Family Britain, 1951-1957 (106 page)

‘We queued up to see the incredible “house of the future” – and decided –
no
,’ recorded Madge Martin after visiting the Ideal Home Exhibition in March 1956, and she was almost certainly not alone in giving a shudder when she saw the Smithsons’ vision. Even so, in the here and now, most new homes in the 1950s were being built along self-consciously ‘modern’ lines, with the emphasis on informality, flexibility of purpose, the creation of as much space as possible, and the kitchen as an integral part of family life. This particularly applied to private housing, with the builders Taylor Woodrow in 1956 setting out their stall for a £2,195 bargain that was ‘the house every woman has dreamed about’:

Design is based on the open-planning idea – a bold step indeed from the orthodox type of house of the 1930s for the whole ground floor is intercommunicated. Entering the house, with its attractive reeded glass door screen and shelves by the front door, is the lounge hall – a spacious, elegant room, 18½ feet long and 12 feet wide. Along the whole facing wall are built-in shelves, to hold, perhaps, a few cherished books, a choice ornament, treasured knick-knacks, or one of those delicate, trailing indoor plants. These are centred by an electric fitted log fire. The lounge sweeps through to the dining area, nearly 11 feet square with its low, wide picture-frame window. It leads to a dream of a kitchen, which again follows the wide-open look. A feature of this is the bright stainless steel, double-sided sink unit with built-in cupboards above and below. Another wall has more long built-in cupboards, and there are yet others to ceiling height, while still more are built around the most up-to-date of refrigerators, which is set at eye-level. Perhaps the most unique of all is a specially made breakfast-table fitment covered with scarlet Formica at working-top height with a cascade of drawers – one green baize lined for cutlery – and a space for the washing machine. Yes – this too is included in the price, and believe it or not, so is the electric clock on the wall.

Nevertheless, there persisted significant working-class resistance to the open-plan revolution, or anything even faintly resembling it, especially if the traditional front-room parlour ‘for best’ was threatened. ‘Come and take a look at what they’ve done inside,’ the Borough Engineer for Harlow New Town said to Tosco Fyvel, researching a ‘This New England’ piece about a development comprising almost entirely young working-class families. ‘It’s worth it if you’re interested. In my first ten houses I put in a kitchen dining-alcove and a big living room. Not a family liked it. They all want a downstairs front and back, even if the rooms are poky.’

It was much the same with furniture, with modern styles such as Robin Day’s (imbued with the Festival of Britain ethos) or Ercol (using natural materials) tending to be embraced with much more enthusiasm by the upper middle-class than by either the lower middle or the working class. Even G-Plan furniture, launched in 1953 by E. Gomme of High Wycombe and seeking, as one of their advertisements put it, to ‘combine the best in contemporary styling with sound construction and the finest finish – all at a moderate cost’, probably failed to penetrate below a certain point in the socio-economic scale. The commercial limits of Scandinavian-style ‘soft’ Modernism were pointed up by an exhibition,
Register Your Choice
, held at Charing Cross station in 1952 and subsequently analysed by Mass-Observation. The choice in question was between on the one hand a traditionally furnished room with dark woods and a three-piece suite, on the other a much more modern room with a light colour scheme and non-suite furniture. ‘It seems evident that as yet many people – probably most – judge furniture in terms of its apparent comfort and solidity, and distrust the capacity of contemporary styles to provide these advantages too,’ noted M-O in a tone of clear regret about a misguided preference largely coming from the working-class visitors to the exhibition. ‘There is much failure even to appreciate the aesthetic attraction of contemporary styles, much emotional resistance to this unfamiliar manner, much tendency to withdraw into the security of the familiar. . .’ Fyvel, inspecting the interiors in Harlow New Town in 1956, would have sympathised with M-O’s disappointment. ‘The houses seemed filled with bicycles, budgerigars, perambulators, and television sets,’ he rather sourly noted. ‘The rooms certainly struck one as small, perhaps because they were stuffed with unsuitable furniture. Oversize three-piece suites and clumsy sideboards hit the eye. Cheap mass-produced china ornaments stood on the chimney-piece or in the front window: haphazard coloured reproductions hung on the walls. The effect was uniformly ugly.’ In fact, he concluded: ‘In all the rooms I did not see one single piece of furniture or decoration of even moderately good taste.’4

