4
‘The main change that has taken place in the last few years is that customers no longer seem as price-conscious as they were,’ the Financial Times noted about Marks & Spencer some four months after Macmillan’s speech. ‘Ninety-five-shilling dresses are found to sell better than 65s models.’ Yet none of M&S’s 237 stores had fitting rooms, and, more generally, in terms of the apparently inexorable shift into a shiny new consumerist world, there were by 1957 at least three significant areas of continuity.
Starting with consumer durables, ownership figures for the second half of the year showed that their penetration was far from total: 56 per cent of adults owned a TV set, 26 per cent a washing machine and only 12 per cent a refrigerator (the figure for the working class specifically being just 5 per cent). In addition, only 21 per cent of adults had a telephone, while even in Colin Shindler’s home in Prestwich, Manchester, where his businessman father kept a Humber Hawk in the drive and a Hotpoint washing machine had recently arrived, they still used a mangle on wash day.
Nor, a further continuity, were supermarkets anything like ubiquitous. The Liverpool Echo’s ‘Onlooker’ reckoned in September that they ‘seem to have made much more of a mark in the South of England than so far they have in the North. Motoring in London and the Thames Valley, I was surprised to find them in quite small towns and suburbs.’ Would they spread? ‘I suspect,’ added Onlooker, ‘that in the North we may be more reluctant than the Southerners to forgo our cross-the-counter courtesies.’ In fact, there was a total of almost 4,000 self-service shops in Britain, but the great majority were relatively small, at around 1,000 square feet. And although supermarkets were undoubtedly on the rise – Sainsbury’s with nine so far, Fine Fare (part of the Allied Bakeries Group) with 15 and planning to open another 15 in the next 12 months – these were still, in the long sweep of things, the Dark Ages. ‘The out-of-town supermarket, based on the North American pattern of the out-of-town shopping centre in the open country, has not yet been attempted,’ the FT pointed out around the time of Onlooker’s southern tour. ‘The obvious reason is the comparatively small number of cars owned in Britain [only 24 per cent of the population had a car].’ Moreover, existing high-street supermarkets ‘as yet provide no parking accommodation’ – and thereby ‘probably miss much potential trade which goes to the neighbourhood grocer, the shop at the corner, the grocer who still delivers (which supermarkets do not) and the grocer who brings his shop to the house’.
The third continuity, helped by a shopping environment in which only 2 per cent of all food products sold were pre-packed, was thrift. Radio and television repairs; the hire and repair of gas appliances; matches, soap and cleaning materials – all featured strongly in 1957’s pioneer annual household expenditure survey. ‘A really tasty dish, and economical too!’ was the headline in Woman’s Own, two days before Macmillan’s speech, for Philip Harben’s recipe for cold pigeon pie, while Mrs H. had revealed earlier in the summer in the same magazine that ‘I cut my loofah into slices – some for cleaning pans, others for bases to hold flowers steady in a vase.’1 Economical hints from readers remained a staple of many popular publications.
Even so, there was plenty new on the market in 1957, often being aggressively pushed through the recently available medium of television advertising. Fry’s Turkish Delight, the scientifically devised (by Lyons) instant porridge known as Ready Brek, ‘the new, exciting taste of Gibbs SR’, the original aftershave (Old Spice), the Hoovermatic twin tub, Wash and Spin Dry machine – all were fresh entrants, while in general two trends stood out. One was towards home-centredness, epitomised by the rapid growth of sales of canned beer, up from 1.5 million cans in 1954–5 to 70 million by 1957–8. ‘It’s nice to watch television but it’s even nicer when you’ve got a drink in your hand,’ Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. ‘Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you’re in a posh cabaret.’ The outspoken textile manufacturer Cyril Lord was already plugged in to the home, manufacturing and selling tufted carpets that made use of new man-made fibres and were aimed squarely at the mass market, often replacing linoleum in working-class homes. Soon there would be a TV jingle – ‘This is luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord’, a jungle accurately described by his biographer as ‘relentless’ – and his carpets were set to become a byword for the gathering consumer boom. The other trend, though far from invariable, was towards going upmarket. The launch of Camay soap involved a series of mildly risqué Norman Parkinson photographs in the more superior women’s magazines, with Parkinson himself claiming elsewhere that he used Camay for shaving in the bath. In the autumn Van den Berghs heavily promoted a new soft-blend luxury margarine, Blue Band, with distinctive gold-coloured packaging. And about the same time, faced by a falling market share, the British Patent Perforated Paper Company decided that it needed a new approach if its cheap, traditional, notoriously non-absorbent toilet paper, Bronco, was to thrive against more yielding competitors like Andrex.2
Inevitably, the pleasure and excitement of new possessions could come tinged with regret, as when shortly before Christmas the parents of 13-year-old Subrata Dasgupta, living in Derby, ‘bought a Bush electric record player’. Admittedly he could now buy records (LPs and EPs) that he had ‘only handled wistfully in Dixons’, but it was still ‘with a great deal of sadness I put away our mechanical, wind-up gramophone’, whose ‘thick, metal-shiny playing arm which held the needle, curled up like a contented kitten, looked clumsy and prehistoric, compared to the lightweight “pick-up” arm on the new player’. The older teen, though, was probably melancholy-free if he or she acquired a Dansette: brightly coloured (usually a mixture of blues, creams, reds and turquoises) and unashamedly lo-fi, it still had the volume to get partygoers dancing.3
How to choose between competing goods and services? The first Egon Ronay Guide to restaurants appeared in 1957, but the event making greater waves came in October with the first issue of Which?, the magazine of the Consumers’ Association. The CA itself had been started the previous year by a young American graduate, Dorothy Goodman, who on returning to the States had passed it over to Michael Young. For Young, as he recalled some 20 years later, there was a direct, potentially fruitful link with the work he had been doing for Family and Kinship:
In Bethnal Green we were able to reconstruct what was happening in the 19th century. It was clear that men’s lives were very much centred on their work; they kept a large proportion of the family income for themselves and spent it quite separately from their wives in pubs and gambling and smoking. Partly they did it because the home was such a bloody uncomfortable place to be.
What we saw was the beginning of a change. The younger men, although interested in their work, were giving more interest to their homes, having something more like a partnership with their wives in building up their homes. And this was symbolised by the material goods that people bought.
They had a terrific pride, an emotional investment in these material goods, and it seemed that they would be more satisfied if they could feel that the things they were buying were efficient and functional. Anything, we thought, that could tell them that, would strike a chord. It struck much more of a chord with the middle classes than it did with the working classes.
The unfortunate class differential was no doubt inevitable, but perhaps less so was the dramatic whoosh of Which?’s early life. ‘At 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning,’ Young wrote on Friday the 10th to his benefactors the Elmhirsts, ‘when we opened the doors of this office which we have rented for 10s a week, a special messenger arrived from Sir Simon Marks [chairman of M&S] with a standing order for 20 copies; and ever since then the letters have been pouring in.’4
Press response was initially cautious – no doubt on account of anxiety about advertising boycotts by upset manufacturers – but a favourable article and editorial in The Times helped ignite interest, as did an item by Marghanita Laski on the 11th in Woman’s Hour, and within a month there would be some 10,000 members of the CA, few agreeing with the electrical retailer who told the Electrical Times that ‘all these well-meaning but voluntary unofficial watchdogs are making much ado about nothing’. Among those do-gooders, the key editorial figure from early on was the hugely capable, clear-sighted Eirlys Roberts, fairly described on her death in 2008 as ‘the mother of the modern British consumer movement’. Meanwhile Which? itself focused in its first issue – after a bold declaration that its mission was to supply ‘the information, impartial, accurate and thorough, which will enable people to get better value for their money’ – on electric kettles (the Russell-Hobbs failing one of the insulation tests), sunglasses, aspirin, cake mixes, scouring powders and pastes (Mirro, Vim and Ajax as the top-rated three, followed by Chemico and Gumption), and no-iron cottons, with additionally the results of Swedish tests of two popular British cars, the Austin 35 and the Standard 10 Saloon. ‘Somehow it seems to belong quite well to a “classless middle-class” society,’ Young wrote a week after the launch to the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, thanking him for his subscription. ‘From now on everyone can have the same article, “the best”.’
