Austerity in Retrospect: The Glamour of Masochism1 |
I wanted to throw the dried egg out of the window, burn my shabby curtains and wear a Paris hat again. The Amazons, the women in trousers, the good comrades had had their glorious day. But it was over. Gracious living beckoned once again.
ANNE SCOTT-JAMES
In June 2007 restaurant critic Matthew Norman noticed how suddenly, and for no obvious reason, Britain had been overtaken by nostalgia for the ‘Austerity Years’. The publication of David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, greeted with rave reviews, and the first instalment of Andrew Marr’s BBC television series, History of Modern Britain, screened shortly after the publication of Kynaston’s book and also massively popular, seemed proof that those years of deprivation and rationing suddenly seemed seductive. Everyone was once more switching off the lights to conserve energy, buying second-hand clothes and saving every scrap of paper. Environmental anxieties partly explain this resurrection of the past. Plastic bags are replaced with carriers made of jute or string; we are continually urged, as Norman notes, to use less fuel of all kinds, and in August 2007 the Guardian noted that:
Life was a beach for Tony Blair. Or a villa. Or a luxury yacht. But perma-tanned politicians must holiday more carefully under Gordon Brown. The prime minister is ushering in a new austerity for summer vacation’
This mood had developed before the credit crunch and the banking crisis of 2008. Environmentalism and economic crisis must partly account for the new interest in austerity, although perhaps there may have been some other premonition in the air, an uneasy deep-down feeling that the bubble could not last forever, but the rapturous reception accorded Austerity Britain suggests that it also keyed into enduring myths about the national past and their relationship to ‘what really happened’ or how it seemed at the time. There is also the question of the meaning of twenty-first-century nostalgia and whether it acts as a substitute for taking control of the present.
David Kynaston believed that his book offered a new interpretation of the 1940s. He asserted that the British look back on the decade with misty-eyed nostalgia for the spirit of the Blitz and the Labour landslide. As such, more than half a century later, his aim was to demythologise it. Certainly the period of the Second World War itself is still remembered as glorious. (The 2011 film, The King’s Speech, winner of many Oscars, is one example of this.) The abiding popularity of television programmes like Dad’s Army, ’Allo ‘Allo! and Foyle’s War (which did show the seamy side of the home front at war) also testifies to the continuing importance to the British of this hard won victory and the myths surrounding it. But austerity gloom is hardly forgotten. Well over a decade ago, for example, the fashion writer Colin McDowell made a television programme on Dior’s New Look, which used the familiar footage of Harold Wilson begging women not to lower their hems; this was also used in another television series on fashion in the early 1990s, Through the Looking Glass. The symbolism of the New Look as a potent, if backward-looking, representation of longed-for luxury is better known than you would think from reading Kynaston and his reviewers.
Austerity Britain is a substantial work. John Charmley, in the Guardian (19 May 2007), described, apparently with admiration, its method – of placing descriptions of events, lavishly backed up with long quotations from ‘ordinary people’ – as resulting in ‘a plum duff of a book’, which, unintentionally perhaps, accurately captures the rather indigestible quality of the accumulation of facts. Kynaston does, however, have a central thesis. As D. J. Taylor in the Independent put it (4 May 2007): ‘Kynaston’s theme [is] the imposition on the British people, throughout a six-year period of quasi-socialist government of ideas, policies and decisions which they did not want or to which they were at best indifferent’; and in the Sunday Times (6 May 2007), John Carey described the picture of unalloyed misery he found in Austerity Britain, and warmed to Kynaston’s populist interpretation whereby the Labour government was full of high-minded socialist ideas that they were undemocratically determined to foist on a resentful, conservatively minded public. Several reviewers mentioned the notorious occasion (which, incidentally, featured in the independent television series The Making of Modern London over 20 years ago) when the Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, was almost lynched as he forced the government’s proposal for a new town in Stevenage down the throats of the existing population of 6,000. He was greeted with shouts of ‘gestapo’ and ‘dictator’, the tyres of his car were punctured and sand poured into the petrol tank.
