12
‘There’s gold in them there stock markets – and how it shines this bright May morning!’ proclaimed the brazenly pro-Tory tabloid the Daily Sketch on the 5th, the day after Nottingham’s loving cup:
These are great days for anyone who has a stake in Britain’s drive for prosperity. Share values are UP yet again. From TV to textiles . . . radio to rubber . . . banks to breweries – the markets sing a merry song of spring.
Car sales – always the best index of a boom – are hitting new heights. And the peak season is still to come.
Can we keep it up? Yes – and yes again.
Indeed, only one thing was missing from the feel-good prospectus: ‘All we want now is for the summer to follow the market’s example – and get in the golden groove, too!’
Two families this Tuesday had unashamedly local preoccupations. ‘I’m afraid Essex is a very competitive county,’ a Woodfordian had recently admitted to Willmott and Young about parental anxieties concerning the 11-plus, and Judy Haines in Chingford would probably not have pretended to be any different. Happily, a year after Ione’s success, it turned out fine again: ‘At 9.30 (as I was trying to concentrate on ironing) a loud rat-a-tat-tat came on the front door, and there was Pamela with Cynthia Gayton. “I’ve passed,” she cried. What joy. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake and then kissed them both.’ Up on Humberside, the preoccupation was with Hull’s imminent appearance in the Rugby League Cup Final. ‘I shall be pleased when it’s all over,’ Tom Courtenay’s mother frankly wrote to him in London. ‘There seems to be an atmosphere all the time.’ Tom’s father wrote also, making plans for his 10.15 arrival at King’s Cross on Saturday morning: ‘I am looking forward to a real good day. Our programme will be a drink to give us an appetite then a good feed so I’m hoping you know where a good pint and a meal can be had. We shall have plenty of time. I think if we get to Wembley Stadium by 2.30 we should be in clover.’ But for John Osborne, it was thorns all the way on Tuesday evening. The first night at the Palace Theatre of his satirical, anti-Establishment musical, The World of Paul Slickey, featured booing during the show, more booing at the end, and afterwards Osborne being chased up the Charing Cross Road. Heap reckoned it ‘crude, tawdry, puerile and putrid’; in Noël Coward’s eyes, it was a case of ‘bad lyrics, dull music, idiotic, would-be daring dialogue’, the whole thing the work of ‘a conceited, calculating young man blowing a little trumpet’. Reviews were almost unanimously hostile, Larkin noting with bipartisan pleasure that ‘it got a bashing in both the D. Telegraph & the M. Gardener’, and when Mollie Panter-Downes a few weeks later attended a matinee performance, ‘the seat holders in the stalls huddled together like shipwrecked mariners in a sea of red plush’. Of course, the conceited Osborne had had it coming, and Slickey was clearly a second-rate (or worse) piece. But Michael Billington also has a point when he argues that the way in which it was ‘elevated from a resounding flop into an instrument of generational revenge’ – John Gielgud among those booing at the curtain calls – revealed the ‘cultural chasm’ across which ‘mutually hostile groups’ were now glaring.1
This was not the only chasm. On Thursday the 7th, two days after Osborne’s debacle, C. P. Snow gave the Rede lecture at Cambridge, taking as his theme ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. It did not come out of the blue – Snow himself almost three years earlier had written in the New Statesman about ‘The Two Cultures’, i.e. literary and scientific, while Richard Crossman more recently had lamented how ‘the preservation of an anachronistic elite educational system’, in the form of public-school-dominated Oxbridge, had created ‘an Establishment with a set of cultural values hostile to technology and applied science, and with an arrogant belief that a mind trained in mathematics, classics or pure science can solve any problem to which it gives attention’. But it was this celebrated lecture, almost instantly printed as a book, that crystallised public attention around the subject. Ostensibly, Snow was the meritocratic (son of a Leicester clerk), Olympian, dispassionate observer – on the one hand an accomplished novelist who would coin the phrase ‘the corridors of power’, on the other hand Scientific Adviser to the Civil Service Commission – but in reality, although of course he called for a better mutual understanding between the two cultures, his principal target was men of letters.
‘If the scientists have the future in their bones,’ Snow declared, ‘then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world.’ He continued with an attack on what he saw as the elitist guardians of that Luddite, anti-scientific culture:
They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.
