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‘I turned on BBC Television – so often hopeless, & we were agreeably surprised to find it as clear as ITV,’ reported Nella Last about her reception on 3 July, the same day that the three reassuring words Sing Something Simple, as performed by the Adams Singers (directed by Cliff Adams), were first heard on the Light Programme. ‘Morecambe area, like up on the East Coast, often has a poor “shimmering” screen,’ Last continued. ‘We hope for better results when the new receiving station is built in this district.’ She had always been preoccupied by her listening habits, and now she and her neurasthenic husband had to juggle the viewing too. ‘I like Tuesday night – The Flying Doctor & Twenty Questions & little or no Television,’ she wrote four days later.
Far from ‘becoming a fan’ as friends told me, we seem, now the ‘novelty’ has worn off, to be as ‘choosy’ as over sound transmission, & as our watching time can only begin when my husband has heard The Archers & finishes at 9 o’clock – except Sunday night, if he is enjoying a Variety show from 8.30 to 9.30 – & he won’t have cowboy, Emergency Ward 10 or ‘crime’ shows where there is shooting or killing, it’s a bit restricting. I’m often wryly amused at his attitude of ‘nothing to interest me’.
The following Friday, ‘doing several little jobs at once’ in the ‘kitchenette’, Last heard on the radio (from the adjoining sitting room?) the Adams Singers, so she ‘sat down & listened to the gentle, “sweet” voices, as they sang the years away for me’.
Predictably, Frances Partridge had not yet yielded to the box in the corner, but soon afterwards, visiting Robert Kee in his London flat, she had no choice but to give Tonight a try. ‘It certainly riveted one’s attention in a horrid, compulsive sort of way, yet I was bored and rather disgusted, and longed to be able to unhook my gaze from this little fussy square of confusion and noise on the other side of the room,’ she recorded. ‘“Ah, here’s one of the great television personalities – the best-known face in England!” said Robert, and a charmless countenance [presumably Cliff Michelmore’s] with the manner of a Hoover-salesman dominated the screen.’ Yet among the millions who did watch regularly, there were perhaps signs of changing taste. ‘He is vulgar and gives the rest of the country a horrible impression of Northerners,’ noted one among several critical viewers later in July in response to the BBC’s Blackpool Show Parade featuring a well-known, long-established variety comedian. ‘Dave Morris is still doing the same act he did twenty years ago . . . His usual “bar” or “club” humour does not work on a stage, or on television.’ And perhaps most damningly: ‘Probably OK for those on holiday there and out for the evening, but not for a television audience.’
Reporting this month, under the BBC’s auspices and chaired by Antony Jay (the future co-writer of Yes Minister), was TICTAC, acronym for Television’s Influence on Children: Teenage Advisory Committee. ‘Teenagers,’ it found, ‘are bored by politics.’
This is rather a bald statement, but it does seem to be true of an astonishingly large proportion of them. ‘It’s all talk’, ‘it’s boring’, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about’. Again and again all of us came across these comments and others like them. Western Germany, steel nationalisation, the constitutional future of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Singapore elections – nearly all of them seem incapable of the slightest interest in, let alone enthusiasm for, any of these topics. The reason seems to be that they cannot see how ‘politics’ impinge on them, or what they have to do with their lives . . .
We found a widespread disenchantment with politicians. ‘It’s sort of corrupt’. ‘They’re too dogmatic’. ‘It’s all fixed’. ‘They’re just keeping to the party line’. At the back of it seemed to be the feeling that their views were conditioned by their party allegiance; they didn’t honestly believe what they said, or at least you couldn’t be sure they did; and that discussion between, say, Labour and Conservative was pointless since neither was open to persuasion by the other.
Other findings were that teenagers were more interested than adults in ‘the large issues of ethics and morality’ such as ‘the colour bar, crime, punishment, marital fidelity, social justice, religion, the H-Bomb’; that they were highly observant of television techniques, criticising ‘bad cueing, unconvincing studio exteriors, fake props and set dressing, bad camerawork, etc’; that they were often ‘outraged’ by insincerity in a speaker or programme; and that particular dislikes included the quiz games watched by their parents (seeing ‘if some bloke was going to go on and win £3 2s’), period drama (‘I can’t bear all those “’pon my soul’s” and overacting’) and slow-paced BBC programmes (‘Victor Sylvester and all that’). Altogether, concluded TICTAC, ‘the more we talked to teenagers about television, the clearer it became that for them it was solely a source of entertainment. They never volunteered this fact, because it had clearly never occurred to them that it might be anything else. Its function in the home was that of Court Jester: to pass the time, to keep boredom at bay, to hold the attention, to interest, to amuse, but always to entertain.’ Or, put another way, ‘neither they nor their parents looked to the television set to serve as private tutor, chaplain, woodwork instructor, occupational therapist or Youth Leader’.1
Nor were Cousins or Gaitskell in the entertainment business. ‘I have never believed that the most important thing in our times was to elect a Labour Government,’ declared the T&G’s leader in early July at his union’s conference on the Isle of Man, shortly before it voted unilateralist. ‘The most important thing is to elect a Labour Government determined to carry out a socialist policy.’ The press gave him a predictable lashing – ‘COUSINS LOSES THE ELECTION’ (Daily Sketch); ‘COUSINS GOES WRONG’ (Daily Mirror); ‘IS COUSINS A DANGER TO BRITAIN?’ (Sunday Express) – and shortly afterwards a poll conducted for Labour found almost half the electorate agreeing with the proposition that the party was ‘severely split by disagreement’, an impression presumably confirmed when Gaitskell on the 11th, speaking at Workington, repudiated unilateralism and insisted that ‘the problems of international relations’ would not be ‘solved by slogans, however loudly declaimed, or by effervescent emotion, however genuine’, but by ‘very hard, very clear, very calm and very honest thinking’. By now, everyone was expecting an autumn election, and Labour’s anxieties were compounded by industrial troubles, especially in the motor industry, while the printers’ strike dragged on until early August.
