Family Britain, 1951-1957 (40 page)

So, ‘community’ or not? Alison Ravetz is surely on the right lines when she argues that ‘perhaps a more fruitful concept to apply to traditional working-class life than the ambiguous one of “community” would be “localism”,’ adding that ‘it was the immediate locality that supplied the economy, the shared culture and the frameworks of personal development’. The contemporary evidence, moreover, is clear that most people had a strong – if not necessarily overwhelming – attachment to their own particular locality. Yet if ‘localism’ is a more accurate term, it undeniably lacks the emotional resonance of ‘community’. Moreover, the truth surely is that although the British were indeed a more individualistic people in the 1940s and 1950s than has often been assumed, they were not yet quite as solipsistic as they were to become. In October 1948 the young Enid Palmer, training as a nurse and presumably in uniform, rode out on her bike from her lodgings in Colchester. ‘This morning,’ she wrote to her parents in Kenya, ‘everybody had red cheeks – & they were breathing clouds of vapour into the frosty air. Everybody seemed lively and cheerful – & hundreds of people must have wished me a “good morning’’ – everybody from the policeman at the corner, the bricklayers, the chimney sweep black under his layer of soot, the baker, postman, etc . . .’
¹⁶

PART THREE

10

Hit It Somebody

Mollie Panter-Downes on 5 October 1952 sent her regular letter to the
New Yorker
not from London but from Morecambe. There, amid ‘some of Britain’s nippiest blasts’, she described the setting for Labour’s just-finished party conference, which had provided ‘a striking contradiction of the theory that the British are a stolid, unemotional race’:

Shivering delegates, hanging on to their sheaves of agenda for dear life, were blown along the waterfront, together with the more normal visitors – jolly parties of mill girls on the spree, who were having a fine time eating saucerfuls of orange and pink cockles and mussels, buying souvenirs of pottery Alsatian dogs and shaving mugs decorated with the Queen’s picture, and not giving a whoop for the drama going on in the Winter Garden Theatre. Inside this ungardenlike spot, a remarkably melancholy Victorian structure with a total absence of ventilation, the conference set to for four and a half days in an atmosphere so thick with cigarette smoke and rancorous passions that the world’s press, skied up in the gallery, with the fumes of both rising toward them, were practically kippered where they sat.

What was the drama’s import? ‘The air at Morecambe buzzed with the sound of explaining voices playing the Bevan successes down, playing them jubilantly up, predicting that they would finish Attlee, predicting that Bevan had bitten off more than he could chew, and so on.’

The defining event of an uninhibitedly fractious, ill-tempered conference – ‘Shut your gob,’ shouted the right-wing miners’ leader Will Lawther at one heckler, while at least two bouts of fisticuffs were reported, one of them involving the heavyweight Bessie Braddock – was the election for constituency representatives on the National Executive Committee (NEC). Six out of the seven places went to avowed Bevanites (including Wilson and Crossman), at the expense of such senior figures as Morrison and Dalton. The union block vote remained firmly attached to the right of the party, but this was still a stunning coup on the part of the Bevanites, increasingly a party within the party.

Then, almost as soon as the delegates had left squally Morecambe, Gaitskell intensified the mood of internecine strife by making a highly provocative speech at Stalybridge. He accused a significant minority of the (increasingly middle-class) constituency delegates of being ‘Communists or Communist controlled’; made a derogatory reference to ‘mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists’ (with the left-wing, Bevan-supporting
Tribune
explicitly mentioned); and called for a restoration of ‘the authority and leadership of the solid and sensible majority of the Movement’. Gaitskell was on the panel for the next
Any Questions?
, from Calne, and unsurprisingly the question came up, ‘Does the team consider that the split in the Socialist Party will widen in the future?’ The farmer-writer A. G. Street believed it would, and earned laughter and applause for his sally that ‘the ultra-Left-Wing are those people who wish to be generous to others with other people’s money’, but the Shadow Chancellor played a pretty dead bat: ‘This is the Light Programme, Mr Chairman, and you won’t expect a serious pronouncement from me on this matter.’ He did promise, however, that by the next election ‘we shall have settled that argument one way or the other’.
¹