Almost inevitably, a year and a half after Sputnik had apparently revealed the Soviet lead in the global power game, he looked east for the solution. ‘I believe the Russians have judged the situation sensibly,’ boomed Snow.
They have a deeper insight into the scientific revolution than we have, or than the Americans have. The gap between the cultures doesn’t seem to be anything like so wide as with us. If one reads contemporary Soviet novels, for example, one finds that their novelists can assume in their audience – as we cannot – at least a rudimentary acquaintance with what industry is all about.
At the end, he issued a ringing call for education to become more scientific, more technological, more progressive, more modern:
All the arrows point the same way. Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense, as well as in the most practical. When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom. For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country’s special danger, for the sake of the western society living precariously rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans and the whole West to look at our education with fresh eyes.2
This sunny Thursday was also the day of local elections. Labour overall sustained some 200 losses – ‘the Tories have got in!’ exalted Kenneth Williams in St Pancras, adding ‘so that’s got rid of all those Red Flag merchants who have queened it so arrogantly & for so long’ – but soon afterwards a cautious Macmillan definitively confirmed that there would be no general election before the autumn. ‘On a hot summer night,’ wondered a Labour agent about the poor turnout, ‘was Diana Dors or Bob Monkhouse more important than exercising the long-fought-for right to vote?’ Results were still coming in when on Friday morning, at Pentonville Prison, a 25-year-old scaffolder, Ronald Marwood, was hanged for stabbing to death a policeman outside a dance hall in Seven Sisters Road, Holloway. ‘Cassandra is out of touch with public opinion when he suggests that the case against Marwood was prejudiced because the victim was a policeman on duty,’ a letter to the Daily Mirror asserted earlier in the week after the paper’s star columnist had vainly called for a reprieve (as had 150 MPs, almost all of them Labour). ‘The reverse is the case, for the public, in the main, do not like policemen.’ A few weeks later, an opinion poll showed over half of British adults believing that ‘all murderers should be liable to the death penalty’, with barely a tenth wanting outright abolition. On the evening of Marwood’s execution, Frankly Howerd, the new TV sitcom starring Frankie Howerd, had its second outing, and it was already clear it was shaping up to be a humiliating flop. Whereas ‘we never quite know how Hancock will respond,’ observed Punch’s Henry Turton, the Howerd character was ‘entirely predictable’; soon afterwards an unforgiving BBC executive privately called him a ‘neurotic performer unable to make up his mind whether he wants to be a slapstick comedian or a comic actor’. For Howerd himself, as with Bobby Thompson up on Tyne Tees, it seemed a career-destroying moment. Next morning, Saturday the 9th, Tom Courtenay’s father duly caught the 5.45 from Hull and the duo made it to Wembley, but the RADA student was distracted by the prospect of performing in Chekhov that evening at Senate House and had to leave shortly before half-time. Hull crashed 30–13 to a Wigan outfit spearheaded by Billy Boston – powerful, Welsh and black.3
Dealing ‘tactfully’ with ‘all shades of opinion in a controversial issue’, was how The Times’s film critic the day before had praised Basil Dearden’s London-set whodunit, Sapphire. The issue in question was race, and Oswald Mosley – veteran fascist and now the Union Movement’s prospective parliamentary candidate for North Kensington – spoke on the Sunday for an hour in Trafalgar Square, undaunted by continuous chanting of ‘Down with Hitler’, ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘Gestapo’, as well as being struck on the shoulder by an orange. ‘Mosley is back, here in London, and anyone who thought Fascism was dead in 1945 is a fool,’ Alan Sillitoe wrote soon afterwards to his brother. ‘He and his thugs are on the streets, organising meetings, stoking hatred.’ Then, in the early hours of the following Sunday, the 17th, a young black carpenter from Antigua, Kelso Cochrane, was attacked and murdered in Notting Hill by white youths, as he walked back – bespectacled, with hand in bandages – from Paddington General Hospital after going there for tablets to ease the pain of his broken thumb. That Sunday evening, with the news of the murder having rapidly spread, the local reporter Colin Eades toured North Kensington. ‘Young white boys walked the streets in twos and threes giving an occasional whistle and jeer at known coloured men,’ while in West Indian clubs ‘the general attitude was one of patience and determination – a determination not to be pushed around’. Two days later, with the police insisting to general disbelief that the murder had no racial significance, Mosley issued a statement, describing as ‘nonsense’ the suggestion that he had contributed to racial tension and thus Cochrane’s death. Would the murderers be found? ‘Notting Hill has closed its eyes and its ears to this crime,’ conceded the Kensington News and West London Times on Friday the 22nd. Indeed they never were tracked down – at least in part a reflection of how deeply and impermeably there ran in the police culture at this time what one can only call institutional racism.
