The Old Order
But not quite yet. The ruling class was still the ruling class. Despite the variety of the 1945 cabinet, Britain in the forties and fifties was a society run mostly by cliques and groups of friends who had first met at public schools and Oxbridge. Public school education remained the key for anyone hoping to make a career in the City, the Civil Service or the higher echelons of the Army. Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester might educate only some 5 per cent of the population, but they still provided the majority of political leaders, including many of Labour’s post-war cabinet. Parliamentary exchanges of the period are full of in-jokes about who was a Wykehamist and who an Etonian. Briefly, it had seemed such schools would not even survive the war: boarding schools had been in enough of a financial crisis for some to face closure through bankruptcy. Churchill’s own Harrow was one, along with Marlborough and Lancing, though all struggled on. More generally there was a belief that public schools had contributed to failures of leadership in the thirties and right up to the early defeats of the war. When the Tory minister R.A. Butler took on the job of education reform during the war, he contemplated abolishing them and folding them all into a single state school system. Had that happened, post-war Britain would have been a very different country. But Butler, intimidated by Churchill, backed off. A watered-down scheme would have seen Eton and the rest obliged to take working-class and middle-class children, paid for by the local authorities, but this quickly fizzled out too. The public schools stayed. Attlee, devoted to his old school, had no appetite for abolition. Grammar schools were seen as a way of getting bright working-class or middle-class children to Oxbridge, and a few other universities, so that they could buttress the ruling cliques. One civil servant described the official view as being that children were divided into three kinds: ‘It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’
The problem for the old ruling order was whether the arrival of a socialist government was a brief and unwelcome interruption, which could be sat out, or whether it was the beginning of a calm but implacable revolution. The immediate post-war period with its very high taxation was a final blow for many landowners. Great country houses like Knole and Stourhead had to be passed over to the National Trust. It was hardly a revolutionary seizure of estates, yet to some it felt that way. Tradition was being nationalized, with barely a thank-you. In 1947 the magazine Country Life protested bitterly that the aristocratic families had been responsible for civilization in Britain: ‘It has been one of the services of those currently termed the privileged class, to whom, with strange absence of elementary good manners, it is the fashion not to say so much as a thank you when appropriating that which they have contributed to England.’ Evelyn Waugh, an arriviste rather than a proper toff, sitting in his fine house in the Gloucestershire village of Stinchcombe, struggled with the dilemma. In November 1946 he considered fleeing England for Ireland (many richer people did leave Britain in the post-war years, though more often for Australia, Africa or America). Why go? Waugh asked himself. ‘The certainty that England as a great power is done for, that the loss of possessions [he is talking of the colonies], the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty…this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive.’
A day later, however, he was having second thoughts. ‘What is there to worry me here in Stinchcombe? I have a beautiful house furnished exactly to my taste; servants enough, wine in the cellar. The villagers are friendly and respectful; neighbours leave me alone. I send my children to the schools I please. Apart from taxation and rationing, government interference is negligible.’ Yet the world felt as if it was changing somehow. Why, he wonders, is he not at ease? Why does he smell ‘the reek of the Displaced Persons Camp’? Many more felt just the same; Noël Coward said immediately after Labour’s 1945 win, ‘I always felt that England would be bloody uncomfortable in the immediate post-war period, and it is now almost a certainty.’ These shivery intimations of change would have some substance, though it would happen more slowly and have little to do with Attlee or Bevan. The old British class system, though it retained a medieval, timeless air, much exploited by novelists, depended in practical terms on the Empire and a global authority Britain was just about to lose. ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ would soon become shorthand for the returnees from Malaya or Rhodesia. A pervasive air of grievance and abandonment would hang about the right of British politics for decades.
Meanwhile, old society events like the ‘Varsity’ rugby match, the Boat Race, the Henley Regatta and Ascot, quickly returned after the war and indeed reached the height of their popularity. Young Conservative dances were where the better-off went to find partners. The most famous actors and actresses were able to carry on a lavish lifestyle, hidden from the taxman. London clubland carried on almost as in the twenties. The capital’s grandest restaurants, some which are still going, such as the Savoy Grill and the Ivy, were again crowded with peers, theatrical impresarios, exiled royalty and visiting American movie stars. In the upper-class diaries of the day there are complaints about a rising tide of ‘common’ behaviour, the end of good taste and the regrettable influence of Americans and Jews.
Under Attlee, Britain remained a country of private clubs and cliques, ancient or ancient-seeming privileges, rituals and hierarchies. In the workplace, there was a return to something like the relationships of pre-war times, with employers’ organizations assuming their old authority and influence, at least some of the time, in Whitehall. Inside the new nationalized industries the same sort of people continued to manage and the same ‘us and them’ relationships reasserted themselves remarkably easily. In the City, venerable, commanding merchant bankers with famous names would be treated like little gods; stiff collars, top hats and the uniforms of the medieval livery companies were still seen, even among the grey ruins of post-Blitz London; younger bankers and accountants deferred utterly to their elders. Newspaper owners would sweep up to their offices in chauffeured Rolls-Royce cars and be met by saluting doormen. The Times was soon full of advertisements for maids and other servants. Lessons in speaking ‘the King’s English’ were given to aspiring actors and broadcasters; much debate was had about the proper way to pour tea, refer to the lavatory and lay the table. Physicians in hospitals swept into the wards, followed by trains of awed, indeed frightened, junior doctors. At Oxford colleges, formal dinners were compulsory, as was full academic dress, and the tenured professors hobbled round their quads as if little had changed since Edwardian times. All of this was considered somehow the essence of Britain, or at least of England.