanted to marry Group Captain Peter Townshend, the innocent party in a divorce case, a Tory cabinet minister, Lord Salisbury, warned that he would have to resign from the government if it allowed such a flagrant breach of Anglican principles. Divorced men and women were not welcome at Court. Homosexuality was illegal and vigorously prosecuted. Pornography was, for most people, almost unknown – ‘dirty books’ were on sale in a very few bookshops but ‘smut’ was still considered something mostly available for foreigners.
The censorship of the theatre, dating back to Walpole’s time, was taken extremely seriously. Playwrights had to submit their plays to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at St James’s Palace, which would strike out double entendre or vulgar language. John Osborne had a letter back about his play The Entertainer in March 1957, with sixteen alterations, such as ‘Page 6, alter “turds”. Page 9, alter “camp” . . . The little song entitled, “The old church bells won’t ring tonight ’cos the Vicar’s got the clappers”. Substitute: “The Vicar’s dropped a clanger”.’ Yet behind the firewall of censorship and law, there is plenty of evidence of a country just as sex-obsessed as it is now, and probably always was. The scatological outpouring in private letters and diaries is amazing, presumably the flip-side of public discretion. The war had involved years of disruption to family life, broken relationships, a lot of quiet domestic adultery, and a boom in homosexual activity, as tens of thousands of young, frustrated servicemen were let loose in darkened cities. One thing which would shock many people now, if they could be transported back, was the huge number of prostitutes working openly on the streets in the ‘red light’ areas of the cities, around Manchester city centre, Edgbaston in Birmingham and Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. In London, the so-called Hyde Park Rangers and Piccadilly Commandos were gangs of prostitutes working almost unmolested by the police and earning small fortunes from horny soldiers.
Street crime had boomed particularly in London and in the words of one of the capital’s historians by 1945 ‘the country was awash with guns, illegally sold by American servicemen for £25 for a handgun, or brought back by British servicemen from abroad’. Over the war years, though the population of London had dropped by some two million, the number of serious offences per head had doubled.42 The immediate post-war years saw real problems, partly because of the size of the black market, armed racketeers, and the continued presence of deserters, of whom many thousands were hiding out, including an estimated 19,000 from the US Army. Because of frustration at the slow pace of demobilization, desertions increased after hostilities ceased. Films of the time sometimes reveal a semi-anarchic wilderness territory of bombed-out homes and urban wasteland, which may be policed by gangs. Memoirs confirm that many children and adolescents, lacking parents or simply profiting from the shaky administration of a great city returning to life, more or less ran wild.
Yet to get the tone of the times right, it is important not to forget that, among the rebellions against rationing and official incompetence, Britain was basically law-abiding. In a country awash with cheap handguns, struggling with profound resentments about shortages and a thriving black market, and still containing many deserters on the run, by virtually every count available, serious crime then fell. The guns did not lead to spates of shootings. Croydon did not become Chicago. Armed crime in London involving guns fell from a high of forty-six incidents in 1947 to just four cases in 1954. The number of people sentenced to prison fell by 3,000 between 1948 and 1950. The murder rate fell.43 Indeed, overall serious crime fell by nearly 5 per cent per head of population in the five years after the war. One historian of British crime concludes: ‘Perhaps the most peaceful single year was 1951, with a low level of crime, especially violent crime, following a brief increase in bad behaviour following the war.’44 Bearing out the tricksiness of all statistics, this year is cited by others as a post-war crime peak, yet the general picture holds up. People respected the police and came across serious crime rarely. The various scares about violent racketeers in London, or lawless youths, were mostly confined to the papers. Foreign observers talked about the orderly, calm, law-abiding nature of British society as something rare in Europe or around the world. All of this matters enormously to Britain’s self-image now, since commentators and politicians often point to the post-war era as a time of Edenic peace and order, far removed from the world of machine-gun-toting police and drug gangs. Why was Britain so well-mannered and lawful?
Some argue that tougher penalties are the most obvious reason. It is true that from 1946 until the year hanging ended, 1964 (though it was legally abolished two years later), some 200 murderers were executed. Other grim punishments, notably flogging, were on the wane; they were ordered infrequently in the fifties. The last judicial birching was approved by the Conservative Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, as late as 1962, though the practice continued in the Isle of Man and very occasionally in Scotland. Yet violent crime was on the increase again well before hanging was abolished. Its abolition cannot be the only reason. One obvious factor is that so many young men, the people who commit most crimes, were in the Armed Forces, latterly doing National Service. This did not simply take people off the streets. It provided discipline and the habit of obeying – and issuing – orders. Two generations of boys were marched off for short haircuts and taught to polish their shoes by fathers who had been in the services. Then there was the relative lack of opportunity. A society in which people barely have enough to eat and possess few movable goods is rather less prone to street crime than one in which every teenager totes an expensive mobile phone, and every urban street is lined with parked cars. Finally, not to be underestimated simply because it cannot be measured, there was the spirit of the times. The war had shaken everyone’s sense of security – not just serving troops but the bombed and the evacuated and the bereaved as well. The Cold War would not diminish an underlying sense that life had become fragile. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was a profound post-war turn towards hearth and home and a yearning for security, order, predictability – in the street, in the neighbourhood, if it could not be there in the wider world.
These then, in all their variety, patriotism and hope, were the people whose fate was now in the hands of Clement Attlee and his ministers. We have looked at the difficulties facing the country and at the confused hopes of the new government. We know that the dream of a New Jerusalem, a socialist commonwealth, was never realized and that some historians see the 1945 government as a wasted chance. It is time now to look at what this government actually did.
The post-war Labour government did the following things. It created the National Health Service. It brought in welfare payments and state insurance ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It nationalized the Bank of England, the coal industry, which was then responsible for 90 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, and eventually the iron and steel industry too. It withdrew from India. It demobilized much of the vast army, air force and navy that had been accumulated during the war. It directed armament factories back to peaceful purposes and built new homes, though not nearly enough. It oversaw a rationalization and shake-up in the school system, raising the leaving age to fifteen. It kept the people fed, though, as we have seen, not excitingly fed. It started to fight Communism in Korea and to develop the atomic bomb. It did these things against the background of the worst financial crisis that could be imagined, at a time when its own civil servants were drawing up plans for starvation rationing if the money ran out, and while meeting its obligations to the malnourished people of other countries, left bereft by war or crop failure. It harangued people to work harder and consume less. In its dying months it did its best to amuse and entertain them too, with the Festival of Britain. This combines to form the most dramatic tale in our peacetime history of a State organization doing things it actually meant to.
Without the war, clearly, there would have been no ‘Attlee government’ as we remember it. With the war, though, some major social reform programme became inevitable; wars shake up democracies violently, whether they win or lose. France and Italy saw a huge rise in Communist influence after the war. Britain did not. But had a post-war British government tried to shrug off the hopes for a brave new world shared by so many and encouraged by everyone from archbishops to newspaper editors, what damage would have been done to Britain’s political system? There could have been no return to the thirties. After the privately run chaos and underinvestment of pre-war Britain people from almost all parts of the political spectrum thought central planning essential. Churchill’s Tories would have done many of the things Labour did, just a little less so, and more slowly. By the time the old man returned to power again in 1951, he was promising to do more in some areas, such as housing. The historian of the Welfare State puts it like this: ‘A country which had covered large tracts of East Anglia in concrete to launch bomber fleets, and the south coast in Nissen huts to launch the largest invasion the world had ever seen, could hardly turn round to its citizenry and say it was unable to organise a national health service; that it couldn’t house its people; or that it would not invest in education.’45 What was done after the war to remake Britain was not inevitable. There were lots of battles and individual decisions on the way. But some such quiet revolution, some big grab of state power, or extension of political will, was bound to have occurred.
Beveridge: Spin Doctor and Sage
If there is one man who deserves a place in the pantheon of reform, outside party politics, it is that cadaverous, white-haired, publicity-mad, kindly, harsh, determined and entirely impossible man, William Beveridge. He had left his wealthy upper-class circle to become a social worker in the East End of London, just like Clement Attlee. He then became a journalist and a civil servant before the First World War, a friend of intellectual socialists. He worked with the young Winston Churchill in the Liberal government, was one of the architects of rationing in 1916 and was later a Liberal MP. He knew Whitehall inside-out but left to become an academic, using the young Harold Wilson as his dogsbody. This was a hard life. Beveridge was fanatically hard-working, rising at six for a cold bath before spending the rest of his day icily wallowing in cold statistics, writing and dictating. When war came again, Beveridge decided that government could not properly function without him and pestered the Churchill team for a job. He was bitterly disappointed when Bevin, who disliked him intensely, finally shut him up with the offer of a review into the confusing array of sickness and disability schemes for workers. It was hardly glamorous or central to the war effort and Beveridge apparently wept tears of rage and frustration when he was told. He set to work, however, and quickly decided there could be no coherent system of work benefits without looking too at the plight of the old, women at home and children. Workers were not alone, self-sufficient. They had families. They aged. He would have to devise a system to include everyone, while keeping the incentive to work. There would have to be family allowances, and a National Health Service, but all this would be undermined if Britain returned to the era of mass unemployment; so the State would have to manage the economy to keep people in work. Giving Beveridge a limited remit and telling him to get on with it was like giving Leonardo da Vinci some paper and telling him to doodle away to pass the time.
Earlier we noted that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell was abroad in the England of the mid-forties. Beveridge was urged by his helper, soon to be his wife, Jessy Mair, to adopt the language of Cromwell too. Soon he was stomping around telling anyone who would listen that he intended to slay five giants – Want (he meant poverty), Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge was addicted to what a later Britain would call ‘spin’. He used his position as a well-known broadcaster, and his contacts with the press, to drip out advance hints of the great report he was preparing, which he clothed in millennial language. He was also lucky in his timing. After the bleakest of the war years, Britain’s fate was on the turn. There were, inevitably, plenty who were nervous or hostile. Leading industrialists protested that Britain was fighting Germany to keep the Gestapo out of our houses not to build a costly Welfare State. The Conservative Chancellor, Sir Kingsley Wood, briskly told Churchill that Beveridge’s plan would be unaffordable. Whitehall mandarins resented his egotism and self-promotion. But he had the wind at his back. Popular expectations were too high and memories of the thirties were too vivid for the white-haired giant-killer to be stopped.