‘I am sure your sensitive adolescent souls will burn with righteous indignation when you read that some poor motor car builders simply had to go out on strike because they were earning only £30 a week,’ Dr J. E. Dunlop, rector of Bell Baxter High School at Cupar, Fife sarcastically surmised on 3 July at senior prize-giving. ‘Try to rise above this horrible example set by your elders,’ he urged the school-leavers, ‘and you will gain what they have missed, the greatest prize in the world – a tranquil soul.’ Within a fortnight, in a different dispute, a major, almost month-long strike had started at Morris Motors (part of the British Motor Corporation) in Cowley, following the instant dismissal of chief shop steward Frank Horsman – ‘because’, according to management, ‘of a continuous and deliberate policy of obstruction, insubordination and insolence over a period of many years, culminating in the incident of July 14, when he instructed certain men to stop work’. Mrs W. Lawrence, a farmworker’s wife and mother of three, was unimpressed. ‘What must other countries think of England?’ she asked in a letter to the Oxford Mail, shortly before Cousins managed to settle an increasingly invidious dispute by arranging for Horsman to be transferred to Pressed Steel. ‘Is it Great Britain when it seems the unions try their best to stop workers’ efforts by these constant strikes?’ A few weeks later, in early September, Gallup found that those viewing trade unions as on the whole ‘a good thing’ had declined from 67 per cent in 1955 to 60 per cent now; given the overwhelming press hostility, arguably the surprise was that the figure was as high as that.
Not only the press was hostile. The Boulting brothers (John and Roy) had been making low-to-medium-strength anti-Establishment comedies for several years, and now, with I’m All Right, Jack, they hit the jackpot. Set in a munitions factory, and in theory attacking equally both sides of industry (with Terry-Thomas playing the useless, pompous manager, Major Hargreaves), in reality the film had as its principal target hypocritical, self-serving trade unionism, as embodied by the shop steward Fred Kite (played – indeed created – by Peter Sellers with cruel brilliance, including short-back-and-sides haircut, Hitler moustache, ill-fitting suit, waddling walk). ‘All them corn fields and ballet in the evening,’ is how he imagined his beloved Soviet Russia. As for concepts of economic efficiency: ‘We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal. That is victimisation!’ Crucially, most reviewers from the left portion of the political spectrum found little to object to. The Manchester Guardian on 15 August reckoned it ‘not so far from the reality as told in the daily news of strikes’, while the day before, Dick Richards in the Mirror gave ‘full marks’ to the ‘witty, irrepressible’ Boultings for their ‘latest thumb-to-the-nose mickey-taking piece of gaggery’, in which they ‘shrewdly, and with very little malice, poke fun at every phase of industrial life’. ‘Maybe,’ conceded Richards at the end, ‘it’s not an accurate picture of 1959 factory life, but it’s splendid comedy.’ Splendid enough for the Queen, who watched it while on holiday at Balmoral – apparently in the company of Macmillan. ‘If that doesn’t win you the election,’ said someone to the PM, ‘nothing will.’2
Macmillan himself had spent the last Thursday of July at his Sussex home, Birch Grove. ‘Butler, Heathcoat Amory, Hailsham, Macleod, & a lot of TV experts to luncheon,’ he noted. ‘We then did about 50 minutes discussion (to be cut to 15 minutes) wh. it is hoped wd do to open the election campaign . . . We did it in the Smoking Room & the whole house was in confusion, with 40–50 electricians, technicians & what-not who made havoc of the place.’ The following week he toured three new towns (Basildon, Stevenage and Harlow, with a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ reception everywhere), while on the 7th came a feel-good announcement from the Palace. ‘The Queen is to have another baby in January or February,’ recorded Harold Nicolson. ‘What a sentimental hold the monarchy has over the middle classes! All the solicitors, actors and publishers at the Garrick were beaming as if they had acquired some personal benefit.’
Nothing, though, improved the national mood more this summer than the heady cocktail of sun and affluence. ‘For week after week, the skies have been deeply blue and cloudless every day, followed by warm, starry nights in which people have sat out in pavement cafés and on their own doorsteps and in every slip of a back garden to enjoy the rare, un-English balminess,’ wrote Mollie Panter-Downes.
Though the old idea of London in August is of empty streets becalmed in a dead season, the city has never appeared more lively and booming, with the hotels, restaurants, and theatres all packed; the chauffeurs waiting beside their Rolls-Royces and Jaguars at West End curbs; the television masts seeming to sprout thicker each day over the suburban housing-estate roofs; and crowds from the provinces, dressed in their holiday best and with money to burn obviously smouldering in their pockets, happily lounging along Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street.
She did not need to spell out the political import: ‘This is also the summer when the country’s prosperity – coming so suddenly after the long, bleak series of governmental exhortations to cut down on spending that many citizens are inclined to pinch themselves rather sharply – can be felt on the skin along with the sunshine.’3
The prospective Labour candidate for Grimsby was far from the metropolis. ‘So now this most gifted political problem-child, this all-but-statesman already at 40, so outstandingly able, astringent, brave, integral, quick, gay – such fun to have about – is on the high road up,’ a delighted, ever-admiring Hugh Dalton had written to Gaitskell in February after the local party had chosen the undeniably gifted, undeniably arrogant Anthony Crosland, out of the Commons since 1955. ‘Great success, given a flick of luck, is easily within his powers.’ His constituency was of course synonymous with fishing, and during August the author of The Future of Socialism spent a fortnight on the Grimsby trawler Samarian’s trip to the Faro and Westerly fishing grounds. As he docked, wearing his wartime red paratrooper beret and an old sweater, Crosland informed the Grimsby Evening Telegraph that the fishermen were ‘the most hard-working and cheerful people I have met in a long time’.
Gaitskell would have approved the sentiments. He had confided to Richard Crossman (a fellow Wykehamist) earlier in the month, apropos Crosland’s friend and rival, Roy Jenkins,
He is very much in the social swim these days and I am sometimes anxious about him and young Tony . . . We, as middle-class Socialists, have got to have a profound humility. Though it’s a funny way of putting it, we’ve got to know that we lead them because they can’t do it without us, with our abilities, and yet we must feel humble to working people. Now that’s all right for us in the upper middle class, but Tony and Roy are not upper, and I sometimes feel they don’t have a proper humility to ordinary working people.
It may have been around this time that Nye Bevan added his perspective. If Gaitskell won the election, someone speculated to him, there would probably be a good job for Jenkins, albeit he was said to be a little lazy. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ reputedly exclaimed Bevan. ‘How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?’
