Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (12 page)

As in any general election, there was a patchwork of local colour. In Preston the young Tory candidate Julian Amery disconcertingly discovered in his canvassing that it was ‘quite common to find eleven or twelve people sleeping in a single room’. In Dundee one of the Labour Party’s leading left-wing theorists, John Strachey, made much of the fact that he was ‘Wing Commander Strachey’ and ensured that in his election address he was photographed in uniform. For another photo opportunity, Labour’s candidate in Oxford, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford), hired a pony and cart, installed his many children in the back and set out holding aloft the placard ‘A NON-STOP DRIVE FOR HOUSING’; unfortunately, the pony soon came to a halt and refused to be budged. In Grantham an Oxford chemistry undergraduate, Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher), spent the early weeks of her summer vacation supporting the Tory candidate, Squadron Leader Worth; she declared, in her capacity as a warm-up speaker at his meetings, that ‘it is the people of my generation who will bear the brunt of the change from the trials of the past into calmer channels’ and insisted that ‘just punishment must be meted out’ to the defeated German enemy. In Kettering the writer Naomi Mitchison, whose husband Dick was standing for Labour, noted of the Tory candidate John Profumo that ‘when asked questions he runs away into the car’, but that ‘he has got the small shop-keepers frightened’. In Blackburn the young Barbara Castle, one of only 87 women candidates in the whole election (out of almost 1,700), told a packed, smoke-filled, almost entirely male hall to forget that she was a woman – ‘I’m no feminist. Just judge me as a socialist.’ In Plymouth the Labour candidate Michael Foot (still in his early 30s but, improbably enough, already a former editor of the
Evening Standard
) met his future wife Jill Craigie, who was making a documentary for Rank about the Abercrombie Plan. With complete confidence he told the electors, ‘We really can have the most beautiful city in the world.’ In feudal Northumberland, where Sir William Beveridge was standing for the Liberals at Berwick, the young Durham miner, Methodist preacher and tyro writer Sid Chaplin, on holiday in Alnwick, told a friend that ‘the shadow of Percy Hotspur still hovers over the town – the Politics of the Duke are the Politics of the Town – Transport House is a rash dream, the
Daily Herald
a red rag! and Communism a nasty nightmare.’ Accordingly, he added, ‘when the Duke spoke for the Tory nincompoop that settled the interloper Beveridge!’ And in Edmonton the Labour candidate, Evan Durbin, told the electors in his best LSE manner that ‘we shall only win the battles of peace against unemployment, poverty and ill-health if we bring to the service of our common purpose the latest inventions of economic and political thought’, while nevertheless emphasising at another meeting (held on Edmonton Green) that he ‘was not asking for the votes of the people because he, or his Party, could produce a new heaven and a new earth in one day or in the lifetime of one Parliament’.
^6.

As emblematic as anywhere of the bigger picture was Luton, home of the Vauxhall car plant. ‘Electors Losing Apathy: Political Warming Up Beginning in Luton: First Assembly Hall Meeting Draws 2,000 Audience’ ran the local headlines after the legendary journalist Hannen Swaffer had come to the town on 19 June to support the Labour candidate, William Warbey. ‘There is tremendous enthusiasm within the ranks of our Party, an enthusiasm such as we have never seen before,’ Warbey told those gathered. ‘I firmly believe that for the first time in history we are going to win Luton for Labour on July 5.’ As for Swaffer, he directly targeted Churchill: ‘You haven’t got a house? The reason is because there is no plan. He doesn’t understand plans – a magnificent man of war, but he doesn’t understand planning.’ A week later, Warbey’s star speaker was none other than Harold Laski, the Labour Party Chairman and LSE professor, who had been the object of sustained attack from Churchill and the Beaverbrook press following various indiscreet remarks. To a packed hall, requiring loudspeakers to be fitted outside for the overspill, Laski insisted, reasonably enough, that the election was not about him. Meanwhile, Warbey (in normal life a press officer living in Barnes) and his Tory opponent Dr Graham Brown were busy addressing an array of meetings, including lunchtime congregations of workers in canteens. Warbey visited the Vauxhall works, but it was in the heavy-machine shop of Hayward-Taylor &Co. that he got his most enthusiastic reception, as workers ‘banged out a welcome with hammers and other tools’.

On the campaign’s final day, 4 July, both candidates held meetings at the Assembly Hall. Brown went first, telling a women’s meeting that ‘the Socialists were making a determined attack to win Luton but, if elected, their programme would mean the end of a democratically-elected Parliament’, while to a later, more male gathering, Warbey summed up the Labour case:

The people wanted to make sure that the war in the Far East would be speedily and successfully concluded and that the men and women in the Services would return to a country in which we had a Government which knew how to plan for jobs for all; for the four million houses required; for all-round social security and for world peace. They were determined not to return to the bad old days of poverty and unemployment which was all they could get if Labour’s opponents were returned to power.
^7.

It was the case – plausible, direct, appealing – that in a pre-television age Labour candidates were making all over the country on that culminating, momentous, pregnant Wednesday evening.

Was it an enthused electorate? Certainly the legend of ‘the spirit of ’45’ would be a powerful one. ‘The packed eve-of-poll meeting in Canning Town Public Hall, scene of many famous trade union meetings, was tremendous,’ a Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn-Jones, recalled about his fight for Plaistow in London’s East End. ‘None of us who took part will ever forget it – the rows of intent, uplifted faces – dockers in their caps and white mufflers, the wives and children and old men and women who had been through so much.’ So, too, Castle, who remembered the 3,000 people at her eve-of-poll meeting in St George’s Hall, Blackburn, and ‘a sort of unbelievable buoyancy in the atmosphere, as though people who had had all the textile depression years, the men and women who had suffered in the forces and the women who had been working double shifts, making munitions and the rest of it, suddenly thought, “My heavens, we can win the peace for people like us.”’ Or take a non-politico memoirist, the writer Nina Bawden, who as a member of the Oxford University Labour Club went with others to campaign for Ian Mikardo in Reading; there they found themselves ‘caught up in an extraordinary atmosphere of political excitement that everyone seemed to share – soldiers on home leave, old men in pubs, tired women in bus queues’.
^8.

Clearly, then, there were pockets of high excitement, perhaps especially on the Labour side. But the contemporary evidence suggests an electorate that was essentially jaded and sceptical. ‘The war’s got us down, what with the bombing and the blackout, and the worrying about coupons and queues, women like me haven’t the mind to take to politics,’ a Fulham resident told Mass-Observation early in the campaign. ‘We want to be left alone for a bit – not worrying about speeches.’ A woman from Bayswater agreed: ‘I don’t take any interest in it. Not a scrap. To me it’s an awful lot of tommy rot, what with each party running the other down, and when they get in, they’ll be bosom pals.’ A Chelsea man was the most succinct: ‘Dunno who I’ll vote for. I don’t like politicians anyway – they’re all crooks.’ In mid-June an M-O survey of Londoners as a whole found that only one in seven was ‘happy or elated’, that a third ‘felt no different from during the war’, that a quarter ‘felt worried’, that 15 per cent ‘felt depressed’, and that several ‘simply said that there ought not to be an election yet’.

There is no doubt that the general interest did increase somewhat as the campaign went on – so that by the end only 24 per cent (as opposed to 57 per cent at the outset) admitted to taking no interest in the local outcome – but when George Orwell went looking in London in the closing weeks for signs of popular interest, he failed either to overhear ‘a spontaneous remark’ in the street or to see ‘a single person stopping to look at an election poster’. Edmund Wilson, meanwhile, escaped from his squalid hotel on the penultimate Sunday before polling and went to watch Laski do his stuff at Southbury Road School, Enfield, on behalf of the local Labour candidate. Wilson’s notebook jottings evoke a quintessentially English scene, in a quintessentially English suburb: ‘Enfield – little bay windows and brick doorways – gray sandy-looking sides of houses (called rough cast or sprinkled ash) – meeting out of doors in noon sun – yellow bricks, dim or neutral red tiles: pale faces, quiet people – blue and gray, occasionally khaki clothes – all in Sunday clothes, the men wearing coats.’ Even in Coventry, symbolic focus of post-war reconstruction hopes, there were few signs of election fever. Indeed, the only time the crowds there really came out, including no doubt many Labour voters, was to see Churchill – and thereby to be able to tell their grandchildren that they had done so.
^9.