Beveridge’s was a long, detailed, number-filled report, longer than this book, with no pictures and very few adjectives. Yet there were queues in London on the day of publication waiting to grab copies. It sold like no government report before, and very few since. Within a month, 100,000 copies had been bought; eventually six times as many were sold. It was distributed to British troops, snapped up in America, and dropped by Lancaster bombers over occupied Europe as propaganda – ‘Look, here’s the kind of thing a democratic society promises its people.’ A detailed analysis of the Beveridge Report was discovered in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war, ruefully describing it as ‘superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points’.46 At home, unaware of the impact he was making in the unlikeliest places, Beveridge lectured. He wrote columns. He filled halls. He broadcast. A few months later the cautious Churchill acknowledged that, far from distracting attention from the war effort, the Beveridge Report was greatly boosting morale. He gave his first broadcast on domestic issues, accepting ‘a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise’ in health, welfare, housing and education, noting that Britain could not have ‘a band of drones in our midst’, whether aristocrats or pub-crawlers; and in a splendidly Churchillian twist announcing that ‘there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.’
The inevitable tumble that follows a Report and White Paper – the watering-down, haggling, legislating and organizing – had to take place before the new National Insurance system was finally brought into being in 1948. Yet it was a fantastic feat of organization which puts modern government to shame in its energy and speed. A new office to hold 25 million contribution records was needed, plus 6 million for married women. It had to be huge and to go up quickly. Prisoners of war were used to build it in Newcastle; meanwhile a propeller factory in Gateshead was taken over to run family allowances. The work of six old government departments was brought into a new ministry. More than half the staff who were transferred were still working away with typewriters and fountain pens in the bedrooms of 400 Blackpool hotels and boarding houses where they had been sent for the war. Forms were printed, box files assembled, new teams picked. Jim Griffiths, the Labour minister pushing it all through and refusing to take no for an answer, wanted a thousand local National Insurance offices ready around the country, decently decorated and politely staffed. After being told a hundred times that all this was quite impossible, he got it. Britain has been a subtly different and slightly less dangerous place to live in ever since. The level of help given was rather less than Beveridge himself would have wanted, and married women in particular were still treated as dependents; there was a lot to be argued about over the next fifty years. Still, from Beveridge’s first rough notes in an office where he was thought to be safely out of harm’s way, to a revolution in welfare, sweeping away centuries of complicated, partial and unfair rules and customs, it had been just six years’ work.
The creation of the National Health Service, which Beveridge thought essential to his wider vision, was an angrier task. Britain had had a system of voluntary hospitals, raising their own cash, which varied wildly in size, efficiency and cleanliness. Later, it also had municipal hospitals, many growing out of the original workhouses. Some of these, in go-ahead cities like London, Birmingham or Nottingham, were efficient, modern places whose beds were generally kept for the poor. Others were squalid. Money for the voluntary hospitals came from investments, gifts, charity events, payments and a hotchpotch of insurance schemes. Today we think of ward closures and hospitals on the edge of bankruptcy as diseases of the NHS. The pre-war system was much less certain and wards closed for lack of funds then too. By the time the war ended most of Britain’s hospitals had been brought into a single national emergency medical service. The question was what should happen now – should they be nationalized or allowed back to go their own way? A similar question mark hung over family doctors. GPs depended on private fees, though most of them also took poor patients through some kind of health insurance scheme. When not working from home or a surgery, they would often double up operating in municipal hospitals where, as non-specialists, they sometimes hacked away incompetently. And the insurance system excluded many elderly people, housewives and children, who were therefore put off visiting the doctor at all, unless they were in the greatest pain or gravest danger. The situation was similar with dentistry and optical services, which were not available to anyone without the cash to pay for them. Out of this Labour was determined to provide the first system of medical care, free at the point of need, there had been in any Western democracy.
Simplicity is a great weapon. Nye Bevan’s single biggest decision was to take all the hospitals, the voluntary ones and the ones run by local councils, into a single nationalized system. It would have regional boards but it would all come under the Ministry of Health in London. This was heroic self-confidence. For the first time, a single politician would take ultimate responsibility for every hospital in the land, bar a tiny number of private ones. Herbert Morrison, the great defender of municipal power, was against this nationalization but was brushed aside by Bevan.
A more dangerous enemy by far were the hospital doctors. What followed was the most important, most difficult domestic fight of the post-war Labour government’s life. The doctors, organized under the Conservative-leaning leadership of the British Medical Association, had it in their power to stop the NHS dead in its tracks by simply refusing to work for it. They were worried about their standing in the new system – would they be mere state functionaries? And they were suspicious of Bevan, quite rightly. He had wanted to have the doctors nationalized too, all employed by the state, all paid by the state, with no private fees allowed. This would mean a war with the very men and women trusted by millions to cure and care for them. But Bevan, the red-hot socialist, turned out to be a realist and diplomatist. He began by wooing the top hospital doctors, the consultants. The physicians and surgeons were promised they could keep their lucrative pay beds and private practice. Bevan later admitted that he had ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’. Next he retreated on the payment of the 50,000 GPs, promising they could continue being paid on the basis of how many people they were treating, rather than getting a flat salary. This wasn’t enough. In a poll of doctors, for every one who said he would work in the new National Health Service, nine said they would refuse to take part. As the day for the official beginning of the NHS drew closer, there was a tense political stand-off. Bevan continued to offer concessions while also attacking the doctors’ leaders as ‘a small body of politically poisoned people’ sabotaging the will of Parliament. Would the old Britain of independent professionals, with their cliques, status and fees, accept the new Britain of state control? They did, of course. More concessions and more threats brought them round. In the end, Bevan was backed by a parliamentary majority and they were not. But it had been a long, tight, nasty battle.
When the NHS opened for business on 5 July 1948, there was a flood of people to surgeries, hospitals and chemists. Fifteen months later, Bevan announced that 5.25 million pairs of free spectacles had been supplied, as well as 187 million free prescriptions. By then 8.5 million people had already had free dental treatment. Almost immediately there were complaints about the cost and extravagance, the surge of demand for everything from dressings to wigs. There was much anecdotal evidence of waste and misuse. There certainly was waste. The new bureaucracy was cumbersome. And it is possible to overstate the change – most people had had access to some kind of affordable health care before the NHS, though it was patchy and working-class women had a particular difficulty in getting treatment. But the most important thing it did was to take away fear. Before it millions at the bottom of the pile had suffered untreated hernias, cancers, toothache, ulcers and all kinds of illness, rather than face the humiliation and worry of being unable to afford treatment. There are many moving accounts of the queues of unwell, impoverished people surging forward for treatment in the early days of the NHS, arriving in hospitals and doctors’ waiting rooms for the first time not as beggars but as citizens with a sense of right. If there was one single domestic good that the British took from the sacrifices of the war, it was a health service free at the point of use. We have clung to it tenaciously ever since and no mainstream party has dared suggest taking it away.
The People’s Economy?
The same cannot be said of some of Labour’s other nationalizations. The first, that of the Bank of England, sounds dramatic but had almost no real impact. Exactly the same men stayed in charge, following just the same policies. Nationalization of the gas and electricity industries, themselves already part-owned by local authorities as well as many small private companies, caused few ripples. Labour had talked about nationalizing the rail system from 1908, almost from the moment it became a party. The railway system had been rationalized long before the war into four major companies – London & North-Eastern; Great Western Railway; Southern Railways; and London, Midland & Scottish. By the mid-forties there was almost no real competition left in the system and periodic grants of public money had been needed for years to help the struggling companies out. The distance between rationalized and nationalized is longer than a single letter, of course, but since the government had taken direct control of the railways from the beginning of the war it was an easy letter to replace.
This did not produce a transport system of delight. Labour had the ultimate Fat Controller world-view. It wanted everything from lorries and ships to trains and barges under one giant thumb. The new British Rail would be only one part of an empire comprising the London Underground, canals slicing through the England of the industrial revolution, the grimy trucks of thousands of road haulage companies, the major ports and harbours and even travel agents and hotels. All this came under a single British Transport Commission. For the railway system, which had been the glory of the country, this meant a subsidiary position, answering to a new Railway Executive and his regional managers who would oversee the 632,000 staff, 20,000 steam locomotives and more than 4,000 electric commuter trains in the country. Among the stock were battered, rackety gas-lit carriages from the days of Queen Victoria and 7,000 horses used to pull rolling stock around shunting yards.47 The post-war train system was more powerful than the pre-motorway road network, but it was now in dreadful condition and, because of the economic crisis and the shortage of steel, it would be starved of new investment. Unpainted bridges and dripping tunnels nearly a century old, creaking and failing signalling systems, clapped-out locomotives, rusted and broken lines, the lack of electrification and cold, uncomfortable carriages – none of that was the fault of nationalization. But nationalization without new investment was no answer to it either. The only people who did well out of rail nationalization were the original shareholders of the railway companies who were, to their surprise, rather well compensated.
In the forties, coal and steel stirred up more emotion even than transport. Coal provided nine-tenths of Britain’s energy. Its smoke and smell hung heavily over every town and city. When the coal industry fell behind its quotas, or was interrupted by bad weather, the factories closed and the people shivered. Coal was also central to Labour’s story. The 1926 General Strike had begun and ended with the miners and ‘hard-faced colliery owners’ were the group most despised by Labour MPs. Coal was red-hot. The ambitious young Harold Wilson, looking for a way to make a mark, wrote a book about how to modernize the industry. Socialist writers such as Priestley and Orwell used the awful conditions of the miners to rub readers’ noses in what was wrong with Britain. So for Labour MPs, nationalizing the coal industry was what they were in politics for, as well as sweet revenge. The job was given to one of the government’s older and more ideological members. Manny Shinwell had been a tailor’s boy in London’s East End before moving to Glasgow and emerging as a moving force on ‘Red Clydeside’. He was a stirring speaker and veteran MP but when handed the task of nationalizing coal and electricity, he found there were almost no plans or blueprint to help him. All anyone could dredge up was a single Labour pamphlet written in Welsh.