August bank holiday was still on the first Monday of the month, and that day questions of class were high on the agenda in a recorded conversation between Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, above all the increasingly vexed question of whether the new affluence was de-proletarianising the working class. Williams was inclined to be sceptical – claiming that, through for instance the universal use of the welfare state, it was as much a case of the middle class becoming working class as the other way round, and he stressed the continuing relevance of ‘the high working-class tradition’, defined as ‘the sense of community, of equality, of genuine mutual respect’. Hoggart did not deny that tradition, but – with a nod to Family and Kinship – argued that whereas ‘living together in a large industrial district’ produced a sense of solidarity, ‘if you spend some time on a new housing estate you are aware of a kind of break, of new pressures and tensions’. And he went on:
I’m not surprised that working-class people take hold of the new goods, washing-machines, television and the rest (this is where the statement that they have become middle class is a statement of a simple truth). This is in line with working-class tradition and isn’t necessarily regrettable or reprehensible – what one does question is the type of persuasion which accompanies these sales, since its assumptions are shallower than many of those people already have.
A lot of the old attitudes remain, but what one wants to know is how quickly these new forces – steady prosperity, greater movement, wives going out to work – will change attitudes, especially among younger people. I’ve talked to a lot of working-class adolescents recently and been struck not only by the fact that they didn’t see their industrial and political situation in the way their fathers did at their age (one expected that), but by the difficulty in getting any coherent picture of their situation out of them. Everything seemed open, and they seemed almost autonomous.
But by the time they’ve married and settled in with commitments a great many forces encourage the picture of a decent, amiable but rather selfish, workable society – the New Elizabethan Age.
Towards the end, the conversation turned to politics. ‘The emphasis the Conservatives put is quite strong and attractive,’ conceded Williams.
That the competitive society is a good thing, that the acquisitive society is a good thing, that all the style of modern living is satisfying and a real aim in life. They seem to believe these things a lot more strongly than the Labour Party believes in anything. Labour seems the conservative party, in feeling, and it’s bound to remain so unless it really analyses this society, not to come to terms with it, but to offer some deep and real alternative, of a new kind.4
As Williams and Hoggart were speaking, the Hague sisters – Frances and Gladys, unmarried, living together in Keighley – were on the third day of their week’s holiday at Bridlington. ‘We began with a dash for the bus, as the taxi we ordered never came, so we only just caught our train,’ recorded 62-year-old Gladys about the Saturday, when public transport was its usual crowded self at the start of a bank holiday weekend.
What a crush in Leeds as all were rushing to the far end of the station for the East-coast trains. Porters need some patience as some travellers need so much reassuring about their train. We were lucky to get in a comfortable coach and sat back to enjoy the scenery . . . Bridlington station with its wooden foot bridges could do with a more modern look but at any rate we had arrived. After a good welcome and tea at our lodge we spent our first evening enjoying the air and watching the players on the putting and bowling greens. After working hard it is nice to watch others playing hard.
Sunday featured a walk on the South Sands, the afternoon on the beach, a salmon salad tea, and church in the evening (‘about 300 in the congregation, very good singing’), while on bank holiday Monday itself the clerk of the weather again obliged:
The sun was hot all morning so deck chairs were in great demand . . . Fathers on holiday seem to have more fun than the mothers who are left in chairs to keep an eye on the family’s possessions, perhaps they would rather watch the cricket and football than take part. Races and other games organised by representatives of a children’s comic paper attracted many of the younger children and there were plenty of prizes for lucky winners. Donkeys weren’t in the mood for trotting and needed some coaxing.
That evening in Glasgow, Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, by now on its post-London tour, opened for a week at the King’s Theatre. The main actors from the original production had all left, so instead the Glasgow Herald’s reviewer singled out Michael Caine (26, working-class, this his first major role) as ‘the remorselessly jocular cockney’, Private Bamforth, with his performance ‘taking (with no small success) the easy way on all occasions to raise a laugh’. The not wholly pleased Christopher Small continued: ‘He does it, it must be owned, with considerable charm; nevertheless, the effect, which brings a complaisant audience almost to the point of finding funny the enforced slaughter of a prisoner, is a little odd.’
Next Saturday the Hagues set off home. ‘Such large crowds at the station that it was 3 hours before we left,’ noted Gladys. ‘The earlier trains came in full of Butlins campers from Filey. The Boys Brigade came on the platform in very orderly style being accompanied by the band playing. Had a very restful and enjoyable holiday. All gone well.’ The 18-year-old Joe Brown had been performing at Butlin’s in Filey earlier in the season, but the group he was in were so wretched, and he was so fed up with being made as a gimmick to have his head shaved à la Yul Brynner, that by the start of the month he had dropped out. Meanwhile at Butlin’s in Pwllheli, the 23-year-old Glenda Jackson did stick it out as a Blue Coat – ‘having’, she remembered rather sourly, ‘to tell all the happy holidaymakers who wanted to be in York House that they were in Windsor House’ – and took the opportunity to dye her hair peroxide-blonde, wear mauve and generally try to become Jeanne Moreau, in the hope of kick-starting her stagnant acting career. The ubiquitous soundtrack this August was Cliff Richard’s number 1 hit ‘Livin’ Doll’ – a single that, observes Pete Frame, ‘conferred unimaginable respectability on Cliff, smoothing out all the bumps in his reputation’ – and the film was South Pacific, on record-breaking runs all across the country. For her family, recalled Trina Beckett half a century later, it was as usual Southbourne in Dorset, even though in an old Austin Seven it was two days’ drive from their Wolverhampton home. The drill was familiar – an unbendingly strict landlady (‘No dinner for late arrivals’), no choice about what you had to eat, four families of four competing for the bathroom – and ‘each day started with the 8.30 non-negotiable breakfast of cornflakes followed by bacon, fried egg and baked beans’. Whereupon, with no one allowed in the house after 9.30 a.m.,
Come rain or shine, we would trail down the cliff path to our beach hut, No 2,378, with a plastic beach bag stuffed with sliced white bread, margarine, meat paste, a couple of Lyons individual fruit pies and, on the last day, a pack of Kunzle cakes.
Once news got round our digs that we had a hut, other guests would often ‘just happen’ to pass by. ‘Could we just dry our Jenny out of the wind?’ A tricky one to refuse, so a cuppa would be offered, which generally extended into lunch. By the end of the week, our four-seater hut was accommodating a dozen interlopers most days.