Attlee as usual proved a resourceful, unflappable fire-fighter. Approaching his 70th birthday, he was determined to stay as leader for as long as it took to ensure that neither Bevan nor Morrison succeeded him; and on 23 October, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), he successfully moved a resolution not only banning all unofficial groups within the party but also forbidding all personal attacks. The result was a semi-ceasefire for the next 18 months or so, but the pro-Bevan
New Statesman
was certain that Bevanism would not die, given that it was ‘the expression of a deep fissure between the official Party machine and the mass of everyday Socialists’. To one somewhat disenchanted party worker, writing in the
Political Quarterly
just as he departed the political scene, the puzzle was that Labour had so entirely failed to be a vigorous, coherent opposition to the Tories. ‘Why have the Bevanites been allowed to hold the field?’ he asked. ‘One reason is the extraordinary freak of yet another hair’s-breadth election. It can be argued that a government which came so near to winning a third term cannot have been so far wrong.’ And he went on: ‘The middle-of-the-road voters apparently approved of the moderate (practically non-existent) programme of 1951, without any specific proposals for further nationalisation. Why then adopt more radical policies? All the more reason for avoiding extremism when its chief advocate is Mr Bevan, who is thought of as being as violently disliked by the body of voters as he is violently admired by his followers.’

The party worker was Michael Young, who in November 1952 bequeathed to Labour’s Policy Committee a sociologically flavoured report called ‘For Richer For Poorer’ – a plea, ‘in its policy-making for the future’, to ‘give some prominence to the needs of the family’, especially young parents suffering from ‘less money, less leisure, and less companionship’. The answer to these shortfalls lay neither in ‘the worship of consumption’ (a worship, according to Young, fuelled by advertising, radio, films and women’s magazines) nor in the welfare state (‘the first cold word recalling the smell of carbolic acid and the tough brown paper of ration books . . . the second cold word suggesting the Law Court, the Sanitary Inspector and the Recruiting Office’). Instead, he now placed his faith unequivocally in the C-word: ‘Revival of the community would relieve the burden of loneliness and overwork.’ One way of achieving this revival was ‘rehousing people in the central areas of our cities and towns, as part of a great plan of urban reconstruction, instead of forcing them to move to housing estates on the outskirts’, but he also wanted to ‘lower the barriers of class which divide people from one another by speeding on with comprehensive schools and by distributing power (and prestige) more widely through an extension of industrial democracy’. Predictably, Young’s report met the fate of most reports. ‘The Policy Committee never had, I think, a 250-page report before – no one read it!’ he recalled many years later. ‘It was just a sort of embarrassment when they got it. Except for Edith Summerskill [an MP who was also a doctor], who did read a bit of it, about women, and thought it was rather good and said, “How on earth did you think up all this?” That was really the only comment on it at all. But it certainly confirmed my view that politics wasn’t for me.’