That Friday evening, the journalist John Gale stood outside a youth club in Notting Hill and found out what a handful of white youths thought about the blacks:
With the white women and that. The birds. Whores, like. Buying up all the houses. Riding around in big cars. Layabouts.
Well, they do jobs you don’t like. You wouldn’t like to work in the gasworks or the sewers, would you?
They don’t like to work. They’re lazy. I’ve worked with them. Metal polishing. Do they work? Do they nothing!
Between you and me, as long as there are coloured blokes in this district there’ll be trouble. Giving the area a bad name. If you’re on holiday, and you say you’re from Notting Hill no one wants to know you. We was in Southend and a copper picks us up and we was in the nick all night.
Altogether, Gale discerned in the youths ‘a reflection of the environment: of the peeling stucco, littered newspapers, festering basements’.4
Next day, Colin Jordan – a 35-year-old Coventry schoolteacher, visiting North Kensington at weekends in his capacity as national organiser of the recently founded, pro-repatriation White Defence League – spoke to the press. ‘We are reflecting an opinion,’ he insisted. ‘It may be that it goes unspoken most of the time, but it is held by the overwhelming majority of people in this country.’ Parading the banner ‘Keep Britain White’, the League held a meeting in Trafalgar Square on the Sunday, as students chanted in riposte, ‘No Colour Bar in Britain’ and ‘Who Killed Kelso Cochrane?’ In the event, contrary to some expectations, Notting Hill did not blow up as a result of the Cochrane murder – on the 26th, Eades walked at dusk around ‘a troubled area’ and found ‘emptied streets’ and a ‘deathly hush’, with ‘people watching the streets below from open windows, or, more cautiously, from behind curtains’ – but after Cochrane’s packed Ladbroke Grove funeral on 6 June, some 1,200 mourners formed a procession a quarter of a mile long from there to Kensal Green cemetery. ‘I was pregnant with my second child and I stood in line feeling the shame of my colour,’ remembered (many years later) Maureen, an Irishwoman who earlier in the decade had married a black musician called Ozzie. ‘Those near me were all white, all feeling that it was our fault for not stopping the poison. Ozzie changed from that day. He was so carefree when we met. I was a singer. He became dark, afraid, and sometimes he took it out on me. He saw me as white, not the woman he had fallen in love with. When he died [in 1970], I was the only white woman at his funeral.’
Racial harmony, let alone racial integration, seemed a distant prospect in the summer of 1959. ‘The immigrants are living in tight pockets turning inwards to themselves and it would seem intent on creating a “little Jamaica” or the like within the City,’ reported Mr A. Gibbs, Birmingham’s Liaison Officer for Coloured People, to the City Council at around the time of Cochrane’s killing. After spelling out some salient facts – 35,200 non-white immigrants in Birmingham occupying only 3,200 houses; those immigrants including 24,000 West Indians, 7,000 Pakistanis and 2,000 Indians – most of the well-meaning, deeply paternalistic report was a plea for a properly resourced home-visiting service, on the grounds that by the time immigrants reluctantly visited his office it was usually too late to help: ‘They talk things over with each other, follow suggested courses of action which are ill-conceived and doomed to failure, and they finish up talking “colour bar” when they finally come to the office.’ Situations where a home-visiting service would be able to help, went on Gibbs, included child welfare when mothers went out to work, complaints by tenants, domestic troubles, health issues, employment problems and voluntary repatriation. Such situations were epitomised by (in a local paper’s summary of the report) ‘the prostrate mother of a murdered girl; the father in Jamaica asking for news of his son – last address Birmingham; the West Indians who lost their house deposits “through criminal activities of certain estate agents”; the West Indian who wrote to the Queen asking for help’. And Gibbs himself solemnly (though in the event to little avail) made his case:
The normal outside influences which are brought to bear within the homes of white people are absent because there is no way open at the moment to introduce them. Unless the apparent mistakes of the present are rectified, neither integration nor a stable community will be achieved. There will exist a coloured quarter made up of people who wish to have the best of both worlds yet are not prepared to accept the moral obligations of either. Very few people will have access and very little information will leak to the outside.