‘Look at the time!’ my father would say each day at precisely 5.10 p.m., followed by a mad dash up the path to the digs, seconds after the hallowed 5.30 p.m. unbolting of the front door.
After dinner, still hungry, we would stroll out to our favourite Forte’s café and tuck into vanilla slices and mugs of Horlicks.
And then, with the sky dark, the final ritual of piling into the Austin, which ‘chugged along the seafront between Boscombe and Bournemouth piers, as we oohhed and aahed at fairy lights on lamp posts and the moon shimmering on the sea’.5
On Sunday 16 August, eight days after the Hagues left Bridlington and the day after the East Riding smallholder Dennis Dee dropped off his wife and four children for a week’s caravan holiday there, the Street Offences Act 1959 came into action, immediately driving prostitutes off the street. Three days later it was the end of trolley buses on the East End’s Mile End and Bow routes; two days after that, Princess Margaret’s 29th birthday was marked by the release of an official portrait (photographer: Antony Armstrong-Jones); and on Saturday the 22nd (Dee fetching the family from Brid, ‘all looked fit & brown, good weather’) the Manchester Guardian announced that from Monday it would be known as the Guardian, reflecting the fact that two-thirds of its 183,000 circulation (72,000 behind its ‘chief competitor’ The Times) lay outside the Manchester area. The following Tuesday evening, Everton played away at Burnley and lost 5–2, bad news for the football special back to Liverpool. ‘The train’s return route was marked by broken glass and various missiles hurled from windows,’ reported a local paper, ‘and the trip was punctuated by halts as passengers pulled the communication cord.’ Altogether, 20 coach windows were smashed, and many electric light bulbs removed from their fittings and smashed, but a British Railways spokesman opted for the laconic: ‘Two policemen travelled with the train and they had their hands full.’ Four days later the Toffeemen were at Bolton, lost again, and the home goalie Eddie Hopkinson was ‘pelted with broken glass, sticks, apple cores and other missiles by hooligan fans behind the goal’.
In Liverpool itself that Saturday evening, the opening night of the Casbah Coffee Club, in the cellar of a large Victorian house in the West Derby district, starred the Quarry Men, the start of a welcome residency after treading water. They got a warm reception from almost 300 – the more troublesome Teds kept out by a bouncer – but Paul McCartney’s brother Mike vomited after swallowing hair lacquer from a bottle claiming to be lemonade. The weekend’s big story, though, was the mass break-out from Carlton Approved School in Bedfordshire. Over 80 boys absconded on Sunday, but by next day, after a police search with tracker dogs, only 11 were still free. ‘It is not true that we are allowed too much freedom at the school – it’s just the opposite,’ a non-absconder told the press. ‘Although we know an approved school is for punishment, the discipline is much too harsh. Our only recreation is a film show on various occasions, and otherwise we work hard in our different trades. Only the other night one member of the staff smashed our portable radio, and another took the pick-up arm from a record-player.’ ‘I am sorry,’ he added, ‘to see all this rioting happen, but some good may probably come out of it.’6
The weather was at last getting a little cooler, and Madge Martin on the 31st detected in Oxford even ‘a real autumnal nip in the air’, albeit short-lived. That Monday the British Home Stores head office in Marylebone had a telling absence. ‘Frankie [a much younger colleague] not in,’ noted Florence Turtle, ‘her sister in law had had a baby, & Frankie had to mind the baby boy aged two. I should never have dreamed of staying from work for such a reason. Jobs are so easy to come by nowadays.’ The presence of the day was Ike’s, as Macmillan, only six months after the publicity coup of a summit in Moscow, now stage-managed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s visit to London, including a live television conversation – full of mutually warm bromides – between the two men, both in dinner jackets, direct from No. 10. The American’s ‘simplicity and directness came over rather better, most Londoners seemed to think, than the Prime Minister’s urbane style, which appeared a shade uneasy’, Mollie Panter-Downes informed her readers.
That same evening, 825 men reported for work at Morris Motors’ first night shift at Cowley, as the company sought to boost production to meet ever-growing demand, while down the road a new revue, Pieces of Eight, opened at the New Theatre. Peter Cook, still at Cambridge, wrote most of the sketches (‘warm, human, topical and spot on the mark’, according to the Oxford Mail), additional material came from Harold Pinter with ‘several bright sketches’, and the senior member of a youthful ensemble was the ‘quite irrepressible’ Kenneth Williams, ‘this small, cherubic bundle of high spirits’. The cherub himself recorded his mixed emotions: ‘I hang above flies while cast do the opening & then descend on a wire. It was unadulterated agony. The audience was wonderful. They behaved charmingly throughout. There were quite a few vultures from London but I didn’t care reely.’7
Two distinctive new novels were up for scrutiny in the TLS in early September. ‘Low-life pastoral’ was the reviewer’s unenthusiastic tag for Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, a novel about teenagers two years after his City of Spades about black immigrants. ‘Sarcastic and facetious rather than humorous’, an ‘unsuccessful mixture of picaresque invention and knowing “copy” ’, a 19-year-old narrator who was not only a ‘pornographic photographer’ but ‘an extremely sententious young man’ – there was praise only for the ‘vivid’ London (mainly Notting Hill) descriptions, though even they were ‘largely written in a sort of up-to-date Runyonese’. D. J. Enright in the Spectator was also unconvinced – ‘Mr MacInnes himself can hardly be a teenager, and much of his “teenage thing” rings false’ – but the New Statesman’s critic was far more positive. ‘Although the decade is almost over, there are few novelists writing about the late nineteen-fifties,’ he declared, whereas this ‘sings with the vitality and restlessness that is seeping out of the glass skyscrapers and the crowded streets’. He quoted with pleasure how the novel’s hero looks around him and says, ‘My lord, one thing is certain, and that’s that they’ll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.’ Altogether, MacInnes had done ‘a first-class reporting job’ on ‘a generation that has more money, leisure and independence than any of its predecessors’, a generation instinctively impatient of class distinctions.