Shinwell managed the job by the due day, 1 January 1947. But his timing was catastrophic. As we have seen it was just then that the freezing weather stopped coal being moved and the power stations began to fail. You can hardly blame socialism for snow but, along with the food minister, John Strachey, Shinwell became a demonized figure for promising that there would be no power cuts. ‘Shiver with Shinwell and Starve with Strachey’ said the papers. More important in the longer term was the lack of planning about how to modernize the industry that kept Britain working, warm and fed. Many mines, operated under Victorian conditions by families which had owned them for decades, simply needed to be closed. In other parts of the coalfield, new mines needed to be sunk for, by 1947, Britain was producing a lot less coal than before the war. Modern cutting and winding gear was desperately required everywhere. So was a better relationship between managers and miners to end the history of mistrust and strikes. The miners got new contracts and a five-day week but the first major strikes spread within months of nationalization. On inauguration day, signs had gone up outside most collieries proudly announcing that they were now managed by the National Coal Board ‘on behalf of the people’. In some cases, ‘people’ was scored out, and ‘miners’ written in. Over time, relations between local managers, most of them from the pre-nationalization era, and the miners did improve a little. Over time, investment did come in, and the worst pits were shut down. But the naive idea that simply taking an industry into public ownership would improve it had been punctured early. What matters is the quality of the managers. The historian Correlli Barnett was unkind, not unfair, to complain that Whitehall chose for the nationalized boards ‘administrators of their own kidney, sound chaps unlikely to rock boats, rather than innovative leaders strong in will and personality’.48 Coal was under Viscount Hyndley, a 63-year-old marketing man from the industry, an Etonian ran the gas boards and transport was overseen by Sir Cyril Hurcomb from the Ministry of War Transport, ‘a man whose entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of engineering were nil’. The political symbolism of taking over great industries on behalf of the people was striking but as politicians discover anew, every few years, talking about change and actually imposing it are very different things.
By the time the last big struggle to nationalize an industry was underway, the steel debates of 1948–9, the public mood was already turning. Labour did nationalize the iron and steel industry, which differed from coal and rail in being potentially highly profitable and having good labour relations. But it did so with a nervousness that showed the government felt a change in the weather. Labour had worked itself up, proclaiming that ‘the battle for steel is the supreme test of political democracy – a test which the whole world will be watching.’ Yet the cabinet agonized and went ahead only because of a feeling that, otherwise, they would be accused of losing their nerve. In the debates in the Commons, bright young Labour backbenchers rebelled. The steel owners were organized and vigorous. Labour had a torrid time and the Tories seemed to be regaining their spirits.49 An over-excited Cripps told the Commons: ‘If we cannot get nationalization of steel by legal means, we must resort to violent methods.’ They did get it, but the industry was little shaken. Steel needed new investment almost as much as the coalmines and railways did – new mills, coke ovens, new melting furnaces. Again, though, nationalization helped not at all. Within just a few years more, it was largely returned to private ownership.
Nationalization would give Britain a kind of modernization, but a thin, underfunded and weak variety, nothing like the second industrial revolution its planners hoped for. Reversing it would give Margaret Thatcher some of her greatest victories, in the programme of privatization that followed some forty years after Attlee’s government. The coal industry would virtually disappear after catastrophic strikes. The railways under BR would become a national joke, but then fall further after a botched privatization. The whole notion of state planning would fall from fashion.
The first stories began to appear in newspapers in July 1946. Out of the blue, fed up with having nowhere decent to live, around forty-eight families had marched into disused army camps at Scunthorpe. Then it happened again, in Middlesborough when thirty families moved into a camp. Homeless people in Salisbury took over thirty huts there. At Seaham Harbour, just up the coast from Newcastle, eight miners and their families chalked their names on empty huts and began unrolling bedding. Then squatting began in Doncaster. In picturesque Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, a hundred families declared themselves the ‘Vache Park Estate committee’ and took over a military base. They elected a Mr Glasspool as chairman, who declared in best Ealing comedy mode, ‘by sticking together, we can do it. If the local authorities try to move us out, they will have a bit of a job now.’ Through August, the squatting gathered pace – Ashton, Jarrow, Liverpool, Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire, Llantwit Major, one of the oldest towns in Wales. In Bath, an RAF aerodrome was seized. At Ramsgate, miners and their families took over gun emplacements. Families marched into an unoccupied Cardiff nurses’ home. A London bus conductor and his family occupied an empty nursery in Bexley-heath. Some 500 people took over camps outside Londonderry. A Sheffield anti-aircraft battery was taken over. Most of the invasions were peaceful, but the squatters were determined. At Tupsley Brickworks army camp outside Hereford, where German prisoners had been housed, The Times reported that ‘A British corporal refused them admission, but he was overpowered, the gates were forced and a party of about twenty men and a number of women entered the camp. They found ten empty huts, which were promptly allocated.’ Six couples moved into a Royal Artillery camp in Croydon. At Slough, where thirty-two empty Nissen huts stood in the football stadium, squatters waited until the guards were distracted and infiltrated through hedges. Birmingham people took over flats.
By early autumn it was estimated that 45,000 people had illegally taken over empty huts, flats or other shelters. It was only then, however, that the spreading revolt really hit the headlines.
On the wet Sunday afternoon of 8 September, about a thousand people began to converge on Kensington High Street in London. They were mainly young married couples with children, including babies. Most carried suitcases. Taxis piled with bedding, and the odd furniture van, joined them. A carefully choreographed operation, it was organized by London Communist Party officials such as Tubby Rosen of Stepney and Ted Bramley, the party’s London boss. They had been identifying and marking up empty properties in the capital. A reporter from The Times takes up the story: ‘Those who could not find accommodation stood patiently in the rain while the scouting parties were sent out to inspect neighbouring property . . . Consultations were held under lampposts in the rain and there appeared to be an elaborate system of communications by messengers.’ Around town, properties were duly taken over: Lord Ilchester’s former London home and Abbey Lodge in Regent’s Park, a building just round the corner from Buckingham Palace and flats in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, Upper Phillimore Gardens and further afield, in Ealing and Pimlico.
The authorities’ initial reaction was superbly British. The Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) brought hot drinks, and the police, rather than trying to evict the families, supplied tea and coffee from Kensington Barracks. The press was sympathetic and so, it seemed, was much of the public. As the squatting continued, crowds gathered outside and formed human chains to pass food and drink through windows. In some streets, the police picked up the food parcels and brought them to the squatters themselves. Blankets, money, food, chocolates and cigarettes were collected for the families. Students from London University marched through the streets with banners declaring ‘Homes for Everybody before Luxury for the Rich’. Some squatted properties soon had too much food to cope with. But as the rebellion went on, the official mood hardened. Electricity supplies were cut to some of the seized properties, local authorities were warned not to help them and mounted police were used to disperse sympathetic crowds. Squatters in Buckingham Palace Road wrote to the King to protest. A deputation went to Number Ten but was met by the Prime Minister’s housekeeper, who told them Attlee was too busy to see them. The cabinet had decided the revolt had to be stopped. Nye Bevan, in charge of housing, announced that this was now a confrontation to defend social justice and led the government response against ‘organized lawlessness’. The Communist leader Harry Pollitt retorted that ‘If the Government wants reprisals, they will get them. The working class is in a fighting mood.’ In the end, the squatting revolt fizzled out and the Communists led the retreat. The clinching argument seems to have been a threat that people who squatted would lose their position in the queue for new council homes.
Housing was the most critical single post-war issue, and would remain near the top of the national agenda through the early fifties. Half a million homes had been destroyed or made uninhabitable by German air-raids, a further 3 million badly damaged and overall, a quarter of Britain’s 12.5 million homes were damaged in some way. London was the biggest single example. Films of the post-war years, such as the Ealing comedies Hue and Cry and Passport to Pimlico, show vividly a capital background of wrecked streets, a cityscape of ruins, inhabited by feral urchins. But the problem was nationwide. Southampton lost so many buildings that during the war officials reported that the population felt the city was finished and ‘broken in spirit’. Coventry lost a third of her houses in a single night. Over two nights, the shipbuilding town of Clydebank, which had 12,000 houses, was left with just seven undamaged.50 Birmingham had lost 12,000 homes completely, with another 25,000 badly damaged. By the time people began to pour out of the armed forces to marry or return to their families, the government reckoned that 750,000 new houses were needed quickly. This was far more than a country short of steel, wood and skilled labour could possibly manage, at least by ordinary building. Worse, though there had been slum clearances, the old industrial cities, including London as well as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, still contained hideous slums, blackened grimy terraces lacking proper sanitation, and in some cases lacking any gas or electric power supply too.
This was about a lot more than bricks and mortar. The war had separated husbands and wives, deprived children of their parents and in general shaken the family fabric of the country. Some 38 million civilians had changed address, a total of 60 million times. Many marriages had broken up under the strain of the war. Yet people wanted a return to the warmth and security family life can offer. There were more than 400,000 weddings in 1947 and 881,000 babies born; the beginning of the ‘boom’ that would reshape British life in the decades ahead.
With both marriages and births, these were really big increases on the pre-war years, a million extra children in the five years after the war. There were not nearly enough individual homes to go round, so hundreds of thousands of people found themselves living with their in-laws, deprived of privacy and locked in inter-generational rows. It was, admittedly, a time when people were prepared to live more communally, more elbow-to-elbow, than they would be later. Wartime queuing had revived a kind of street culture, as women spent hour upon hour standing together, inching forward, sharing their grumbles as they waited for the shutters to snap up. Cinemas and dance-halls were crammed with people trying to escape the cold and monotony of their homes. Without television, or central heating, and severely short of lighting, people were in it together. It was the least private time of all. With wartime requisitioning, evacuation and the direction of labour, many were lodging in unfamiliar rooms. So the sharing of toilets and squeezing past each other in small kitchens that so many new families had to put up with in the late forties, was not a shock. It was just a disappointment, like the dreary and meagre food, and the ugly, threadbare clothing. Some believe the popularity of the mother-in-law joke in British variety and television comedy, well into the seventies, was forged in the cramped family homes of the immediate post-war period. Public support for the squatters was perhaps not so surprising. What could ministers do?