He might have wished, though, for a rather different headline in the Birmingham Mail: ‘White Women Who Live With Coloured Men’.5
During the second half of May, intense scorn was directed at the England football team for losing successive friendlies in such minor outposts as Peru and Mexico; the days of the Aldershot Show seemed numbered after disappointing attendances despite Princess Margaret’s presence; the first Commonwealth Day (replacing Empire Day) was marked in a low-key way; Dame Margot Fonteyn appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium; Gladys Langford lamented how ‘boys & girls, tiny or adolescent, wear gaudy trousers, long or short, plastic hair slides, multi-coloured, plastic rings for horse-tail hair styles’; and the property developer Charles Clore provoked virulent opposition by bidding for Watneys. ‘I disapprove of take-overs,’ declared A. P. Herbert soon afterwards. ‘It’s simply not right for someone to reap the benefits of other people’s work just by offering a ridiculous amount of money. What does this Mr Clore know about pubs, anyway?’ The two great emerging Marxist historians were in contrasting modes. E. P. Thompson declared in the New Reasoner that the New Left of the future would ‘break with the administrative fetishes of the Fabian tradition, and insist that socialism can only be built from below, by calling to the full upon the initiatives of the people’, just as Eric Hobsbawm (no friend of the New Left) was publishing, as ‘Francis Newton’, his survey The Jazz Scene. Larkin’s Observer review was respectful enough – though ‘there are times when, reading Mr Newton’s account of this essentially working-class art, the course of jazz seems almost a little social or economic parable’. He added that ‘Mr Newton has little charm as a writer’.6
Class could not be avoided. Ian Rodger’s radio column in the Listener besought the writers of Mrs Dale’s Diary to create ‘something more than permanently ignorant “proles” and continually omniscient middle-class managing women’, while the release of the film version of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (by now ‘easily digestible and mildly dated’, according to Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express) prompted discussion about whether Richard Burton had become too grand to play an authentic working-class anti-hero. On Saturday the 30th, Oh Boy! – live from the Hackney Empire, as usual – bowed out with a Cliff Richard/Marty Wilde duet, and two days later pop music on television took a decisive ‘family’ turn with the first Juke Box Jury. The impeccably smooth David Jacobs was in the chair, and – in addition to ‘Britain’s number one Dee-Jay’, Pete Murray – the pioneering panel comprised ‘the popular songstress’ Alma Cogan, ‘popular recording star’ Gary Miller and, almost ex officio, ‘a typical teenager’ in Susan Stranks. The programme was immediately followed by the first British showing of Bronco, with the BBC trusting to Ty Hardin as the roving cowboy to challenge the dominance of a hugely popular genre that ITV had established through Cheyenne, Gun Law and above all Wagon Train.
These TV developments coincided with the piquant case of Eftihia Christos. ‘SCANDAL OF THE HARD WORKING MOTHER’ was the Sketch’s indignant front-page headline on Friday the 29th after Mrs Christos, from the council estate at Dog Kennel Hill, East Dulwich, had been sentenced by the Lambeth magistrate to two months’ imprisonment, waking up this morning (her 39th birthday) in Holloway Prison. She was a widow, her husband having died six years earlier of TB; three of her four children had TB; and her crime was concealing the fact that on various occasions in the past four years she had supplemented a National Assistance allowance by earning two or three pounds a week at home – mainly by sewing hooks and eyes on clothes, with the two shillings per dozen garments set aside for the benefit of her children. The Mirror was similarly indignant, fiercely attacking the magistrate, 69-year-old Geoffrey Rose, for his lack of compassion; next day it was able to report that over a thousand London dockers had not only signed a petition calling for Christos’s release but were collecting money for the children. The double denouement came on Monday, 1 June, as Christos was released on bail and Rose was taken ill at his Oxfordshire farmhouse, dying hours later. Even-handedly, the London dockers sent a telegram of condolence to the magistrate’s widow.7