The reviewer was a 30-year-old Daily Mirror journalist, Keith Waterhouse – whose own new novel, Billy Liar, was the other one being appraised by the TLS. There, enthusiasm for the subject was muted, the reviewer calling Billy Fisher, the undertaker’s clerk, ‘a hapless welfare-state Yorkshire chap’; but the novel as a whole was acclaimed as ‘a brilliantly funny book, rich in absurdities and beautifully edged writing’. Other critics also dished out the plaudits, with Maurice Richardson in the Statesman applauding how ‘Billy’s daydreams, with their amalgam of telly-formed consciousness and literary ideas and juke-box sex, and his dialogue, with its scriptwriter’s wisecracks and puns, are contemporary right up to the minute’. A long, multimedia life lay ahead for Waterhouse’s creation. But in retrospect, arguably what is most striking is not so much the contribution that Billy Liar made to the cultural northern drift, but more Waterhouse’s delight in guying the crusty, stolid, narrow-minded northern stereotype, whether in Billy’s uncomfortable encounters with Councillor Duxbury or in his fantasy conversations with the Stradhoughton Echo’s columnist ‘Man o’ the Dales’. One reviewer, John Coleman, referred to ‘that humorist’s playground, the grim North’, but this was humour with a sardonic albeit half-affectionate twist.8
Yorkshire’s cricketers did their bit on Tuesday the 1st by winning the county championship – ‘one in the eye for J. Wardle’, noted Larkin – and thereby ending Surrey’s remarkable seven-year run. The following weekend included a section of the West Ham crowd starting a slow handclap and chanting ‘Take him off’ after the visiting goalkeeper was knocked out; Juke Box Jury (Murray and Stranks joined this week by Eric Sykes and Cleo Laine) in its now regular Saturday early evening slot; the death of Kay Kendall, only 32; and a one-off performance at the Royal Court of Wesker’s early play, The Kitchen. Too many characters becoming ‘People, and then Ideas’, reckoned Brien, but Alvarez called it, ‘without any qualifications at all, the best play of the decade’. Next day, Monday the 7th, saw the unveiling in Bethnal Green – in the new Roman Road market square adjacent to the fairly recent Greenways housing estate – of a group of modernist bronze statues. Depicting the borough’s traditional ‘Blind Beggar and Dog’, this was the work of 29-year-old Chelsea sculptress Elisabeth Frink, who calmly told a local paper, ‘I never worry about people’s reactions to my work.’ The mayor, Alderman Bill Hart, did the honours, but among those watching, one woman apparently spoke for most. ‘It’s disgusting,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t see how it has cost £1,000. Fancy spending money like that. The council ought to have their heads examined.’ A youngster got hold of one of the blind beggar’s legs, which swayed slightly before he was told to stop by a man who then said, ‘It’s very frail. I bet it won’t be there after Saturday.’ There was more vox pop next morning when the TV cameras visited. ‘It looks all right,’ remarked 69-year-old George Biggs, ‘and if I knew what it was it would be even better.’ But Councillor G. A. Hadley, chairman of the Housing Committee which had commissioned it, was adamant: ‘It’s typical Bethnal Green. Put a fence round to keep people away? Certainly not. People will like it when they get used to it.’9
These were challenging, invigorating days for Edward Thompson. During August he signed a contract to write a textbook of 60,000 words on working-class politics between 1759 and 1921 – a commission that ultimately came out in 1963 as the rather different The Making of the English Working Class. More pressing, though, was the organising and supporting of the New Left’s only candidate in the almost certainly imminent general election. This was the highly intelligent miner Lawrence Daly, who after leaving the Communist Party had founded the Fife Socialist League and was now about to stand in West Fife. ‘Brother, I cannot produce a loudspeaker & van,’ Thompson wrote from his Halifax home to Daly at the end of August. ‘It is just possible we might lay hands on a speaker, but not a van. People just don’t have vans to lend around.’ More missives followed:
Look. This Ernest Rodker lad is a first-class lad. He is, what a young socialist comrade ought to be, heart soul and body in the cause. He has initiative and good ideas. He is willing to listen and learn. He has proved himself as an organiser – did most of the publicity in London for the first Aldermaston. It would be good for him. The only problem? A beard. I have written to him and suggested to him he takes off his beard. If he does, I am telling you Bro. Daly, you will damn well have him for your campaign, and you will thank us all afterwards. (2 September)
I think Ernest Rodker has been choked off with the beard business; but he might be up for a weekend . . . In my view you ought to send an address to every elector, since I think there will be arguments inside families, especially between young voters and their parents. (8 September)
The 8th itself was yet another warm, sunny day; Gallup put the Tories 5½ points ahead; and Macmillan at last fired the starting gun, with polling day to be exactly one month hence.10
Galaxy, Picnic, Caramac (‘Smooth as chocolate . . . tasty as toffee . . . yet it’s new all through!’), Knorr Instant Cubes, Bettaloaf, Nimble, New Zealand Cheddar (‘Now I’m sure they’ll grow up firm and strong’), Jacob’s Rose Cream Marshmallow Biscuits, Sifta Table Salt (‘Six Gay Colours’), Player’s Bachelor Tipped, Rothmans King Size, wipe-clean surfaces, Sqezy (‘in the easy squeezy pack’), coloured Lux (‘four heavenly pastel shades of blue, pink, green and yellow, as well as your favourite white’), Fairy Snow, new Tide with double-action Bluinite, Persil (‘washes whiter – more safely’), Nylon, Terylene, Orlon, Acrilan, Tricel, Daks skirts, Jaeger girls, ‘U’ bra by Silhouette (‘Gives You the Look that He Admires’), Body Mist, Mum Rollette, Odo-ro-no, Twink (‘The Home Perm that Really Lasts’), Pakamac, Hotpoint Pacemaker, Pye Portable, Philips Philishave, ‘Get Up to Date – Go Electric!’11 Irrefutably, 1959 was the year of consumption: refrigerator sales up from 449,000 (in 1958) to 849,000; washing machine sales up from 876,000 to 1.2 million; vacuum cleaner sales up from 1.1 million to 1.5 million; radio and electrical equipment sales up by 21 per cent; motor-car sales (including exports) up from 1.05 million to 1.19 million; jewellery sales, ladies’ underwear sales, money spent on eating out – all up by significant percentages. Even so, there still remained a considerable way to go in the consumer durables revolution: TV sets may have been in roughly two out of three British homes by the summer of 1959, but the ratio for telephones was one in two, for washing machines one in four and for refrigerators one in ten, while only one in three households had a car.12