The most dramatic response was factory-made instant housing, the ‘prefabs’. They were designed for a few years’ use, though a few of them were still being lived in sixty years later. Between 1945 and 1949, under the Temporary Housing Programme, a total of 156,623 prefabs went up, far fewer than the total of new homes needed, but a welcome start. They were a lot more than mere huts; the prototype ‘Portal’ bungalow, shown outside the Tate Gallery and in Edinburgh in 1944, came with a cooker, sink, fridge, bath, boiler and fitted cupboards too. Though, at £550, it cost fractionally more than a traditional brick-built terraced house, it used a fraction of the resources – it weighed, for example, just under two tons, as compared to about 125 tons for a brick house.51 The houses were typically built in hastily converted aircraft factories – the Bristol Aeroplane Company made many – and then loaded onto lorries, with bags of numbered screws, pipes and other fittings. When they arrived at cleared sites, ready-painted, they would be unloaded and screwed together on a concrete plinth, often by German or Italian prisoners of war. Within a couple of days, they could be ready for moving into. The thirteen designs, such as Arcons, Spooners and Phoenixes, had subtly different features – some had larger windows, some had porches, some had curved roofs, some looked almost rustic – but they were all weatherproof, warm and well lit. People did complain about rabbit hutches or tin boxes but for many they were hugely welcome. The future Labour leader Neil Kinnock lived in one, an Arcon V, from 1947 until 1961, and remembered the fitted fridge and bathroom causing much jealousy: ‘Friends and family came to view the wonders. It seemed like living in a spaceship.’ As they spread around the country, in almost all the big cities and many smaller ones too, they came to be regarded as better than bog-standard council housing. Communities developed in prefab estates which survived cheerfully well into the seventies.
Dirty Stubs to Rich Spikes
The great grey stubs of the tower-block boom which ran from the fifties to the late sixties litter most of urban Britain. Never has newness turned dark so quickly. Rarely has revolutionary optimism been so quickly and abjectly confounded. This revolution was born, like others, on the European continent and imported to Britain a generation after the prophets of concrete modernism had spoken. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius were idealists of the twenties and thirties who dreamed a new world of light, tall, glass-covered buildings springing up to free humanity. This was about more than architecture. It was to be social revolution accomplished with concrete and prefabricated steel, bringing hygiene and sunlight to the masses who had lived and worked in the dark, grimy and above all messy streets of industrial Europe. With the arrival of the Nazis many of the idealists fled, particularly to the United States, where their towers would glorify not socialism but American capitalism in its age of triumph. Some, however, came to Britain. Berthold Lubetkin designed beautiful white modernist structures for London, early multi-storey concrete flats, a famous health centre and the Penguin Pool and Gorilla House at London Zoo. Erno Goldfinger on the other hand went for vast towers to house human gorillas and managed to offend Ian Fleming sufficiently to be used as a Bond villain’s name.
In other circumstances, avant-garde artists from Germany, Russia, France and Switzerland might have had limited impact in Britain, a country whose architecture had see-sawed between classicism and revivalism, and where the prefix ‘mock’ was not a term of mockery. But from the end of the Second World War through to the seventies, the shortage and foul quality of much older working-class housing meant a desperation for speed and short-cuts. Scotland alone had 400,000 homes without indoor toilets in the mid-fifties. Glasgow’s slums were so bad they had been formally denounced by the Roman Catholic church as inhuman. The great industrial cities of the Midlands and the North of England were in almost as bad a way. Politician after politician promised more new houses, ever faster. Britain would end up building a higher proportion of state-subsidized houses than almost any comparable country – beating, in fact, most of the Communist-run countries of Eastern Europe. The idealist architects offered scale and speed – huge streets in the sky, thrown up fast. The local bosses of British cities seized these foreign dreams with both hands. There is a photograph from the late fifties and sixties endlessly reproduced. Actually, it is many photographs, taken in different cities at different times. But they all show the same thing: eager, powerful men in suits staring down, or pointing, at a small-scale model with cardboard blocks set across it.
The architectural visionaries and the scores of ambitious, modern-thinking British architects who worshipped them, drew their towers set against rolling fields, surrounded by trees, on sunny spring days. In Britain’s cities, the municipal bosses were generally hostile to decanting populations out beyond their borders to entirely new settlements where they might have more space. People would want to stay in their own communities, they reasoned. Also, they wanted to keep the tax base and the votes. So instead, the towers tended to go up right in the middle of towns, on waste ground, or where old Victorian terraces had just been bulldozed. From 1958 councils got a central government subsidy for every layer over five storeys, a straightforward bribe to build up, not out. The new towers, which were only ever a minority of the total new housing, offered working-class families real benefits, though – fitted kitchens, underfloor heating, proper bathrooms, enough space for children to be able to stop sharing beds. The more ambitious and refined tower-block plans rarely got built: shortage of money and haste, plus a lot of local corruption, favoured quick-build thrown up by local companies.
Once, the different regions, counties and countries of Britain had boasted their own architectural traditions. Glasgow had her red sandstone tenements, London her ornate dark crimson brick apartments, Manchester her back-to-backs. Now, under the influence of a single modern aesthetic, identical-looking towers appeared, often bought off-the-peg from builders. The architect Sheppard Fidler recalled a boozy day out with Birmingham’s Labour boss, the ‘little Caesar’ Harry Watton, when they went to inspect a prototype tower-block by the builder Bryant. It gives a flavour of the time: ‘in order to get to the block we passed through a marquee which was rolling in whisky, brandy and so on, so by the time they got to the block they thought it was marvellous . . . As we were leaving, at the exit, Harry Watton suddenly said, “Right! We’ll take five blocks” – just as if he was buying bags of sweets! “We’ll have five of them . . . and stick them on X” – some site he’d remembered . . .’52 Watton was a right-wing, anti-immigrant, pro-hanging Labour boss (not lord mayor, but chairman of the key committee in Birmingham). He was not corrupt but he was autocratic and self-righteous. There were Wattons everywhere. Some, like Newcastle’s T. Dan Smith, working with the massive architectural practice Poulsons, were corrupt. Others, like the puritanical socialist Bailie David Gibson of Glasgow, were certainly not. One of Gibson’s colleagues remembered him as frightening: ‘white-faced, intense, driving idealist, absolutely fanatical and sincere . . . He saw only one thing, as far as we could see: how to get as many houses up as possible, how to get as many of his beloved fellow working-class citizens decently housed as possible.’53
Scotland and the North of England saw the most dramatic examples of the prefabricated mania. On the outskirts of Dundee, under the city’s controversial Bailie J. L. Stewart, more new housing was thrown up per head than anywhere in Europe, including the vast hexagonal nightmare of the Whitfield estate, built by Crudens. Under Gibson in Glasgow, the huge thirty-one-storey Red Road flats went up, the tallest in Europe, and at astonishing speed. As time went on, lessons were learned and more dispersed, varied and decorated concrete developments appeared. Newcastle had a late example, the giant wriggle of the Byker Wall, as if the emperor Hadrian had turned residential developer. Mostly, though, the stubby blocks were much the same everywhere. West Ham or Kidderminster, Blackburn or Edinburgh – who could tell? And everywhere the same problems quickly began to crop up. Dispersed local communities did not easily reform when stuck vertically in the air. The entrance halls and lifts, so elegantly displayed in architects’ watercolours, were vandalized and colonized by the young and the bored. Asbestos, it was discovered too late, was dangerous. Hideous condensation problems appeared. Walls were too thin for decent privacy. Shops were too far away.
In many cases, blocks were popular and well run in the early days, when people were proud of their new homes. The deterioration was human as well as concrete. A single drunken, fighting family could spread misery throughout many floors of a block. Two or three could wreck it. Councils who simply crowded tenants in, without considering problems such as those caused by having large numbers of children high up in the blocks, were at least as much to blame as Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. It is true that some of the prefabricated, hurriedly flung-up blocks were dangerous. In May 1968 part of the Ronan Point tower block in east London, built with concrete panels, simply collapsed. Since the four deaths then, nobody else has been killed by a collapsing tower block and the craze to condemn them as inherently unstable matches the original craze to throw them up everywhere. Just as the slimy brick slums of the forties and fifties were blamed for producing hooliganism, so the new vertical slums were blamed for the vandalism of the sixties and seventies – even though some were being vandalized well before they were finished and open. Perhaps the bleakly uncompromising shadows they cast did have a demoralizing effect. You would have to be a very naive rimless-glassed modernist to love those dully repetitive lines.
Opinion began to turn against the towers, even among architects. Smaller-scale projects came into fashion during the seventies except in a few isolated and well-managed cities, such as Aberdeen. Tower blocks began to be blown up. Rochester destroyed all of its blocks to improve the look of the town. Later, Birmingham promised to do the same. Even Glasgow’s Red Road flats were being discussed for demolition. In other places, such as Wandsworth in London, the blocks were repackaged, covered with brightly coloured panels and given a more decorative silhouette. Left-wing councils, which in the sixties had championed the blocks, began to champion cottage-style housing instead. Council house sales meant blocks in the most favoured areas began to be improved from the inside, by their new owners. Many were sold to housing associations, others were left to house asylum seekers, drug addicts and the most desperate of the poor. Through her history, Britain has seen many building crazes, most notably the vast sprawl of brick terraces during the industrial revolution and then the ribbon-development suburbia of the interwar years. Yet not even they have marked so much of the look of Britain as quickly and nastily as the tower block revolution. The concrete jungles have become the most easily despised, most universally rejected aspect of the British experiment in modern living.
