The Victorians were now dying off, and so was their England. William Nicholson (1872–1949) was one of the most impressive painters of his time, easy to undervalue because, as his son the modernist painter Ben remarked, all William had ever wanted to do was merely to paint. His portraits – of the Earl of Harewood, George VI’s brother-in-law, or of Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor of that volume of all but Biblical status, The Oxford Book of English Verse), or of Sidney and Beatrice Webb beside their austere bricky chimneypiece, captured many of the key figures of his time. Unlike Augustus John, this painter has not (in any sense) imposed himself upon the sitters. His landscapes, especially of the Wiltshire Downs, his interiors – whether of City Dinners or of ballrooms suddenly emptied by an air-raid – are both rich, painterly works of art and records of a passing age. Perhaps most eloquent of all are his still lives, pale English light glowing on newly burnished pewter, gold or silver. In 1949, it probably felt as if a merely minor painter had died. Now, seeing his work as a whole, we probably rank William Nicholson with the giants. And like all great artists, however private their concerns, we see that he reflected the age in which he lived with complete sureness.
In the post-war world which he just lived long enough to see, they looked to the future, and yet so much, in spite of bombing and war, survived of the world not just of pre-1939 but of pre-1914. Especially was this true of the railways.
If we had travelled about in Victorian England we should almost certainly not have imitated John Ruskin, who was rich and old-fashioned enough to go everywhere in his own privately designed horse-drawn coach. We should have gone by train. The hiss of steam, the clank of coupling, the rattle of girders, the vast tenders heaped with glistening Welsh coal, and the smell, on every station, of coal; the gas-lit platforms of the Victorian rail networks survived deep into the twentieth century. Until the 1950s, at least, Britons travelled in much the same way as Sherlock Holmes and Mr Gladstone had done. That magnificent old steam locomotive the Stanier ‘Pacific’ City of Birmingham was still puffing its way up Shap, drawing the ‘Night Scot’ from London to Glasgow, as late as 1964. But it already looked like an anachronism;1 it was at one with such great, lost, majestic locomotives as the 1938 Flying Scotsman, an ‘A4’ Pacific No. 4498, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley; or Liddesdale’s North British ‘Atlantic’ No. 9877, or the superb engines which ran on the Great Western with the names of Welsh castles, such as Abergavenny and Caerphilly. In these railway engines, and the lines on which they ran, a century and more of Britain’s past was carried in a rattling rhythm and a steam-filled cloud of romance never to be recaptured. The beginnings of change came with the new Labour government.
The nationalization of the railways took effect from 1 January 1948. The Big Four railway companies – LMS (London, Midland and Scottish), the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway), the Southern and the Great Western – were now absorbed into British Railways. These four companies had themselves, in the course of time, absorbed innumerable smaller Victorian railroad companies, many with picturesque and distinctive engines and carriages: the Brighton and South Coast Railway, the Dingwall and Skye, the Settle and Carlisle, the London, Chatham and Dover, the South Devon and many another.
The war had put great pressure on the railways. The Southern Railway was alone in seeing a fall in passenger numbers (361 million in 1938 down to 347 million in 1944); this was owing to the all but complete collapse of holiday traffic. All the other railways, which had been used both for troop movements and for freight traffic, including the transport of munitions, had a huge increase; there was also a rise in the number of ‘passenger specials’ – there were 24,241 special trains commissioned by the government to move troops in 1940 alone. Imports, and rail transport from the docks, a traditional source of rail income, fell, and not much money was spent on infrastructure, so that by 1948 most of the railways were in a poor state of repair. ‘This railway system of ours is a very poor bag of assets,’ complained the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton. ‘The railways are a disgrace to the country.’2 It was inevitable perhaps that coal-dependent steam trains would eventually be phased out. Americans during the war had begun to interest British railway engineers with the change in some US railroads from steam to diesel traction.3 Inevitable, too, once nationalization had gone ahead, would be the eventual arrival upon the scene of a figure such as Dr Richard Beeching, the Widmerpool of the railways, who in the early 1960s under a Conservative government began his merciless closure of branch lines. Had the railways not been nationalized, some of the old steam trains would probably have survived.