Integral to the FT’s analysis in July of the ‘Consumer Boom’ – fuelled by the end of hire-purchase restrictions, reductions in purchase and income tax, and a ‘general feeling of buoyancy and optimism’ – was ‘the rising trend in sales of radio and television sets, records, cameras and photographic equipment’. Soon afterwards, in late August, the National Radio and Television Exhibition at Earl’s Court (heavily plugged by the BBC, including on Saturday Club) featured not only the technological breakthrough (and Anthony Heap’s future nightmare) of the transistor radio, but also the latest TV sets, whose sales as a whole had almost doubled during the first half of 1959. Hitherto the great majority of sets had been 17-inch, but by now there were signs (noted the FT in its exhibition preview) that the 21-inch set was ‘at last beginning to make some headway’, with ‘the new wide-angle cathode ray tube’ making it ‘possible to design a far slimmer model reducing the 21-inch set to more manageable dimensions’. Up in Liverpool, to chime in with Earl’s Court, the prominent local retailer T. J. Hughes held its own Radio and Television Exhibition, with the sets on display still the smaller screen size but with plenty else to compensate, such as the Philco Slender Seventeener II:
Takes up only a fraction of the space that older bulkier sets needed
Biggest possible picture from 17" tube
Finest full circuit gives perfect clarity and definition
Finely proportioned in the contemporary style
Rich walnut veneers with scratch-resistant finish
Ekco still had the largest market share among set manufacturers, but Bush, Pye, Ferguson, Murphy, Philips and Sobell were all pushing hard. ‘Elegant slim cabinet covered in simulated pigskin with matching mouldings and carrying handle’, promised a recent ad for the Ferguson Flight 546, while a rival made creative use of its name: ‘Touch of genius! BUSH BUTTON channel change TV . . . With this exclusive Bush feature, you can change channels instantly. Once you’re switched on, you have BBC or ITA at your fingertips – accurately, instantaneously!’13
In the kitchen – itself transformed by the mass arrival of light plastics, whether (itemises the historian Jan Boxshall) in the form of washing-up bowls or bins or laundry baskets or storage jars or tablecloths – two of the keenest marketing wars during 1959 were over soups and breakfast cereals. Heinz Tomato still accounted for one in every four tins of canned soup, and chicken and mushroom soups were still stalwarts. But, noted the FT, ‘green pea and spinach are not what they were, and the present tendency is towards lighter or “cream” soups, and those with a meat content’, while Knorr-dominated packet soups, ‘almost negligible five years ago’, now made up over 20 per cent of UK soup sales. As for breakfast cereals, their production some 33 per cent up since 1953, ‘the latest arrivals on the market have been for the most part sugared, or pre-sweetened, cereals, almost all of which have contained some kind of free gift and have been carefully packaged to appeal to children’, though the pink paper did not deny that ‘brand loyalty is fairly strong among the old-established brands – Cornflakes (Kellogg Company of GB), Shredded Wheat (Nabisco Foods) and Puffed Wheat (Quaker Oats) for instance’. In terms of trends more generally, the National Food Survey carried out this year found that convenience foods (i.e. already cooked and canned, quick-frozen or dehydrated) were increasingly popular, taking around a quarter of total food expenditure on the part of younger housewives; that old-fashioned staples like potatoes, tea, herrings and kippers were being consumed less, while relatively expensive commodities like poultry, coffee (especially instant) and fresh citrus fruit were being consumed more; that housewives had lost much of their appetite for turning fat into dripping; and that, among regional variations, the people of the north-west ate the most carrots and onions, Midlanders the most canned and bottled tomatoes, and the Welsh the most pickles and sauces.14
If dripping’s halcyon days were over, so too were tripe’s. In July the Manchester Evening News ran a large, rather desperate, front-page ad for UCP tripe (‘EVERY-NIGHT supper dish – because it is LIGHT, TASTY and NOURISHING . . . and ensures a good night’s REST . . . with plenty of ZEST for tomorrow’) that convinced few, just days before, in the same paper, Mary Murphy’s feature ‘NOW TRY THAT SALAD THE FRENCH WAY’ included a recipe for French salad dressing. Other signs of Continental influence in 1959 were the popularity not only of Italian motor scooters but also of three-wheeler bubble cars like Isettas and Messerschmitts; the opening in Soho of the informal, modestly priced La Terrazza, ‘the Trat’; and at Burton’s, the arrival of the Italian suit (lighter, brighter, slimmer). The American influence had of course been spreading through the decade, but it was in 1959 that the Hungarian-born rag-trade salesman Willi Gertler won the UK distribution rights for Levi’s jeans. Further straws in the wind pointing away from the rigidities of the black-and-white past and towards a more relaxed, easeful, sophisticated future included electric razors becoming increasingly available, Colston marketing its first dishwasher, sales of untipped cigarettes dropping but those of filter-tipped rising fast, and Bronco’s coloured toilet paper successfully going national, with pink the most popular, followed by blue and green – perfect accompaniments for the new coloured bathroom suites.15
Continental influence was at work in a classic car launched in April 1959. ‘The first small, affordable British car actually to look chic,’ claims an obituarist of Harry Webster, designer of the Triumph Herald, whose ‘sharp, sleek lines came from Italy’ and which ‘was available as a racy coupé and a stylish convertible, as well as a two-door saloon’. In fact, ‘there was nothing else quite like it, especially at the £702 price’. Yet after only four months, in late August, the Herald was overshadowed by the launch of a car that rapidly became not only a classic but an icon. ‘IT’S WIZARDRY ON WHEELS AND “QUALITY FIRST” ALL THROUGH,’ proclaimed a full-page, dots-filled advertisement for the Morris Mini-Minor, made at Cowley:
Who would have thought it possible . . . Four adults travelling in comfort in a car just 10 feet long . . . with heaps of luggage . . . at up to 70 m.p.h. and 50 miles per gallon? But today Morris make it possible! With one stroke of genius they have turned the engine East-West across the car – and created the Mini-Minor, the roomiest high-performance small saloon in the whole history of motoring!
