Family Britain, 1951-1957 (37 page)

On a Sunday morning in March 1953, just after winning his third Welsh cap, the rugby-union player Terry Davies was still in bed in his council-house home in Pen-y-graig, Llwynhendy, when (in his biographer’s words) ‘his mother roused him with the news that two strangers with a large briefcase wanted to talk to him’:

They were Wigan [ie rugby league] representatives intent on persuading him to ‘go North’. It got to the point where sums ranging between £5,000 and £9,000 were being discussed, and £5,000 in notes were actually piled up on the kitchen table. Terry heard his mother’s gasp as she glimpsed the fortune through the dividing curtain:
Arglwydd mowr, drycha ar yr arian ’na, Ted!
(Lord God, look at that money, Ted!). Such a sum in 1953 would have bought sixteen houses in Llanelli or three local farms! He rejected his would-be Wigan captors as he would later reject Leeds and Bradford. Like his father before him his roots went deep, and more to the point his newly acquired status as a Welsh international had even conferred a certain distinction on his mother as a faithful member of Soar Baptist Chapel! With so much to savour at home it was no time to ‘go North’. As for the fortune he spurned he would, as he said phlegmatically, most probably have misspent it.

The desire not to move away from one’s familiar environment was undoubtedly a widespread one. ‘Although today with the beginnings of new housing estates and movement of people from the slum houses these neighbourhoods are becoming less well defined, they are still characteristic of the region,’ Rich found about the different ‘villages’ (each originally growing up around a coal mine or iron works) that made up Coseley. ‘On the whole, people, particularly the women, are still attached to their own neighbourhood and like to remain in or near to it. Most of them have been to the same schools, and many go to the same workplace.’ So too in inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s, where John Barron Mays was adamant that ‘contrary to the belief of those who advocate a semi-rural, suburban housing scheme there are very many people who prefer to live in the city and more particularly in the central and most heavily built-up areas’, adding that ‘the city way of life seems to suit their requirements and many have formed strong attachments to the dockside neighbourhoods in particular’. Or, as an elderly Bethnal Green woman told an investigator not long afterwards: ‘I want to stop here in Bethnal Green and die. My roots are here. I want to be carried out of here.’ Kerr in her study of Liverpool’s ‘Ship Street’ offered the most interesting explanation of why long-established residents, especially the ‘Mums’, of slum or semi-slum property told her ‘with surprising uniformity’ that they did not want to leave the neighbourhood. ‘It is not because of friends or human relations in general that the family wishes to remain,’ she argued. ‘The reason seems to be a vague undifferentiated feeling of belonging and the security of moving around in a well-known territory.’
⁵

It is hard to be certain, though, that in terms of the larger national picture this was the predominant working-class sentiment. ‘People wanted to get out of New Cross,’ the historian Roy Porter insisted about his childhood. ‘We were on the London County Council housing list, but that was regarded as an unfunny joke (“You’ll be dead before they’ll offer you a place”).’ Often it depended on what stage one had reached in life. ‘Among those who were parents, moving tended to be justified by its presumed benefits for children, although the latter might well be ignorant of these,’ reflects Ravetz. ‘People living in older districts of terraced housing thought it particularly desirable to remove their children from the streets where they played, and to give them gardens instead. In satisfying the children’s interests, grandparents and other relatives were left behind in the old neighbourhood, and this was a sacrifice that was noticed but felt to be justified.’