The rest of June was the time of part of Southport Pier burning down (machines crashing apart on the beach, people instantly gathering to pocket still-warm pennies); of the Minister of Supply, Aubrey Jones, going to Paris to propose the joint building of a supersonic civil aircraft; of Vanessa Redgrave appearing in Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘played Helena in the tradition of that fine old English schoolgirl, Joyce Grenfell’, observed Al Alvarez); and, in Madge Martin’s words, of ‘such a spell of lovely weather’, though on another day ‘hotter and more trying than ever’. On the 8th, Nigel Pargetter was born and George Lyttelton in Suffolk hosted his old pupil John Bayley and his wife Iris Murdoch (‘I liked the tousled, heelless, ladder-stockinged little lady’); on the 9th, Heap took his son to Littlehampton, where ‘in a dingy café alongside the Funfair’ tea was served in ‘small cardboard cartons at 5d a cup!’; on the 15th, Macmillan recorded with satisfaction (‘the crowds were enormous, & very enthusiastic’) the first time the Trooping of the Colour had been on a Saturday; on the 17th, Liberace won £8,000 damages plus costs after the Mirror’s Cassandra had strongly implied that the pianist, a ‘slag-heap of lilac-covered hokum’, was homosexual; and on the 19th, Charles Clore bowed to the hostile mood music by reluctantly withdrawing his bid for Watneys. The following week, some five dozen miners at the Devon Colliery near Alloa in Clackmannanshire spent 52½ very cold hours underground – ‘singing, playing card games and draughts’, with local people sending down food at regular intervals – in protest at the colliery’s announced closure (along with 15 others). Eventually, recalled one of them, ‘the pit committee called us up. The Coal Board had agreed to meet a delegation of miners in Edinburgh to discuss the closures. But the net effect was that the pit still closed.’8
The collapse in the demand for coal, the sunshine blazing, a national printers’ strike under way that affected magazines, local papers and book publishers (including delaying the last volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet), the Tories ahead in the polls – June would have been a difficult time for Labour even without the start of a major defence row, particularly unhelpful just as Gallup was about to show only 15 per cent in favour of unilateralism. ‘I have led more controversies and rebellions than anyone else here,’ Nye Bevan as shadow Foreign Secretary admonished the unilateralist Frank Cousins at a heated meeting on the 23rd between Labour Party leaders and the TUC, ‘but whenever Elections approach I call for unity against the common foe.’ Eventually a form of wording was temporarily agreed, causing Macmillan to worry that Labour’s ‘“compromise” policy on the H Bomb’ might ‘have a rather spurious success’. But a lengthy private letter to Gaitskell on the 26th made it clear that Cousins would continue to press for a pledge that Britain not only would not use the nuclear bomb first but would suspend production of it – ‘in the firm belief’, he helpfully explained, ‘that ambiguity on any aspect of our defence policy would be the most damaging thing in our approach to the electorate’. Gaitskell’s even lengthier reply to Cousins on the 30th gave little ground, insisting that if Labour won the election he did not want to find himself in the position ‘in a year or two hence unable to do something which I believed to be right for the country because of some commitment I have made now’. He ended by pointedly expressing confidence that ‘you will appreciate the great importance of presenting, as far as we are able, a united front at the moment’.9
Also on the 30th, Arnold Wesker’s Roots, his second play of a projected trilogy that had begun with Chicken Soup with Barley, had its London opening. Joan Plowright (about to become Lady Olivier) starred as Beatie Bryant, ‘an ample, blonde, healthy-faced young woman’ who had returned to impoverished rural Norfolk after living in London, and Heap that first night called it ‘an exceeding well written and richly rewarding play, frequently funny, occasionally moving and never in the least dull’, all of which made Wesker ‘a far more promising playwright than John Osborne’. Reviews were mixed, but most were favourably struck by Wesker’s full-frontal, unsentimental treatment of the working class. ‘Even in the Welfare State,’ reflected Alan Brien,
a large section of the population still lives on a hostile and unmapped planet where the invisible dragons of disease and loneliness and poverty wait outside the light of the camp fire. Conversation is the interchange of ritual, repetitive magic formulas which dull the edge of their fears. Roots not only captures the occasional surface eruptions of humour and anger but also exposes the banked fires beneath the surface.
He added that, although a left-wing dramatist, Wesker (unlike most such) ‘does not start off with the assumption that the working class are noble victims of a selfish conspiracy’.