So it is worth remembering that some survived with contented tenants. It is worth recalling that even some graffiti-stained tower blocks, if they have heating, hot water and working lifts, may be better places to live than the leaking, rat-infested terraces, with outside toilets and small gas fires that they replaced. We can add to the small credit side that had Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London not built high then much less of the countryside within fifty miles of these cities, and others, would exist today. The new homes had to go somewhere. Tower blocks were said to be good because they prevented ‘sprawl’ – the very shabby-Tudor ugliness deplored in the thirties. And some sprawl certainly was stopped. Today, it seems, we are wiser. Architects are as keen on high density as ever but now want to devise street patterns, squares and low-rise homes on a human scale. By the early eighties Britain’s housing shortage was, in general terms, solved by the concrete boom: some 440,000 homes were created in tower blocks alone. But migration and the break-up of families since then have created a new housing crisis and once again skyscrapers are coming back in fashion. They are different now. From Manchester’s new forty-seven-storey Beetham Tower, with its queasy-making overhang, to plans for a 66-storey shard-shaped London Bridge Tower, these are chic palaces for the urban rich, not upended slums. They are as close to Harry Watton’s off-the-peg blocks as the drug habits of supermodels are to the ravages of heroin in prison. Architecture matters; but it does not matter as much as class.
Back in the forties, Labour’s idea of Britain was beginning to take shape. This would be a well-disciplined, austere country, organized from London by dedicated public servants, who in turn directed a citizenry which was dignified and restrained. Sanitation, reason, officialdom and fairness; it was a Roundhead vision, without the compulsory psalms and military dictatorship. Unfortunately for Labour, the real country was nothing like this. It was (and is) a more disordered, self-pleasuring, individualistic place. Labour’s ethic was about restraint and fair shares. Ministers viewed consumerism with disdain, a personality defect of Americans. Yet consumerism would soon erupt with a strength never known before. People were pleased with the free spectacles and the more generous insurance arrangements, and they took to the prefabricated houses, and accepted Indian and Pakistani independence without much problem. It was just that they loathed the restrictions, the queues and the shortages, and disliked being lectured about Dunkirk seven or eight years later. And so the British did what they always do, in their way. They rebelled. They did this not in the French fashion, violently, with flying cobblestones and wild manifestos, but quietly and stubbornly. As we have seen, they rebelled over housing shortages. They refused to wear the clothes they were told they should. And they would not eat what was put in front of them, either.
Diaries and letters of the time show a country utterly obsessed by food. There had been a general assumption that as soon as the war was over pre-war variety and spice would return to the shops. Instead rations were cut and the disappointment was bitter. One response was the rise in popularity of that wartime character, the spiv. The later BBC television comedy Dad’s Army featured in the fictitious platoon, one Joe Walker, played by James Beck (who was even wilder than his character, and died at forty-four from alcohol poisoning). Walker is a double-breasted-suit-wearing, pencil-moustached, perky villain with a heart of gold, forever upending the moral pretensions of his betters by slipping them an illicit bottle of whisky, a carton of cigarettes or a pair of stockings for the missus. Walker is the service economy in guerrilla form. He is a criminal but one whom everyone relies on. After the war the real-life spivs, the traders and dealers on street corners or in cafes, came out of the shadows and became a recognized part of life under Labour.
Moral confusion about people taking the law into their own hands features in two of the hugely popular Ealing comedies, both first shown in 1949. In Passport to Pimlico, the citizens of an area around a bombsite find out they legally belong not to the United Kingdom but to the Duchy of Burgundy. As Burgundians, they are free from the rationing and petty restrictions hemming in other Londoners. Almost as soon as they have finished celebrating their freedom, they are swamped by a plague of spivs, jostling, threatening and causing a breakdown of law and order. They represent the suppressed greed and wild consumerism that socialists feared was always present under the surface – as indeed it was. When the British State responds by cutting off Pimlico with barbed wire, the Burgundians hold out, in a comic mimicry of the country’s stand in 1940. The people of London take their side and throw them food to keep the ‘Burgundians’ from having to surrender. It seems clear that this was directly copied from scenes in the real-life squatting revolt eighteen months earlier. In a comic conclusion the tensions are resolved, just as in a Shakespeare comedy. The rebels reach an amicable agreement with the authorities and return to the ration-card Britain where everything is fair and ordered, if somewhat frustrating.
Whisky Galore!, shown a few months after Passport to Pimlico, comes down on the other side of the argument. It relates what happens when a cargo ship full of whisky, tellingly called the SS Politician, runs aground off the Hebridean island of Todday. The story is fictional, taken from a comic novel, but was based on real wartime events; the actual ship was called the SS Cabinet Minister. The islanders, like the rest of Britain, are whisky-starved and opportunistic. The film tells the story of how the island community steals and hides huge quantities of whisky which had been intended for North America, foiling the authorities in the shape of the English Home Guard commander Captain Waggett (played by Basil Radford; a precursor to Arthur Lowe in Dad’s Army). In the film, the puritanical British State is subverted by a tightly knit and determined island community who end with a great dance of celebration and liberation. In Todday, unlike Pimlico, the people’s yearning for good things triumphs. In real life, the rather heroic struggle of a lone exciseman to recover the whisky divided the islanders, led to convictions for theft and produced a poisoned atmosphere between families which lasted for many years. The fantasy, however, is remembered and the truth forgotten.
One can see the tension between the Burgundians returning to ration books, and the islanders of Todday beating the authorities to keep the stolen whisky, as a filmic version of the political tension between wartime-style controls championed by the Labour government; and the frustrated hostility exemplified by pro-free market Tories. Eventually the controls would be partly dismantled, rationing would end and the first great consumer boom would begin, more or less in parallel with Labour’s loss of power in 1950–1. In the meantime, however, a surprising degree of petty criminality was tolerated in an otherwise law-abiding country, not just on the part of spivs but the shopkeepers bending rules to help old customers, or the people who filched a little from work, or the ordinary men in pubs who would buy an extra pair of stockings for their wives. This criminality, however, would not have existed without the privations of the time, and the impertinence of officialdom. A novelist looking back a decade later caught the mood:
Ludicrous penalties were imposed on farmers who had not kept strictly to the letter of licences to slaughter pigs; in one case, the permitted building was used, the authorised butcher was employed, but the job had to be done the day before it was permitted; in another case, the butcher and the timing coincided, but the pig met its end in the wrong building. Never had a bureaucracy so flaunted its total failure to comprehend the spirit of the times, which was low and resentful . . . So really, almost everyone participated; it was a sort of pale, hangdog spivery in back kitchens and the rear of shops.54
There were other ways of rebelling. The British Housewives’ League, formed in 1945 by a clergyman’s wife to campaign against rude shopkeepers and the amount of time spent queuing, helped remove the hapless food minister Ben Smith over the withdrawal of powdered egg. Other foods brought into the country and foisted on consumers were regarded as disgusting. Horses were butchered and sold, sometimes merely as ‘steak’. Whalemeat was bought from South Africa, both in huge slabs and in tins, described as ‘rich and tasty, just like beefsteak’. It was relatively popular for a short while, but not long. Magnus Pyke, later a popular television scientist, explained that though it tasted fine to the first bite of a drooling mouth, ‘as you went on biting, the taste of steak was quickly overcome by a strong flavour of – cod-liver oil’.55 Then there was snoek, a ferocious tropical fish supposed to be able to hiss like a snake and bark like a dog.
One of the odder vignettes of wartime Britain has the young Barbara Castle, then Betts, working for the fish division of the Ministry of Food.56 She was quartered in a grand London hotel, the Carlton, which boasted large bathrooms and generously sized baths. These were filled with fish, to be observed for experimental purposes. Barbara Castle, in short, lived with a snoek. Her report on its behaviour must have been favourable because in October 1947 the government began to buy millions of tins of snoek from South Africa. Protein was in short supply. South Africa would take pounds, not the scarce dollars. So ministers tried to persuade the British that, in salads, pasties, sandwiches, or even as ‘snoek piquante’ with spring onions, vinegar and syrup, the powdery, bland fish was really quite tasty. The country begged to differ and mocked it mercilessly, buying very little. Snoek became a great joke in the newspapers and in Parliament. Eventually it was withdrawn and sold off for almost nothing as catfood.57
The Conservatives would later put out pamphlets showing pictures of a horse, a whale and a reindeer to show ‘the wide choice of food you have under the Socialists’. Labour tried hard to keep the country decently fed during a grim few years, when much of the world was at least as hungry. But between the black market organized by the spivs, which spread very widely across Britain in the forties; the British Housewives’ League, whose rhetoric would be remembered by a young Conservative student called Margaret Thatcher; and the spontaneous boycott of snoek, the public showed that it was fed up to the back teeth with rationing. Fair or not, as soon as they could, Labour from 1948 and then Tory ministers began to remove the restrictions and restore something like a market in food. American aid began to flow again and spiritually the mildly anarchic island of Todday trumped goody Pimlico.
It took a long time for British clothes to brighten up. Well into the sixties, children were still wearing the baggy grey shorts and unravelling home-made jumpers of the forties, men were still dressing in heavily built grey suits for social occasions, wearing macs and hats on their days out, and women were in housecoats and hairnets. But the forties did see one celebrated revolution, which showed just how frustrated women had become at the dowdy, dreary life they had suffered. It began in Paris, with the arrival of a new fashion house, created by a young designer who was in love with the belle époque France of his childhood, the pre-First World War country of swirling skirts, elegance and luxury. His name was Christian Dior and his revolution was christened the New Look. One of the British women who attended the unveiling in 1947 said she heard for the first time in her life ‘the sound of a petticoat’ and realized that at long last the war was really over.58
Dior’s revolution was a return to billowing, deliberately unpractical skirts and dresses, what the magazine Harper’s Bazaar described as ‘a slight, slender bodice narrowing into a tiny wasp waist, below which the skirt bursts into fullness like a flower. Every line is rounded . . .’ The long skirts and padded bosoms, the pleats and extravagance, burst like a firework display over a British womanhood described later as in a ‘grey state . . . weary, dispirited, cramped and cross’. It was a direct challenge to the austerity culture of the government and quickly caused a genuine political battle. The British Guild of Creative Designers complained that they did not have the materials and could not give way to French irresponsibility. Labour MPs busily threw themselves into the fight against frippery. The beefy and redoubtable Mrs Bessie Braddock denounced the New Look as the ‘ridiculous whim of idle people’. Mabel Ridealgh MP said it was being foisted on women and promised that housewives would not buy it. All this padding and artificiality was bad because it made for ‘over-sexiness’, she added; the New Look was turning women into caged birds and removing their new freedom.