Sadly, what one does not get in the pages of Which? – undeniably imbued, for all its sterling work, with a whiff of paternalistic puritanism – are the voices of the consumers themselves. For those one can still turn occasionally to Mass-Observation (albeit by now an organisation devoted to market research rather than sociological enquiry), specifically to its Detergent Survey of late 1957 and early 1958. Among 40 housewives interviewed in London, Liverpool and Manchester, a headmistress said she would ‘rather pay for a good all-rounder’ and was ‘old-fashioned enough to want to see the bubbles’; a part-time shop assistant declared herself ‘very sensitive to smell’ and thought ‘they scent them too much, especially Daz’; and a Liverpool docker’s wife, who went ‘to the wash house to do the big wash’, explained how ‘I used to use Persil quite a lot’ but had ‘changed to Fairy Snow’ because ‘Persil is very hard on the hands’. One of the interviewees, in a small, untidy Paddington flat, was a childless 38-year-old who worked as a part-time researcher and was married to an Encyclopaedia Britannica sales rep. Not exactly a bright, bushy-eyed consumer, she described her washing routine:
Always on Sunday morning after I read the Sunday papers. It has to be very much of an emergency to wash any other time. I often find my husband’s things on my chair or my ashtray, for me to wash up, if my husband wants anything done he’ll follow me about with them, put them on my bed, my pillow and so on till I wash them. I can’t wash things while I’m running the bath, because the bath looks too tempting. My terylene curtains, it’s essential to wash them once a fortnight – I go on with mine till people mention it, but I don’t care personally if they’re black, and if my dog could speak, he’d ask for his bedding washed. In other words you can gather I don’t like washing.5
‘Some of the methods used to prevent coaches not involved in the stoppage from carrying on were far removed from the peaceful picketing allowed by law,’ reported the Manchester Guardian on Tuesday, 23 July (three days after Macmillan’s Bedford speech), about the ongoing national (outside London) busmen’s strike. ‘Drivers were attacked and beaten, tyres were slashed and windows broken – sometimes to the danger of passengers as well as crew.’ Later that week at Headingley the West Indies were again on the rack, with the England fast bowler Peter Loader celebrating his hat-trick by dancing a fandango, very different to cricket’s still customary low-key displays of emotion. But Philip Larkin on the Friday was more interested in The Archers. ‘Don’t you adore Carol Grey’s voice when Toby S. [Toby Stobeman] is making love to her?’ he asked Monica Jones. ‘It quite broke me up over my leathery tinned tongue tonight: she goes all small & unconfident. She’s the only woman on the programme I’ve ever liked. I’m getting to the point where I want to bang a skillet on Prue’s [Pru Harris, later Forrest] head.’ A less inveterate grumbler, Florence Turtle, spent the weekend in Suffolk, and on the train back to London ‘a passenger remarked that he thought Liverpool St Station must be the dirtiest station in the world, a remark that I must agree with’. Harold Macmillan was more satisfied when his Monday audience with the Queen turned to the question of where the eight-year-old Prince Charles was to go to boarding school next term: ‘She has chosen Cheam – a good preparatory school, solid but not smart.’6
In fact the royals and those around them were in for a tricky few months. ‘A pain in the neck’ was young Lord Altrincham’s memorable description of the Queen’s voice, in a trenchant article on the monarchy in the August issue of the National & English Review; he added that the unfortunate impression she gave in her speeches was of ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation’. Altrincham (the future John Grigg) largely blamed the monarch’s ‘tweedy’ entourage – a ‘tight little enclave of English ladies and gentlemen’ – rather than Elizabeth herself, but that did not stop a torrent of abuse. The Daily Express inevitably led the way; in the Daily Mail the political commentator Henry Fairlie accused the peer of ‘daring to put his infinitely tiny and temporary mind against the accumulated experience of the centuries’; Altrincham received some 2,000 letters of complaint and a punch in the face from a member of the League of Empire Loyalists; and Macmillan noted his luncheon guest Churchill as ‘splendidly indignant’. Even so, a poll of Daily Mail readers found that as many as 35 per cent agreed with Altrincham, compared to 52 per cent disagreeing – and that among younger readers the split was actually 47–39 in his favour. Summing up ‘this unofficial national debate’ later in August, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in the New Yorker that there were indeed ‘many loyal and thoughtful English’ who would be ‘glad to see a bit of fresh air blown into the stuffier recesses of palace protocol’; she pinned her hopes on the ‘forceful ventilating influence’ of the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘whose breezy common sense and intelligence make short work of red-tape trimmings’. The Queen’s first minister was less convinced. ‘After luncheon, a sharp little discussion with Prince Philip,’ recorded Macmillan at Balmoral on 1 September. ‘He is against our having a nuclear power. The tone of his talk confirms me in the view that he will try to play up to the Left. He may honestly think this to be in the Queen’s interest. But I don’t altogether like the tone of his talk. It is too like that of a clever undergraduate, who has just discovered Socialism.’7
One month later, and the controversy was still alive. ‘Mr [Geoffrey] Howe is the chairman of the Bow Group, and as impertinent a young whipper-snapper as ever needed his breeks dusting,’ was how the Spectator’s new Westminster correspondent ‘Taper’ (Bernard Levin) described the launch of that Tory pressure group’s magazine Crossbow. ‘He spent a good deal of his speech insulting Lord Altrincham in a particularly offensive, ham-fisted and naive manner.’ A Sunday Dispatch photo caption a few days later about Princess Alexandra was a reminder of the royals’ increasingly fish-bowl world – ‘a princess plays tennis – in slacks’ – before news broke that, to coincide with the Queen’s North American tour, New York’s Saturday Evening Post was publishing a critical piece on the royals and their great cheerleader, Richard Dimbleby. The Sunday Express headline provided a pithy if not a balanced summary – ‘MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE RIDICULES ROYAL FAMILY IN USA. ASTOUNDING ATTACK ON THE QUEEN. SHE IS CALLED DOWDY, FRUMPISH, BANAL’ – and one of its readers, Nella Last in Barrow, reflected that ‘after listening to his prim, waspish voice on “Any Questions”’ she had pictured Muggeridge as an ‘ageing Peke’. The People also weighed in, a front-page piece calling his article ‘ruthless’ and ‘tasteless’. Next day he was banned from appearing on that evening’s Panorama, and later in October the BBC’s board of governors not only disinvited Altrincham from Any Questions? but decided not to renew Muggeridge’s contract. ‘This chap will never go on the air as long as I am director-general,’ declared Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob, and, as a military man, he was as good as his word.8
‘You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen, who does more good than you if you lived to be 5,000 . . . signed, Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys.’ So read one of the many patriotic letters to Altrincham back in August, but not everyone felt reassured by the nation’s youth. ‘We did not enjoy the horrid crowds of Leicester Square, Coventry Street and Piccadilly Circus,’ recorded Madge Martin that month after an evening in London to see Anna Neagle in No Time for Tears. ‘Surely these were exciting, gay places to be in at night, but now filled with the lowest type – Teddy boys with their friends of both sexes, etc. We had a cup of tea at Fortes – once the dear old Criterion – feeling tired and disgusted with this side of our dear London.’ In September a series run by the Liverpool Echo about widespread vandalism on Merseyside culminated with readers expressing their views. Mrs M. Green of 10 Bower Road, Huyton blamed working mothers – ‘when her day is spent largely outside her home, the pivot is removed and the family, as such, just disintegrates’ – but for most there was a single, unambiguous line of thought:
We won’t get anywhere until the punishment fits the crime. It is scandalous that if one catches a delinquent in the act and cuffs his ear, one is liable to be hauled up for assaulting a juvenile. (M. Temple, 10 Abergele Road, Stanley, Liverpool 13)
They ought to bring the cat in again: a few strokes with that would soon put an end to it. Teachers should be able to use the cane again to show children which is right or wrong. (Mrs White, Parkgate Road, Neston)
Why not bring back the birch like the Isle of Man? (‘Disgusted’ (OAP))
Mrs K. E. Lee of 32 Barnsbury Road, Liverpool 4 also had a question, or rather two: ‘What sort of homes do these little vultures come from and what kind of citizens are they going to be?’9
The young themselves were bothered by neither issue. On 7 August, a month and a day after the Woolton church fête, the Quarry Men (not yet with McCartney) played for the first time at the Cavern in Liverpool. ‘We did some skiffle numbers to start off with but we also did rock ’n’ roll,’ recalled the drummer Colin Hanton. ‘John Lennon was passed a note and, very pleased, he said to the audience, “We’ve had a request.” He opened it up and it was from Alan Sytner [the club’s cantankerous owner] saying, “Cut out the bloody rock ’n’ roll.”’ Elsewhere these summer holidays, the 11-year-old Helen Shapiro first met the 10-year-old Mark Feld (later Marc Bolan), ‘this chubby kid’ whose ‘quiff would cover his face when he combed it forward’. Another 11-year-old, Bob Harris, was on holiday with his parents in Cromer when he passed an amusement arcade and heard the American singer Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’ coming from the jukebox (‘There was a magic to it that made me want to be a part of the world it came from’), while the 14-year-old Lorna Stockton (later Sage) went with a friend to Southport:
Gail and I spent all our time and pocket money dashing from one jukebox to another to make sure that Pat Boone’s chaste hit ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ would be drowned out all over the windswept town by ‘All Shook Up’. The one was sweetness and light, the other inarticulate, insidious bump-and-grind . . . All the Elvises groaned and whimpered at once, and the waves rushed in and obliterated Pat Boone. And we clung to each other in a shelter smelling of orange peel and piss on the promenade, and shrieked with glee, like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus.
Skiffle was by now at its apogee, with the catchy (especially for this six-year-old boy) ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ by Johnny Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys steaming through the charts. But a curmudgeonly Welshman, Frank Lewis, was less enamoured when on 2 September he saw ‘the Mountaineering Skiffle group’ play at the Globe pub in Barry: ‘The skiffle place was jammed with young people. Too many tunes all in one key. It begins to boredom [sic] after a while.’10
Two days later, HMSO published a blue paper-bound volume, 155 pages long and priced at five shillings. This was the Wolfenden Report – or Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution – and its initial 5,000 print run sold out within hours. ‘It is a fine, thorough, dispassionate piece of work, which uses words more clearly than many best-sellers do,’ found Mollie Panter-Downes. Its two key recommendations were that prostitutes should be punished much more severely for accosting and that, more controversially, private homosexual relations between consenting adults should be decriminalised. ‘It is not, in our view, the function of law to intervene in private lives of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular pattern of behaviour,’ declared the report about the latter aspect. ‘It follows that we do not believe it to be a function of the law to attempt to cover all the fields of sexual behaviour.’ Importantly, Wolfenden made clear that ‘this limited modification of the law should not be interpreted as indicating that the law can be indifferent to other forms of homosexual behaviour, or as a general licence to homosexuals to behave as they please’. The following evening on ITV, a programme on the report – preceded by a warning to viewers that it was unsuitable for children and might distress some adults – featured an anonymous doctor (his back to camera), who was asked by the interviewer, ‘Would you prefer to be normal?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘I would – if there was a guaranteed cure – a hope – that I could become an ordinary normal person I would certainly welcome it. I think all homosexuals would like to be cured and marry and have children.’11
Press reaction to the decriminalisation proposal was predictably mixed. Only two national dailies came out unambiguously against, namely the Daily Mail (‘leaving perverts free to spread corruption’) and the Daily Express (‘cumbersome nonsense’); The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle were almost wholly supportive; the Daily Telegraph worried that legalised homosexuality might spread like an infection; and the Daily Mirror initially sat on the fence, but eventually backed Wolfenden. Among the Sundays, the Observer was positive, but the Sunday Times warned against the undermining of the ‘basic national moral standard’, while in the Sunday Express the resolutely homophobic John Gordon wrote about ‘degraded men’ with ‘bestial habits’ and called the report ‘The Pansies’ Charter’. As for the weeklies, the Spectator asserted that ‘whatever feelings of revulsion homosexual actions may arouse, the law on this point is utterly irrational and illogical’. Most provincial papers were hostile, and the Scotsman declared flatly that it was ‘no solution to any public problem to legitimise a bestial offence’.
