Under the Skin: Belief
Below the skin, though, were the British of the forties fundamentally different to the British of today? This was then a religious society, though less so than in any previous time. In surveys people overwhelmingly described themselves as Christian, but communal worship and knowledge of the Bible was falling away. The Church of England saw one of the sharpest declines in membership in the decade from 1935 to the end of the war, losing half a million communicants, down to just under three million. (Another half million would be lost by 1970 and more than a million by 1990.) The Roman Catholics rose in numbers after the war, perhaps because of Polish, Irish and other European immigration, while the Presbyterians and the smaller churches also suffered decline. Though the first mosque in Britain had been built in Woking, Surrey as early as 1889, there were few Muslims or Hindus. North of the border, the Church of Scotland, which had only finally won full independence from the British State in 1921, was more popular than the English established church, and continued to grow until the early sixties. In the absence of a Scottish parliament, debates at the Kirk’s ruling body, the General Assembly, had an authority and produced a level of newspaper interest unthinkable today. Scotland’s higher religiosity – for the Catholics were strongly represented too – had its darker side in the persistence of Orange marches, bigotry and mutual suspicion on a scale which almost matched that of Northern Ireland. To the visitor, Britain would have seemed a very obviously Christian nation, with its State and Royal ceremonies, its famous and often controversial bishops, its religious broadcasting and above all its spires and towers in every suburb and village. The churches below those spires were at least thronged for marriages, funerals and the special services such as Christmas and Easter. Girls and boys were likelier to be in the Christian Scouts or Guides; schools had prayers at morning assembly; Sunday schools were busy; the Army had its Sunday parade.
Some of the most eloquent cultural moments in the life of post-war Britain had religious themes, from the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, with its tapestries by Graham Sutherland, to the popularity of Benjamin Britten’s wartime choral work A Ceremony of Carols. Perhaps Britain’s best-loved serious painter was Stanley Spencer, who was turning out work in the forties and fifties based on his own idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical events – the Resurrection, Christ calling the Apostles, the Crucifixion. John Piper was famous for his watercolours and etchings of medieval churches; John Betjeman celebrated later, Victorian ones. Post-war Britain’s major poet, the American-born T.S. Eliot, was an outspoken adherent of the Church of England. His last major book of poetry, Four Quartets, is suffused with English religious atmosphere, while in his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral he addressed an iconic moment in English ecclesiastical history. He would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. C.S. Lewis had become a nationally known Christian broadcaster during the war, with his Screwtape Letters, and for children there was soon to be the religious allegory of the Narnia books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared in 1950. It could fairly be said that in this period, there still existed an Anglican sensibility, a particularly English, sometimes grave, sometimes playful, Christianity, with its own art and thought. It may have been wispy and self-conscious but it was also alive and argumentative, as it is not today. It was of course a limited and elite movement. Already, saucy revelations in the Sunday papers were where most people turned when they thought of immorality, not to sermons.
Were the British of the forties any more moral, or at any rate any more law-abiding, than the modern British? This is one of the hardest questions to answer. Conventions and temptations were just so different. On the surface, it was certainly a more discreet, dignified and rule-bound society. Divorce might have been becoming more widespread, but it was still a matter for embarrassment, even shame. Back in the early thirties, the average number of divorce petitions filed was below 4,800 a year. During the war, it jumped to 16,000. By 1951, with easier divorce laws, it was more than 38,000. In the forties and fifties, it still carried a strong stigma, across classes and reaching to the highest. As late as 1955, when Princess Margaret wanted to marry Group Captain Peter Townshend, the innocent party in a divorce case, a Tory cabinet minister, Lord Salisbury, warned that he would have to resign from the government if it allowed such a flagrant breach of Anglican principles. Divorced men and women were not welcome at Court. Homosexuality was illegal and vigorously prosecuted. Pornography was, for most people, almost unknown – ‘dirty books’ were on sale in a very few bookshops but ‘smut’ was still considered something mostly available for foreigners.