Known from almost its earliest days as the Mini, the car’s origins lay in the petrol rationing caused by the Suez Crisis, prompting the BMC’s Leonard Lord to demand that his chief designer, the brilliant, implacable Alec Issigonis (creator of the Morris Minor), come up with a new small car with low fuel consumption. Reaction in the national press to its unveiling was not far short of ecstatic – ‘obviously destined to meet with world-wide success’ (Times), ‘the most sensational car ever made here’ (Daily Express), ‘a new era in democratic motoring’ (Daily Telegraph) – while the bluff, handlebar-moustached John Bolster tested it for Autosport. ‘At first sight,’ he acknowledged, ‘the car is not beautiful to look upon, its very short bonnet, small wheels on each corner, and lack of an overhanging nose or tail perhaps offending convention. Yet, one soon grows used to it, and the sheer good sense of its design appeals enormously.’ A detailed, almost wholly positive technical appraisal followed, including a reference to how ‘quite the most outstanding feature is the suspension’, before Bolster ended ‘on a slightly personal note’:
I have for long deplored the old-fashioned design of the typical British small car, and have had to go to the Continent for acceptable transport. Now, Britain has produced a really modern vehicle which can teach the Continentals a thing or two. I am so happy that at last patriotism may be combined with enjoyable motoring, and I have expressed my appreciation by signing an order form.
Unsurprisingly, the Mini – fatally underpriced at just under £500, including purchase tax – attracted enormous attention from the start, with an unofficial strike at Cowley in early September merely stoking up demand even more. ‘No beauty to look at, certainly,’ readily conceded Mollie Panter-Downes on the 3rd of the squat newcomer; but she warmed to its ‘astonishing’ leg room as well as parking-in-London possibilities, adding that ‘every day, the BMC showrooms on Piccadilly are packed with family parties waiting their turn to hop in and out of these obliging midgets.’16
Even at that price, and despite their significantly enhanced disposable income (real wages up by 50 per cent since 1938, compared to 25 per cent for adults), few ‘teenage consumers’ could afford a Mini. The term itself was coined in July 1959 in a pamphlet by Mark Abrams, who defined the group as unmarried people aged 15–24. Clothing, footwear, drink, tobacco, sweets, soft drinks, slacks, pop records, gramophones, romantic magazines and fiction paperbacks, the cinema, the dance hall – these, according to Abrams, were the things on which The Teenage Consumer spent his or her money, a pattern of ‘distinctive teenage spending for distinctive teenage ends in a distinctive teenage world’. Insisting that ‘the teenage market’ was ‘almost entirely working-class’, given that middle-class teenagers were ‘either still at school or college or else only just beginning on their careers’, Abrams offered other nuggets: fewer than 4 per cent of young women did not use cosmetics; at least two-thirds of all teenage spending was in male hands; over 60 per cent of teenagers visited the cinema at least once a week; the Daily Mirror was easily the most-read paper; and among young (under-25) working-class housewives, the majority used the same brands as their mother and largely stuck to traditional working-class foods (bread, potatoes, margarine), avoiding ‘modern’ foods like fresh milk, eggs, and fresh fruit and veg.
Around this time, interviews in Sheffield with those about to leave school, or who had just left it, revealed a little more about teenage spending habits:
Bus fares for leisure alone take a lot of money. Dancing costs 3s 0d and 2s 0d for fares and a drink. I go to the cinema about once a week, but a boy friend pays about two out of three times. I buy two hair shampoos a week at 7d or 9d each. And I have to buy combs and hair grips. My mother buys my nylons, but they are supposed to last for two weeks. If I ladder a pair soon after getting them, I have to pay for a new pair.
I go [to the cinema] with my friend three times a week. We don’t go to the Ambassador, because it is full of coloured people. And we don’t go to the Regent, because not many people go there, and it is usually old people who do. We like the Victoria best – it’s people of your own age more, there.
‘While you have the money,’ fairly typically remarked a third teenager, ‘you might as well spend it and enjoy yourself.’17
Inevitably, across the age range, not all shopping trends pointed in the same direction. Woolworth’s opened in 1959 its 1,000th store (at Portslade in Sussex), though would soon be losing its way; another expanding multiple chain, Littlewoods, took over Oxford’s long-established Grimbly Hughes; British Home Stores paid £140,000 for the huge Trinity Methodist Church in Scunthorpe High Street, so that it could be demolished and have a BHS store put up in its place; Edwin Jones of Southampton, one of the Debenhams group of department stores, opened what was claimed to be ‘the most up-to-date store in the South’, including ‘high local intensity’ lighting, Formica plastics ‘on counters, table tops, walls and doors’, and, in the large self-service food hall, ‘Sweda Speeder moving belt check-out counters, designed to smooth out rush-hour peaks and eliminate queues and delays’. Self-service generally was by now reckoned to produce a 30-per-cent increase in a shop’s turnover within six months of conversion, but the roughly 5,000 self-service stores still represented only about 3 per cent of grocery outlets. In Northampton, the entrepreneurial Frank Brierley opened the first of his cut-price discount stores, which rapidly spread across the East Midlands, and, befitting the self-confessed ‘Pirates of the High Street’, adopted the skull and crossbones as their logo. At Burton’s menswear shops, the tone was becoming both more upmarket and less relentlessly masculine, with wives actually encouraged to be present, or at least on hand, during the fitting ritual, while at another multiple tailor, John Collier (formerly known as the Fifty Shilling Tailors), the emphasis was on younger customers and new fabrics, with heavy promotion from 1959 of the John Collier 4 Star Policy, each of the stars (gold, blue, white and silver) representing a particular cash price for a range of suits, overcoats and waterproofs. Anywhere and everywhere, meanwhile, there was potentially the American-imported attraction – or threat – of Muzak, as pioneered by a company called Readitune, which by this time boasted the availability of over 5,000 ‘unobtrusive and relaxing’ melodies, thereby creating ‘in shop, store or showroom an atmosphere of goodwill and the background for better and increased business’.18
In prosperous Coventry, the recently built shopping centre in the city’s heart was becoming particularly busy on Saturdays, as shoppers flocked there from the new estates, where local shops supplied food and essentials, to buy bigger items like furniture, radio and TV sets, kitchen equipment and larger items of clothing. ‘They like to have a lie-in and then a good breakfast,’ one retailer told a journalist about customers’ Saturday habits, ‘driving in at about 10.30 to do their shopping and make a day of it.’ What did the shoppers want? ‘Coventry people, say retailers, are quality and brand conscious, partly because of television advertising. Attractive prices are not enough; shoppers want selection, and the increasing popularity of the city as a shopping centre is due partly to the greater choice that shops are able to give.’ Even so, and perhaps especially in rather more typical working-class areas, a strong counter-trend was towards mail-order shopping, the total sales of which virtually tripled during the 1950s. ‘Slowly chipping away at the fixed-price structure’, according to the Daily Mail in March 1959, and dominated by three major players (Littlewoods, Great Universal Stores, Grattan Warehouses), it was a type of shopping ‘largely done on a friends-and-neighbours basis in industrial areas’ – i.e. involving local organisers who received a commission – ‘and only recently have there been signs that it is now spreading to suburbia also’. One such organiser was Mrs Isabel Stewart, a compositor’s wife living in Battersea. ‘I have 20 members, mostly neighbours, and with £25 in hand I can order goods worth £125,’ she told the Mail. ‘I usually manage to make enough commission for the family holiday, and enjoy meeting the friends it has brought me.’ Was a possible third way, though, the development of planned shopping centres away from established town centres? Later in 1959, A. D. Spencer of Boots addressed the Multiple Shops Federation on this nascent trend. Delegates were generally sceptical, with a speaker from the British Shoe Corporation adamant that ‘the women shoppers who provided the greater part of retailers’ business preferred the congestion, the bright lights, the noise and the traffic of the High Street.’19
Television advertisements were of course on the front line of the consumer boom, but there were indications, with commercial TV almost four years old, that viewers were starting to tire. In March, shortly after Gallup had revealed 81 per cent expressing irritation about adverts in – as opposed to between – programmes, the Rev. R. G. Bliss, living near Midhurst, wrote to Geoffrey Gorer (who in a letter to The Times had played down the menace): ‘These breaks so madden all my household that we now just cannot look at ITV even when the programme is excellent. We live deep in the countryside, without other evening entertainment, apart from what we make ourselves, which makes it all the more infuriating.’ Beverley Nichols disagreed. ‘During those two minutes in which the screen is filled with the rival claims of the detergent giants, one can leave the set in order to powder one’s nose, replenish one’s glass, and let out the cat. This is impossible during the chaste, non-commercial productions of the BBC. One must sit it out to the bitter end.’ And, argued this veteran, versatile writer in his letter to the New Statesman, ‘though some of the advertisements are admittedly idiotic, many of them – particularly the cartoons – are brilliant little cameos, worthy of Disney’. Predictably, the diarists sided with the grumblers. ‘Now we are “settling down” to Television,’ reflected Nella Last in July, ‘I find much of the Commercial advertising irritating.’ After citing the ads for two soaps, Camay and Knights Castille, as particularly ‘distorted’ and ‘misleading’, she added: ‘I always take the chance of the advertisement “breaks” to let the dog out, or in, lay breakfast in the front room – any little needed job.’ So too from a less house-proud perspective, that of John Fowles. ‘The Roman putridness of ITV,’ he declared in August during a spell of enforced television-watching at his parents’ home at Leigh-on-Sea. ‘Advertisements for detergent and budgerigar seed – why so many?’20
Plenty of activators may have worried in 1959 about the working class being swept along in a degrading consumer frenzy. The Labour politician Christopher Mayhew, for instance, launched another campaign against commercial television; Shopper’s Guide (published by the Consumer Advisory Council) described as ‘fit only for the nursery’ the language of ‘magic new formulas’ and ‘exclusive ingredients’ used to sell Omo, Daz et al; and I’m All Right, Jack included cheerful, mindless jingles for ‘Num-Yum’ and ‘Detto’. But around this time two sociologists were uncovering salutary evidence. ‘I don’t need one, my wife is my washing machine’ and ‘My wife wouldn’t have it’ were frequent responses when Ferdynand Zweig asked working men in different parts of the country whether they had a washing machine. Regarding the material possessions they did have, and the general home comforts they enjoyed, gratitude and a degree of pride predominated over acquisitive greed, with remarks like ‘I have many things which would be unthinkable to my father’ and ‘I have achieved something which I thought would have been impossible for me’. As for burgeoning automobile ownership, Zweig found that a car was prized less for status reasons than as ‘a toy, a tool for pleasure’, and he quoted one man: ‘It is my main luxury; others spend £2 or more on beer, I spend it on a car and have something to show for my money.’ Peter Willmott’s relevant fieldwork was concentrated on heavily working-class Dagenham, where ‘the overwhelming impression’ he gained from his interviewees was that ‘the improvement in material standards has generated very little tension or anxiety’. He quoted some:
There’s more pride – when you buy something now, you go out to buy the real thing. But that’s not because of the green-eyed monster, or keeping up with the Joneses. It’s because we’re all reaching up for the same sort of thing at the same time.
These things like washing machines have become necessities for working-class people. It’s not a matter of copying other people. It’s everybody wants them when they can get them.
I was telling the young woman over the road about the Marley tiles my husband had just put down in the scullery. She seemed interested, so I said, ‘Why don’t you come over and look at it?’ Now she’s seen it she’ll tell her husband about it. I gave her a sample, as a matter of fact. I expect her husband will put some down for her in their scullery. We don’t mind about that. Why should we?
‘There’s not a bit of jealousy about these things, as far as I can see from people round here,’ another wife observed to Willmott. ‘People seem to be glad if someone else gets something. They don’t grudge it. They say, “Good luck to them.”’
As so often, it is the brief, suggestive fragment that tells the larger story. Towards the end of August 1959 the Hampstead & Highgate Express ran a front-page story on the ‘storm of protest’ that had broken out in Hampstead Village about the Tastee-Freez (i.e. ice cream) and Wimpy Bar that had opened in Heath Street a month earlier. The result was a petition to the paper, signed by over 150 residents, calling on it to mount an investigation into ‘how and why this particular tasteless design complete with mock mosaic pillars of different patterns, diamond-shaped multi-coloured facia, and the lettering Tastee-Freez, was passed’. The Ham & High seems to have declined to do so, instead quoting the proprietors – brothers Tony and Brian Burstein – of this, the first combined Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Bar in London. ‘It is our policy,’ they simply stated, ‘to try to please the majority.’21