The Mirror took a poll of its largely working-class readers. Within a week there were nearly 7,000 votes in, overwhelmingly wanting prostitutes cleared off the streets but narrowly against decriminalisation of private homosexual behaviour. As further votes came in, those overall preferences stayed constant, while it became apparent that there were significant regional variations: roughly 1 in 2 in the south of England wanting decriminalisation, compared to 3 in 7 in the north and only 1 in 6 in Scotland. A more authoritative opinion poll (though broadly in line) was Gallup’s, published later in September. This revealed that 81 per cent had heard about the report; that 42 per cent saw homosexuality as ‘a serious problem’, compared with 27 per cent ‘not very’ and 31 per cent ‘don’t knows’; and that 38 per cent agreed with decriminalisation, as against 47 per cent disagreeing. ‘Considering all things,’ commented Panter-Downes on Gallup’s figures, ‘this hardly represents the wave of scandalized indignation that many people thought would follow.’12
The issue rumbled on through the autumn, with one Oxford undergraduate, Dennis Potter, reflecting in Isis that ‘inevitably the natural reaction of all of us who find the thought of homosexual behaviour repulsive or difficult to comprehend will be a troubled one’. Politically, the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, was inclined initially to legislate for decriminalisation, but soon found that he was out of line with mainstream Tory opinion and pushed the issue into the longish grass. The House of Lords did debate the question in December, with Lord Denning speaking for many when he condemned unnatural vices and insisted that the law should continue to punish homosexual conduct, albeit ‘discreetly’. Meanwhile, for homosexuals themselves, the secrecy and gnawing anxiety continued – perhaps typified this autumn by how Brian Abel-Smith, arguably the most gifted social scientist of his generation, felt unable to apply for a safe Labour seat (the retiring Hugh Dalton’s, in Bishop Auckland) for fear of public humiliation if his homosexuality was discovered. Earlier in the year there had been a sign of the Victorian permafrost starting to melt (with the Homicide Act, which restricted the use of the death penalty for murder), but for the moment this remained a right little, tight little island.13
‘What the British people are waiting for,’ Macmillan reflected privately on 17 September with an alert reference to an ITV game show, ‘is the answer to the 64,000 question – how to stop rising prices & fall in value of money. They will (perhaps) accept measures to deal with these problems.’ In the context of sterling under severe pressure, he went on: ‘But they regard an exchange crisis (which they do not understand) as some kind of a swindle organised by foreigners.’ Two days later the Evening Standard included a review of Hamlet at the Old Vic: ‘Ophelia is played by a girl called Judi Dench, whose first professional performance this only too obviously is. But she goes mad quite nicely and has talent which will be shown to better advantage when she acquires some technique to go with it.’ Homeward-bound commuters, though, could not avoid the front-page headline: ‘Bank Rate Shock – Up To 7 per cent: Thorneycroft’s H-bomb shakes the City’. Peter Thorneycroft was Chancellor, and he had gone for a 2-per-cent hike heavily under the influence of the Governor of the Bank of England, Cameron (Kim) Cobbold, whose spokesman was quoted in strikingly robust language: ‘There has recently been a good deal of speculative pressure against the pound. People have been selling sterling. This will show them “where they get off”.’ The démarche temporarily did its job, confounding the instant, apocalyptic prediction of the cerebral merchant banker Siegmund Warburg (made privately to the Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson and recorded in the diary of Wilson’s colleague Richard Crossman) that ‘it was a gamble which would not come off and we were in for a 1931 crisis, but this time with rising unemployment and rising prices simultaneously’, yet it still generated plenty of scepticism. The Spectator’s Keynesian economic commentator Nicholas Davenport was appalled, calling the move ‘the crowning folly’, while the more measured FT argued that unless there was real ‘determination in extending restraint to wages’, which in practice meant the government standing up to the unions, then ‘nothing will have been gained, and much will have been lost’.14
There were two piquant consequences of this sharp tightening of policy. ‘It is alleged that there was a “leak” about the intention of the Government to raise the Bank Rate,’ Macmillan noted the following week, adding that ‘careful enquiries’ had found ‘no trace of any irregularity’. The ambitious Wilson, however, was on the case, and by October he was publicly demanding a formal inquiry – a request eventually acceded to by a very reluctant Macmillan. The other consequence, barely noticed at the time, concerned the implications of an accompanying measure, the temporary forbidding of London banks to use sterling to finance third-party trade. Dollar deposits had already been mounting in Paris and London – in part reflecting the Cold War reluctance of Soviet and East European banks to trust their dollars to New York – and it was these dollars that some of London’s banks now sought to use in order to go on doing their business of financing international trade. Such were the origins of what would become known as the Eurodollar market. One of its pioneers was the visionary Sir George Bolton, a former Bank of England man but now chairman of the Bank of London and South America (BOLSA). In his pitch for the job earlier in 1957 he had asserted, ‘London has barely succeeded in maintaining its international banking system following the loss of political influence by the UK, the weakened position of sterling and the incapacity of the London Market to increase its foreign investment net.’ Accordingly, those London banks, like BOLSA, ‘whose main business is to maintain and develop a position in the foreign field will have to adapt their structure to meet the needs of the time’.15 The Euromarkets, starting with the Eurodollar market, would be the means of that adaptation – and a first, long step towards London returning to its pre-1914 glories as an international financial centre.
Judi Dench’s was not the only debut that autumn. ‘Mr Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet, and seems to be quite outside the currents of his time,’ wrote the august critic Edwin Muir in the New Statesman, reviewing The Hawk in the Rain. ‘His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together. His images have an admirable violence.’ The very different poet Robert Conquest generously agreed in the Spectator – ‘not just promising but very promising’ – though his friend Kingsley Amis held his counsel, perhaps mulling instead over the tepid critical response to the just-released Boulting brothers’ version of Lucky Jim. ‘The film has taken what was farcical in the book and turned it into a rowdy, slap-happy, knockabout comedy in which all that was social, significant, representative, etc., etc., is kept firmly out,’ reckoned Isabel Quigly, while Lindsay Anderson was even less forgiving: ‘The characters have been flattened, simplified and vulgarised. The temptations of realist shooting have been consciously resisted, and the story has been wholly abstracted from reality.’
Elsewhere, Florence Turtle went to the Ambassadors to see The Mousetrap (almost six years in) and recorded that ‘it was a Comedy Thriller, somewhat tripey but quite entertaining’; Anthony Heap ‘walked down to Drury Lane Theatre and back in early evening to make enquiries about First Night seats for “My Fair Lady” seven months hence’, discovering that ‘booking for the first year commences next Tuesday!’; and the third series of Hancock’s Half Hour on the small screen began at the end of September. ‘I can’t remember when I laughed so much at a comedy show on television,’ declared a viewer. One cultural phenomenon largely passing under the radar was that of the cartoon character Andy Capp getting into his work-shy, beer-swilling, cigarette-dangling groove. Created by a Hartlepool man, Reg Smythe, he had first appeared in August in northern editions of the Daily Mirror and would soon go national, becoming an emblematic, wholly unreconstructed working-class figure. ‘Look at it this way, honey,’ Andy says in one of the early strips, leaning nonchalantly against the wall as his wife Florrie sits battered on the floor, ‘I’m a man of few pleasures and one of them ’appens to be knockin’ yer about!’16
‘Forward with the People’ was the slogan on the Mirror’s masthead, and on Thursday, 3 October the people’s party, gathered on the south coast, experienced a day of high drama. Some six months after Muggeridge had noted Gaitskell telling him that the Labour Party was ‘hopelessly split’ over the H-bomb issue and that it was ‘impossible to have sensible or coherent policy’, and some five months after a British nuclear test in the Pacific, this was the day of decision – played out, recorded Panter-Downes with her novelist’s eye, ‘on the boarded-over ice rink of Brighton’s Sports Stadium in a haze of cigarette smoke and Asian flu heated to the combustion point by strong television lights’. The pivotal figure was Aneurin Bevan: the rebel of 1951, by now shadow Foreign Secretary and in increasingly visible, if ultimately uneasy, partnership with Gaitskell. ‘Already every inch a statesman in his dark suit, with his distinguished silvery thatch of hair,’ noted Panter-Downes, ‘he sat on the platform frowning over horn-rimmed spectacles at the Times, as though lifted intact from the bow window of a St James’s Street club.’ The quondam unilateralist also spoke, with that compelling oratory which few if any politicians of the era came close to matching:
If you carry this [unilateralist] resolution and follow out all its implications and do not run away from it you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber. Able to preach sermons, of course; he could make good sermons. But action of that sort is not necessarily the way in which you can take away the menace of this bomb from the world.
A minute or two later, being heckled from the floor, he was provoked into dismissing unilateralism as ‘an emotional spasm’ – at which words, reported James Cameron next day in the News Chronicle, ‘something like an emotional spasm did indeed go through that stark, crowded arena’. For Bevan’s disciple and future biographer Michael Foot, and for others on the Labour left, it was a moment of deepest betrayal. Yet, Foot would insist in later years, the widely bruited idea that Bevan had ‘entered into a cynical compact’ – in other words, that his speech was the price of becoming Foreign Secretary in a future Labour government – ‘was not merely deeply repugnant to his nature, but is utterly confounded by any study of the facts’.