The censorship of the theatre, dating back to Walpole’s time, was taken extremely seriously. Playwrights had to submit their plays to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at St James’s Palace, which would strike out double entendre or vulgar language. John Osborne had a letter back about his play The Entertainer in March 1957, with sixteen alterations, such as ‘Page 6, alter “turds”. Page 9, alter “camp”…The little song entitled, “The old church bells won’t ring tonight ’cos the Vicar’s got the clappers”. Substitute: “The Vicar’s dropped a clanger”.’ Yet behind the firewall of censorship and law, there is plenty of evidence of a country just as sex-obsessed as it is now, and probably always was. The scatological outpouring in private letters and diaries is amazing, presumably the flip-side of public discretion. The war had involved years of disruption to family life, broken relationships, a lot of quiet domestic adultery, and a boom in homosexual activity, as tens of thousands of young, frustrated servicemen were let loose in darkened cities. One thing which would shock many people now, if they could be transported back, was the huge number of prostitutes working openly on the streets in the ‘red light’ areas of the cities, around Manchester city centre, Edgbaston in Birmingham and Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. In London, the so-called Hyde Park Rangers and Piccadilly Commandos were gangs of prostitutes working almost unmolested by the police and earning small fortunes from horny soldiers.
Street crime had boomed particularly in London and in the words of one of the capital’s historians by 1945 ‘the country was awash with guns, illegally sold by American servicemen for £25 for a handgun, or brought back by British servicemen from abroad’. Over the war years, though the population of London had dropped by some two million, the number of serious offences per head had doubled. The immediate post-war years saw real problems, partly because of the size of the black market, armed racketeers, and the continued presence of deserters, of whom many thousands were hiding out, including an estimated 19,000 from the US Army. Because of frustration at the slow pace of demobilization, desertions increased after hostilities ceased. Films of the time sometimes reveal a semi-anarchic wilderness territory of bombed-out homes and urban wasteland, which may be policed by gangs. Memoirs confirm that many children and adolescents, lacking parents or simply profiting from the shaky administration of a great city returning to life, more or less ran wild.
Yet to get the tone of the times right, it is important not to forget that, among the rebellions against rationing and official incompetence, Britain was basically law-abiding. In a country awash with cheap handguns, struggling with profound resentments about shortages and a thriving black market, and still containing many deserters on the run, by virtually every count available, serious crime then fell. The guns did not lead to spates of shootings. Croydon did not become Chicago. Armed crime in London involving guns fell from a high of forty-six incidents in 1947 to just four cases in 1954. The number of people sentenced to prison fell by 3,000 between 1948 and 1950. The murder rate fell. Indeed, overall serious crime fell by nearly 5 per cent per head of population in the five years after the war. One historian of British crime concludes: ‘Perhaps the most peaceful single year was 1951, with a low level of crime, especially violent crime, following a brief increase in bad behaviour following the war.’ Bearing out the tricksiness of all statistics, this year is cited by others as a post-war crime peak, yet the general picture holds up. People respected the police and came across serious crime rarely. The various scares about violent racketeers in London, or lawless youths, were mostly confined to the papers. Foreign observers talked about the orderly, calm, law-abiding nature of British society as something rare in Europe or around the world. All of this matters enormously to Britain’s self-image now, since commentators and politicians often point to the post-war era as a time of Edenic peace and order, far removed from the world of machine-gun-toting police and drug gangs. Why was Britain so well-mannered and lawful?
Some argue that tougher penalties are the most obvious reason. It is true that from 1946 until the year hanging ended, 1964 (though it was legally abolished two years later), some 200 murderers were executed. Other grim punishments, notably flogging, were on the wane; they were ordered infrequently in the fifties. The last judicial birching was approved by the Conservative Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, as late as 1962, though the practice continued in the Isle of Man and very occasionally in Scotland. Yet violent crime was on the increase again well before hanging was abolished. Its abolition cannot be the only reason. One obvious factor is that so many young men, the people who commit most crimes, were in the Armed Forces, latterly doing National Service. This did not simply take people off the streets. It provided discipline and the habit of obeying – and issuing – orders. Two generations of boys were marched off for short haircuts and taught to polish their shoes by fathers who had been in the services. Then there was the relative lack of opportunity. A society in which people barely have enough to eat and possess few movable goods is rather less prone to street crime than one in which every teenager totes an expensive mobile phone, and every urban street is lined with parked cars. Finally, not to be underestimated simply because it cannot be measured, there was the spirit of the times. The war had shaken everyone’s sense of security – not just serving troops but the bombed and the evacuated and the bereaved as well. The Cold War would not diminish an underlying sense that life had become fragile. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there was a profound post-war turn towards hearth and home and a yearning for security, order, predictability – in the street, in the neighbourhood, if it could not be there in the wider world.
These then, in all their variety, patriotism and hope, were the people whose fate was now in the hands of Clement Attlee and his ministers. We have looked at the difficulties facing the country and at the confused hopes of the new government. We know that the dream of a New Jerusalem, a socialist commonwealth, was never realized and that some historians see the 1945 government as a wasted chance. It is time now to look at what this government actually did.