A Winter Landscape
The winter of 1947 has gone down in history and personal memory as a time of almost unendurable bleakness. For three months, Britain seemed more like one of the grimmer scenes in a medieval Flemish painting. It was not only the shortages of almost everything in the shops, and what was described as a virtual peasant diet, heavily based on potatoes and bread – though by then even the bread had now been rationed, and potatoes ran short. It was not only the huge state bureaucracy still interfering in so much daily life, controlling everything from how long you could turn your heater on, to what plays you could see and whether or not you could leave the country. It was not the 25,000 regulations and orders never seen in peacetime before, administered by a government which though anti-Communist, still urged people to learn from the ‘colossal’ industrial achievements of Soviet Communism. It was not the smashed and broken homes. It was not even all those war dead – for this war had involved far fewer soldiers than the First World War, and far fewer dead – 256,000 as against nearly a million, as well as the 60,000 British civilians who had died in air-raids. Relief at the final victory was still strong across the country, and pride in Britain’s part in it. No, the crisis of 1947 was set off by that most humdrum of British complaints – the weather.
At the end of January with an efficiency the Red Army could not have mustered, a great freeze had swept across from Siberia and covered the country in thick snow, a bitter cold which brought the exhausted British very nearly to their knobbly, ill-clad knees. The country still ran on coal. But at the pits, the great piles of coal froze solid and could not be moved. The winding-gears ceased to function. Drifting snow blocked roads and closed the rail lines. At the power stations, the remaining coal stocks ran swiftly down until, one by one, power stations began to close. Lights flickered off. Men dug through snowdrifts, tramping for miles to find food to carry back to their neighbours and homes. Cars were marooned on exposed roads. With shortages of power, factories across the South and Midlands of England had to stop work and within a week two million people were idle. Attlee suspended that still unusual middle-class diversion, television. Much worse, electric fires were banned for three hours each morning and two each afternoon. Everywhere, people shivered, wrapped in blankets in front of barely smoking coal fires, or those rationed electric ones. Around London, commuters were completely unable to reach the capital. Scotland was cut off from the rest of the country. Then things deteriorated further. It was the coldest February for 300 years. Another half million people had to stop work. One young office worker from Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt, recorded herself sitting in her house, the water in washbasins frozen, looking out at the ice-blue sky: ‘I am wearing thick woollen vest, rubber roll-on, wool panties, stockings, thick long-sleeved wool sweater, slacks, jacket, scarf and two pairs of woollen socks – I am just about comfortable.’ The sun was so little seen that when it came out briefly, a man rushed to photograph the reassuring sight for the newspapers. Green vegetables ran out in the shops. ‘CHRIST ITS BLEEDING COLD’ howled the future novelist Kingsley Amis to the poet Philip Larkin, from his Oxford student rooms.
After a short thaw March had brought terrible storms and snowdrifts thirty feet high. People talked about snowflakes the size of five-shilling coins. There were ice-floes off the East Anglian coast. Three hundred main roads were unusable. Still to come were the worst floods in memory, cutting off towns, inundating huge areas of low-lying England, and destroying the crops in the fields. On the hills the sheep were dying. Their carcasses would be piled into pyres, causing foul-smelling smoke to hang over rural Wales, a precursor to the foot-and-mouth and BSE episodes of later decades. It was, in short, about as near as this country has been to experiencing at first hand a truly Siberian winter, though without the sturdy boots, furs and vodka that help the Russians get through. It would be followed by the real political storm – the run on the pound made inevitable by the Keynes deal in Washington, and a balance of payments crisis. As people were digging out frozen vegetables from fields and despairing of the empty shops, the Treasury was finally running out of dollars to buy help from overseas. This was the moment when the optimism of 1945 shivered and died among many voters.
Summer did come, as summer does, and it was a good summer. The sun shone, cricketers blazed away at Lords and a nation sweltered. Economically, though, Hugh Dalton’s year of misery continued. The clauses negotiated by Keynes insisting that sterling should become freely convertible to American dollars were triggered, and the inevitable happened. The world rushed to change pounds into greenbacks, and such was the outflow that convertibility had to be hurriedly stopped. The economy was simply too weak – a message that echoed round continental Europe’s finance ministries too. British housewives might have been more worried still had they known of a secret plan during the sterling crisis drawn up by the civil servant Otto Clarke (father of the later New Labour minister Charles Clarke). With Britain running out of dollars to buy food from America, Clarke drew up preparations for a ‘famine food programme’, including taking children out of school to help in the fields. It never came to that but the rationing of bread, which had not been necessary during the war was now in place. There was not enough cash left to buy wheat supplies from the United States, yet British ministers had to ensure there was no actual famine in other parts of the world for which they were responsible, including India and defeated Germany.
The answer, bread rationing at home, was hugely unpopular and long remembered. Along with the sterling crisis and the subsequent devaluation of 1949, a further but necessary humiliation, it gave Churchill’s Tories the essential ammunition they needed to turn Attlee out. Their manifesto would later remind voters that ‘In 1945, the Socialists promised that their methods of planning and nationalization would make the people of Britain masters of their economic destiny. Nothing could be more untrue. Every forecast has proved grossly over-optimistic. Every crisis has caught them unawares. The Fuel Crisis cost the country £200 millions and the Convertibility Crisis as much.’
The next year, though, the government did try to cheer the country up, holding the 1948 London Olympics. Cost over-runs were trivial. Security was barely an issue. The games were a triumph of determination in a war-scarred, rubble-strewn city, during which the athletes were put up in old army camps and hospitals, and the Union Jack was missing for the opening parade. And though the medal toll for British competitors was very meagre, holding the games was a genuine sign that Britain was back. For all its weaknesses, this was still a country that could organize itself pretty well.