The historian who has argued most strongly that very many working-class people – although, on the face of it paradoxically, less so in the case of those living in the very
worst
conditions – had a decisive desire to move out and thereby improve their and their children’s material lot is Mark Clapson. In particular, he cites two studies of Birmingham conducted during the 1950s which, in his words, ‘found that a majority of slum dwellers wanted to move to improved homes in the suburban rings around Birmingham, although a sizeable minority liked their old house and district’. In his pioneering study
Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns
(1998), he draws a largely convincing picture of a great, mainly
voluntary
dispersal from the inner cities during these post-war years, especially on the part of younger couples. And he also shows how, whatever their original misgivings, most people in practice were pleased to have made the move. Or, as one of the 90 per cent of Mogey’s Barton sample without a good word to say about their former accommodation told him about life on a new estate by Oxford’s ring road: ‘It’s like heaven after what we’ve been used to. People today don’t know of the times when we had to live in old broken-down houses because we could afford nothing better. But today we are given nice little houses to live in . . .’
⁶

That leaves mutuality – the truly central question in any discussion of ‘community’. Hoggart in
The Uses of Literacy
cited emblematic exchanges from
Have a Go!
: ‘ “Ay, and what do you dislike most, then?” asks Wilfred Pickles. “Stuck-up fowk.” Roars of applause. “Jolly good! And will you just tell me what you like most?” “Good neighbourly fowk.” Increased applause. “. . . and very right too. Give her the money.” ’

Context is everything here, and the key contextual point is to reiterate the extent of status divisions
within
the working class. Robert Roberts, in his justly celebrated evocation
The Classic Slum
(1971) (about Salford either side of the Great War), identified an ‘English proletarian caste system’ that divided working-class people living or working in the same place; it is clear that this system was still alive and well after the Second World War. ‘The East Enders could be incredibly snobbish and class-conscious in their social gradings,’ Jennifer Lee (later Worth) found as a Poplar-based midwife in the early 1950s, while at about the same time Jimmy Boyle, growing up in Sandyfaulds Street in Glasgow’s Gorbals, saw two cultures thriving in one place:

All the buildings were identical, but of the fifty or so close-mouths, three were different because the people in them were ‘toffs’, and in a way there was a resentment even amongst the kids from our closes against those who stayed in them, to such an extent that we wouldn’t even rake their midgies [ie search their bins] for ‘lucks’. The exterior of their part of the building was no different from that of ours. The difference lay in the interior as their windows were always beautiful with a fresh appearance about them, nice curtains, coloured glass, bright paint making the houses look very warm and cosy, like palaces. The close-mouth was always clean, with white chalk running up the sides and it smelled of fancy disinfectant when washed. It was really a sharp contrast from the houses in the rest of the street, though they weren’t rich enough to have doors on their closes to prevent strangers getting into their back courts. The kids in these three closes kept together when playing and none of them ever played with us in the poorer closes. However, this didn’t bother us as our parents called them ‘half-boiled toffs’, and when clustered around the closes at night our mothers used to gossip about them, mimic their proper accents and laugh at them . . . Their kids were always clean as new pennies with their hair combed neatly and their nice clothes, with stockings pulled up to the knees, a clear sign of a toff. Most of them were in the Boy Scouts or the Cubs and wore the uniforms . . .

Elsewhere in Glasgow, on the housing estates, there was also a deep internal division. ‘The dirty tenants are usually found to be irregular at paying rent and the children are the most destructive,’ reported the Corporation’s Medical Officer of Health in 1951. ‘Most of them are below par mentally and often they have large families. It has been found that the chief reasons for dirty tenants are domestic worries, money worries, wives not getting a fair share of the husband’s wages, low mental standard, gambling, drink, criminal history, and just laziness.’ The respectable working class had to put up with such unsatisfactory, ‘problem’ families even in Norwich. ‘Dear Sir,’ began an anonymous letter in 1948 to the council’s households committee:

This [Mrs Carlisle], who you had at your office this morning about her house and two children which are dirty. People have helped her and given her clothes which she has sold again. She is a disgrace to other women who are clean to what she is. I hear the children have no bed to lay on. She has been working at Pearl Laundry now and don’t care. Pictures and a smoke is all she care. Her legs are awful and smell too. So I trust this letter of advice help you. Woman at laundry have helped her but it’s no good.