Phyllis Willmott was unconvinced. ‘I hated the points where he seemed to be saying to the audience “Look at the funny, ludicrous ways of these clods!”’ she noted after going to the Royal Court a week or two into the run. ‘And even more the amusement of the audience in response.’ So too Charles Parker, middle-class producer of the Radio Ballads, who in early July complained directly to Wesker that his portrayal of the gracelessly boorish agricultural labourer had all too easily enabled ‘an intellectual Royal Court audience’ to ‘hug to themselves the comfortable feeling that these uncouths did not significantly touch their own humanity at any point’; ‘corrupt and moronic though the common people are seemingly becoming,’ he added, ‘only in the common people can the true work be rooted, the true tradition rediscovered and re-informed.’ Wesker’s unapologetic reply was suggestive of how much his play had been influenced by the challenging, largely pessimistic implications of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: ‘I come from the working class and I know all their glories but I know their faults also, and this play was written for them . . . It was aimed at the muck-pushers for pushing the third-rate and at them for receiving it. It must have been obvious that I saw these people as warm and worthwhile.’
It was a more nuanced, complicated perspective than another playwright’s. ‘Graham [Payn] and I have taken a great shine to the East End,’ recorded Noël Coward shortly before Roots opened, ‘and we drive down and go to different pubs, where we find the exquisite manners of true cockneys, all of whom, men and women, are impeccably dressed and none of whom is in the least “look back in angerish”, merely cheerful and friendly and disinclined to grumble about anything.’10
During a long, memorable summer, the new world continued, especially in London, to come inexorably into being. In the City, central London’s first new highway since the war, Route 11 (now named London Wall), was formally opened, with a car park beneath for 250 cars, while just to the north the City Corporation was preparing to give the go-ahead to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s hugely ambitious Barbican proposals, hailed by the architect-planner Graeme Shankland as ‘Britain’s most imaginative scheme for big-scale central area redevelopment’. In the West End, Basil Spence’s 14-storey Thorn House was completed (‘somehow the human scale of the St Martin’s Lane area has been preserved’, thought the Architects’ Journal), designs appeared for the towering New Zealand House at the foot of Haymarket, and Richard Seifert lodged the formal planning application for Centrepoint, crisply informing the City of Westminster that ‘we shall be glad to discuss any amendments, but it is most important that the bulk of the building should not be reduced’. South of the river, Ernö Goldfinger won the LCC’s competition for office development at Blitz-ravaged Elephant and Castle, for what became the Ministry of Health’s Alexander Fleming House – more popular (concedes even Goldfinger’s biographer) with architects than with occupants and eventually infamous for ‘sick building syndrome’. And in the East End, the LCC announced that Chinatown, in the Pennyfields district of E14, was to be wholly demolished, while officials of the LCC and the British Transport Commission met to discuss a proposed reconstruction of the whole of Euston station, with its famed Doric arch to be moved to Euston Road.11 Elsewhere, Croydon’s first major new office block, Norfolk House, was approaching completion – the start of ‘Croydonisation’; Coventry decided to liven up its new shopping centre by building blocks of residential flats above it; the highest block in the Midlands, 16 storeys in the Lyndhurst estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, was almost finished, giving ‘an unrivalled vista over green-belt Warwickshire’; and in Hull, the new university library was ready by the end of the summer to receive books. ‘Some bits are awful: others are not bad,’ the hard-to-please librarian informed Monica Jones. ‘It is a clumsy, rather graceless building, lacking intelligence at all levels, but not without a certain needless opulence in parts.’12
Understandably, few if any activators denied the need for pressing on with at least a substantial measure of slum clearance. ‘At Anderston Cross, built in the middle of the last century, I visited the worst slums I have ever seen,’ wrote John Betjeman in June in a Telegraph piece about Glasgow.
Enter one of the archways to the court-yards which they enclose, and you will see the squalor. Small children with no park or green space for miles play in rubbish bins with dead cats and mutilated artificial flowers for toys. Spiral stone stairs, up which prams and bicycles have to be carried, lead to two-storey tenements with one lavatory for four families. One such tenement I saw housed five children and the parents. The coal and the marmalade and bread were in the same cupboard. There was one sink with a single cold tap. There was a hole in the roof and a hole in the wall, and the only heat was from an old-fashioned kitchen range on which was a gas ring for cooking.