At the conference itself, the unilateralist motion was crushingly defeated, with the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Frank Cousins, unable to persuade his block-voting delegation to support it. Bevan’s stance was no doubt electorally necessary, but arguably this was the fateful post-1945 moment when Labour and radical sentiment as a whole started to become increasingly detached from each other. ‘People like himself had lost interest in the Party after Nye’s Brighton speech,’ Crossman (in 1961) would record the playwright Wolf Mankowitz telling him. ‘That was the turning point. Since then they couldn’t care less about the Parliamentary leadership or see any great distinction, indeed, between Gaitskell, Wilson and Crossman intriguing against each other.’17
In any case, another event – also science-related – quickly stole Bevan’s thunder. ‘Russians first to launch satellite,’ noted Judy Haines on Friday the 4th, in an increasingly rare mention of current affairs. ‘It is circling the earth at a fast rate and emitting signals.’ This was Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite and, amidst considerable popular enthusiasm, tracked from Britain by the new Jodrell Bank observatory. As early as the 5th the FT placed a dot by the globe on its normally staid front-page news summary; that same day Frances Partridge on behalf of ‘Bloomsbury’ welcomed the satellite as a news story for once ‘something purely interesting and pleasant’; and Doris Lessing was one of many staying up all night hoping ‘to catch a glimpse of it bowling past overhead’. On the 7th the Evening Standard’s headline was ‘Thousands See The Blip’, which had passed over London that morning at just after 7.07 a.m., and by the 11th the FT’s dot had transmuted into a satellite-like shape.
What were Sputnik’s implications? ‘The satellite is not an isolated breakthrough on a narrow front,’ claimed the New Statesman. ‘It merely crowns the growing pyramid of evidence that over a wide sector of scientific knowledge the Russians are advancing further and faster than the West.’ Bevan agreed, asserting in Tribune that the satellite was evidence of Russia’s ‘technically dynamic society’. For Churchill ‘the disconcerting thing’, as he told his wife, was not ‘the satellite itself’ but ‘the proof of the forwardness of Soviet Sciences compared to the Americans’. Gallup duly sounded public opinion: 36 per cent felt an increased respect for the Russians, 27 per cent could not understand why the Americans had been beaten to it, and only 14 per cent said that Sputnik had made them more frightened of Russia. Inevitably, the fascination eventually abated. ‘As the week progressed and the satellite continued, after a panicky interval of doubt and speculation, to transmit its signals, the BBC allowed a note of boredom to creep into its bulletins,’ Bernard Hollowood was recording in Punch by the 23rd. ‘The satellite became “it”. “Well,” the announcer began, “it’s still up there and going strong.” The thing was proving rather a disappointment: it hadn’t burned itself out, it hadn’t landed on Washington, it wasn’t quite playing the game. It was threatening to clash with the royal visit to Canada.’18
Six days into Sputnik’s flight – and seven months after the announcement by the Paymaster-General, Reginald Maudling, of the tripling of the civil nuclear power programme – it was discovered that one of the nuclear reactors at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) was on fire. That was early on Thursday the 10th. Over the next two days, as makeshift hoses delivered water into the reactor, enormous bravery was displayed, above all by the deputy works manager Tom Tuohy. ‘I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out,’ he recalled. ‘I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully, but if you’re staring straight up the core of a shut-down reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.’ Or, as he also put it, ‘I’m glad I was there, but I’d rather not do it again.’ From the start the official line was to downplay the seriousness of the situation and its potential dangers: the BBC’s six o’clock radio news bulletin on the 11th stressed that no public hazard was being caused because the wind was blowing from the east and carrying radioactivity out to sea, while next day the ban on the sale of locally produced milk covered only 14 square miles. Nevertheless, reflected Nella Last that Saturday after reading about the fire, ‘I often have wondered about “fall” of atomic tainted dust from Windscale, or Calder’; she called the prospect of it being blown down the coast to Barrow ‘not a happy thought’.
Monday saw the ban being significantly extended – to 200 square miles, thereby including a further 500 farms – but the Atomic Energy Authority was adamant that ‘people in the new area need have no apprehension about milk they have already drunk’. As for the undrunk milk, thousands of gallons were now being tipped into the sea, but it was too late to prevent what Panter-Downes soon afterwards described as ‘a wave of national disquiet’ not only about the ‘alarming leak of radioactive iodine’ into west Cumberland’s milk supplies but, more generally, about ‘what went wrong, why the Atomic Energy Authority was so slow in saying that anything had gone wrong, why the safety measures were fumbled – and slow off the mark, too’. This was probably an accurate assessment, to judge by Nella Last’s chat on the 17th with her friend Mrs Higham. ‘Like myself she has had “qualms” about these big atomic works,’ Last noted, adding they were both agreed that ‘there’s bound to be downright ignorance of effects & results, with something so utterly new’. In fact the government had already commissioned an inquiry by the AEA’s Sir William Penney, but on its completion later in the month Macmillan – deeply concerned not to endanger Anglo-American nuclear collaboration – was willing to release only a relatively anodyne version. ‘On the whole, reassuring,’ was the News Chronicle’s response to the ensuing White Paper on the accident, though in regard to Britain’s ambitious atomic energy programme, the paper highlighted the ‘radiation risks about which we still know far too little’, plausibly asserting that ‘it is this mystery, this sense of vague and ill-understood menace, which worries the public’.
And the locals? ‘As an inhabitant of West Cumberland, the accident at Windscale has naturally been an unpleasant shock,’ a woman wrote to a local paper in the almost immediate aftermath. ‘The fact, however, that heightens the shock is that we were given no warning until the situation was under control. Why not? Suppose the situation had “run away”? What then? Surely people have a right to be given enough warning either to move their children out of the vicinity, or, at least, to keep them indoors if any severe accident is expected.’ Accordingly, ‘until we can rely on a more immediate warning of irradiation or even a threatened explosion, we shall remain dissatisfied and anxious’. Even so, the most authoritative historian of the episode, Lorna Arnold, reckons that ‘Cumberland remained remarkably calm’, and she points to the fact that Windscale, since the start of its construction ten years earlier, ‘had brought employment and considerable prosperity to a severely depressed area’.
Jenny Crowther (later Uglow) was at school next to the plant and lived three miles up the coast at St Bees. ‘People were told not to eat anything from their allotments,’ she remembers. ‘But the allotments were their pride and joy, and as the word “fallout” was used they assumed the ban only applied to vegetables above ground, as if rain had fallen on them, not radiation. They just ate the carrots and beetroot and potatoes without giving it a thought.’19
‘I have discovered another August pleasure in London, and that is to walk in the evening light around the new council estates,’ John Betjeman announced in his Spectator column a few weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech.
Some of the latest are magnificent, and when one compares their openness, lightness, grass and trees, and carefully related changes of scale from tall blocks to small blocks, with the prison-like courts of artisans’ dwellings of earlier ages, one realises that some things are better than they were. ‘The awful equality of it all is frightening,’ a friend said to me. And that is true. If you are lucky enough to have one of these new workers’ flats, there is not much chance of showing individuality . . . But there are compensations. There are light and air, and the shrieks of children, instead of echoing against brick walls, are dispersed in open space.
Betjeman singled out for praise Brixton’s Loughborough estate (‘tall concrete and glass blocks turn out to be two-storey houses built on top of one another’), the Cremorne estate near World’s End (‘provides a quiet walk among grass and houses which are of pleasant texture and to human scale’) and in particular the vast Churchill Gardens estate by the river. ‘It is hygienic, egalitarian and frightening, but it has a beauty and can never deteriorate into the squalor of the parts of Pimlico it has replaced,’ he declared. ‘Maybe it has no place for someone like me, but it gives one hope for modern architecture.’
Increasingly, though, Betjeman was in embattled mode about the forces of modernity. In October, soon after he had lamented how ‘the majority of building projects today in Britain are ones of vast bulk’ (as typified by the City of London’s Bucklersbury House, ‘that monster now dwarfing everything between the Monument and St Paul’s’), he was campaigning vigorously to save John Nash’s Regent’s Park terraces from the wrecking ball. And in December, responding to an MP who wanted to see Tower Bridge demolished, he argued in his column that ‘the reason why people dislike the word “planning” and those connected with it is not because they object to new towns or to flowering cherries and civic centres, but because in their minds planning is associated with destruction’. ‘Bombing we can take,’ he went on. ‘It is part of the fortunes of war. Fire may be carelessness. But the deliberate pulling down of a familiar street or building with associations, the felling of timber in a village and the destruction of old cottages is really playing about with part of ourselves. They are roots and home to somebody.’ He ended with a caustic personal observation: ‘I have always noticed that progressive architects and planners and, no doubt, the chief shareholders in those sinister development trusts which are buying up London and ruining it with oblong-ended packing cases, live in old houses and go to a good deal of trouble to protect their views.’20
Yet for the planners themselves – but not the architects or developers – the unpalatable truth in 1957 was that their high tide had already passed. ‘One of the expressions of bewilderment that is most commonly heard in the profession,’ the once highly influential town planner Thomas Sharp told his peers that spring, ‘is that to most people planning has now become just a colossal bore and that to many others it is something actually to dislike with an active hostility.’ He added, not implausibly, that ‘what is most disliked about us, I think, is that control which we exercise over other people’s activities with so little obvious and acceptable result’. Peter Self of the Town and Country Planning Association tended to agree: ‘Town planning questions . . . seldom figure in party manifestos or wireless debates, and they arouse hardly any political controversy – more as a result of indifference than agreement. Planning controls are coming to be viewed as necessary evils, rather than as instruments for forging lasting benefits. A dead hand grips the spirit of planning.’