But whether tastes were acceptable or unacceptable, by the mid-1950s the age of DIY was dawning. Importantly, it was a supply as well as a demand revolution, including the emergence of emulsion paint and the paint roller as well as the selling of wallpaper through retail outlets. ICI was quickly on the case, with Dulux on sale by 1953, and in general optimistic white paint was starting to replace dirt-concealing brown as most amateur decorators’ colour of choice. So too Black & Decker, which in 1954 decided to enter the domestic market, developing for its electric drill such accessories as a lathe, saw attachment and bench stands – prelude to a major advertising campaign that autumn which resulted in a spectacular increase in sales. There were other landmarks. Bon Marché in Liverpool had by this time already opened its ‘Household Boutique’, aimed at women as much as men, and other department stores such as Heelas in Reading followed in 1955. DIY’s bespoke magazine,
Practical Householder
, was launched in October 1955, while in September 1956 there was the first of the annual Do-It-Yourself exhibitions at Olympia. A glance at the December 1956 issue of
Practical Householder
gives the prevailing flavour, with articles such as ‘Disguising that old Fireplace’, ‘A Contemporary Table Lamp: Made from a Darning Stool and Knitting Needles’, and ‘Modernising an Old Type Sewing Machine: To Include Built-in Shelves, Drawers, Cotton Wells and Stool’. Elsewhere, a large ad pictured a middle-aged man showing his son and daughter-in-law how to do it. ‘It’s quite an easy job to re-surface your kitchen table with FORMICA Laminated Plastic, and surprisingly economical,’ ran the text. ‘Half an hour’s pleasant work, and hey presto! you have a table with a top that will never stain, chip or crack, resists heat up to 310°F – a joy for years to come.’ The special delight of the magazine was its covers: invariably in bright colours, they almost always depicted a recently married husband and wife working happily together as a team on some ingenious, challenging, but ultimately do-able DIY project.5

‘Cannon Raises the Level of Cooking – With the Exclusive Foldaway Eye Level Grill’, ‘Bendix Automatically Makes Washing a Leisure – You Just Set It and Forget It’, ‘Swirlux – This Is The Way to Wash Your Clothes’ – consumer durables, above all washing machines, were starting in the 1950s to transform the everyday lives of millions of housewives. Market leader for washing machines was, by a long way, Hoover, which had moved into the field in 1948 (with its new factory near Merthyr Tydfil) and by 1955 was selling its Mark III Power Wringer, with its boffins still working on the twin-tub concept, while fridge manufacturers included Prescold, Electrolux, Coldrator (an Ambridge favourite), English Electric and Frigidaire. It is easy, though, to exaggerate at this stage the penetration of these so-called ‘white goods’. Vacuum cleaners may by 1955 have been in a majority of households, but washing machines were in only 18 per cent and refrigerators in a mere 8 per cent. In Wales, as late as 1960, there were fridges in just 5 per cent of households. On washday, the typical housewife was not the ecstatic figure of the washing-machine ads, nor indeed the duly grateful Judy Haines in Chingford, but rather David Blunkett’s mother in a council house in Sheffield, ‘pummelling the clothes in the “dolly tub”’. Among those housewives fortunate enough to have labour-saving appliances, a survey was conducted in 1953 in order to guide manufacturers about female criteria for new appliances. Overwhelmingly the main consideration, found the survey, was durability; but it was soon a message wholly ignored, as built-in obsolescence became a deliberate manufacturing ploy, allied to marketing that increasingly emphasised fashion and novelty.6

