The Land of Lost Content
Between the fall of old Clem Attlee’s Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky, wisecracking Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe a golden-tinted era of lost content. To others they were the grey, conformist, ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Tory misrule. Either way, this part of our past was truly a different country. Much of it has disappeared. You might climb into your Austin Sheerline for a visit to the Midland Bank, stopping off at a Lyons to read your News Chronicle or Picture Post while smoking a Capstan, looking forward to a weekend visit to the Speedway by tram. It was possible to imagine a different way of being British. To leaf through newspapers and magazines of the time is to glimpse just how very different the future might have been. There are the unfamiliar all-British cars with their bulky, rather innocent styling – Jowett Cars of Idle, Bradford, advertise their Javelins and Jupiters; or you could be ‘well-off in a Wolseley’. There is no sign that, just as the great age of the car begins, Britain’s sprawling independent car industry is about to be wiped out. Nor, for that matter, that the ‘freedom of the road’ will soon be replaced by a maze of new regulations, fines and documents; there are no motorways, no out of town speed limits. There are drawings of the coming passenger heliports.
People still look different. Few schoolboys are without a cap and shorts. Caught breaking windows or lying, they might be solemnly caned by their fathers. Young girls have home-made smocks and, it is earnestly hoped, have never heard of sexual intercourse. Every woman seems to be a housewife; corsets and hats are worn and trousers, hardly ever. Among men, a silky moustache is regarded as extremely exciting to women, collars are bought separately from shirts and the smell of pipe-tobacco lingers on flannel.
Above all Britain is still a military nation, imaginatively gripped by the Second World War, whose generals are famous public figures and whose new jet-bombers provoke gasps of pride. Military uniforms, which would be worn ironically by sixties hippies, were much more common on the streets. National Service had been introduced in 1947 to replace wartime conscription and began properly two years later. It would last until 1963. More than two million young British men entered the forces, most of them the Army. It brought all classes together at a young and vulnerable age, subjecting them to strict discipline, a certain amount of practical education, often to privation, and sometimes to real danger. Teenagers were introduced to drill, cropped haircuts, heavy boots and endless polishing, creasing and blancoing of their kit. In due course some would fight for Britain in the Far East, in Palestine or Egypt, and in Africa. Most would spend a year or two in huge military camps in Britain or Germany, going quietly mad with boredom. Some died. An estimated 395 conscripts were killed in action in the fifty-plus engagements overseas during National Service, while a couple of dozen are said to have been killed in secret experiments using chemical weapons at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Others were used as human guinea pigs in British atomic bomb tests and some killed themselves, as they might have done anyway. National Service mingled and disciplined much of a generation of post-war British manhood and helped therefore to set the tone of the times. Some of the anti-authority anger and sarcasm in the culture of the time derived directly or indirectly from National Service but so did the civilian habits of polishing, dressing smartly and conforming to authority in millions of homes. In general, it probably kept some of the atmosphere of the forties alive for a decade longer than might have been expected.
In other countries – Germany, France, Russia or Japan – the trauma and devastation of the Forties was still plain everywhere. In Britain, the last prisoners of war were being sent home. Bomb-sites were being filled in and functional, unromantic buildings were taking their place, but the lessons of the war were still being unpicked. People today who were children then recall, inevitably, the fifties as the normal time – the way we were and by implication always had been. Yet the urge for domestic tranquillity, with women at home, making jam and knitting, while men worked orderly and limited hours, was a conscious response to the pain and uncertainty of 1939-45 and the continued fears of nuclear war. Then, it felt new; to be at home and quiet was a kind of liberation. For the middle classes, there was also the memory of the pre-war years as a time of order. The return of Winston Churchill in 1951 added to the impression Britain really could return to hierarchies vaguely recalled from before the war. By the end of this period, in 1963, there were still nearly a quarter of a million people in ‘domestic service’ – maids, housekeepers, valets – and more than six hundred full-time butlers. Britain was still graced with thirty-one Dukes, thirty-eight Marquesses and a mere 204 Earls. Many private companies had an almost military feel at the top, with an officer class of gents and middle-ranking NCO types below them. Outside work the public was monitored by a self-confident officialdom, hospital consultants and terrifying matrons, bishops and park keepers, bus conductors and bicycling police officers whose authority was unconstrained by modern standards. Hanging, the physical punishment of young offenders, strong laws against abortion and homosexual behaviour by men – all these framed a system of control that was muttered against and often subverted, but through the early fifties little challenged. The country was mostly orderly. People were more or less obedient citizens and subjects, not picky consumers. Patriotism was proclaimed publicly, loudly and unselfconsciously, in a way that would quickly become hard to imagine.
In the mid-fifties, Britain is a worldwide player, connected and modern. Her major companies are global leaders in oil, tobacco, shipping and finance. The Empire is not yet quite gone, even if the new name of Commonwealth is around. Royal visits abroad, and delegations of exotic natives, feature heavily in news broadcasts and weekly magazines. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are promoted as places for holiday cruises or emigration – sunlit, rich and empty. Collectively, they are a British California, a new frontier. Commercial liners, their flags fluttering, are waiting at Southampton. This is not a country which is closed to foreign influence, far from it. But the influences seem as strong from Italy or Scandinavia as from America – coffee-bars, Danish design, scooters and something promoted as ‘Italian Welsh rarebit’ (later known as pizza) are all in evidence. The awesome power of American culture is growing all the time over the horizon. But for a few years the idea of a powerful, self-confident Britain independent of American culture seemed not only possible but likely. Per capita, after all, Britain was still the second-richest major country in the world.
In public a front of national confidence was kept up. After the 1953 Coronation of the new Queen, there was much talk, albeit slightly self-conscious, of the New Elizabethan Age, a reborn nation served by great composers, artists and scientists. Not all of this was false, even in retrospect. In Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Britain did have some world-class musical talents. W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot were among the great poets of the age. Then, at least, it looked to many as if the sculptor Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were world-class figures. Churchill may have been really too old to be Prime Minister during the first few years of the fifties, but he was undoubtedly one of the few great figures of the time, an ageing colossus whose books were pouring from the presses, stamping his version of history on the public mind. Along with another star author of the fifties, William Golding, he would be a Nobel Prize-winner. In popular culture, the steady rise of television brought, at first, a traditionalist English upper-crust view of the world to millions of homes. This was the age of ‘Andy Pandy’ and gardening tips, of Joyce Grenfell and Noël Coward. It was also the time of Roger Bannister and his four-minute mile; the conquest of Everest; triumphs in yachting and football; even in the world of adventure and sport, Britain was doing well. With Nobel Prize-winning science in physics and biology, there was no sign yet of the brain drain of scientists to the United States.
Knowing what we know now, there were signs of social change everywhere from the disaffected teenagers just beginning to be discussed, to the rise of Maltese, Italian and home-grown crime dynasties, and the first wide-eyed, optimistic Caribbean immigrants. There was also much boredom and frustration. Working-class Britain was getting richer, but still housed in dreadful old homes, excluded from higher education, unless part of a small and lucky elite, and deprived of any jobs but hard and boring ones. Eventually, the lid would blow off. Yet to be British was something to be proud of. Even the mild hooligan element was home-grown; the exotic and expensive costumes of the Teddy boys, with their velvet collars, long jackets and foppish waistcoats, were modelled on English Edwardian dress.