‘From one who has given her things,’ the less-than-forgiving, neighbourly letter signed off.
⁷

Inevitably the picture was not uniform. James Robb, studying relatively homogeneous Bethnal Green in the late 1940s, discovered even there ‘certain areas which are normally regarded as better or worse than the greater part of the borough’, with ‘better’ areas such as most of Old Ford Road having inhabitants who ‘occupationally are not easily distinguishable from the rest of Bethnal Green, but are conscious of their greater respectability’. By contrast, Hodges and Smith in their Sheffield study found that only about a quarter of the residents were conscious of the social difference between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ ends of their estate (‘It’s better at the top – always Sunday up there’ and ‘They say the top part is better, and you get the scruffs down here’), whereas ‘the answers of the vast majority indicated either that they recognise no such distinction between the two ends of the estate, or else that they had no experience which enabled them to form a judgement’. Or take Liverpool’s ‘Ship Street’, where, according to Kerr, ‘in general the competitive attitude of keeping up with other people is lacking’, so that ‘conduct such as cruelty to children or stealing from your mother may be heartily disapproved of but the people of Ship Street do not feel called upon to dictate to others what furniture they should have or what conduct they should pursue’.

It was very different in Braydon Road in the Houghton district of Coventry. ‘It would be misleading to assume that, because the residents are predominantly “working class”, they are homogeneous with reference to anything other than occupation,’ was Leo Kuper’s conclusion, backed up by some acutely status-conscious vox pop (from around 1950) about neighbours, including their children:

Mr Williams is always saying, ‘I can grow bigger flowers than anybody else’, or ‘I’ve got bigger plants than anybody else’, and he’s always talking about how much money he has in the bank – the things they’ve got, and that he gets paid 9s 6d an hour. Perhaps he hasn’t been used to anything before.

She gets up to see her husband off at 6 am, then right away she cleans her doorstep, and when the milkman and the postman come she’s talking to them loudly, so that everybody knows she’s been up and working. Then she’ll appear at her front door early in the morning, all dressed up, even to a necklace, and come right out for everybody to look at. Then at night, she’ll parade in front of her window in pyjamas, all got up neatly for everybody to see. She strikes me as the type who’s not used to much.

She once saw our two younger girls walking past, dressed up, and she said to Mrs Rice: ‘Look at that; they had nothing when they came up there. They’re getting on very nicely, I must say.’ Well, that was nasty; of course, everybody wants to get on if they can.

I hate to see her [ie the speaker’s daughter] playing with the children round here, but she’ll play with anybody.

The other day Tony (aged three) came in and said a certain word. I was astounded! There was only Arthur (aged fourteen) and me in. And I looked at Arthur: he blushed and looked down at the table, so that I knew he knew what the word meant . . . My husband said: ‘My God, if he says that when he’s at my mother’s, she’ll have a fit.’
⁸

Braydon Road would never inspire a madeleine moment, but perhaps was not so different in its infinite snobberies from Proust’s Combray.

Crucial to the economic as well as the social ecology in all working-class neighbourhoods was the small shopkeeper. ‘The local corner shops helped many people to survive during the 1930s depression,’ unambiguously declares one historian, Avram Taylor, of working-class credit about a time when the pawnbroker was in decline (though far from vanishing), but the small local retailer still flourished – as he continued to do for a generation or so after the war. Moreover, though the 1950s were not the 1930s, many families would have found it difficult to survive without these small shops. ‘Virtually the whole of a wife’s “wage” in Ashton is spent on food, on the immediate needs of the week,’ noted Dennis et al in Featherstone, ‘so that by Wednesday and Thursday the pennies are being counted, and most things bought in the shops are “on tick”.’ So too in Birmingham’s Ladywood district. ‘Gerry Marshall was a jolly fat man with horn-rimmed glasses and short white jacket,’ recalled Carole Anne Stafford (born 1945) about the grocer on the corner of Melson Street and Summer Hill: