Family Britain, 1951-1957 (111 page)

On the genuine grounds of ill-health, Eden resigned on Wednesday, 9 January. It is a moot point whether he really had a political future, but the striking fact was that, at the point of resignation, 56 per cent of the public were, according to Gallup, still satisfied with him. ‘Here’s a pretty mess, the Prime Minister resigning like that,’ a taxi-driver said to Nicolson, while it was ‘no shock’ to Nella Last, given how ‘his photos have shown him as a very sick man’. She expected Rab Butler to succeed Eden, but it turned out to be Harold Macmillan who had the greater confidence of his party, having generally displayed greater vigour – in both offensive and defensive mode – during the Suez affair. He also had, observed Panter-Downes soon afterwards, ‘an extremely original mind, a bitingly witty tongue, and a touch of the showman’, though Last’s husband refused to believe the news, saying ‘now what qualifications has
he
got?’ ‘THE QUEEN SENDS FOR MACMILLAN’ announced the
Evening Standard
in its ‘Final Night Extra’ for the 10th, as the political wheel took another spin, but tucked away on an inside page its ‘Newsbriefs’ column was a pleasing reminder of the permanence of the local and particular:

Bus fares
at Lowestoft are to be raised to offset petrol rises.

Final cost
of a health centre on the Harold Hill estate at Romford is fixed at £35,270.

15 budgerigars
offered to Friern Barnet Council have been refused. Reason: no aviary.

The Queen
has sent a donation towards a new church on a housing estate at King’s Lynn.

Police
have been asked by Harlow Council to watch for hooligans smashing street lamps.

Minimum charge
fixed by Bexley Council for circuses in parks there is £10 a day.

Complaints
of increased noise due to shunting at North Chingford are being investigated.

Elsewhere in Chingford, it was just another Thursday for Judy Haines, who made no mention of Macmillan in her diary. ‘Still pegging away at Pamela’s frock,’ she noted instead. ‘As my kitchen curtains are in ribbons, spared time to cut out material from new bought yesterday. I feel more confident with measuring since Dressmaking lessons.’18

Afterword

‘Good food and plenty of it, full employment, well furnished homes – today’s generation knows what Good Living really means!’ began an advertisement for New Zealand butter (‘the perfect butter with the natural golden colour’) in
Woman
in the first week of 1957.1 Food, jobs, homes: such was the holy trinity of the 1950s, a formula for Tory votes and a widespread, almost wholly welcome sense of security after the tumultuous upheavals and painful privations of the 1940s. ‘Kitchencraft is the art of making your kitchen light, livable and labour-saving,’ declared the current issue of
Woman and Shopping
, before itemising ‘some good buys’ – including ‘a fluorescent light fitting designed specially for efficient, shadowless light at the cooker and sink’, ‘a spin dryer which will dry six shirts to ironing stage in six minutes’, ‘a chair in tubular steel with a foam rubber seat’, and ‘a “Mixidiser” that operates from a main tap and does your egg whisking, fruit pulping and creaming’.2 For most people the future, not just in the kitchen, was indisputably modern – yet modern, they hoped, within a familiar, reassuring setting. Modernists, by contrast, had little patience with the recalcitrant forces of social conservatism. The tensions between these two perspectives – one glancing anxiously over the shoulder at a disappearing past, the other forging ever onwards and upwards – would be played out in modernity Britain.

Notes

Abbreviations

Abrams

Mark Abrams Papers (Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge)

Amis

Zachary Leader (ed),

(2000)

BBC WA

BBC Written Archives Centre (Caversham)

Benn

Ruth Winstone (ed), Tony Benn,

(1994)

Chaplin

Sid Chaplin Papers (Special Collections, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)

Janet Morgan (ed),

(1981)

Crossman

Diary of Richard Crossman (Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick)

Dalton

Ben Pimlott (ed),

(1986)

Daly

Lawrence Daly Papers (Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick)

Charles Drazin (ed), John Fowles,

(2003)

Fowles

John Fowles Papers (Special Collections, University of Exeter)

Gaitskell

Philip M. Williams (ed),

(1983)

Golden

Diary of Grace Golden (Museum of London)

Hague

Frances and Gladys Hague Papers (Keighley Library)

Haines

Diary of Alice (Judy) Haines (Special Collections, University of Sussex)

Heap

Diary of Anthony Heap (London Metropolitan Archives)

Hill

Diary of Jennie Hill (Hampshire Record Office)

Hilton

The John Hilton Bureau Collection (News Group Newspapers Limited Archive, News International Limited)

Hodgson

Diary of Vere Hodgson (held by Veronica Bowater, literary executor)

King

Diary of Mary King (Birmingham City Archives)

Langford

Diary of Gladys Langford (Islington Local History Centre)

Lewis

Diary of Frank Lewis (Glamorgan Record Office)

M-O A

Mass-Observation Archive (Special Collections, University of Sussex)

Macmillan

Peter Catterall (ed),

(2003)

Martin

Diary of Madge Martin (Oxfordshire Record Office)

MNA

Muir and Norden Archive (Special Collections, University of Sussex)

Osborn

Michael Hughes (ed),

(Bath, 1971)

Preston

Diary of Kenneth Preston (Bradford Archives)

Raynham

Diary of Marian Raynham (Special Collections, University of Sussex)

St John

Diary of Henry St John (Ealing Local History Centre)

Speed

Diary of Florence Speed (Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum)

Streat

Marguerite Dupree (ed),

(Manchester, 1987)

Townsend

Townsend, P.,

[computer file], Colchester Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], September 2004. SN: 4723.

Turtle

Diary of Florence Turtle (Wandsworth Heritage Service)

All books are published in London unless otherwise stated.

