Family Britain, 1951-1957 (39 page)

A friend you can confide in, a neighbour you can’t. What you say to neighbours over the garden wall might be passed on and you might get involved.

You can let a neighbour know too much.

If you get too familiar, you’ve got them on your doorstep for the rest of your life.

I never thought I’d come to hate anybody like I do her.

I’ve never asked her in. I could see how it was right from the beginning. She was going in people’s houses all day long, and I couldn’t stand that.

Mrs Adams always used to be coming round. I had to put a stop to it, I couldn’t get on with my work; she used to step over the fence, so we put a higher wire up; and I always kept the gate locked, so that she had to knock at the front door, then I needn’t let her in if I was busy. She’s only been in once lately.

‘Stability exists in the area, but does not arise from any feeling of belonging together,’ sensibly concluded the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
in 1952 after Kuper’s study had gone to the City Council’s Planning and Redevelopment Committee. Book publication the following year earned an equally sensible summary by the
TLS
of the study’s important but, on the whole, sadly ignored conclusions: ‘One is that intimacy forced on people by the position of houses may lead to hatred and instability instead of friendship and stability. Another is that friendship depends on something more than proximity; it depends on the human beings themselves. Another is that social groups of very different status may be more tolerant to one another than groups nearer in status.’ ‘The district studied was “working-class”,’ added the reviewer, ‘but the inhabitants showed themselves highly aware of social distinctions.’
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Fortunately, the quantitative evidence prevents either side of the ‘community’ debate from making extravagant claims. The Sheffield study asked 153 housewives on the estate which persons they would ask for help in the event of running out of bread. Almost ten times as many opted for a neighbour as for a relative, though more than 30 per cent replied ‘nobody’. But in the case of serious illness, the figures changed to 48 per cent looking to a neighbour, almost 47 per cent to a relative or someone else, and 5 per cent to nobody. As for neighbourly relations, a companion study at about the same time of a recently developed Liverpool estate found these prevailing attitudes from a sample of 36 families:

Mutual assistance with expression of good neighbourly relationships: 11

Little contact with neighbours but an absence of adverse comments about them: 14

No contact with neighbours and general disapproval of them: 4

Unwanted contacts with neighbours involving difficult relationships and strong personal criticisms of them: 7

Positive, neutral, negative – the roughly equal proportions may well have been fairly representative. Mogey, meanwhile, found an interesting contrast in Oxford. Whereas in St Ebbe’s there was roughly a 40 per cent acceptance of next-door neighbours and a 60 per cent rejection (ie in terms of general attitudes expressed to the interviewer), on the much newer Barton estate the ratio was 80 per cent acceptance and 20 per cent rejection. ‘In Barton everything is strange,’ explained Mogey. ‘The house, the layout of the estate, the behaviour of the people, and even the way you view your children has altered subtly.’ Even so, he observed how, among the pioneer families on the estate, the initial burst of ‘great mutual friendliness’ – when ‘groups of people helped one another in all sorts of ways, by shopping, baby minding, helping with the garden, lending, welcoming newly arrived families with a cup of tea, and so on’ – had inexorably given way to ‘a retreat to the general ideal of “I keep myself to myself” ’.
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Finally, two national surveys on this vexed subject were confined to neither one place nor one class. ‘How well do you know your next-door neighbours?’ Mass-Observation asked its largely but not exclusively middle-class Panel in 1947:

Just by name.
(Metalworker, 29, near Sandwich)

It wd be difficult to know less about neighbours than we do.
(Musician and journalist, 56)

I am only acquainted with my neighbour, think well of her, but leave it at that.
(Housewife, 39, Glasgow)

Neighbours on one side known fairly well (old air raid shelter companions) but we have no interests in common. Not on speaking terms with neighbours on other side because they have quarrelled with my relatives.
(Teacher, 33, Lancashire)

On one side enough to say ‘Good morning,’ other side not forgiven us for not fire-watching.
(Office worker, 49)

Too well – don’t like ’em.
(Physicist, 41, Castle Bromwich)