Although in the early days of steam, some landowners had protested at the new-fangled railway innovation, steam trains had quickly become part of the British landscape. There was no more romantic way to travel through the West Highlands, or the Lake District, or across the expanses of Suffolk and Norfolk, than by train; the movement and smell, the gushes of steam, though all the consequences of engineering skill, had an almost organic quality which made the steam trains part of nature in a way that diesel and electric never could be. As with the mists of nature, in dawn or autumn, there was always a hint of melancholy about the steam trains. Their banshee warning-shrieks had something about them, especially when heard at night, of the uncanny. Almost no writer in English conveys the romance of rail travel so well as the crime writer Michael Innés, whose The Journeying Boy or Appleby’s End describe railway journeys which have not been possible since Beeching, and which would entirely lack poetry without their steam accompaniment.
Typical of the British habit of coming in at the end of things and therefore creating almost instantaneous nostalgia was the Rev. W. Awdry’s decision, in the late Forties, to write a series of children’s stories about Thomas the Tank Engine on a small branch line. Within a very few years of Awdry’s series beginning, the Fat Controller, one of the old private railway bosses, would in fact have been sent packing by the new British Railways apparatchiks; and Thomas’s friends, Gordon the Big Engine, Henry the Green Engine, and so on, would only have survived in museums or those slightly sad small stretches of track on which enthusiasts still run steam trains. In the world of children’s literature, however, these steam trains with their Fat Controller appear to be as immortal as the fairies or the gods, impervious to any changes on the Earth, let alone changes of government or transport ownership. Children who have hardly travelled on a train, still less a passenger steam train, find these stories endlessly re-readable. In part this is surely because of the illustrations by C. Reginald Dalby which evoke – witness the marvellous snow scenes in the story called ‘The Flying Kipper’ – a vanished Britain, though not always one which is sin or crime-free. (In a later story in that volume, ‘Henry’s Sneeze’, some boys throw stones from a railway bridge and leave the Fireman concussed.)
The Labour victory came as no surprise to those who had heard the way men spoke while on active service about their hopes for postwar Britain. Few, if any, wanted a return to the high unemployment, the poverty, the social divisions of the 1930s. Most people in Britain, though obviously not all, attributed these ills to the Conservatives.
A Mass Observation Poll was conducted at the height of the Blitz to determine the answer to a number of deep political questions: would postwar Britain have less class distinction? More state control? A reform of the educational system? A levelling of incomes? An increase in social services? A dictatorship, possibly along fascistic lines?
Mass Observation was not an opinion poll to which people knew they were contributing. The observation was by busybodies of the Masses. Obviously, it was rough and ready, but the results of this particular report, drawn up by a panel of observers who had moved among a cross-section of society in pubs, factories and other work-places, were as follows: 29 per cent thought there would be less class distinction; 21 per cent more state control; 19 per cent educational reforms; 15 per cent a levelling of incomes; 14 per cent increased social services; while 13 per cent believed that there would be a fascist state after the war. If by fascist they meant absolutist, or interventionist on lines undreamt-of in former ages, this was hardly surprising given the conditions of wartime, in which Habeas Corpus had been suspended, the press and broadcasting were heavily censored, a high proportion of the male population was in uniform, and, it seemed, the state was suddenly in unstoppable control.4