Yet these people, though they complained, were not bitter and I was told that there were 150,000 such houses in Glasgow . . .
That city’s housing problems were of course unique, but by 1959 in England and Wales only some 18 per cent of the 850,000 dwellings estimated four years earlier as unfit for human habitation had been demolished or closed. The Housing Minister, Henry Brooke, declared later in June during an inspection of slum clearance in Bethnal Green that ‘many of these mothers and fathers are putting up a splendid fight in the surroundings they have to put up with. It is libellous to dub them slum dwellers. They may have just a tap and a sink in a black hole under the stairs, and a tumble-down closet shared with their neighbours in an open yard at the back, but they are trying to keep decent standards in their homes all the same.’ He added: ‘We are going to win this battle. I am determined to get all slums down.’
Among architects by this time, if Basil Spence firmly represented the acceptable face of the modernist push – ‘he belongs to the modern school’, noted an Observer profile, ‘yet he and his buildings have a charm well calculated to mollify the feelings of those who are normally affronted by modern architecture’ – then Alison and Peter Smithson were still defiantly uncuddly. ‘The use of traditional forms in traditional ways is sentimentality,’ they bluntly informed students at the Architectural Association. ‘It is possible that a future architecture will be expendable, and that an urban discipline of few fixed points and the pattern of change will be developed. In such an architecture the shortness of life can allow of solutions in which the first process is the last process. There would be no problem of maintenance. At present most buildings are assumed to be permanent.’ Many of those students continued to be bewitched by Le Corbusier, and by this time the high-profile, high-rise, Corb-inspired, hard-modernist estate at Roehampton was finished. Among those making the pilgrimage to it were members of Dundee’s Housing Committee and the young, uber-modernist architect Rodney Gordon (future partner of Owen Luder), profoundly shocked to witness the unreconstructed taste of the early tenants: ‘The windows were covered with dainty net curtains, the walls were covered with pink cut-glass mirrors and “kitsch”, and the furniture comprised ugly three-piece suites, not even the clean forms of wartime Utility furniture.’ The estate’s special eminence was recognised in a lengthy piece by Nikolaus Pevsner in the July issue of Architectural Review. Admiring its ‘pride in béton brut’, its ‘delight in chunky shapes’ and its ‘instinctive refusal to compromise with sentimentality’, he approvingly asserted that altogether the estate was a ‘vast, yet not inhuman, composition’.13
In many towns and cities, the juggernaut – which some dared criticise, or even resist – was still only revving up, but in September the Shrewsbury Chronicle printed a heartfelt letter (‘Stop knocking Shrewsbury about’) from B. Dodd of 9 Combermere Drive:
The Crown Hotel is to be knocked down and replaced by shops. The Raven Hotel may be demolished and its place taken by more shops. On the old Smithfield site – a splendid setting for a public garden – there is to be more ‘development’ in the form of a large block of shops. Next April, the market clock is to be knocked down and a characterless modern structure is to be erected in the place of that charmingly ugly piece of Victoriana, so essentially a part of the Shrewsbury skyline.
Can nothing be done to halt this maniacal ‘progress’? . . .
We can see the kind of proposed ‘improvements’ in any of a hundred other towns. There is, sir, at present, only one Shrewsbury. Has not the time come to cry halt and keep it that way? Or is it already too late?
Lurking increasingly by this time was the sometimes barely visible hand of the property developer. ‘We knew nothing about the matter; nobody has approached us and the suggestion that someone can come along and pull down our property like that is quite laughable,’ declared (in August) the indignant managing director of the Tolmer Cinema in Tolmer Square, just north of Euston Road, after St Pancras Borough Council rejected a planning application to demolish the cinema and redevelop the island site:
This cinema is regarded with a great deal of affection locally and many of our elderly patrons come along three and four times weekly and they like us because we do not hustle them out; if they want to stop for three or four hours, they are welcome. I am certainly looking further into this matter because I want to know if it is really possible for someone to seek planning consent in respect of property that they do not even own.