I dislike neighbours who ‘drop in’ often at inconvenient times. On one side is a house badly needing decorating and with two or three children and them I boycott. The other side is a pleasant old lady with whom I have passed the time of day.
(Bank clerk, 38, Bradford)

M-O also asked, ‘How many people living in your immediate vicinity do you know, and how well do you know them?’ Again, an underlying apartness prevailed:

There are one or two people with who I may exchange a few words if I see them in their front gardens, and there is one woman with a baby with whom I would walk to the shops if we were going out at the same time. Otherwise we don’t know even the names of any of the people who live near.
(Housewife, 32, Leeds)

I have very little in common with most of my neighbours & I haven’t time to spend in cultivating acquaintance unless it promises to grow into a mutual friendship.
(Civil servant, 41, Oxted)

I know about 4–5 people – not counting children – in the immediate vicinity well enough to say ‘good-morning’ to them & pass the time of day. That’s all. My children play about with the other children living near – about a dozen – but I don’t encourage them more than I must for I don’t think much of them.
(Housewife, 37, Birmingham)

I know the names of all the people on our side of the road for about twenty houses along. I have an idea of their occupations. Some I know personally. I do not go into their homes. The road is wide so I know only a few of those who live opposite. We have a little conversation at the bus shelter.
(Housewife, 56, Burnley)

I do not know anyone in the immediate vicinity with any degree of intimacy. I am just on speaking terms with perhaps half a dozen, though only with one have I any interest in common, and that is slight, in a joint attendance at a WEA class several years ago.
(Accountant, 46, Sheffield)

Lots I suppose but only to say ‘Good morning etc’ to or have ‘the daily grumble’ with either on the road or perhaps in the bus, wherever we happen to meet.
(Housewife, 47, Sunbury-on-Thames
)

One panellist, a man living in Willesden, briskly answered both questions together: ‘I know neither my next door neighbours nor any people in the immediate vicinity, except my landlord’s family living in the same house. With them I discuss only formal matters; they are in no sense friends.’

Three years later, in his
People
survey, Geoffrey Gorer discovered that ‘the typical relationship of the English to their neighbours can probably best be described as distant cordiality’, a memorable phrase justified by the fact that fewer than one in twenty knew them sufficiently well ‘to drop in on without an invitation’. Could they, though, despite this deliberate distance-keeping, rely on their neighbours’ help in a pinch? ‘Only a minority,’ he found. ‘Eight per cent felt they could rely on their neighbours entirely, and another 27 per cent to a large extent; 10 per cent felt they could not rely on their neighbours at all, and 32 per cent only to a small extent. The remainder – just on a quarter – would not commit themselves, and said that “it depends”.’ Significantly, the regional and class breakdowns behind these figures upset two of Gorer’s understandable presumptions. First, it transpired that ‘there is no more reliance on neighbours’ help in the Northern regions than there is in London’; second, ‘there is greater reliance among the well-to-do, the members of the middle classes, than there is among the poor’, ie people with incomes of under £5 a week. ‘The middle class has repeated for generations the cliché that it is the poor who help the poor,’ he wryly added. ‘The poor themselves seem to doubt it.’

There were two other key prevailing emotions that Gorer found in his survey of ‘Friends and Neighbours’. One was the heartfelt desire for quietness and privacy, not least from snooping neighbours. ‘Their noses are longer than their arms,’ typically complained a middle-aged artisan from Cheshire. ‘They cannot live their own lives for watching and meddling in others. Curtain shakes.’ The other emotion, either revealed or complained about, was that powerful nexus of envy-cum-snobbishness. ‘They speak with an
Oxford
accent but work, perhaps in a better paid job, but have to work to live as I do, but they make you think that they are just that bit above you,’ was the bitter complaint of a 31-year-old worker from Crawley about his neighbours. From a Yorkshireman (calling himself ‘Hard Working Class’) from Barnsley the beef was ‘the way they begrudge what we have and the way they spend their money on drink and gambling and sending the children with bets to the bookie’.
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No neighbour, in short, came without baggage – whether real or imaginary.