In the kitchen, the possibilities for innovative cooking steadily broadened – Kenneth Lo’s
Cooking the Chinese Way
sold 10,000 copies in hardback on its publication in 1954, while the following year, in her preface to the Penguin edition of her
A Book of Mediterranean Food
, Elizabeth David noted that ‘so startlingly different is the food situation now (from two years previously) that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country’ – but more important for most people was the increasing availability of convenience foods. New additions in the mid-1950s included Colman’s ‘Instant Desserts’, Birds Eye frozen chicken pie and, most popular of all, Birds Eye Fish Fingers, introduced a fortnight before the start of commercial television and reputedly only saved by a last-minute name change from being called cod pieces. Even so, for all their time-saving advantage, there was often an innate resistance, essentially a social conservatism, that new foods had to break down. ‘I’m too old for these modern ideas,’ a 64-year-old labourer told Mass-Observation in 1953 about frozen foods (which anyway depended to a large extent on would-be consumers having refrigerators), while an advertisement in 1956 for Batchelors ‘Soup Mixes’ made much of how ‘if you pride yourself on serving
freshly cooked
food, warming up just isn’t good enough’, whereas in this case bringing the contents of the packet to the boil and simmering for 20 minutes meant that ‘you actually COOK the soup yourself’ and ‘you serve it
freshly made
’. As for drinks, tea-bags had yet to make their commercial appearance, but by 1954 Nescafé instant coffee had doubled its sales since the war and Maxwell House (‘America’s favourite coffee’) was poised to offer real competition. On the alcoholic front, the sales of canned beer for home drinking started to take off from 1956, and that Christmas off-licences reported a sharp rise, compared to previous Christmases, in the sale of wine. In this whole area of eating and drinking, though, there was one particularly emblematic food. ‘Collected 15/- Sainsbury chicken,’ noted Judy Haines on the first Friday of August 1956. ‘My! It was good!’ It may well have been a chicken produced by John Eastwood, Nottinghamshire pioneer of factory farming methods that in time transformed chicken from one of the most expensive to one of the most affordable dishes; and it may also have been about the time that when I was having Sunday lunch at my uncle and aunt’s Shropshire farm, my little cousin piped up as the trolley was wheeled in, ‘Oh no, not another bloody chicken!’ My mother, living in Grove Park in south-east London, where chicken was still a special treat, could not get over it.7

In any domestic setting, nothing could stop the irresistible spread of the television set. By 1956 there were sets in some 48 per cent of households, with a majority at this stage having access to BBC programmes only, and generally during the early to mid-1950s there was often keen competition to be the first in a street to have one. In Neasden the father of Lesley Hornby (the future Twiggy) was one such pioneer, and as an inveterate DIY man, ‘forever making “improvements”’, he quickly knocked up a cabinet for it. Crucially, in terms of the ecology of working-class homes, the set more often than not invaded the hitherto sacrosanct parlour, including in miners’ houses in the Forest of Dean. ‘The little screen found its place amongst the cumbersome best furniture and the heavily flowered, deep-bordered wallpaper,’ recalled Dennis Potter some years later:

And, of course, when the family began to watch, furniture got moved around, a few superfluous things were slung out, a giant change in domestic habits was being made. . . Instead of a coal fire once a week ‘to air the room’, to preserve the mausoleum from the damp, fires were lit throughout the winter; some people even began to have a glass of beer or a flagon of cider, to keep on their working clothes and boots, consciously to relax over it all, to create a genuine living space in what had been the lifeless clutter of the old Front Room. When this happened, the former wallpaper was discovered to be irritating and out-of-tune, the best china ‘a pity to keep for looking at’, the heavily framed picture ‘a bit miserable’, and a minor revolution was finally consummated when supper was eaten in the room to the pale flicker of the Lime Grove light. . .

Inevitably, attitudes varied. In Michael Palin’s intensely respectable, middle-class home in Sheffield, the TV was usually covered with a knitted antimacassar; while from a left perspective, Doris Lessing adamantly refused her son’s entreaties for a set, and she recalled that in her circle the typical attitude to the medium was, ‘Our children’s minds would be rotted by this monstrous new invention,’ and ‘What could we all do to save ourselves?’ There was less agonising in working-class homes. ‘In one household,’ reported Michael Young and Peter Willmott about an interview in Debden, ‘the parents and five children of all ages were paraded around it in a half circle at 9 p.m. when one of us called; the two-month-old baby was stationed in its pram in front of the set. The scene had the air of a strange ritual. The father said proudly: “The tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now.”’ Or as one of the Crown Street sociologists recorded after interviewing a middle-aged press tool setter and his wife: ‘Own T.V. – they paid £69 for it – saved up over a long period. Wife admitted that she thought T.V. good because “after you’ve been married for a long time you run out of conversation.”’8