In late July the Institute of Contemporary Arts staged a highly charged meeting on the subject of ‘planning controls’ in London. Among architects speaking, Lionel Brett insisted that the case for control was ultimately to prevent ‘the spivs’ (i.e. presumably the developers) from wrecking the environment; the ultra-modernist Peter Smithson was for complete abolition of aesthetic controls; and the equally modernist Ernö Goldfinger concurred. For the planners, Hertfordshire’s County Planning Officer E. H. Doubleday spoke in unashamedly paternalistic vein about the value of planning control for ‘arrogant young architects’. In a subsequent Third Programme talk, Brett astutely identified how on the part of younger architects there existed an increasing feeling
that the post-war planners are out of touch with the real world of 1957, that our New Towns, neighbourhood centres, shopping precincts, national parks, etc, are not what is wanted and lack some essential thing that our old towns and neglected counties had, presumably spontaneity, so that nobody would ever want to paint a picture in Harlow or Bracknell . . . planners waste their time controlling elevations in Watford and Redhill when they should be concentrating their minds on Liverpool and Glasgow.
1960s-style urbanism, in short, was where the exciting future action lay, not 1940s-style planned dispersion. Brett added that, at the recent ICA meeting, ‘the people on the platform in favour of planning control wore suits and ties and the people against it wore open shirts or turtle-necked jerseys’.21
In Liverpool itself, as in other major cities, the key players by this time were neither planners nor architects, nor yet developers or construction companies, but instead local politicians. ‘It is already apparent that the eleven-storey blocks now going up are really insignificant when considered against their backgrounds and we are investigating very closely the possibility of going much higher,’ stated Alderman David Nickson, Labour chairman of the Housing Committee, in early September, in the context of tower blocks rising on Everton Heights. ‘This form of development is obviously the only answer to sprawl.’ Later in the month he continued to insist that ‘the Housing Committee take the view that there is no reason why the 20-storey mark should not be passed’, adding that ‘we regard this as important a step in the construction of domestic dwellings as was the breaking of the sound barrier in the world of aeronautics’. Soon afterwards the Liverpool Echo’s Municipal Correspondent wrote suitably portentously of time and the city:
Slowly but surely the face of Liverpool is changing and its terraced skyline, so familiar to travellers by sea arriving in or leaving the Mersey, is gradually taking on new features. Already Everton Brow is crowned with a mammoth block of flats [i.e. the ten-storey Cresswell Mount, opened in 1956], the symbol of the new Liverpool, and just below it, on the sweeping seaward slope, new twin blocks [i.e. The Braddocks], with the skeleton fingers of mammoth cranes reaching for the sky in close attendance, are fitting themselves into the landscape.
Just in case there were any doubters, he emphasised that the two new blocks were ‘rising on a site that not so long ago was occupied by countless mean cottages of uniform drab brick separated by narrow ditches of streets’.
Even so, when Nickson at the end of September reported on the Housing Committee’s annual inspection of building developments, and set out again its aspirations for new blocks of up to 21 storeys, he was revealingly anxious about working-class families being housed high: ‘They have always been used to the more ordinary type of dwelling, and we shall have to convince them of the advantages of this type of construction. If we can persuade the people to accept this type of building as a reasonable type of home, then we will have achieved something worthwhile.’
At a City Council meeting in early October, the Tory councillor J. Maxwell Entwistle declared himself as supportive as the Labour group of high-rise blocks, and as opposed to unnecessary future overspill to such places as Skelmersdale, Ellesmere Port or Widnes. ‘Dislike flats as they might, the people of Liverpool would sooner stay, even in multi-storey buildings, than go to outlandish areas where there was little industry and the cost of getting back to the city was great.’ Was that in fact a fair reflection of the wishes of Liverpudlians living in decaying inner-city areas? Easily the best evidence we have is the 1956 survey of residents of the Crown Street district: on the one hand, 61 per cent did indeed want to stay where they were, whether or not they were rehoused; on the other hand, in terms of those specifically living in houses already scheduled for slum-clearance demolition, almost half wished to move away entirely. Or, put another way, the survey’s Liverpool University authors helpfully noted, ‘variety, confusion and conflict prevailed both in the district as a whole and its sub-areas’.22
Across the Pennines, November 1957 saw the opening of a ten-storey block of flats about three-quarters of a mile from the centre of Leeds. This was the start of the Saxton Gardens development – hailed by the Yorkshire Post as ‘one of the biggest post-war housing schemes of its kind in the Provinces’ – with six further blocks, between five and nine storeys each, to be completed over the next year, altogether housing some 1,460 people on land that had been cleared of slums just before the war. That was when the nearby Quarry Hill estate had been opened, and its office now took on the additional management of Saxton Gardens. Indeed, with almost 4,000 people to be rehoused in due course in the York Road redevelopment scheme, which Saxton Gardens overlooked to the east, and a further 6,000 or so also to be rehoused in the Burmantofts area east of York Road, this meant, declared the Post, that ‘Saxton Gardens will form part of a new central township with a population of more than 15,000 people.’ On the day of the opening ceremony, the Yorkshire Evening News trumpeted loud and hard: ‘With its central heating and domestic hot water in all dwellings, its gas or electric wash boiler with clothes drying cabinet in each flat; its 30 lifts and Garchey system of refuse disposal, Saxton Gardens reaches the heights of modern amenities.’ At the ceremony itself, the major reported speech was given by Alderman F. H. O’Donnell, who had spent his boyhood on the Saxton Gardens site, then known as The Bank. ‘To the people outside, The Bank was a place where policemen walked about in pairs. But, he pointed out, the people there 50 years ago worked hard for long hours and were as industrious, intelligent, and respectable as any in the country.’ And O’Donnell ended by looking ahead: ‘He hoped that the people of Saxton Gardens would be as good as the people of the old Bank, and that there would be not only 448 units of accommodation but 448 homes.’
Even the politicians of Bognor Regis had their dreams, as this autumn the possibility emerged of an apparently attractive deal with Billy Butlin, by means of which he would be permitted to build a holiday camp close to the town in return for knocking down his tatty funfair on the Esplanade and giving the land to the council. ‘Not often does opportunity knock in so decisive a manner as it does in Bognor Regis today,’ declared its chairman J. C. Earle.
Facing, as they do, the finest sandy beach on the South Coast, the opportunities for really bold and imaginative architecture are immense. Tall, modern buildings in the style of Basil Spence, Corbusier or the many other gifted architects practising today are what I hope to see. Nothing pseudo, nothing shoddy, we must not tolerate drab brick boxes. This is our chance to have beautiful architecture reflecting our day and age, and we must seize it with firm hands. Fine hotels, luxury flats, a solarium, shops, theatres and conference halls, and civic buildings can and should arise, fronted by a broad, impressive seaway.
With only one dissenter, who argued that a Butlin’s holiday camp would be disastrous for Bognor’s image, the deal was overwhelmingly approved.23
Almost everywhere, but above all in the major conurbations, the greatest engine of physical change was of course the slum-clearance programme. Slum clearance in ‘the atomic age’ was the theme of an address by Dr Ronald Bradbury (Liverpool’s City Architect) to a national housing conference in September, which included the estimate that almost two-thirds of the 850,000 unfit dwellings in England and Wales were concentrated in about one hundred industrial towns, headed by Liverpool itself (88,233), followed by Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, London, Hull, Sheffield, Salford, Stoke-on-Trent, Oldham, Bradford and Bristol – ‘all of which’, noted Bradbury, ‘have very considerable slum problems’.
In third-placed Birmingham, it was around this time that demolition began in the Ladywood district, a process of slum clearance that from the start seems to have been carried out in a horribly flawed way, at least to judge by the subsequent cri de coeur of Canon Norman Power of St John’s, Ladywood – not an opponent of slum clearance in principle. ‘In all this redevelopment, during which I saw a living community torn to pieces by the bulldozers and scattered to the four corners of the city,’ he recalled in 1965 in his short, devastating book The Forgotten People, ‘there was no consultation with the people most affected and concerned. Neither was any opinion sought from local teachers, social workers, organisation-leaders or clergy.’ Crucially, Ladywood’s demolition started not with the worst housing, but instead with some of the better; Power surmised that ‘probably the need to clear a space for the new Inner Circle Road was one motive’. Overall, he went on, ‘The heart of our community was destroyed. A living, corporate personality was crushed by the bulldozers. There were some extraordinary and inexplicable side-effects. The new Waste Land was left waste for seven years. But it was not cleared. It was left a wilderness of brick-ends, tin cans, broken bottles and even half-demolished buildings.’ In short, ‘It was the best school of vandalism I have ever seen.’
Elsewhere, the Salford City Reporter announced towards the end of 1957 that ‘“HANKY PARK” AREA WILL SOON DISAPPEAR’ – the district which, back in the 1930s, ‘gained notoriety in Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole’ – while in Bristol some 10,000 houses were identified as needing to be cleared in the next five years, including among the steeply sloping Georgian terraces of Kingsdown, thus leading to protests from Betjeman downwards. In London the ongoing development of Notting Hill Gate (already involving considerable demolition ahead of planned road-widening, the replacement of the two existing underground stations on opposite sides of the road by a single station under it, and the construction of two tall slab blocks of flats as well as many new shops and offices) was likewise a source of unhappiness. ‘The Village Behind The “Gate”’ was the title of some verses that J. F. Adams of Bulmer Place sent in November to the local paper:
Once we were happy the whole day through,
With neat gardens where our flowers grew;
There’s not many left, sad to relate,
In the Village behind the ‘Gate’ . . .
We’ll dig up our roots and home ties,
Remember those welcomes and final goodbyes
Of loved ones passed on early and late
In the Village behind the ‘Gate’.
But there will be no friendship in skyscraper flats
Or leaning on garden fence for chats,
And help your neighbour in this new estate,
Like we did in the Village behind the ‘Gate’.