It is interesting that 71 per cent therefore believed that class distinction would continue after the war more or less as it had before; and that a thundering 81 per cent thought there would be no real educational reform. These people were broadly speaking right. The trivial details of class distinction would perhaps become less important in the immediate postwar years; and by the 1960s, deference, and debutante presentations at Court, and the sillier outward trappings of the class system had been laid aside. But as late as 1962, in his Anatomy of Britain, for example, Anthony Sampson could observe that while the Civil Service ‘lean over backwards to avoid favouring public schoolboys’, between 1948 and 1956, 50 per cent of recruits to the Senior Civil Service were from Oxford, and 30 per cent from Cambridge, and the great majority of those educated at the older universities were still from public schools.5
The existence of private schools, and in particular those private boarding schools called public schools, Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest, was one of the most socially divisive, and deliberately socially divisive, features of Victorian Britain. Although many of these schools went back to the sixteenth, and some as far as the fifteenth (Eton) or fourteenth (Winchester) century, the constitution of the public schools, their ethos and their place in the scheme of things were essentially Victorian. Moreover, it had been the policy of the Victorians, as they founded and built new schools, and gradually provided education for all, to do so on strictly stratified lines. Funds which had been laid aside by philanthropists of an earlier age were often simply plundered for the middle classes. For example at Sutton Coldfield, where a charitable fund existed to educate the poor, £15,000 was taken by the Victorians to provide a ‘high school for well-to-do children’. In the older public schools, which had all been founded to educate the poor, money was taken by the nineteenth-century reformers to build new schools for the lower orders. For example, one of Thomas Arnold’s first acts when becoming headmaster of Rugby was to close the free class for town boys, and to make his school exclusively the preserve of ‘gentlemen’. The Lawrence Sheriff School was started in Rugby town for the more plebeian customers. Canon Woodard, founder of High Church boarding schools for boys and for girls, did so with clear ideas, in each case, about the social position of the parents. Lancing was meant to be a sort of nouveau riche equivalent of Eton, preparing boys for the university or the army, whereas Ellesmere, Denston or Ardingly, some of the canon’s other creations, were for ‘respectable tradesfolk’.6
By the close of the nineteenth century, there were many good schools in England, but as well as imparting knowledge they were reinforcing the fairly recently devised social hierarchies. 1945 would have been an obvious moment to abolish private education altogether, and to force the British to draw, for their Civil Service, their better universities, their professions and skilled jobs, from as wide a pool as possible, regardless of wealth or levels of gentility. When it came to it, however, the likes of C. R. Attlee (Haileybury), Sir Stafford Cripps (Winchester), Viscount Stansgate (Westminster) and Hugh Dalton (Eton) funked the abolition of their old schools.
The Fleming Committee,7 which sat from 1942 to 1944, and was set up to review the position of independent schools and direct grant schools,* recommended that after the war, society should no longer tolerate the social divisiveness of the old public school system. A minimum of 25 per cent public schoolboys, in the first instance, should be chosen from state primary schools. This proposal was dropped in the Conservative Rab Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which merely increased the opportunity for clever boys and girls to go to grammar schools. Butler had been in favour, personally, of abolishing the fee-paying element of direct grant schools, and he was an agnostic about the question of whether the private schools should be abolished.8 Butler, however, was a Man of Munich, a compromiser. Half his name was given to the phenomenon of consensus politics which governed Britain until the 1970s – Butskellism (an amalgam of the names Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, Social Democrat leader of the Labour party after Attlee). His autobiography was entitled The Art of the Possible. He had to be able to sell the generous, and on the whole liberal, flavour of his educational reforms to the diehards on the Tory backbenches and to the House of Lords. Moreover, since the funding for education passed largely from central government to local government, the overall question of whether powerful private schools should continue to exercise their overwhelming bias in favour of particular groups and classes was simply allowed to drop.