Yet from the young princesses of the Royal Family downwards, women were ignoring the political orders and doing everything they could to alter, buy or borrow for the Dior look. Ruth Adam, who worked in the Ministry of Information during the war and later became a novelist, argued that a generation of girls who had been ordered to work in factories, on pain of prison if they refused, did not see it as a liberation:
To them, Labour MPs who lectured them about wearing ‘sensible’ clothing, suitable for productive work, were the same breed as the women officers who had routed them out of doorways where they were having a goodnight kiss, and sent them back to camp; and as the forewoman who had shouted at them for spending too long in the Ladies while Russia was waiting for aeroplane-parts. Now they did not have to listen to lectures about hard work and freedom any more, but could think about being feminine and glamorous.59
There was a pent-up yearning for the better, more colourful life that middle-class people, at least, could remember from before the war – everyone from their twenties onwards would have had a reasonably vivid recollection of mid-thirties consumerism. In a world in which men and women were still wearing roughly fitted and standardized demob suits, handed out with hats, ties and shoes as you left the forces, clothing was a powerful symbol of prosperity postponed.
Knobbly Knees and Other Fun
In and out of their homes, what were the British of the forties doing for fun? They were certainly not watching television, something owned by less than 0.2 per cent of the adult population in 1947 and by only 4 per cent in 1950. They were not travelling abroad for their holidays. For one thing, people had less time on holiday, and less money to spend too. The Holidays with Pay Act, passed shortly before the war, had hugely expanded the number of people with guaranteed paid holidays but a fortnight was more common than a month. In 1947, in the days before jet travel and with the amount of money one could take severely restricted, just over 3 per cent of people holidayed abroad, the vast majority being wealthy and going no further afield than the Mediterranean or northern France. They did not drive around the British countryside, either, or ‘go motoring’ in the pre-war phrase; petrol rationing had seen to that. But in that same year, slightly over half the British did take some kind of holiday. Many took the train to one of the traditional Victorian-era seaside resorts, which were soon bursting with customers. Others went for cycling and camping holidays – the roads were by modern standards almost empty of traffic. Yet more would take the charabanc or train to one of the new holiday camps, run by such early entrepreneurs of leisure as Billy Butlin.
The South African-born Butlin had come from a broken family and, on his mother’s side, fairground barkers. She gave him his first taste of the showman’s life with her gingerbread stall which she took around West Country market towns. After a much-interrupted education and a short spell as a commercial artist in Canada, followed by service in the war, Billy Butlin began a hoopla stall in the twenties. Year by year, he slowly built up a business in amusement parks – with haunted houses, helter-skelters, hoopla and merry-go-rounds. His big breakthrough was getting the European licence for selling the new Dodgem cars. Then, having spotted the miserable time spent by many families in seaside landladies’ accommodation, he opened his first camp at Skegness in Lincolnshire in 1936.
Holiday camps of different kinds, often run for employees of a particular company, had existed before. But Butlin’s Skegness was a hugely ambitious undertaking, with a swimming pool, theatre, cinema, many amusements and – crucially – creche facilities so that parents could spend time together without their children. A second camp followed at Clacton two years later and after handing over facilities to the armed forces, he ended the war with five large holiday camps just at the opportune moment. A tough little man, who had carried a cutthroat razor in his top pocket while building his fairground and exhibition business before the war, and who boasted to friends that his aims were ‘money, power and women’, Butlin had a shrewd understanding of what war-weary people wanted. He offered colour, fun, warm cabins, surprisingly good food and almost constant activities, from dancing to the famous ‘knobbly knees’ and ‘glamorous granny’ competitions.
Butlin, who was a millionaire within two years of the war ending and who, after various financial crises, would be knighted and receive the Queen at one of his camps, was targeting the middle classes as much as the better-off workers. Italian opera, Shakespearean productions, radio stars, politicians, the odd archbishop and sporting heroes were all invited to the camps – and came. There was nothing ‘naff’ about the camps, certainly in the forties and fifties, their heyday; indeed, for a lot of people they were pricey. After the wartime experiences of everyone mucking in together, the morning-to-bedtime activities provided by the Redcoats, with their relentless jollity, seems to have been welcomed. Butlin had his fingers burned with an ill-timed attempt to expand into the American market with a Caribbean camp in 1948, and the mass overseas tourism which began in the sixties would end the glory days of his camps, and their rivals. But for millions of British people they would remain a synonym for summer holiday well into the age of Benidorm. And, if cheap air travel falls victim to oil price rises or worries about global warming, the age of the domestic holiday camp may yet return.
Outside the annual holiday, the traditional spectator sports made a swift post-war return. Football had been badly hit during the war years, not just because so many players were away in the forces, leaving veterans the field to themselves, but because the English Football League had been suspended, and the country simply divided into north and south. New rules meant that League players had numbered shirts, could earn up to £12 a week, and that games could be played until they produced a result (though in 1946 this meant Doncaster Rovers and Stockport County playing into the darkness after 203 minutes without a goal, there being no floodlighting then). The great soccer teams were soon back in action, to capacity crowds.
Stanley Matthews, the Stoke barber’s son who was a pre-war legend, was back amazing crowds for Blackpool after the war. In 1953, when Matthews was the ripe old age of thirty-eight, some 10 million people watched him in the first televised Cup Final. By 1948–9 there were more than 40 million attendances at football matches and a general assumption that British football was the finest there was, something seemingly confirmed the previous May when Britain had played a team grandly if inaccurately named the Rest of the World (they comprised Danes, Swedes, a Frenchman, Italian, Swiss, Czech, Belgian, Dutchman and Irishman) and thrashed them 6-1. That illusion would be dispelled before long, but in other ways too this was a golden age of football. The stands were open and smelly, the crowds unprotected and the greatest stars of the post-war era still to come. But football was relatively uncorrupt, was still essentially about local teams supported in their immediate area, and was not dirty on the pitch: throughout his long career Matthews, for instance, was never cautioned, never booked.
Another famous footballer of the time was Arsenal’s Denis Compton. It is just that he was still more famous for cricket, which became massively popular again after the war. Some three million people watched the Tests against South Africa in 1947 and Compton’s performance then and in the following years produced a rush of English pride and mass enthusiasm. The cricket writer Neville Cardus found him the image of sanity and health after the war: ‘There was no rationing in an innings by Compton.’60 In cricket as in football, many of the players were the stars of pre-war days who had served as PT instructors or otherwise kept their hand in during hostilities; but with the Yorkshire batsman Len Hutton also back in legendary form at the Oval, cricket achieved a level of national symbolism that it has never reached since, not even in the heyday of Botham or the summer of 2005. Again, as with football, the stars of post-war cricket could not expect to become rich on the proceeds. Hutton, a builder’s son who first made his name beating teams of public schoolboys on behalf of London council schools, became England’s first professional captain of the century in 1952 and the dishevelled Compton, whose father had worked in a chemist’s shop, first came into decent money as the face of Brylcreem adverts.
Greyhound racing, using electric hares developed before the war, was a prime working-class focus for betting. The sport had begun in Britain in 1926 at Manchester’s Belle Vue stadium and spread quickly across the country; unlike horse-racing, it was something that millions of people in the industrial towns could go and watch near home, and many of the most famous dogs were bred and trained by people using a narrow back garden or local parks. The greyhound tracks were also used for Speedway – the 500cc brakeless motorcycle racing which had arrived from Australia in the twenties and which went through a big expansion after the war. So too, more bizarrely, did bicycle speedway, with men and boys pedalling furiously around bombsites throughout Britain, the courses marked out with painted lines on grass or house-bricks. Cities such as Coventry, Birmingham and London played ‘Test matches’ against each other and there was even an international, England against Holland, in 1950. Eventually, rebuilding removed the courses and the craze gently subsided.
But the main leisure activities of the time were more traditional. Britain was, then as now, gardening-obsessed. Pottering around in a shed was how many a British male liked to spend any spare time, not in the pub. There was a post-war boom in attending football and cricket matches. Cinema, though, was for everyone, and to give some idea of its popularity, it is worth recording that in 1947, there were around ten times as many visits to a film as there are today, with a much smaller population. At the post-war peak, there were 4,600 cinemas in the country, each showing news films alongside the main and second features. The British film industry, which extended far further than Ealing, was turning out a steady flow of wartime adventures, history films, adaptations of Dickens and romances, but was not then or ever really able to stave off the power and glamour of Hollywood.
Did It Matter, Darling? Theatre After the War
After the war, you would not have bet on British theatre, an old national glory, surviving as something that mattered. Though television had been suspended during hostilities, cutting out dramatically during a Walt Disney cartoon, and was only reintroduced in 1946 to a small audience around London, it was clearly going to present a challenge. In 1950 there were still only 350,000 television licences but the technology and appetite were clearly apparent. The first television sit-com, Pinwright’s Progress, had begun as early as November 1946. The first BBC attempts to produce television plays were stilted and badly lit but had already proved popular. As we have seen, cinema audiences had shot up during the war years and there was, however briefly, a thriving British film industry. For the big stars, the money was in film and if at all possible, in Hollywood. Worse, British theatre before and during the war had produced little new writing of major significance; it had become an embattled heritage theatre, with astounding Shakespearean performances, plus musical reviews and other light fare to keep people’s spirits up. There had been nothing like the energy and ingenuity of the film-makers as they responded to big social and moral questions thrown up by the war and its aftermath. For these failures, history has alighted on a single scapegoat. His name was Hugh Beaumont, but his friends and his many enemies called him Binkie.