As it happened, it was not so far away, in the Kensington drawing room of the Victorian artist Linley Sambourne, that (a few days earlier) the Countess of Rosse had acted as hostess at a meeting to form the preservationist Victorian Group (later Society). Betjeman was present, as was the leading architectural journalist of the day, that qualified modernist (and suburb-loving, but New Town-hating) J. M. Richards. ‘On the whole,’ Richards suggested in vain soon afterwards, ‘it had better avoid calling itself “Victorian” – the word now has overtones of funniness.’24
The Victorian era seemed remote enough when in due course the Architects’ Journal ran its feature ‘Buildings of the Year: 1957’. Presenting ‘the uncensored opinions’ of the users of a dozen or more newly completed buildings, the tone was largely positive. ‘Smashing!’ declared James Loft, a 52-year-old worker who had spent ten years in the dust of a cement factory before coming to the Bowater-Scott Tissue Mill, producing Andrex toilet rolls, at Northfleet, Kent. ‘You don’t know what the weather’s like outside: it’s practically always the same temperature in here.’ Generally there,
The workers, when asked what they like, find it difficult to put in words. Sally Donoghue, the shop steward in the converting department, said the girls liked the press button machinery. ‘It’s very modern, isn’t it?’ she said. Could she suggest any improvements? The answer was a simple, ‘No.’ Beryl Duff, a pretty Irish girl who was packing, said ‘It’s a good place to work in: it’s modern, isn’t it?’ And pressed to say what she means by ‘modern’, she says it’s light, airy and colourful. The very high quality of the toilet accommodation was mentioned by everybody who was interviewed, and Mr Morley [assistant manager] has found that it is appreciated by the staff and properly treated.
Elsewhere, Sir Vincent Tewson, General Secretary of the TUC, praised its new headquarters in Great Russell Street as ‘a piece of contemporary architecture our eight million members can be proud of’; recently married Daphne Jones on the 14th floor of Great Arthur House, on the Golden Lane estate just north of the City of London, loved the ‘feeling of being out in the open’, with the balcony being ‘like sitting in a garden’, while in Basterfield House, one of the estate’s four maisonette blocks, Angela Hobday, a nurse at Bart’s, found it all ‘exciting, so new and different, and such fun to be living in’; at Dunn’s in Bromley (specialists in selling modern furniture), the managing director Geoffrey Dunn was almost entirely happy with his quasi-brutalist new premises, noting that he had had ‘letters from perfect strangers, and not from such high falutin’ addresses either, congratulating us on adding this shop to the town’; and at a primary school in Amersham, two small boys with caps askew, Geoffrey Magee and Garry Livemore, offered a spontaneous volley of praise – ‘Super!’ ‘Smashing!’ ‘Supersonic!’ – with the magazine reckoning that ‘what appeals to the children most is the colour, the glass, the wallpapers, the lighting, in a word the bright modernity of the interior, as much as the practical arrangements’. The feature, though, did include a couple of grumblers. On the Claremont estate in West Ham, Mrs Nellie Richardson (living with her bus-conductor husband and four small children) was adamant that a flat ‘isn’t really a place for a family’, adding that ‘most of the time you have to say to the children, “keep it down a bit”’. And at the factory-like Churchfields Comprehensive (845 pupils in six completely isolated blocks) in West Bromwich, the headmaster Mr Hobart not only found the use of glass ‘quite excessive’, especially in south-facing rooms like his own study, but called the sound insulation ‘downright disgusting’.
There were mixed feelings, too, in a vox pop survey late in 1957 of Britain’s most emblematic city of post-war reconstruction. ‘Generally, it is the older Coventrians who are least happy,’ found the Sunday Times. ‘“Horrible ugly boxes!” they rail, as the new blocks go up. But the youngsters, with no nostalgic memories of the old town, are delighted. “The new cathedral,” exclaimed a young typist with real fervour, “is going to be beautiful – lovely and bright, you know, not a gloomy old place like they usually are.”’ Even so, it was probably not all that aged a waitress who, in the Civic Restaurant, ‘gazed wistfully across the new Broadgate at an isolated block of pseudo-Tudor beyond’, and said, ‘I’d have liked little black-and-white buildings really, but the foreign visitors all say this is wonderful.’ The piece’s accompanying photographs (including of the vast, glass-sided Owen Owen’s department store) provoked a cross letter from a reader in the south-east. ‘I see nothing admirable in the new Coventry,’ he asserted. ‘The large buildings illustrated last week might do for a prison or a boot factory, but I don’t think they would do for the patrons of Nash and Wren. The style is ungentlemanly.’ To which John Hewitt, the Ulster poet who had recently become curator of Coventry’s new Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, replied a week later that
the new centre of Coventry is built to a human scale . . . Coventry is not a capital city with the necessity for State architecture, impressive to visitor and reassuring to citizen. It does not belong either to the age of Wren or Nash. It is an industrial city, where motor-cars and aeroplanes and machine tools are manufactured. Having lived here for six months any other industrial town depresses me with the heavy pomposity and grimy insincerity of its architecture.
Meanwhile, one footloose, hard-to-please Londoner was finding everything disagreeable. ‘On the whole a dull, disappointing tramp,’ recorded Anthony Heap in November after a Sunday inspection of Denmark Hill, Herne Hill and Camberwell. ‘Pleasantly picturesque this hilly part of South London may have been fifty years ago. Today it’s just a dreary wilderness of uniform blocks of drab new council flats, and dilapidated old Victorian villas. And I’m not sure which look the most depressing.’25
‘John went to football,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford on Saturday, 12 October, the day after the Windscale fire had been put out. ‘I mowed the lawn. So much to do.’ That same day the Tory conference (in Brighton, like Labour’s) ended, with the party’s new chairman, Lord Hailsham, the undoubted star and doing much to boost flagging, mid-term, post-Suez morale. Early each morning he appeared on the seafront in a blue dressing gown, bathing trunks and bedroom slippers, ready to take a chilly dip; his oration one evening to the Conservative Political Centre, containing a fierce, uninhibited attack on the conduct of the trade unions, was, according to Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘rapturously hailed next day, over the conference coffee cups and cocktail glasses, as being “as good as one of Winston’s wartime speeches”’. On the Saturday morning itself, winding up the conference, ‘that stocky, rumpled figure’ with a ‘cherubic, aggressive face’ (as she described Hailsham) found a prop and let himself go. ‘At the end of his speech,’ reported the Sunday Times,
he stretched out his hand and gripped the large handbell which Mrs Walter Elliot, the chairman, had used during the conference. Holding it above his head and ringing it with enthusiasm he said: ‘Let it ring more loudly. Let it ring for victory.’ As the delegates rose to their feet and cheered and stamped, Lord Hailsham shouted: ‘Let us say to the Labour Party “Seek not to inquire for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”’
At least one commentator, Francis Williams, was viewing the 50-year-old Hailsham by the end of the week as ‘a potential prime minister’, but Hailsham himself was quick to reassure Macmillan of his ‘unqualified loyalty and support’, adding, ‘I am not quite such an ass as I seem.’ Macmillan himself, just before the conference, had privately pondered his government’s position. ‘At the moment, the whole thing is swinging away from us,’ he readily conceded. ‘If we cannot bring back the traditional strength of the Party to the fold – small shopkeepers, middle class, etc., – we have no chance. But we also need at least three million trade union votes. We have a war on two flanks.’ Over and above such tactical considerations was the increasingly asked question of what was to be done about national decline, relative though it may have been. Or, as a youngish Daily Express journalist with misplaced political ambitions, the future historian Maurice Cowling, put it from a particular perspective in a letter to the Listener later in October,
Many people in Britain – not only tories, not only tories of the right, and not only members of the middle-class – fear that an infernal conjunction of inflation, excessive taxation, trade-union irresponsibility, governmental interference and governmental timidity have in the recent past been undermining Britain’s social stability and may in the future destroy her economic prosperity.26
It was a different kind of decline that the contributors to Declaration, published the same month, mostly addressed. Edited by an ambitious 24-year-old publisher, Tom Maschler, the book was a gathering-up of those more or less connected with the ‘Angry Young Men’ (AYM) phenomenon, his only two refuseniks being Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch. Among the eight essayists, Doris Lessing (at 37 the oldest contributor and only woman) expressed her frustration at the ‘kindly, pleasant, tolerant’ British people, ‘apparently content to sink into ever-greater depths of genteel poverty because of the insistence of our rulers on spending so much of the wealth we produce on preparations for a war against communism’; Colin Wilson went ‘beyond the Outsider’; John Osborne, writing late and furiously, took scattergun aim, including at the Royal Family – ‘the gold filling in a mouthful of decay’; Kenneth Tynan observed that ‘the trouble with most Socialist drama, and with much Socialist thinking, is its joylessness’; and Lindsay Anderson coined the phrase ‘chips with everything’ (about the culinary ordeal of returning to Britain from abroad), called the absence of working-class characters from British films ‘characteristic of a flight from contemporary reality’, and claimed that Amis would ‘rather pose as a Philistine than run the risk of being despised as an intellectual’.
Critical reaction was largely negative. J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times was particularly hard on Anderson, not least his ‘curiously old-fashioned worship of what he calls the “working-classes”’, having failed to ‘notice that the very nature of this stratum of society is changing’. So too Angus Wilson, at 44 possibly not unjealous of the AYM. ‘We have rhetoric, exhortation, apocalyptic spine-chilling, smart-aleckry – each and all rather earnest and repetitive – but the total content is trivial,’ he asserted in the Observer. And soon after, on the Third Programme, the middle-aged critic Alan Pryce-Jones frankly accused the eight of contempt for the public: ‘They dislike it for one set of reasons if they are materialists. In that case, other people seem dull, gullible, and snobbish. If on the other hand they are transcendentalists, they accuse the public of lack of purpose, torpidity, unawareness.’ Still, Declaration sold some 20,000 copies, made a lot of noise and put Maschler firmly on the map.27
Also in October, on Saturday the 19th, an undeniably authentic working man, Billy McPhail, scored three second-half headed goals in Celtic’s 7–1 trouncing of Rangers in the Scottish League Cup Final, which was played with the usual heavy, laced ball. A third of a century later, long after the end of his professional career, McPhail would lose his claim in the courts for compensation, even though he had been suffering from pre-senile dementia since his thirties. Twelve days after his hat-trick, another Scottish working man, Lawrence Daly, attended a meeting at Glencraig Colliery, Fife – where there had been a plethora of unofficial stoppages over the past year – between National Coal Board management (including G. Mullin, Area General Manager) and National Union of Mineworkers’ officials (including Daly himself as local branch delegate). ‘The position at Glencraig is very serious,’ insisted Mullin. ‘We spent money on this pit and the output should improve. Unless there is improvement, I may be compelled by circumstances to recommend to the Divisional Board to consider whether it is worthwhile carrying this pit on or not.’ To which Daly riposted, ‘You have refused to listen to the complaints from Glencraig for 15 years.’ But Mullin was adamant: ‘I would say to you people here, let a man examine himself – and you Mr Daly are talking about a manager being to blame – I think you are just as much to be blamed for the atmosphere at this pit. That is the impression I get from your manner and demeanour at this meeting.’