‘This is not the election that is going to shake Tory England,’ declared the
Manchester Guardian
the day before polling. Few pundits disagreed, even though that same day the
News Chronicle
published a Gallup poll giving Labour a six-point lead – a poll which the paper found so hard to credit that it ran the story as a low-key, single-column one full of caveats. Next day, polling began at 7.00 a.m. (except in 24 northern and Scottish constituencies where ‘Wakes week’ fell on the 5th, necessitating a week’s, in one or two places a fortnight’s, delay), and a quarter of an hour later the Home Service’s
The Daily Dozen
gave all but the earliest voters a chance to exercise while they pondered their collective mind. We have a few glimpses from what turned out a pretty warm day. At Gladys Langford’s Highbury hotel, another resident, Mr White, was ‘furious’ at breakfast when he read that a youth had flung a lighted squib in Churchill’s face. ‘“
Very
reprehensible but NOT criminal,” said I while
he
was advocating lynching.’ In contrasting stages of life, H. G. Wells voted for the last time (unable to leave his car, he had to have the ballot paper brought to him for marking) while the five-year-old Patrick Stewart (many years later Captain Jean-Luc Picard in
Star Trek
) was briskly moved along by a policeman for marching with a placard and singing loudly outside a polling booth near his home in working-class Mirfield, West Yorkshire – a moment that turned him into a lifelong Labour supporter. For Durbin in Edmonton, standing in a truck all day touring the streets, these were tedious hours of what his wife remembered him calling ‘just cheering and wasting time’. Ernest Loftus, down in Tilbury, exercised his democratic right after tea: ‘I voted for the National Conservatives – that is Churchill. The least one could do for the man who has saved the country. His opponent here is a wretched Jew – the limit. Why can’t we find English Gentiles to represent us?’ Another diarist, St John, made no reference to voting but that afternoon travelled by train from Bristol to London, reaching Paddington by 6.20. ‘I had to wait until after 6.35 for a train to Shepherds Bush, which came in packed. It stopped at White City, where many passengers alighted, presumably to attend a dog-racing meeting.’

The polling stations closed at 9.00 p.m., just as
Northern Music-Hall
was finishing on the Home Service and a quarter of an hour before Alistair Cooke’s
American Commentary
. For those interested in the outcome, that left three weeks to wait before counting began, while the votes came in from the Forces abroad. ‘If I may put down my forecast of the result,’ the Tory-supporting Glasgow pattern-maker Colin Ferguson surmised, ‘it is this: – For the Govt. 360; Labour 220; the rest 60.’ Three days later, the
News of the World
’s jumping-the-gun headline was similarly sanguine: ‘Mr Churchill Has Secured His Working Majority’. But whatever the eventual result, there was satisfaction in a general election successfully conducted, the first for almost ten years. Or, as the Pathé News commentator sententiously boomed out the following week to the cinema-going millions, over anodyne shots of the backs of people in polling booths, ‘A good many European countries might learn a thing or two from the way a free people choose their government.’
¹⁰

As ever, life’s daily rhythms continued during those three suspenseful weeks before 26 July and the declarations in the constituencies. Royal Ascot may have resumed on Saturday the 7th for the first time since 1939 – ‘It was something of a shock,’ one report noted, ‘to discover cloth caps, Panamas, and grey slacks in the Royal Enclosure, where peace-time etiquette demanded more formal clothes’ – but for Nella Last in Barrow a week later it was an altogether more humdrum motif: ‘Queues were everywhere, for wedge-heeled shoes, pork-pies, fish, bread & cakes, tomatoes –& emergency ration-cards at the food office.’ Indeed, by this time such was the fed-upness with ever- lengthening queues that two determined London housewives (Irene Lovelock, married to a South London vicar, and Alfreda Landau, married to a Neasden rabbi) came together, following local campaigns, to form a British Housewives’ League. Still, later on in the day during which Last gazed glumly at the queues, there was a major boost for all. ‘The clocks are being put back tonight [marking the end of wartime double-summer time], and the lights are up!’ Judy Haines recorded. ‘I was very thrilled indeed to see Chingford lit up.’ No longer the groping along with a torch looking for steps and obstacles, no longer either the windows of buses and Tube trains mainly covered by gauze netting, with only a little diamond slit to see where one was.