So, most astoundingly, it may be said with hindsight, was much of an attempt to counteract the essentially aristocratic method by which Britain was governed. Just before he became Home Secretary and when he was still the president of the Board of Trade, in 1910, Winston Churchill had said: ‘The time has come for the total abolition of the House of Lords … Many Conservatives have frankly abandoned the hereditary principle. Scarcely a voice in any party is raised on behalf of the existing institution. We as a Liberal Party stand outside this spontaneous repudiation of hereditary and aristocratic privilege.’9
As leader of the Opposition in the postwar period, however, Churchill took a rather different view. The question of the abolition of the House of Lords might have been dear to the heart of a few firebrands on the left of the Labour party. All the Tory Opposition found themselves opposing, however, was some very mild tinkering with the Parliament Act, shortening the time in which the House of Lords could delay legislation which was passed to it for approval from the Commons. The Lords were careful not to antagonize the new Labour government, the 5th Marquess of Salisbury (leader of the Tories in the Upper House) taking the view that it was not peers’ job to stifle the mandate of an elected government.10
Churchill, with his love of building up the Labour party as a swarm of anti-democratic demons, represented the new legislation as ‘class tyranny’. What Labour wanted, he claimed, was ‘virtually single Chamber Government’.11 He now defended the Lords, which in 1910 he had wanted abolished, on democratic grounds. The constitutional aim was ‘that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power’.12
In fact, House of Lords reform did not loom large in the 1945 Parliament because the Attlee government had so much else on its agenda. The only reason the Labour government wished to shorten the veto was in order to speed through iron and steel nationalization, which the Tories in the Lords were questioning. It was very much as an expedient parliamentary measure that this check on the Lords’ power was proposed and not per se as an attack on the hereditary principle, such as the Liberals had made in 1909–10. By leaving alone the private schools, and the House of Lords, the Attlee government revealed that it was not attempting to turn Britain into one of the northern European socialist states such as Finland or Sweden. Its social engineering took a back place behind its belief in centralized, government-owned industries – coal, steel, iron – government-owned railways, and government-sponsored welfare, especially in the field of pensions, and with the creation of the first National Health Service in the world where treatment was free at the point of entry.
One of the first acts of nationalization was more in the nature of a symbolic act than anything else: the Bank of England. ‘Make me Chancellor of the Exchequer and give me a good Labour majority in Parliament and I will undertake the nationalization of the Bank of England over a dinner party,’ said Hugh Dalton. In fact he did not even need a dinner party. He ‘nationalized’ the Bank over a cup of tea with his friend, the governor of the Bank of England, Lord Catto. All that happened was that the Court of the Bank was reduced in number, and restricted to technical experts. The superfluous merchant bankers resigned. Nicholas Davenport, who knew the City well in those days, wrote in his memoirs: ‘What Dalton did was really a non-event. First, he asked … Lord Catto of Morgan Grenfell to stay on because he was such a nice friendly chap who had risen from the ranks. Then he reduced the Court from twenty-four to sixteen and took power to appoint only four of them each year. He retained the prominent directors who had been associated with the worst disasters of Montagu Norman’ – that is, the deflationist governor who had presided over the financial disasters of the between-war years.13
Times were hard in these austere war years. Men were coming back from the armed services to a bomb-scarred, bankrupted country. Housing was desperately short. ‘We DEMAND a Home, not the WORKHOUSE. EX-SERVICEMEN demand Justice for our wives and kids’ read the notice outside one Islington squat in a council-owned building. Tiny little prefabricated houses – prefabs – sprang up all over the place as a temporary solution to the problem; but it was only temporary, and the Conservative government, when it was returned in 1951, was faced with a massive rebuilding programme.
There was a run on the pound from almost the moment Labour took office, and the financial situation in the exchequer was dire, with tax income at an all-time low, and no help from the Americans at first on offer to a socialist party. Barbara Castle was a new Labour MP in 1945 – later a minister in the Labour governments of 1966 onwards. She recalled that the attitude of the Truman administration to Britain changed automatically with the election. ‘Even ships which were crossing the Atlantic changed their nature’ as they became conveyors of goods which had to be paid for on docking rather than of a contribution from one ally to another.14
The British economy had never faced graver difficulties. There were accumulated foreign debts of £4,000 million. Foreign assets were hugely reduced. Exports had shrunk to about 40 per cent of their 1939 levels. There was a calamitous shortage of raw materials.15 A low point was reached in 1947 when, on top of food shortages (even bread was rationed), fuel shortages and money shortage, the worst winter on record immobilized the country under mounds of snow and ice. ‘Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails,’ as Anthony Powell powerfully evoked that time.16 Hugh Dalton, the somewhat clerical (his father had been a canon of Windsor) Chancellor of the Exchequer, leaked the contents of an emergency budget in November 1947 to a lobby journalist. In the twenty-first century, British lobby journalists are told the contents of the chancellors’ budgets before they are announced to the Commons, but in those days the House of Commons was still considered to have a serious political function, and Dalton honourably resigned. He was replaced as Chancellor by Sir Stafford Cripps, an austere bespectacled Wykehamist, rumoured to subsist upon mustard and cress grown from the blotting paper on his desk. His nickname was Austerity Cripps. Briefly a member of the war cabinet, when he had been a persistent critic of Churchill and his policies, his own Puritanism and zest for self-denial matched the necessary leanness of the times. Major W. H. Lewis, the brother of C. S. Lewis, the Oxford don and literary scholar, gloomily told his diary in November 1947: ‘Potatoes are put “on rations” on a scale of 3 lbs per week for the bourgeois. And so the last “filler” food disappears from the diet, and the days of real hunger come upon us. It’s extraordinary how one is conditioned by a secure past: even now I can’t grasp the fact that I, WHL, will go to bed hungry and get up hungry; these, I say, are things that happen to nations one reads about in the papers, not to me.’17
Cripps was a much more effective Chancellor than Dalton, rising betimes and getting through the equivalent of a day’s work before most of his Treasury colleagues had had their breakfast. Thanks largely to American aid in the Marshall Plan from 1948 onwards, and to his encouragement of collaboration between the unions, government and management in the newly nationalized industry, the postwar economy began to recover. It exacted a very great personal cost. He resigned through ill health on 20 October 1950, and six months later, three days short of his sixty-third birthday, Cripps was dead.
Cripps’s economic and political ideas were left-wing, in so far as they assumed the desirability of state ownership of the transport system and the coal, iron and steel industries. But Ruskin’s Unto This Last more than Marx’s Capital was the inspiration for his belief in a mixed economy. Even more Victorian was the philanthropic inspiration of the welfare state, which was the Attlee government’s lasting legacy to the British people. The guiding spirit and founding father of the welfare state was not a socialist but William Beveridge, who was born in Rangpur, Bengal, on 5 March 1879, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service. After Charterhouse and Balliol, he worked at Toynbee Hall, the Oxford settlement in the East End of London, and throughout his life, as a civil servant, academic (he was for a while Master of University College, Oxford) and politician (briefly Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1944–5), he was a classic Victorian liberal who believed not in a nanny state nor in a dependency culture, but in self-betterment. He never liked the phrase welfare state. His persistent belief was that society existed for the individual, and it was this belief which inspired his famous Report of 1944 in which he set out a programme to wage war on the five giants who stood across the path of national reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
With the advent of Margaret Thatcher on to the political scene in Britain in the late 1970s it became fashionable to belittle the achievements of the Attlee government and to question the very notion of welfare. Churchill’s words of 1909 were forgotten – ‘I do not agree with those who say that every man must look after himself, and that intervention by the state … will be fatal to his self-reliance, his foresight and his thrift … It is a mistake to suppose that thrift is caused only by fear: it springs from hope as well as fear. Where there is no hope, there will be no thrift’.
Beveridge, and those whom he inspired, who included not merely members of the Labour party, but all who wished to build a decent society after the war, can hardly be blamed for any of the problems facing an under-funded, badly managed welfare service in the Britain of the twenty-first century. What the Report, and the Labour government that had the courage to put it into practice, brought to pass was the chance of a decent schooling for every child; the chance of decent housing for all – it was no longer left to the likes of Basil Jellicoe to build habitable dwellings for the less well-off; the chance of full employment – through those Keynesian methods encouraged by Oswald Mosley in 1931 and finally adopted by his old party in 1945; and the provision of health care, which included dental care, for all, regardless of their income. What Beveridge was recommending, and what Attlee’s government was putting into practice, was a programme almost identical to that of Mosley’s New Party in 1931. In 1931, it had been regarded as ‘extreme’. By 1945, it was seen as no more than the people of Britain, after six years of war, and a much longer history of being shafted by the capitalist system, deserved.
Any who now feel called to mock the Beveridge Plan, or its extraordinarily faithful execution in the period of 1945–50, should ask themselves – would they rather live in the slums of one of the big British cities before or after the Second World War? Would they rather be a poor person in 1933 or in 1953? Would they rather be sick in 1933 or 1953? Would they rather be an old person in the workhouses which still survived until the Second World War, or living on the, albeit modest, pension provided by the Labour government of 1945?
It was not merely the health service of which the Attlee government was rightly proud, it was the whole achievement. In economic circumstances of unprecedented exigency, these so-easily mockable men in their three-piece suits, with their pipes and their trilby hats, did the decent thing. It would have been intolerable to leave things as they had been before the war, with children suffering from rickets in mushroom-infested slum-dwellings, with the pensionless old dying destitute, with health care available only to those who could afford to pay for it. Of course, decent-minded doctors in general practice had always cared for patients regardless of whether they could pay or not. But the National Health Service was one of the most stupendous British inventions. As soon as it was started, it was in a state of ‘crisis’, and it has been in a state of crisis ever since. It could have been better run from the beginning. No doubt wiseacres know ways of making it better. The simple and magnificent thing about it cannot be diminished. You no longer needed, before you had your appendix removed, or your teeth fixed, or your weak heart, kidney or stomach attended to, to produce a chequebook. It was the great Ruskinian corrective to the Darwinian relentlessness of capitalist necessity.
Undoubtedly the boldest cabinet appointment of Attlee’s was to make Aneurin Bevan (‘Nye’) the Minister of Health. He was far to the left of the party; indeed, during the 1930s he had advocated the Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties with the Communists, and an ‘English Revolution’. Not that there was anything English about this brilliant Welshman. Born in 1897 in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, he was the son and grandson of coal miners. He himself went down the pits at the age of thirteen. He spoke in childhood with a stammer, and his vast reading, like his later legendary eloquence, was the combination of energetic self-improvement and inborn genius. From the beginnings of his political self-education, he was a reader of, and believer in, Marx. In 1931 he had been attracted to Mosley’s New Party, but he never really wavered in his belief that in practical terms, the British Labour party was the only institution which could bring to pass the socialist society in which he believed. Throughout the war he was a vociferous critic of Churchill, who repaid the compliment by describing him as ‘a squalid nuisance’.18
The importance of personal charm in history is sometimes forgotten. Chaim Weizmann had it in abundance, and this largely explains Arthur Balfour’s 1917 Declaration. Churchill had it, and could woo the most unlikely political opponents. When Nye Bevan arrived at the Ministry of Health, Sir William Douglas, a natural Conservative, had been appointed his Permanent Secretary. Douglas made it clear to friends that he did not intend to stay long. Bevan, he said, was ‘a terrible fellow. I’ll never forgive him for all those attacks on Churchill during the war. I made it clear that I would carry on only for three months until they got someone else.’ A few weeks later, a colleague asked Douglas how he was managing under Bevan. ‘What are you driving at?’ Douglas asked. ‘He’s the best Minister I ever worked for. I’ve made it clear that while Bevan’s there, I’ll stay.’19
Of all the professions, the British medical profession was perhaps the most conservative in all senses. On 26 July 1945, while the election results were being announced, the British Medical Association was holding its annual meeting in its headquarters in Tavistock Square. This was a building where clerical staff, as late as the 1930s, were instructed that they must vacate the lift, rather than share it with the frock-coated, top-hatted consultants who had arrived from Harley Street to conduct business. Deference towards doctors in the great hospitals rivalled the reverence shown towards the higher clergy in Rome. When the BMA heard that Beveridge had lost his parliamentary seat in the election, they interrupted their meeting and burst into a loud round of applause. One Harley Street consultant said: ‘I have spent a lot of time seeing doctors with bleeding duodenal ulcers caused by worry about being under the State.’20
Butler in 1944 had allowed schools to be under the spending control of local government authorities, which still accounts for the current state of muddle in British education. Bevan made sure that spending for the health service was nationalized and centralized, the responsibility of central government: and that probably accounts for the current state of chaos in the health service. The truth is, that with an organization on such a scale, however it is funded, and whoever is doing the funding, some measure of chaos is inevitable. Butler’s aim was to give grammar school-quality education to all, all who would benefit from it, regardless of their wealth and of where they lived. He broadly achieved his aim, until the educationalists themselves introduced the dogma that it was socially divisive for schools to distinguish between clever pupils and stupid ones. In health, the fundamental aims were always more rational, even if in an expanding population, with limited resources, and a medical profession ever growing in skill and knowledge, the aims were unaffordable: namely health care, free of charge, for all.