Towards the end, after Mullin had referred to an under-official being recently threatened by a miner, Daly baldly asserted that ‘if men are treated as human beings that is not likely to happen’. Daly – an articulate, even charismatic man in his early 40s – had left the Communist Party the previous year and was starting to become the New Left’s emblematic working-class representative. ‘I can see how to carry on our cultural and intellectual work all right, and perhaps how to deepen and extend it,’ E. P. Thompson wrote to Daly earlier in the month after staying at Glencraig with him and his wife Renée. ‘But in the practical organisational side I am puzzled and depressed. I think there is a 50/50 chance that a new left party may in the end get formed, because I don’t see how the broader labour movement will be transformed without an electoral threat being presented on the left of the official LP.’28
Daly, with a fine tenor voice, enjoyed singing Scottish and Irish folk songs, but like many in the New Left had little enthusiasm for commercial pop music. Top of the charts at the start of November were the Crickets with ‘That’ll Be The Day’ – the vocal style as well as spectacles of their leader, Buddy Holly, an inspiration to the short-sighted John Lennon, by now at art college, while on Saturday the 16th, Six-Five Special was broadcast live from the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho. The line-up included the pink-haired rocker Wee Willie Harris, seen calling Gilbert Harding (an improbable presence) ‘daddy-o’; comedians Mike and Bernie Winters; and the Worried Men, whose Terry Nelhams would go on to become Adam Faith. The 2i’s’ most famous alumnus, Tommy Steele, was also present in a co-hosting role, just 48 hours before topping the bill at the Palladium’s Royal Variety performance, a bill that featured (among others) Gracie Fields, Judy Garland, Tommy Cooper, Vera Lynn and Alma Cogan. That night, the week after his ninth birthday – marked by an unprecedentedly informal, hand-in-the-pocket official photograph by Cecil Beaton’s usurper, the more modern-minded Antony Armstrong-Jones – there was no place in the royal box for Prince Charles, confined to quarters at prep school; but the Crazy Gang, lining up to meet the Queen, wore blue Cheam blazers and caps, with a large ‘C’ badge. Steele himself, reported the News Chronicle, initially struggled:
His first number, ‘Rock With The Caveman’, ended in dull silence from an icy audience. The young Rock and Roll King started on ‘Hound Dog’. Still the audience did not respond.
Then, from the Royal Box high up on the right, somebody was heard clapping in rhythm. It was the Queen Mother.
Once she turned to her daughter as if to say: ‘Come on, dear,’ but the Queen refrained. After a little, the Duke of Edinburgh started, rather half-heartedly, and off-beat.
Within weeks ‘The Pied Piper from Bermondsey’ was the subject of an Encounter profile by Colin MacInnes, who saw in Steele (‘every nice young girl’s boy, every kid’s favourite elder brother, every mother’s cherished adolescent son’) the harbinger of a possible English challenge to the dominance of American songs and performers. Coming from whichever side of the herring pond, all this youth culture largely passed Gladys Langford by. In poor health in her late 60s, living alone in a room in Highbury Barn, she kept her diary going despite severe bouts of depression. ‘Waiting to cross Highbury New Park,’ she recorded on the last Thursday of November, ‘I was amazed by the chivalry of the lorry-driver’s mate, a handsome Teddy boy who leapt from the cabin and led me across the road like a courtly knight errant.’29
Other diarists this month focused on the unfolding Space Age. ‘The 2nd Russian Satellite launched with a dog on board,’ noted Gladys Hague, living with her sister in Keighley, on 3 November. ‘Protests voiced from all over the world.’ Or, as Macmillan wryly put it two days later, ‘The English people, with characteristic frivolity, are much more exercised about the “little dawg” than about the terrifying nature of these new developments in “rocketry.”’ The dog, popularly known as Laika, ‘obsessed the public imagination’, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes. And when she was officially pronounced dead, recorded Frances Partridge on the 15th, ‘the Daily Mirror came out with a wide border of black, and a great deal about soft noses and velvety eyes up there in the stratosphere’.
As for the satellite itself, degrees of excitement took several forms. ‘It is far more momentous than the invention of the wheel, the discovery of the sail, the circumnavigation of the globe, or the wonders of the industrial revolution,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn reckoned in his diary on the 5th; at a Church Assembly meeting in London on the 12th, one speaker declared the Church should send a Sputnik into outer space with a bishop inside it, given that ‘the present generation, founded on technology and science, is more interested in the “bleep, bleep” of the satellite than the “bleep, bleep” of the preacher’; and for almost a fortnight satellite-like shapes could again be spotted on the front page of the FT.
The canine aspect apart, perhaps the most striking thing about the episode was, a year after the USA had brutally pulled the plug on Eden’s war against Nasser, the extent of the pleasure taken in America’s technological humiliation – or what Panter-Downes tactfully described to her New Yorker readers as ‘the slight chuckle with which a man might note the discomfiture of the rich neighbor across the way whose Cadillac has suddenly refused to start’. A few weeks later, the failure of an American rocket provoked some almost gleeful headlines from Fleet Street (‘US calls it Kaputnik’, ‘Ike’s Phutnik’, ‘Oh, What a Flopnik!’), while by the following spring schoolchildren were chanting the rhyme
Catch a falling sputnik,
Put it in a matchbox,
Send it to the USA
They’ll be glad to get it,
Very glad to get it,
Send it to the USA
to the tune of Perry Como’s ‘Catch a Falling Star’.30
On Monday the 11th, Armistice Day, John Sandoe opened his high-class bookshop in Chelsea, despite his grandmother’s shock about the absence of shutters to cover the windows on Sundays. Next day, Sir Robert Fraser, director general of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), gave a press conference robustly criticising the BBC and defending commercial television, while Woman’s Hour had at least one irritated listener. ‘That wretched “know all” Ruth Drew took part in telling us “how”,’ noted Judy Haines. ‘Another was telling us “how” in regard to fish, and another “how” in regard to washing, but Ruth loves housework. She takes a duster in each hand so that she doesn’t waste time with the odd hand! Of course, I only hate her because she’s not good for my conscience.’ That same day, the Post Office’s announcement of plans to introduce postal codes was neatly balanced by the Advisory County Cricket Committee’s decision at Lord’s to shelve yet again a proposed knockout competition. Arguably, though, the overall mood was for change, for two days later Buckingham Palace let it be known that after 1958 debutantes would no longer be presented at court, a decision effectively ending ‘the Season’ and perhaps reflecting Princess Margaret’s reputed disgust that ‘every tart in London can get in’.31
‘The conventional characters of “good BBC” and “bad ITA” belong to the land of myth and fable,’ Fraser had asserted at his press conference, responding to disparaging remarks by the head of BBC television. ‘We are often told we have audiences of morons: we think we have an audience of men and women . . . What some regard as the herd, we respect as the human family.’ Fraser was certainly talking from a continuing position of strength, having the day before given the key facts to Wedgwood Benn. ‘In 4.5 million homes with choice, 75 per cent prefer ITA, 25 per cent preferring BBC if you include children,’ the Labour MP duly noted. ‘Excluding children the figures are 70/30.’ Later in the week he lunched with the BBC’s Mary Adams: ‘She said they were absolutely defeated and in a complete dither.’
Still, the original television channel had its undoubted glories, not least the scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. ‘There’s a bite to Hancock’s Half Hour,’ observed the critic John Metcalf soon afterwards, ‘a willingness to accept the worst in all of us, to make social and human observations that belong to the satirist rather than the clown.’ So too Tonight, soon to move to a 6.45 start and increasingly addictive to members of the Viewers’ Panel:
The whole programme is good from beginning to end. It also has the essence of surprise – you don’t know what to expect next (which is the very thing that makes it hold you, I believe).
I would sooner miss my evening meal than miss this harmonious three (Cliff Michelmore, Derek Hart and Geoffrey Johnson Smith).
There had also been a sharpening-up in a key area. ‘The BBC, inspired by ITV News, has improved the manner of its news presentation,’ reckoned the Spectator’s John Cowburn in his end-of-year TV review, ‘so that it is no longer the voice of the Establishment talking to the poor gammas.’ Even so, for the medium as a whole, paternalism remained the order of the day: not only did the Postmaster General, Ernest Marples, refuse in December to allow an extension of viewing hours (‘It is not only quantity but general quality and balance which has to be borne in mind’) but many among the progressive intelligentsia disdained to acquire a set, so that, as Doris Lessing recalled, ‘One could more or less work out someone’s political bias by the attitude he took towards television.’ Of course, there were variations. At the end of January, Michael Young was informing the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer that his co-author Peter Willmott had become ‘a real television addict’: ‘He says that he has not been to a cinema since December 16th when he acquired his new set.’32
Young passed on this titbit in the context of Gorer having been engaged since the autumn on a detailed investigation of television-watching habits. Adults were surveyed in November, leading to some suggestive statistics: 59 per cent of the upper middle class never had the set switched on while they were eating, compared to an overall average of 46 per cent; 22 per cent, mainly from the working class, always had the set on during meals; and, in answer to the question ‘How important is television in your daily conversation?’, 52 per cent overall replied, ‘not at all important’ (66 per cent in the case of the upper middle class). One of Gorer’s ‘greatest surprises’ from the study was ‘the apparent almost complete absence of emotional involvement of the viewers with “TV personalities”’, while in general he reckoned that ‘although TV will help somewhat to identify people who appear on the screen fairly frequently its influence as a form of political education and enlightenment is practically non-existent’.
Two months later it was the turn of children to give their views:
I would rather go out really; go down to the coffee bar or stay with a friend, we have the records on. Yes, records are more important. (Jean Milner, 14, girls’ grammar, Stoke-on-Trent)
Everyone sits down and watches it; you don’t talk as much as you used to. If anyone came in, you used to talk – now you watch the television. (Elaine Bate, 14, girls’ grammar, Stoke-on-Trent)
I don’t think some programmes it is a timewaster but with others it is. Such as these cowboy Westerns – I can’t see what use you get from them but I watch them just the same. (Peter Sockett, 14, secondary modern, Sheffield)
I ask if we can have it on and if my brother wants the BBC, there is always a row going on. (Janet Slack, 10, primary, Sheffield)
I think I have learned a lot from it – Panorama and Tonight, these specially I like. Some of the comedy programmes haven’t taught me much. (D. J. Bettany, 15, boys’ grammar, Newcastle-under-Lyme)
Westerns – you get sick of them. (David Wise, 14, secondary modern, Crawley)
Gorer’s conclusion was that television had only two major effects on young people: it made them stay at home more, and it made them go to bed later. The Manchester Guardian’s television critic, in a swingeing attack just before Christmas on ITV’s fare for children, was much less inclined to ignore the moral dimension. ‘There is a certain amount of crime and violence in these programmes,’ he complained, ‘but almost as disturbing is the tawdry and trashy character of the incessant films and series.’ And he instanced The Buccaneers – ‘a sort of pseudo-Stevenson tale, in which, as in all ITV serials, neither character nor dialogue matter one jot; action, crude, abrupt, and almost mechanical, is all that matters’. Even Robin Hood, ‘which I had thought passable when commercial television began, now seems to have deteriorated into the same perfunctory, empty bustle as all the rest of the film serials’. In fact, the only saving grace was Rin-Tin-Tin, ‘the most humane of these affairs, perhaps because this handsome dog can neither talk nor shoot’.
Radio’s principal innovation this autumn was the coming of Today on the Home Service, in effect as the sound equivalent of Tonight. It began as two 20-minute strands, either side of Lift Up Your Hearts and the eight o’clock news; its debut on 28 October featured Petula Clark, interviews with a pilot and plane passenger, record reviews, Robert Morley on a first night, Eamonn Andrews on boxing, and an item about an auction of Napoleon’s letters – a miscellany with not a hint of politics, let alone a bruising interview. It was not until the following summer that the raffish Jack de Manio, with his gin-and-tonic voice, became the main presenter, and another five years before Today more systematically focused on news and current affairs. The Archers remained the favourite radio programme, with some 18 million listeners. In late November a survey was conducted, and many fans ‘paid tribute to the authentic atmosphere of the Ambridge community’, as in the words of a police sergeant’s wife: ‘The characters – foolish, kind, wise and occasionally spiteful – make a very realistic programme.’ A salesman’s wife, however, found the female characters less plausible. ‘Why are all the women rather crudely drawn? They whine, they nag, they grumble, they are usually very silly and demanding; and when they are good, they are very, very dull.’33
The run-up to Christmas began for Judy Haines on the last day of November. ‘Had an enjoyable but exhausting time in Gamage’s,’ she recorded. ‘Girls got pencil cases from Father Christmas and enjoyed the Animal Show. I ordered four articles to be sent home.’ The following Wednesday afternoon, in dense fog near Lewisham, the 4.56 steam express from Cannon Street to Ramsgate crashed into a stationary electric train, bringing down a bridge carrying a loop line over the track path and altogether killing 90 people. ‘Bodies shrouded in blankets and coats lay in a long row beside the track,’ reported the Manchester Guardian. ‘Alongside were strewn handbags, gloves, shoes, and gaily wrapped Christmas parcels.’ That was a disaster, down to human error as well as the weather, but later in the month three scandals began to unfold. On the 7th, in Thurso, a police officer was provoked by a foul-mouthed 15-year-old grocer’s boy (‘you think you’re a smart fucker’) into hitting him, leading to complaints which the police dismissed before the local MP eventually forced a public inquiry, amidst considerable parliamentary disquiet about a cover-up. On the 9th, the former and future right-wing Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt exposed on Panorama the gerrymandering practices of the Communist-led Electrical Trades Union, most recently its cynical blackballing of Les Cannon, the union’s gifted Education Officer who had resigned from the CP over Hungary. And on the 19th, the Commons debated the recently exposed abuses at Rampton Mental Hospital near Retford, Nottinghamshire, where the mentally ill rubbed shoulders with violent criminals. Amidst all this, the critic Hilary Corke (in the Listener on the 12th) ferociously attacked Doris Lessing (a writer ‘of absolutely no importance’); the 14-year-old future critic, Lorna Stockton, went to her first, dismal school dance in Whitchurch, Shropshire and met Vic Sage (‘temples glistening with sweat and Brylcreem’); and on the 16th, in a live TV transmission of Hancock’s Half Hour, much of the scenery fell prematurely apart, leaving Hancock to play an entire scene holding up a table. But at least the audience was laughing – unlike for the most part at Barnacle Bill, the final Ealing comedy, released just before Christmas to a critical panning summed up by Isabel Quigly’s three words, ‘a big flop’. It was comic cuts, though, at a cold, wet Valley on Saturday the 21st, as ten-man Charlton Athletic came from 5-1 down to beat the visitors Huddersfield Town 7-6, leaving their manager, Bill Shankly, for once speechless until the train back reached Peterborough.34
A running subplot during December was the ‘Bank Rate Tribunal’. Reluctantly granted by Macmillan under political pressure, and sitting at Church House, Westminster under Lord Justice Parker, its brief was to determine whether there had been a ‘leak’ that accounted for the heavy selling of gilt-edged stocks just before the 2-per-cent rise in the Bank Rate on 19 September. The individuals under most suspicion were two of the Bank of England’s non-executive directors, Lord Kindersley of Lazards and W. J. (‘Tony’) Keswick of Mathesons. Keswick’s cross-examination on the 6th, conducted by the Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, included the question of what he and his brother had discussed five days before the rise. ‘It is difficult for me,’ he observed in a memorable phrase that would be much cited, ‘to remember the exact timing of conversation on a grouse moor.’ Overall, Macmillan was privately reflecting by the second week that the evidence to the tribunal, ‘tho’ not really damaging, does the Capitalist system as a whole no particular good’, while the following week the City establishment’s increasing vexation with the proceedings was encapsulated by Kindersley’s angry missive to the banker George Bolton about Manningham-Buller’s ‘offensive’ winding-up speech: ‘If he was the next gun to me tomorrow I would certainly use my cartridges in a different direction to the pheasants!!!’ Even so, for outsiders it was a fascinating spectacle, watching (as Panter-Downes put it) ‘a succession of spruce, pink-joweled City gentlemen easing themselves and their briefcases into the witness chair’ and speaking a ‘totally different language’ about ‘“comparatively small”’ deals of a million or so pounds. ‘It has all been a revealing glimpse into a special, jealously guarded world,’ she added, and ‘many Conservatives are wondering what the average hard-up voter is going to make of it’.35
Christmas Day was marked by the Queen’s first Christmas television broadcast, live from the Long Library at Sandringham. ‘That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all round us,’ she observed. ‘Because of these changes, I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard, how to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.’ Viewers were predictably delighted:
Her Majesty was so natural and her message must surely have moved and inspired many viewers. The innovation of TV in the Queen’s home made us feel, as she herself said, that she is really our friend and not a removed figure.
Her Majesty’s relaxed, sincere and charming approach was captivating. It seemed in contrast to her former style of speaking, which always struck me as slightly aloof.
A real thrill to see the Queen so clearly and so close.
It was a prosperous-feeling Christmas in Chingford. ‘Had a picnic lunch in the lounge, which was most enjoyable,’ Judy Haines noted two days later. ‘Now we have electric fires in both dining and lounge we can use both rooms at a moment’s notice.’ Another diarist, Dennis Dee, was just starting out. A farm worker and horse breaker turning himself into a horse, pig and poultry breeder, he was 31 and had recently acquired a smallholding in the East Riding village of Winestead. A countryman of few words, he began his journal at the start of 1958 as economically as he intended to go on:
1 January. Keen frost today. W [his wife Wendy] went to Hedon to see her mother. I am working for Mr Patchett at ‘Westlands Farm’, Winestead.
2 January. More frost. I punctured George’s car today.
3 January. Frosty again today. Mowing the big ditches out at Westlands.
4 January. Milder weather. Started to cut the large rough hedge round the paddock. A big job and a hard one.
That same day, Saturday the 4th, fellow diarist Madge Martin went to the Old Vic to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which ‘Frankie Howerd, the comedian from the music-halls and radio, was a good, but quiet Bottom’, playing alongside (she did not mention) Ronald Fraser as Flute and Judi Dench as First Fairy; next day, Anthony Heap visited his mentally unstable wife Marjorie at Friern Barnet, to which she had recently returned and where the doctors were going to try ‘electric shock treatment’ again. The weekend also saw, amidst stirring scenes, the last passenger train run between Abergavenny and Merthyr Tydfil. ‘I have lived in a house where the back garden adjoins the line,’ Graham Jones of 36 Rhyd-y-cae, Rassau wrote soon afterwards to the Merthyr Express.
The trains passing by have formed part of our lives. Last Monday was so quiet and then we realised that no longer would those grand ladies of the steam track pass by again. To many on-lookers we may seem perhaps sentimental and a little foolish, but that sad last train with its even sadder whistles as it graced the track for the last time was to me and many others the end of something in our lives which will never be replaced.36