Whether this really proves that there was hostility across the board to the reforms of the Atlee government is unproven. This Stevenage protest seems little different from the long-standing protests today by local residents against the expansion, for example, of Stansted airport. It is hardly surprising if the inhabitants of picturesque villages have never welcomed their destruction. It is true that the Byzantine structure of controls and planning regulations after the war were hugely cumbersome and much disliked by the large variety of groups affected by them; but this is not the same as saying that the totality of post-war welfare reforms were rejected.
Kynaston, in fact, tends to reinforce the belief that post-war planning and housing policy was dominated from the word go by the Le Corbusian vision of high-rise living and the separation of pedestrian from vehicular traffic. His reviewers certainly read him in this way and it is true that after the war modernism was the dominant trend in the English architectural community. The influential Architectural Review was wholly committed to it; though in 1946 its editor, J. M. Richards, had published The Castles on the Ground, a nostalgic tribute to the English suburb, written when he was still on active service in the African desert. His plea for the beauty and romance of the suburbs was atypical, for town planners in general loathed the way ‘suburban sprawl’ ate up precious land; this was one reason for the later adoption of high-rise flats.
Significantly, though, the earliest post-war housing estates in the East End of London were high-density but low-rise. Moreover, the high-rise block was not the only ideal for post-war British planners. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas were equally influential. Patrick Abercrombie, architect of the post-war plan for Greater London, wanted at least 1 million Londoners to be decanted to new towns (one of which, of course, was to be Stevenage). The new town as a garden city was to end the vast incoherence of the twentieth-century urban agglomeration. Garden cities would be of manageable size and would therefore create better regulated and more harmonious communities (community being, as always, a buzzword beloved by planners and politicians).
Kynaston deals fully with these issues, but his method, with its welter of detail, obscures the outlines of these controversies, which are simplified to the elitism of highfalutin planners versus the wishes (or indifference) of ‘ordinary people’. True, the redevelopment of partially bombed city centres such as Plymouth or Exeter was disastrous and the support of the new, combined with hostility to Victorian architecture and conservation, resulted in fearful acts of vandalism. This was not, though, entirely due to some kind of elitism on the part of the Atlee government and its henchmen, but is rather a story which has continued through to the present day. Writing in the Guardian in November 2007, Simon Jenkins celebrated the unlikely saving of St Pancras Hotel (in contrast to the Victorian Euston station, which was demolished) and pointed out that the same battle was now having to be fought over Smithfield market. And even though he cited Spitalfields as a success story for conservation, the reality is that a formerly interesting market has been decimated and partly replaced by yet another anonymous high street/outdoor mall-type development, complete with all the usual banal chain stores.
It was Lionel Esher who pointed out that the real failure of post-war planning was not the mismatch between elitism and the popular will, but the uneven contest between the local planning authorities and the private property developers, who were always one step ahead, picking up ‘plum sites on the cheap’. The developers gambled on population pressures ‘long before governments had finalised their regional plans … they picked up all the plums of urban renewal, leaving the local authorities to do the unremunerative chores’.2 Nor was it only the planners who wanted Victorian squalor swept away. Housing shortages were never resolved, but the extensive local authority housing projects – which continued under the Tories in the 1950s – constituted a major advance and were welcomed by tenants. Even tower blocks were initially popular, as the researchers Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius have exhaustively demonstrated in their monumental tome on the subject, Tower Block, published in 1994.