This had been the aim of the Labour party for a very long time, at least since 1909, when Beatrice Webb, in her report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, wanted a ‘state medical service’. By 1930, such was the chronic state of health in the big cities, the BMA itself was suggesting ‘a general medical service for the nation’. Beveridge recommended a comprehensive health service. The question which faced the incoming Labour health minister in 1945 was how to implement it.
Hospital care in Britain, very much like education, had grown up in a haphazard way, with a mixture of old foundations, and more recent ones established by Victorian philanthropists. There were 1,334 voluntary hospitals. These included nearly all the great teaching hospitals, as well as specialist research hospitals such as the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. By the end of the 1930s most of these voluntary hospitals were desperately strapped for cash, with most of their investments reduced in value. (In 1891, 88 per cent of their income came from investment; in 1938 only 33 per cent.) As for the municipal hospitals, many of them had grown up as workhouse infirmaries. They were run by local councils with money from the rates and most of them were awful. Bevan’s genius was to see that the health service could only be made to work by nationalizing the hospitals, and putting them all under one central authority with government funding. To make it work, he had to persuade the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, Physicians, and Obstetricians. And he enlisted the help of ‘Corkscrew Charlie’, Lord Moran. Conversations such as this took place:
BEVAN: I find the efficiency of the hospitals varies enormously. How can that be put right?
MORAN: You will only get one standard of excellence when every hospital has a first-rate consultant staff. At present the consultants are all crowded together in the large centres of population. You’ve got to decentralize them.
BEVAN: That’s all very well, but how are you going to get a man to leave his teaching hospital and go into the periphery? [He grinned] You wouldn’t like it if I began to direct labour.
MORAN: Oh, they’ll go if they get an interesting job and if their financial future is secured by a proper salary.
BEVAN: (after a long pause) Only the State could pay those salaries. This would mean the nationalization of the hospitals.21
Bevan made some concessions which must have upset him; they certainly upset his leftist colleagues. He allowed the doctors in hospitals to continue their private practice, which effectively meant that many of the best consultants were only offering part of their time to the new health service. But some time was better than none. The profession which had collectively cheered when Beveridge was booted out of Parliament in 1945 formed a determination, by 1950, to make the new health service work. By and large, they, with the nursing profession, succeeded in doing so. The failures to fund or administer the unwieldy health service in the last thirty years have led to hospitals in many parts of Britain being reduced to a state which Bevan, Moran and Beveridge would find completely incredible if they were to return to Britain in the twenty-first century. It does not diminish Bevan’s achievement. Apart from his eloquence, and his wit, which inspired so many who heard his oratory both on the hustings and in the House of Commons, he was that very, very rare thing in the history of politics, a man whose decisions on behalf of those he served brought about human betterment. This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and human wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of. The National Health Service, which inspired so many other countries in the world to imitate it, did what it set out to do, and with all its many mistakes and shortcomings, it still does so: it provides free medicine, free advice, free surgery, free nursing to everyone, regardless of their income. Others could have bungled things at the outset as, one must candidly say, Butler bungled education by not abolishing private education. Bevan’s bold and patient nationalization programme of the hospitals, together with his drawing into the national fold the general practitioners and the dentists, was a formidably skilful achievement. He deserves the laurel crown as the British politician who did least harm and most good.