Like ‘juggling with jelly’ is how one historian describes the whole question of ‘community’, and not the least of the difficulties is identifying a ‘typical’ working-class district. Was it, for instance, Jennifer Worth’s Stepney or Roy Porter’s New Cross? ‘I took many walks around parts of Stepney to see what it was like,’ the former midwife recalled:

It was simply appalling. The slums were worse than I could ever have imagined. I walked south of Cable Street, down Graces Alley, Dock Street, Sanders Street, Backhouse Lane and Leman Street, and the atmosphere was menacing. Girls hung around in doorways, and men walked up and down the streets, often in groups, or hung around the doors of cafés smoking or chewing tobacco and spitting. The condemned buildings were still standing, nearly 20 years after they had been scheduled for demolition, and were still being lived in. A few families and old people who could not get away remained, but mostly the occupants were prostitutes, homeless immigrants, drunks or meths drinkers, and drug addicts. There were no general shops selling food and household necessities as the shops had been turned into all-night cafés, which in fact meant they were brothels. The only shops I saw were tobacconists.

It was certainly different – and probably
more
typical – in New Cross:

All the men were in work, many with big local employers such as the council, Surrey Commercial Docks, the railways, London Transport, Borough market or Peek Frean’s biscuit factory; women kept house and raised children. Husbands had wives, housewives had breadwinners, and children had parents (and aunts-in-laws and grandparents round the corner). Families stuck together. Menfolk slipped down to the Royal Archer, but there were no notorious drunks or wife-beaters. Nor was there violence or crime. Girls skipped, and we boys kicked a tennis ball in the street, and mothers didn’t worry too much: there was little backstreet traffic – no one we knew owned a car – and no fear of child-molesters.

‘Nobody liked living in New Cross Gate,’ Porter wholly concedes, ‘yet there was much to be said for that kind of respectable working-class inner-city neighbourhood that is now [1994] pretty much a thing of the past.’
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New Cross was home to Millwall FC, playing at the take-no-prisoners Den in Cold Blow Lane, and arguably ‘community’ flourished most – assuming it did exist – in the context of an embattled (or anyway entrenched)
contra mundum
group of people sharing the same physical location and a similar set of attitudes towards the dissident, the outsider, the other. Take the oral memories of Danny Brandon, who worked at the Royal Group of Docks, south of West Ham:

In those days you didn’t just work on the docks, you lived by dockers, you were a community, the man next door was a docker, the man over the road, you were a very closely knit community. And that’s the reason why a scab in those days he certainly took, not his life, in that sense, but he was a man that would be ostracised, not just at work but where he lived, because they cut one and we all bled, it was as simple as that, which was one of the reasons for the militancy in the docks.

In the East End more generally, the immediate post-war years were characterised by an ugly rash of anti-Semitism, with Robb’s Bethnal Green survey finding that more than 26 per cent of his sample were ‘extreme anti-Semites’, regarding Jews as (in the paraphrased words of one of his interviewees) people who were ‘mean, operate a black market, drive hard bargains, are unscrupulous businessmen, full of low cunning, unpatriotic, dirty in their habits, have foreign accents and gesticulate’. Or take Coventry, where Kuper’s Braydon Road study detailed the deep resentment felt by Coventrians towards the many incomers since the 1930s. ‘Friendliness seems to have disappeared these days’, ‘All out for themselves’, and ‘Always trying to get on in the world – rush, rush, rush’ were typical attitudes towards non-Coventrians, one of whom told Kuper: ‘Coventry people always class us as foreigners. They say: “Go back to your own place.” There’s a lot of jealousy here.’ The overall picture is perhaps of an infinite cluster of small, cut-off worlds in which one was either in or out. ‘A different code of ethics is held towards people outside the group,’ Kerr explained in 1953 about ‘Ship Street’ to the British Association, meeting that year in Liverpool. ‘It is not stealing to shoplift in the big stores, but a dreadful crime to pinch anything from “Mum”.’ And she added that in that particular small world, ‘fear and superstition are predominant’.