Kynaston is also mistaken in suggesting that the special experiences of women after the Second World War have never been addressed, as a number of feminist studies were written in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet this collective effort to puncture the many myths circulating about women’s experience in the second half of the century seems to have failed, for worn out stereotypes resurface. John Carey, for example, deduces from Kynaston that ‘most women did not have jobs’. This is simply not true. A desperate need for labour contradicted the assumption that married women would retire from the labour force after hostilities had ceased. The Royal Commission on Equal Pay, which reported in 1946, gave a very guarded welcome to the idea of married women working, and the economist Roy Harrod blurted out the underlying fear about equal pay when he stated that the most important thing was ‘to secure that motherhood as a vocation is not too unattractive compared with work in the professions, industry or trade’. There were efforts to foster the idea of ‘home making as a career’ across all classes. Yet many women, who had experienced radically different and more challenging kinds of employment during the war, now rejected the idea that marriage and career were alternatives. They wanted both. Conservative ideology persisted, but women did not go back to the home. The employment of married women, even if mostly in part-time work, continued to rise after the war, and certainly during the late 1940s there were voices that argued for an end to all laws and customs impeding women’s participation in the labour force. In 1946 an International Labour Organisation study reported: ‘A sound and scientific basis for the employment of women is being increasingly advocated as serving the cause of democracy and as promoting the general welfare’; and the Economic Survey for 1947 initiated a campaign for the recruitment of women to the labour force, although in restricted terms:
Women are urgently needed in many factories, in many services and in agriculture … [the Government] was not asking women to do jobs usually done by men, as had been the case during the war … the labour shortage was temporary and women were being asked to take a job only for whatever length of time they could spare, whether full time or part time.3
This is one interesting aspect of the immediate post-war years, that conservative attitudes and ideologies continued under their own momentum, yet to some extent were parting company with economic trends.
The most interesting aspect, therefore, of the success of Austerity Britain is the question raised by Matthew Norman: why now? At first I attributed this enthusiasm to a prevailing cultural mood in which anything even faintly resembling socialist reform, the state and the command economy is assumed to be at best mistaken, at worst sinister. But the first programme in Andrew Marr’s television series, which presented a more nuanced and largely positive picture of the late 1940s, was also well received. The praise heaped on Kynaston’s vision of a surly, fuck-off populace uninterested in having its cultural or any other sights raised beyond material comfort nevertheless depressed me, yet I would interpret the post-war mood rather differently. It is hardly surprising that the British, exhausted by six years of war, having achieved victory against the odds, and then finding themselves faced with smaller rations, appalling weather, in hock to the United States, their empire disappearing and their role in the world diminished, should have reacted with sullen apathy: ‘We won the war – why is everything so much worse?’ No wonder the mood was mean-spirited and carping and the cultural climate so downbeat. Yet Kynaston does seem to overstate the popular resentment (and is, in any case, not the first to comment on it4). Until 1950 the Labour party had not suffered a by-election defeat in five years (and there were more of them at that time as the male lifespan was shorter – more MPs died in harness than is the case today), and Donald Thomas speculates that it was not austerity and rationing but the Sidney Stanley corruption scandal (Stanley was a rather shady businessman who bribed or attempted to bribe a government minister) that turned the tide.5 Kynaston also, rather strangely, given his desire to speak for ordinary people, which must mean primarily working-class people, downplays the strength and significance of the ferocious opposition by sections of the middle-class to the Atlee reforms, to which the even then largely right-wing press added powerful ammunition, waging continual ideological campaigns against nationalisations, petty bureaucracy and rationing.
This was a period of recovery after the massive trauma of war; an aftermath, a psychic hangover. The bloody mindedness of postwar Britons could be seen as a way of getting through the bitter disappointment that was this society in the first years of peace, when many people did not yet feel the benefits of the policies brought in by the Labour government.
There was another, more intimate, cause for the sour mood. Reviewers of Austerity Britain seemed fascinated by the sexual repression expressed by Mass Observation interviewees and diarists, and the situations in which so many found themselves after the cessation of hostilities must have contributed to the wider disillusionment. Victorian puritanism and hypocrisy had lingered on right through the 1930s; but during the war this changed abruptly. Love affairs, adultery and homosexuality became briefly more acceptable because lovers might be killed tomorrow or never meet again; there were more opportunities for forbidden and fleeting loves to flourish.6 With the coming of peace, husbands returned home, families had to be put together again, ‘living in sin’ or having a child out of wedlock became unthinkable once more, there was soon a massive witch-hunt against homosexuals, and an attempt was made to put the lid on promiscuity, divorce and venereal disease and to return to pre-war morality. Even if psychoanalysis was influential at this time – and it was – and led to the promotion of the view that men and women should be helped to enjoy more fulfilling erotic lives, this was to be strictly within the confines of marriage; the Freudians and Kleinians were every bit as down on queers as the police, even if their methods were not quite so draconian (and they also deplored working mothers).
This sense of erotic frustration and doom was played out in the art, literature and film of the period. John Piper painted dark, gothic landscapes; the verse plays of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry were in vogue; and although ‘Scandinavian’ soon became code in interior decoration for modern furniture with spare lines, there was also the fashion for Regency wallpaper and Victorian tat, while in fashion the New Look offered a wholesale return to the Belle Époque.
But it was in films that the dark atmosphere found its truest expression. Needless to say many of these were comedies, from the Ealing stable in particular. And while Passport to Pimlico was in part an attack on rationing, petty regulations and controls, the earlier Hue and Cry, released in 1946 as one of the earliest of the Ealing productions, was a stirring account of how a group of kids running free through the lavishly photographed bomb sites of the capital, managed to foil a gang of thieves. This was the optimistic view of austerity Britain, with its belief in the collective resourcefulness and responsibility of the rising generation and with footage of the new buildings rising out of the ruins of the old.
Still, the dominant mood captured on celluloid was gothic. In American cinema, film noir was in the ascendancy, a strange amalgam of thriller, melodrama and the expressionism directors such as Fritz Lang had brought with them from Germany. Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) was one of the few set in an atmospheric London and explored a gloomy underworld of wrestling promoters and drinking clubs. Robert Hamer’s films, The Long Memory (1952) and Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) (the latter set in the Victorian period, but still essentially noir), similarly touched on ideas of thwarted love, betrayal and men on the run, while They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) was a tale of gangsterism that also drew a savage picture of masculine attitudes to women. The theme was typically the ‘little’ man, lost in the urban labyrinth, betrayed and betraying, crushed by the cruel anonymity of the metropolis. Behind this theme, though, doomed romance perhaps best expressed the great post-war disappointment: no more snatched affairs, just family life once more and for women, even if they had jobs, a return to housework unshared by husbands.
It is always tempting to look back on the past as a way of persuading ourselves that we are different. The vision of a put-upon nation harried by controls and grandiose plans may resonate less today when the contemporary world is so utterly different from the late 1940s, so far as daily life is concerned. We live in an ultra-consumerist society, whereas the immediate post-war past was dominated by extreme shortages. Old political allegiances have weakened. Even how to vote is for many a consumer choice, based on short-term considerations rather than long-term loyalty to a set of ideas. Yet ‘choice’, so often promoted as the touchstone of the good life, can lead to disorientation and be as depressing, if there is too much of it, as too little, especially when the choices are between goods that are essentially the same, as Barry Schwartz so clearly demonstrated in The Paradox of Choice.
Kynaston’s negative assessment of those short yet endless years of austerity did not meet with universal agreement. John Carey’s populism and dislike of ‘elitism’ – elitism in this case being the Fabian paternalism of planners who thought they knew best – leads him optimistically to think that ‘we are infinitely more tolerant than our counterparts 50 years back’, and that we have been saved by prosperity (again, writing before the banks crashed). By contrast, Christopher Hudson, writing in the Daily Mail (12 May 2007), believed that
despite the devastation, Britain was in many ways more blessed back then … for all the poverty and hardship people behaved towards each other with greater civility than they do today … queues were orderly … children did not insult their elders, and were liable to be ticked off in the streets by strangers if they misbehaved – but they could walk to school in safety. There was a pride in British history …
Whether or not such different assessments reflect the possibly differing political positions of the writers, they do illustrate a contemporary ambivalence towards austerity. The extent of the housing crisis has begun to force a rethink about home ownership, reckless mortgage lending and public sector housing. The growing awareness of the dangers of climate change, the fragile state of the environment and the growing inequalities in society – for example, the widening gap between rich and poor – has led to a reappraisal of the consumer society. But the revolt against consumerism has also an aesthetic and moral dimension and is not wholly pragmatic. The occasion of Matthew Norman’s comments quoted at the beginning of this article was his visit to a new kind of restaurant. He tells us:
As for the restaurant industry, though it would be stretching things to discern a towering tide of austerity, it becomes clearer by the week that the opulence and pretension of recent years is yielding to simplicity … Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay have opened pubs serving ultra-traditional food … and the march of cheap and previously dishonoured cuts of meat … seems irresistible.