Three weeks before the general election which returned Churchill to power as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1951, Clem Attlee addressed the Labour party:
I am proud of our achievement. There is an immense amount more to do. Let us go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake:
I will not cease from mental strife,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.22
Labour lost the election largely because of national mood. England was not a green or pleasant land, and nor were the other parts of the United Kingdom. Housing was a problem which the government has still not solved. Many of the bombsites were not cleared until the 1960s. It was the Britain captured in Rose Macaulay’s beautiful novel The World My Wilderness, a story of the London bombsites. ‘The squalor of ruin … was a symbol of loathsome things, war, destruction, savagery; an earnest, perhaps, of the universal doom that stalked, sombre and menacing, on its way.’23
The films and literature of the period reflect the sense of drabness, greyness and bureaucracy threatening people’s lives. George Orwell’s telling political satire, Animal Farm, was the most devastating possible analysis of Communist Revolution. He followed it up with the much sourer 1984, a book which foresees a world in which thought police and totalitarian interference into personal life in effect destroy humanity. As with Animal Farm, he had in his sights the Soviet Union, but the drabness of his invented world surely owed much to the actuality of Attlee’s Britain.
Passport to Pimlico was the first of the famous comedies to emerge from the Ealing Studios. Pimlico in those days was a melancholy district of London which had known more prosperous days. The eruption of an unexploded bomb makes a crater in which the local grocer, played by Stanley Holloway, discovers hidden treasure, belonging to a medieval duke of Burgundy. The researches of the learned Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) establish beyond doubt that Pimlico was actually on Burgundian soil. (The starting point for the original joke was that the government of Canada officially made a hotel room in Ottawa a part of the Netherlands so that Princess Juliana could bear the heir to the Dutch throne on Dutch soil.)
Wearied by the bureaucracy of the Labour government, and by the austerity of rationing, the people of Pimlico declare their independence of Britain. In the pub, they all tear up their ration books; it must have been a wonderfully liberating fantasy to watch in 1949. As well as being a film which expresses exasperation with the dreary state of things in Britain, it is also a gentle expression of consensus politics. After extensive negotiations, the little London area is reabsorbed into the United Kingdom in return for assurances that it will have many of the social amenities which became commonplace in the 1950s. The bomb crater, for example, becomes a public lido where the children can bathe. Although Tory in its anti-bureaucratic instincts, the film has embraced the centralized public service ethos of Attlee’s government, and which would remain a characteristic of all subsequent Westminster governments, however right-wing or radical they wished to appear to their fans.
The gallant little Burgundians of Pimlico also reflect the insularity of Britain in its relation to Europe. The European Coal and Steel Community began in 1950 with France and Germany agreeing to pool their production of resources. Britain’s attitude to Europe was well summed up by the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin’s, remark to Christopher Mayhew in 1948: ‘Well you know, Chris, we’ve got to give them something and I think we’ll give them this talking shop in Strasbourg – the Council of Europe – we’ll give them this talking shop.’24 Bevin as Foreign Secretary and Stafford Cripps as Chancellor both resented deeply the Marshall Plan for Europe, and the American desire that Britain should get involved with the origins of the Common Market with Konrad Adenauer of Germany, the Christian Democrat leader, with Jean Monnet, the effective architect of the Common Market, and with the French foreign minister Robert Schuman. Attlee’s government wanted nothing to do with it. Britain, like Pimlico in the film, was to go it alone. And this spirit was reflected also in the Festival of Britain of 1951. Whereas the 1851 exhibition in Hyde Park had reflected Britain’s cosmopolitan place in the world, the Festival of Britain was in part a celebration of her natural history and cultural heritage of an unashamedly insular kind, in part a hopeful looking-forward to the new nation which would emerge from the war. Much of the exhibition space was devoted to housing, to domestic and industrial design. Those looking round the exhibition must have felt, surveying the clean lines of the Scandinavian-inspired furniture and architecture, that a new world had come into being.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory, had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?
The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1921 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.
Powell was a close friend of Malcom Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water.25 By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.
* Direct grant schools depended in part on government funding and in part on private fees charged at the school’s discretion.