One immediate bonus was no longer having to fret about the question of nationalisation. ‘It is no longer any use discussing in principle whether public ownership would be desirable,’ Young declared in his parting pronouncement on the subject. ‘We have to get down to cases . . .’ He cited shipbuilding, chemicals and insurance (an old favourite) as three potentially fruitful sectors. Another left-wing intellectual, G.D.H. Cole, advocated in January 1953 twofold criteria in terms of Labour’s future nationalisation commitments: ‘Any further nationalisation will be a success only if the workers like it, and only if it is undertaken, not simply for the sake of smashing capitalism, but also with a positive view to its contribution towards getting Great Britain out of the economic difficulties under which it is labouring.’ In fact, to a surprising extent, Labour at this point was relatively unruffled about the whole issue, with instead the major internal fault lines concerning foreign policy, above all attitudes to America. Importantly, there was no Tory threat to the bulk of the nationalisation carried out by the Attlee government, with road haulage and steel as the only two sectors receiving the privatisation treatment. Neither proved hugely contentious, with the latter much facilitated by the support from the steelworkers’ leader, Lincoln Evans. Knighted at the start of 1953, and soon afterwards made vice-chairman of the Iron and Steel Board (at a handsome annual salary of £5,000), which had the power to fix maximum prices, he was the epitome of the right-wing trade unionist who placed harmonious industrial relations with management well above socialist ideology.
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Privatisation of nationalised health care – aka the NHS – was never on the agenda. But by autumn 1952 there was considerable pressure on the new Minister of Health, Iain Macleod, to get a tighter grip on costs. This pressure came partly from the Treasury, dismayed by the way in which a generous award to doctors earlier in the year had led to a chain reaction of wage claims across the NHS; partly from hard-line elements in the Cabinet, keen on major tax cuts as soon as possible; and partly from the City, which, according to the
Financial Times
in October, was looking for a ‘re-think’ of ‘the principles of Government expenditure from the beginning’. The upshot was a decision to appoint an independent committee to examine NHS expenditure – a decision that involved a considerable tussle over both the committee’s terms of reference and its composition. The hardliners lost both: they wanted the committee’s explicit goal to be a reduction in costs, but instead it was merely asked how to avoid ‘a rising charge’ on the Exchequer; while the chairman was to be a leftish economist (and Macleod’s old tutor) from Cambridge, Claude Guillebaud, abetted by four figures of impeccable political balance. Macleod himself had no desire to dismantle the NHS or significantly reduce the service it provided, and indeed for an ambitious young politician in 1952 it would have been folly to have harboured such aspirations. That autumn Charlie Chaplin paid a much-publicised visit to the London slums where he had grown up and told reporters about the contrast between the ‘rotten teeth’ he had once known and the ‘rosy-cheeked children, vigorous, smiling with confidence’ that he saw now. ‘They are the future of England,’ he added in words that carried a powerful emotional charge, ‘and, if for nothing else, socialised medicine, if I may say so, is a grand thing for that reason.’ The following spring, a Gallup poll found that seven out of ten were satisfied with the treatment they received under the NHS.

The more consensual Tories were encouraged anyway by the improving political climate. By November 1952 – against a background of the government winning three by-elections in a row, the economic situation (including the balance of payments) looking better, Butler succeeding ‘in making the pound suddenly look more bobbish’, houses ‘going up at a faster clip’, food ‘all at once far more plentiful in the shops’, the ‘first cold snap and foretaste of winter unaccompanied, for once, by warnings of a coal crisis’, and above all the failure to come to pass of Labour’s dire warnings of ‘large-scale unemployment, possibly war, and anyhow the pulling down of the welfare state brick by brick’ – it was clear to Panter-Downes that the Tories were firmly in the box seat: ‘This seems like a really serious moment for the Socialist Party, badgered as it is by Bevan from the rear and faced with the necessity of thinking up a new policy to take the place of the old, outdated emotional appeals to the voters to save their hard-won rights from the wicked Tories.’ Nothing mattered more than the increasingly benign economic picture, in large part a reflection of the falling price of raw materials and the start of the long peacetime boom for the industrial West, and in his budget the following April, Butler took full political advantage by taking sixpence off income tax, as well as reducing purchase tax on some household articles. ‘Personally I shall not profit very much as my income is so small,’ lamented Gladys Langford, still living in a hotel in north London and about to turn 63. ‘If only I could give up smoking!’ The general reaction, though, was predictably positive – so much so that Gallup soon afterwards found that the government’s satisfaction rating was at a well-nigh unprecedented 60 per cent, up some 14 points from January. ‘The Socialists have a theme,’ Churchill somewhat smugly reflected the day after Butler’s budget. ‘We have no theme – we just have a way of life.’

Even so, rationing remained widespread. Tea did come off in October 1952 and sweets (this time conclusively) in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs were all still on the ration. So too was margarine, but more generously than butter. ‘The Food Ministry should give us more butter,’ implored ‘Wanderer’ in the Dumbarton-based
Lennox Herald
. ‘The youth of the nation cannot build up a physique on “marge”.’ The middle-aged and elderly Chiswick housewives interviewed in November 1952 for Mass-Observation’s ‘Margarine Survey’ would have wholeheartedly agreed:

I ’ates the stuff and I always did. Wouldn’t eat bread and marge if you paid me. Often I don’t get our ration. I’ll tell you what I do – I mix the cooking fat with the little bit of dripping out of the Sunday joint, and if there’s a drip of bacon fat I put that in too, and we haves that on our bread with pepper and salt, and it’s a lot better than any margarine.