He goes on to describe a new City of London eatery, ‘the genteel shabbiness of the room … cheap repro antique light fittings, yellow ceiling adorned with the odd bit of cornicing … and a succession of reasonably priced, splendidly simple and beautifully cooked dishes’, and concludes:
This wasn’t a meal notable for austerity. But in spirit … it paid tribute to a time long before truffle oil, aubergine caviar and the substitution of gravy with jus and spoke eloquently for a new generation of cooks who’ve bleeding had it with the … Franco-eclectic poncery that has plagued restaurant food for so long. Had he saved up the five years’ worth of ration books for such a lunch, dear old Clement Atlee would have loved it, and higher praise than that there cannot be.
And the fact is that today many people have ‘bleeding had it’ with the ever more bewildering varieties of choice in a world from which a wider secular social morality has been leached away.
Austerity, then, becomes a more bracing, more purposeful stance to life, and one in which objects are to be used and cared for rather than just consumed and thrown away. A Guardian journalist recently described how her father had always insisted on turning one light off before turning another on, had advocated unheated bedrooms and saved everything possible for re-use. She had judged this mean and penny-pinching until taken to task by a friend who said that, on the contrary, he was an environmental hero and genius of conservation before his time. Another columnist in the same paper wrote of her mother’s wonderful fry-ups made from scraps of leftover food, from which she aimed to get at least one free meal a week. Meanwhile, in the Daily Mail, an unnamed writer offered a recipe for rabbit broth and added:
These economies had nothing to do with wartime shortages, it was the way we lived then. Not so much to do with poverty either. My mother spent her early years as a maid of all work in some of the biggest industrial barons’ mansions in south Yorkshire, and all her stories were of thrift verging on stinginess. Stale bread could be made into rusks for the nursery, or rubbed through a sieve to make breadcrumbs for the mackerel au gratin. There wasn’t a war on; it was just that her employers believed that if you looked after the pounds, the pennies will be looked after by the staff.
Meanwhile, Lydia Slater in the Evening Standard (9 November 2007) reported the rise of the new ‘unlikely frugalettes’ – fashion models and TV stars who practise austerity mode by seeking out cheap haircuts and buying second-hand clothes.
Such evidence is anecdotal, yet the reappearance of string bags, composting and the vogue for used clothes (although that is not in itself so recent) suggests that the ‘Austerity Period’ still has a deep appeal. This has little to do with the achievements or failures of a government in the late 1940s that thought of itself as socialist, but which has since been condemned both as too timid and as too ‘statist’. The fascination of the period may reside rather in its being so contradictory: it was progressive and conservative, depressing and heroic. And its inconsistencies resulted in an atmosphere compellingly memorialised in the films produced at the time by the ailing British film industry.
It is tempting to enjoy the austerity years as a nostalgic trip down memory lane to smile at the horrors of tinned whale and spam fritters avoided, but perhaps the threat of climate change will forge a different, more generous reappraisal. Then perhaps it will be possible better to understand the generation of intellectual planners who insisted on deferred gratification for the sake of the general good and to bring the country back from bankruptcy, and that choice and consumption are more distractions than solutions. Unlike the 2010 Coalition government, the post-war Labour government, in a far worse economic position than today, used austerity to invest and expand the welfare state and to regrow the economy, not to privatise and destroy it. Whatever its faults and failures, it had hope in the future. That is the paradox of austerity: that it brought hope out of deprivation. Something that cannot be said today.
Figure 7: Charity shops reinvent themselves as fashion boutiques to entice the fashion ‘frugalettes’.