The Hippodrome at Golders Green was also under threat, with Hallmark Securities Ltd seeking to have the theatre demolished and turned into a 13-storey block of flats, but during September some 25,000 people signed a protest petition, stars of stage and screen attended crowded ‘Save the Hippodrome’ meetings (‘If I were in charge,’ announced Bruce Forsyth, ‘this would never have happened’), and eventually Hendon Council unanimously recommended to Middlesex County Council that the application be rejected.14
Two situations this summer highlighted the gulf between planners and planned. ‘Pit Village Preferred to New Town’ was the Manchester Guardian’s story in June after over 1,700 of the 2,000 adults in the Durham mining village of South Hetton had signed a petition protesting against the rehousing of 620 of them in the new town of Peterlee. The county’s planning department could not understand, observed the special correspondent, why they did not want ‘good new houses’ in Peterlee in preference to the back-to-backs in South Hetton scheduled for demolition. The answer, he went on, was partly the six miles between new town and pit head, but also ‘the community spirit built up through 120 years of living and working together’, making South Hetton ‘a large, close-knit family’. Accordingly, ‘its new and handsome miners’ institute is not an experiment in social living, it is an elegantly painted roof over a thriving social life to which the happiest citizens of new towns may sometimes look back in wistfulness’. In another mining area, South Wales, the conflict in Aberdare, running for almost two years, was between the Labour-run council supporting Glamorgan County Council’s town plan – one-third of the buildings (including over 3,000 houses) to be demolished, with instead comprehensive development areas releasing the townspeople from an ‘outworn environment’ – and the many local residents who bitterly opposed it. ‘They will have to get the bloody army to get me out,’ declared one. ‘Whether they want my house for a bus station or a car park, I just don’t intend to go.’ Ralph Samuel wrote up the case in August in the New Statesman. ‘The Glamorgan planners did not set out to destroy a community,’ the young historian reflected. ‘They wanted to attack the slums and give to the people of Aberdare the best of the open space and the amenities which modern lay-out can provide. It did not occur to them that there could be any opposition to a scheme informed by such benevolent intentions; and, when it came, they could only condemn it as “myopic”.’ In the spirit of the New Left, he concluded: ‘When bureaucracy is at work in the institutions of welfare, its intentions are quite frequently benevolent, and its face is always bland. As a result, its sway is generally unresisted and its assumptions rarely challenged. But the people of Aberdare have shown that its advance need not be inexorable.’
Overwhelmingly, the sense in 1959 was of being on the eve of not only a new decade but also of urban change of a fundamental nature with unknowable consequences. ‘This is a very ambitious project and one can only wish its sponsors luck,’ John Osborn, a prospective Conservative candidate in Sheffield, told the local Telegraph in June after touring show flats among what the paper called ‘the giant honeycomb of future homes’ at Park Hill, just a few months before the first residents were due to arrive. ‘It is indeed a social experiment and the architects have given a lot of thought to the problems involved,’ he went on. ‘This trend for building upwards is new to the city and it is something we have got to accept.’ Osborn was asked if high-rise development was the answer to the problem created by the huge Sheffield housing list. ‘We shall know that only in the future,’ he replied. ‘When, in fact, people have the choice of living on estates or in multi-storey blocks. I would like to walk around these flats – which I consider very good – in five years’ time. Then we shall know how successful the project has been.’
Or take the thoughts of a clergyman, observing at close quarters the whole fraught process of slum clearance and subsequent development. Norman Power, occupant of about-to-be-demolished Ladywood Vicarage, wrote in the Birmingham Post of Ladywood’s ‘strange appearance’, as ‘besides the shells of the condemned back-to-back houses, the new flats rise in hygienic, impersonal majesty’. He did not pretend to be regret-free. ‘I do think it is very tragic that some fine old roads, with real charm and character, should also be swept away. Surely a civilised city would wish to preserve roads like Calthorpe Road, Hagley Road, and Beaufort Road? Surely its citizens would insist that it should?’ He found it impossible too to quell his doubts about ‘the great, American-looking blocks of flats’ that were making up the new Ladywood. ‘Splendid as they look, there is something very cold and impersonal about the new flats. And each block seems curiously separate – here are people without any community where once thrived the intense social life of a city centre.’
Yet overall, Power’s glass was at least half full. ‘On the whole, it is impossible not to rejoice. I have seen too much of what living in “back-to-back” does to the third or fourth generation to have many regrets.’15 A perceptive witness with humane concerns, he was still travelling hopefully. And so, to a greater or lesser extent, were most people.