His company, H. M. Tennant Ltd, was responsible for a seemingly endless run of musical and popular hits. Later on, after the theatrical revolution of the late fifties and sixties, Beaumont, who had been born in Cardiff in 1908, would be reviled as everything that was worst about the old ways, a conventional queenie Tsar of the West End, relying on drawing-room comedies, lavish sets and star names to keep the audiences happy. He would be regularly accused of running a gay mafia for friends such as John Gielgud. Much of this is unfair. Beaumont was not so timid. He was ready sometimes to take risks, such as with the controversial 1949 production of Tennessee Williams’s powerful A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivien Leigh. It was denounced by the Public Morality Council as ‘thoroughly indecent . . . we should be ashamed that children and servants are allowed to sit in the theatre and see it’; the Arts Council suddenly withdrew its support, and planned Royal visits were cancelled after an outcry about American ‘sewage’ and sex-obsession. In beautifully produced, no-expense-spared productions such as Oklahoma!, West Side Story and My Fair Lady, and gripping dramas such as Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, Beaumont offered the middle classes of London and the Home Counties an escape from daily life and dreary politics. He made a great deal of money for his theatres and backers, and would carry on doing so for many years to come. He was the nearest equivalent to the huge popular successes of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals in the final decades of the century, offensive to the intellectual elite, perhaps, but keeping the West End solvent and busy. Nor was he any kind of philistine; perhaps his closest acting collaborator was the great John Gielgud, and he was responsible for some still-famous productions of Shakespeare.
Beaumont stood in the middle of a glossy circle of talent, much of it gay, which celebrated luxury and wit at a time when the country seemed short of both. The most successful of his playwright collaborators was Terence Rattigan, born in 1911 to a diplomat father who was sacked from the Foreign Office after an affair with a Romanian princess. Rattigan had made his name before the war with French Without Tears but his most famous and well-made plays came in the forties and fifties – sharp, poignant studies of upper middle-class life such as The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables. Homosexuality is a hidden theme, necessarily so at the time, but the veneer of clipped, upper-crust politeness made Rattigan an easy target when the national mood turned. In a notorious preface in 1953, he seemed to confirm all his critics’ case by explaining the importance to him of ‘Aunt Edna’, the audience member always inside his brain when writing, a ‘nice, respectable, middle class, middle aged, maiden lady with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it’. Rattigan, like Beaumont, would fall suddenly and dramatically out of fashion – the days would soon pass when entertaining Aunt Edna, rather than heaving verbal bricks at her, was what ambitious playwrights wanted to do.
Among Beaumont’s other key collaborators was Cecil Beaton, the photographer and designer. Born in 1904, Beaton first made his name by photographing the ‘bright young things’ of the twenties. He would survive to take pictures of the rock stars of the sixties and even punks of the seventies, having a long career as a Royal portrait photographer in between. His stage work exemplified the ‘ooh, aah’ effect that Beaumont loved, exotic and witty designs for the pinched post-war public; his film designs would later win him a pair of Oscars. An older star in the same firmament was Ivor Novello, born in 1893 who would die six years after the war’s end of a heart-attack, and who had been badly shaken by a short prison sentence in Wormwood Scrubs for a wartime motoring offence. Novello’s career had included composing, notably the patriotic First World War song, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and a stream of musicals, ending with King’s Rhapsody in 1949 and Gay’s the Word in 1951. Strikingly good-looking, Novello’s homosexuality was carefully hidden from his legion of female fans; at his funeral women outnumbered men mourners by around fifty to one.
But the best-known of this group of gay stars was Noël Coward, who was forty-six by the time the war ended. By now he was acknowledged as ‘the Master’ after a stream of hits, such as Cavalcade and Private Lives made him one of the world’s highest-paid writers. Though he had self-consciously posed as a decadent drug-taking dandy in the twenties, virtually inventing high English camp, and was briefly taken up by the intelligentsia, Coward became increasingly mainstream. His patriotism was not ironic and he bitterly regretted the passing of British imperial status; his wartime films were morale-boosters. In Which We Serve, the 1942 film about Lord Louis Mountbatten’s destroyer HMS Kelly, and This Happy Breed helped consolidate his status as Greatest Living Englishman and although the immediate post-war years were a time of relative failure, his plays and influence would continue through the fifties and sixties. Coward showed that the British could be light, witty, amoral and yet also patriotic; he expanded the limits of the accepted national character. For this, and his devastating wit, he survived even when the kitchen-sink realism, which he loathed, took over the stage.
Though the forties and fifties saw the beginning of a new theatre, it is salutary to remember that these decades were just as coloured by people who had been born in Victorian or Edwardian times, and carried a whiff of Oscar Wilde’s London around with them. Novello, Beaumont, Coward, Beaton and Rattigan were all gay, mainstream middle-class entertainers of one kind or another, highly talented and overtly patriotic. Just because they would then be pushed aside by a new generation, the self-publicizing Angry Young Men and the producers who brought talents like Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht to the British stage, does not mean their years in the sun never happened. The wit and wistfulness of the Binkie Beaumont era was another British way of facing a future of grim and guttural questions. Beyond the theatre proper, it was a tone repeated in the hugely popular novels of Nancy Mitford, and the arch television performances of Joyce Grenfell.
The other dominant figure on the British post-war stage was William Shakespeare. Rarely since the days of the earlier Elizabeth had so much Shakespeare been performed to such excited adulation. Contemporary audiences thought Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud were the equal of any Shakespearean actors, ever. They may well have been right. The Old Vic theatre at London’s South Bank, seen as an embryo National Theatre, was turning out a stream of Shakespeare; the young Peter Hall, looking back at the early fifties, reflected that ‘by the time I was twenty-one, I had seen the entire canon, some of it many times, and you could not do that now.’61 There was talk of a ‘bardic traffic jam’ in the West End. After the wartime patriotism of Olivier’s film version of Henry V and with a dearth of strong new writing, it was perhaps inevitable that so many directors and actors would turn to England’s greatest writer, as well as to other established classics. For a literate, culture-starved public, there was nothing to complain about in that. Shakespeare probes as deeply into the human state as anyone, before or since. Audiences would reel from the latest Olivier performance as emptied and wrung-out as it is possible to be. The same goes for the few other great dramatists regularly performed at the time – Chekhov and the Greek tragedians.
Yet the question would not go away: was there nothing more contemporary, nothing more political, to be said on the stage? To ask whether the theatre matters is, in one sense, a meaningless question. If it gives people a unique insight into their situation; even if it only entertains them, then surely that is enough. Yet in other times and places the theatre has aspired to do more, to function as a social and political force. Despite censorship, it had shaken up pre-Revolutionary Russia. It had mattered in Weimar Germany, post-war Paris, and would again in the United States as the Americans experienced anti-communist hysteria and the moral impact of the world’s first mass consumer society. So why not Britain? One historian of the theatre, reflecting on the early fifties, found the London stage ‘completely indifferent . . . to contemporary events. The heavy costs of a rearmament programme necessitated by the Korean war; the inflationary pressures that this produced in a still war-weakened country; the continued shortages caused by rationing; the dramatic impact of the welfare state . . . the manufacture of the first British nuclear bomb: all failed to impinge upon the West End stage.’62 Anyone who cares about live theatre hopes that the unique coming-together of certain actors, words and audiences, will produce a transformation of some kind. This was still, just, the pre-television age. The possibility of British theatre meaning more than a pleasant, or stirring, night out, was still open.
By far the most dogged and courageous attempt to make theatre matter was led by one of the true cultural heroes of the time, a Cockney-born outsider who fled RADA for a career of provincial poverty. Joan Littlewood had been heavily influenced by a communist-inclined Salford actor, Jimmie Miller, who would later change his name to Ewan MacColl and lead the folk-song revival. In the thirties, they had produced German-influenced left-wing or agitprop plays with their touring Theatre of Action, had been offered work in Moscow, and been blacked by the BBC. Reforming after the war, they hit upon the name Theatre Workshop (‘workshop’ would eventually be appended to every banal meeting in schools, businesses and colleges, but was then, used in this sense, a new coining). Touring through Kendal, Wigan, Blackpool and Newcastle, they would be the very first act to exploit the new Edinburgh International Festival as ‘fringe’ performers and could hardly have been a starker contrast to the metropolitan flash of Binkie Beaumont. Their first major play, created by Miller, was Uranium 235, an impassioned and funny account of the road to the nuclear bomb, with a strongly anti-nuclear message at a time when, as we have seen, the pro-Bomb Labour government was widely supported.
Theatre Workshop mixed its political fare which eventually culminated in Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963, with half-forgotten Elizabethan and Jacobean classics. There were also new plays, including by the Irish republican and drunk, Brendan Behan, whose beer-sodden and misspelled manuscripts were first recognized by Littlewood as works of genius. In every case, her shows cast aside the overwrought, self-conscious style of West End acting and direction. The cast and the production staff lived almost on the breadline, making their own sets and costumes, even after finding a semi-permanent home in the rundown old Theatre Royal at Stratford, in London’s East End. Critics began to come to the performances, and they would win rave reviews travelling to Paris and Eastern Europe; among the actors who worked with Littlewood would be Richard Harris, Roy Kinnear and Barbara Windsor. Yet the conservative-minded Arts Council kept them starved of funds, and political censorship plagued the group’s history. When they had popular hits, such as Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey, a shocking story about a dysfunctional family, written by a nineteen-year-old from Salford, or Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’ Be, a Cockney musical a year later, these transferred to the West End and made a mint. Back in Stratford, Littlewood, with her long-time lover Gerry Raffles, struggled to pay the bills and turn good publicity into a secure future. On one famous occasion when Behan was being interviewed while almost incoherently drunk by Malcolm Muggeridge on BBC Television, Littlewood was reduced to crouching on the floor, holding onto his legs so he would not fall. She harassed and harangued, campaigned and cajoled. Eventually the temptations of proper wages, and the pressures of underfunded theatre on the fringe of London, lured too many people away and destroyed Theatre Workshop.