The Certainties of Place

1 All Madly Educative

  1. Streat, pp 581–2;
The Times
, 2 May 1951; Langford, 3 May 1951;
The Times
, 4 May 1951; Gavin Stamp,
Britain’s Lost Cities
(2007), p 133;
Daily Express
, 4 May 1951.

  2. Keith Waterhouse,
Streets Ahead
(1995), p 14; Richard Weight,
Patriots
(2002), pp 200–201; ‘Ralph Tubbs’,
Daily Telegraph
, 27 Nov 1996;
The Times
, ‘Hidalgo Moya’, 4 Aug 1994;
Vogue
, July 1951, p 59.

  3. Heap, 4 May 1951; Russell Davies (ed),
The Kenneth Williams Diaries
(1993), p 63; Hodgson, 20 May 1951.

  4. MNA, Box 7,
Take It from Here
, 3 Dec 1950; Bobby Robson,
Farewell but Not Goodbye
(2005), p 20; Bernard Adams, ‘Brian Behan’,
Independent
, 6 Nov 2002; Casson obituaries in
The Times
/
Daily Telegraph
/
Guardian
, 17 Aug 1999.

  5.
Picture Post
, 6 Jan 1951; Michael Frayn, ‘Festival’, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (eds),
Age of Austerity
(Oxford, 1986), pp 307–8; Becky Conekin, ‘“Here Is the Modern World Itself”: The Festival of Britain’s Representations of the Future’, in Becky Conekin et al (eds),
Moments of Modernity
(1999), pp 228–46.

  6. David Cannadine,
In Churchill’s Shadow
(2002), p 265; Candida Lycett Green (ed), John Betjeman,
Coming Home
(1997), pp 279–80; Charles Reid,
John Barbirolli
(1971), p 295;
Vogue
, June 1951, p 74; Dylan Thomas,
The Broadcasts
(1991), pp 246–51; Nigel Warburton,
Ernö Goldfinger
(2004), p 131; Lionel Esher,
A Broken Wave
(1981), p 304;
New Statesman
, 12 May 1951; Peter Mandler, ‘John Summerson 1904–1992’, in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds),
After the Victorians
(1994), pp 236–7.

  7. Frayn, ‘Festival’, pp 324–5; Iona and Peter Opie,
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
(1959), p 105; Becky E. Conekin,
The Autobiography of a Nation
(Manchester, 2003), p 209; Christina Hardyment,
Slice of Life
(1995), p 37; Winston Fletcher, ‘1951: The Truth’,
Guardian
, 9 Apr 1998; Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier,
A Tonic to the Nation
(1976), p 180; Stuart Hylton,
Reading: The 1950s
(Stroud, 1997), pp 12–15; Chris Waters, ‘J.B. Priestley 1894–1984’, in
After the Victorians
, p 222; BBC WA, R9/74/1, June 1951; John Simpson,
Strange Places, Questionable People
(1998), p 33; Robert Hewison,
In Anger
(1988), p 64; Banham and Hillier,
Tonic
, p 176.

  8. St John, 11 Jun 1951; Heap, 17 Jul 1951, 19 Jul 1951.

  9. Alison Ravetz,
Remaking Cities
(1980), pp 214–15; Osborn, pp 194–5.

10.
Coventry Evening Telegraph
, 15 Aug 1951, 17 Aug 1951; Nicholas Bullock,
Building the Post-War World
(2002), pp 80–82;
Coventry Evening Telegraph
, 30–31 Aug 1951;
The Times
, 12 Nov 1951;
Coventry Evening Telegraph
, 16 Jan 1952;
Listener
, 17 Jan 1952.

11.
Melody Maker
, 21 Jul 1951.

12.
Fowles
, p 131; Daly, Ms 302/5/3, 31 Aug 1951; Golden, 12 Sep 1951, 28 Sep 1951.

13.
Manchester Guardian
, 29 Sep 1951; Juliet Gardiner,
From the Bomb to the Beatles
(1999), p 57;
Listener
, 4 Oct 1951;
The Times
, 1 Oct 1951;
Daily Express
, 1 Oct 1951.

2 A Narrow Thing

  1. M-O A, D5353, 21 May 1951; Raynham, 17 Sep 1951; BBC WA, R9/9/15 –LR/51/2313; King, 29 Aug 1951.

  2.
Radio Times
, 25 May 1951; Roger Wilmut and Jimmy Grafton,
The Goon Show Companion
(1976), pp 44–5; BBC WA, R9/74/1, Oct 1951.

  3. M-O A, D5353, 14 May 1951, 27 Sep 1951;
Radio Times
, 13 Jul 1951;
Daily Express
, 17 Jul 1951;
Western Daily Press
, 26 Jul 1951; BBC WA, R9/4, 4 Oct 1951; Hilary Kingsley and Geoff Tibballs,
Box of Delights
(1989), p 10; Andy Medhurst, ‘Every Wart and Postule: Gilbert Harding and Television Stardom’, in John Corner (ed),
Popular Television in Britain
(1991), pp 60–74; Candida Lycett Green (ed), John Betjeman,
Coming Home
(1997), p 381.

  4. Gore Vidal,
Palimpsest
(1995), p 148;
Evening Standard
, 29 May 1951, 9 Jul 1951; Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (eds),
The Noël Coward Diaries
(1982), p 177;
Coventry Evening Telegraph
, 5 Sep 1951.

  5.
Guardian
, 10 Jun 2005 (Frank Keating); Hodgson, 5 Aug 1951;
Western Daily Press
, 6 Aug 1951; Milton Johns, ‘Wally Hammond’,
Journal of the Cricket Society
(Autumn 2006), pp 4–5.