Yet the Littlewood story deserves to come ahead of the far more famous theatrical rebellion of the ‘Angry Young Men’, which began with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger in 1956. The ‘Angries’ were partly a good PR stunt by the press officer of the Royal Court Theatre. They barely existed as a group, certainly not of the theatre. Newspaper hype, picked up by historians, implied that before them there had been no fresh drama in post-war Britain beyond the odd limp verse play by Christopher Fry or a middle-class romp produced by Binkie and acted by a clique of waspish homosexuals. Though Osborne himself contributed to the legend, in bitterly homophobic tirades later in his life, it is entirely untrue. The two great critics whose energy helped drive British theatre into a new age, Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times and Kenneth Tynan of the Observer, were intensely interested in Theatre Workshop and gave some of its plays rave reviews well before Osborne came along. Littlewood’s problem was that her group were too obviously left-wing at a time when the Establishment was still staunchly conservative and Cold War fever was raging. The Angry Young Men’s anger was less clearly directed. Comfortingly, it had no programme, no overseas admirers, no ideology. Had Theatre Workshop emerged a decade later, in the mid-sixties, it might have found stronger financial support from an Arts Council and BBC by then leaning to the liberal left. But of course, in that case, it would have pioneered nothing.
Most of us think of the story of theatre as the story of actors, whose familiar faces and fruity memoirs entertain more mundane lives. Others, particularly in universities, think of a theatre as being succession of writers and playscripts – Rattigan, Wesker, Stoppard, Hare, Brenton – as if drama was fundamentally something written down, a wayward branch of solid prose literature. And of course, this is true: no great acting, no good words, no theatre. Yet the real driving force in a nation’s theatre is often provided by the producers and entrepreneurs, the people who shape the institutions, discover the plays, coax the companies. So, if Joan Littlewood found Behan and sustained Theatre Workshop, another contemporary hero is George Devine, the man who found Osborne and created Royal Court’s English Stage Company. An actor who had become increasingly enthralled by new French techniques of experimental theatre before the war, which he spent fighting in the Far East, by the fifties Devine was an experienced director. At the Old Vic Centre he had overseen a radical programme of training and production, working on Shakespeare, opera and new work too. But he felt there was something lacking, a dearth of modern plays at a time when ‘there had been drastic political and social changes all around us’. He was unlike Littlewood in being already a cultural insider and certainly not communistically inclined (though he admired the German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht). Devine drew around him some of the best young actors in London, people like Joan Plowright and Alan Bates. One of his closest friends was Samuel Beckett. But his great coup was picking up a manuscript by a younger actor, a rather less successful one.
On the hot afternoon of 12 August 1955 John Osborne was lounging on an old Rhine barge tied up near Hammersmith on the Thames, the cheap houseboat where he was living. He had written Look Back in Anger over nineteen days, consumed with revulsion about the state of the country, and sent his wispy typescript to as many agents and theatre managers he could find an address for. Every one had briskly refused it. Osborne was in a hole. He had acted his way round the more obscure theatres of provincial England and was flat broke. A vegetarian, he and his house(boat)-mate had been reduced to gathering nettles from the riverbank to boil and eat. The creak of rowlocks signalled the arrival of Devine, a fat man sweating in a small boat, before he was hauled up on deck by Osborne. Devine had loved the play, and now cross-questioned Osborne; he had a prejudice against homosexuals and in favour of working-class actors and Osborne satisfied him on both counts. Look Back in Anger is now almost universally regarded as a classic, perhaps the single most important English play of the second half of the twentieth century. The story barely matters here. What did matter was the stream of bright, sarky bitterness that flowed from the main character, Jimmy Porter, as he bickered and ranted in the company of his wife and best friend. It was a resentful, disillusioned young voice, frustrated with what had happened to Britain. Later it would be echoed in a hundred bitter rock songs and in countless novels of youthful angst, and in films. But it had not been heard on a stage before. When the play was finally produced by the Royal Court, the third in its season, immediate reactions were unpromising. The critics were hostile. Binkie Beaumont had come, but then walked out at the interval. Early audiences seemed unenthusiastic. Osborne’s mother was told by the theatre barmaid: ‘They don’t like this one, do they dear? They don’t like it at all. Never mind, it won’t be much longer. We’re having Peggy Ashcroft soon. They’ll like that. But they don’t like this one. Not a bit of it.’63
The history of theatre is the history of legends. No newspaper review of a British stage play has been remembered quite like Tynan’s review of Look Back in Anger in the Observer, published on 13 May 1956. It is widely thought to have single-handedly saved the play from being taken off. It was certainly a rave review, describing Osborne’s work as a minor miracle showing qualities Tynan had despaired of seeing on stage. He thought it would be a minority taste, but continued: ‘What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups . . . I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.’ The heart-on-sleeve emotion and directness of the review made waves. Yet other newspapers had spotted it too; the Financial Times found it ‘arresting, painful and sometimes astonishing . . . a play of extraordinary importance’ and the Daily Express felt it was ‘intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined. It is even crazy. But it is young, young, young . . .’ Furthermore, it was not until the play was shown on television, in extract by the BBC in October and then in full by the new ITV in November, that it really became a success.
Meanwhile, if the meeting between Devine and Osborne on the houseboat provided the first act of this story, there was a much more remarkable one to come. Though the accounts differ in detail, the substance is clear. Laurence Olivier had been to see Look Back in Anger and, like so many, took against it as ‘a lot of bitter rattling on’. But the American playwright Arthur Miller was in London because his girlfriend Marilyn Monroe was making a bad film with Olivier. Miller was intrigued by the title of Osborne’s play. He persuaded Olivier to take him to see it and found it wonderful. Afterwards, Devine came over and asked whether they would meet the young author. They went to the bar. Though Osborne says the remark came later, and to Devine, Arthur Miller tells the story thus: ‘a few inches to my right I overheard with some incredulity, Olivier asking the pallid Osborne – then a young guy with a shock of uncombed hair and a look in his face of having awakened twenty minutes earlier – “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” in his most smiling tones, which would have convinced you to buy a car with no wheels for twenty thousand dollars.’64 The part would become that of Archie Rice, a fading and seedy music-hall entertainer in Osborne’s savage demolition job on Harold Macmillan’s delusional Britain. Osborne was quick to point out that he had been researching the declining music hall world well before Olivier asked for a part in The Entertainer. But it was an astonishing request. Olivier was then the sun-king of British acting. Though his marriage was collapsing in private, he and Vivien Leigh were the royal couple of the stage and screen, courted around the world, offered the greatest parts, apparently wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. For him to ask a young playwright at a fringe theatre for a role seemed like Lord Mountbatten of Burma rolling up and asking for a job as deckhand on a battered Hull trawler.
Yet it was one of Olivier’s shrewdest career moves. This was the moment when the old theatre world, of magnificent Shakespearaan film productions, Royal Command performances and West End grandness bowed and gave way to a new, rougher Britain. It was a symbolic removing of swords, buckles and plumes in favour of loose civilian clothes and satire. Olivier was incomparably the most important figure in the story of post-war British theatre. In the thirties he had swashbuckled and starred alongside many of the great Hollywood divas. His wartime stage roles had brought him huge personal success – the scent of success, he reported back, was ‘like seaweed, or like oysters’ – and his knighthood and films, as well as his marriage to Leigh, made him a global star. Some idea of this is given by the guest list at a Hollywood party thrown to greet him in the late forties – Groucho Marx, Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers, Ronald Coleman, Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall turned up to pay court. Later, he would be the driving force behind Britain’s National Theatre; today one of its most important venues, as well as the annual awards for acting, are named after him. Actually, to compare him to a modern monarch is slightly to undersell Olivier at his zenith. Why then did he decide to ask Osborne for a part he must have known would be shockingly different to the romantic leads and tortured princes his public expected of him? Partly, it was boredom and the crushing effect of his marriage to the increasingly mad Vivien Leigh, which he was determined to leave. After various love affairs he would eventually marry Joan Plowright, one of Devine’s Royal Court regulars. He would not actually give up the great Shakespearean parts – a magnificent Othello was still to come – nor would he quite turn his back on Hollywood. But The Entertainer and his relationship with Plowright set him on a new direction. The answer was that Olivier was able to reinvent himself as a man of the modern world, no longer the codpiece and tights-wearing hero of mid-century.
British theatre did something similar. It found a way of mattering despite the arrival of television and the continuing huge power of cinema. It is not coincidental that, while Britain was still bleakly under provided-for in the aftermath of war, British theatre in the Binkie years was extravagant, colourful and generally shallow, while when Britain set out on a mass consumer boom, British theatre turned darker and edgier. In each case, the stage offered a contrast to what was around it. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter bemoaned the lack of ‘good brave causes’ left in 1956; in 1946, as the Cold War began and with people still demobilizing from the army, such a sentiment would have seemed ludicrous. Similarly, the naive celebration of life which warmed London when Oklahoma! arrived after the war would not have made nearly such an impression on the richer city of a decade later. Live theatre would have to compete for writers and actors who found they could reach far bigger audiences and make better money elsewhere. Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, The Entertainer and Oh, What a Lovely War! would all be filmed. Many of the key talents, the best actors and directors and producers, would head for the new virtual theatres at Lime Grove, Ealing and Teddington, the hangar-like television studios with no seats for an audience and a forest canopy of lights and microphones.
The West End, and the big provincial theatres, would continue to provide entertainment to the middle classes who wanted to see famous actors in the flesh, and who were prepared to try out new playwrights. Of those, Harold Pinter, whose The Birthday Party opened to bafflement in 1958 until it was rescued from likely oblivion by a single rave review, is widely acknowledged as the greatest. His famous pauses, mundane settings, intricate use of ordinary language and background political agenda provided a way of seeing and hearing modern Britain unlike any other. He followed earlier so-called absurdist dramatists, above all Samuel Beckett, who had been given his English premier of Waiting for Godot by the young Peter Hall in 1955 at the Arts Theatre Club, but Pinter was as English as Beckett was French-Irish. Yet the talent pouring out of British theatre through the sixties and seventies, from the satirists like Orton, the magicians like Stoppard, the sheer entertainers like Ayckbourn, through to the great political dramatists – Wesker, Arden, Bond, Hare – showed that television had failed to kill off live drama. Londoners, indeed any British people near a major playhouse, had the opportunity to be amused, provoked, obliged to think about the world around them, with as much live wit and anger on offer to them as in any modern nation. In the twenty-first century, as Hollywood stars make a regular pilgrimage to play or direct in London theatre-land, and with the flow of good contemporary work unceasing, theatre remains, against the odds, one of the little glories of British life.