Family Britain, 1951-1957 (16 page)

Arthur Koestler said that every communist who stayed in the Communist Party in the face of all the evidence had a secret explanation for what was happening, and this could not be discussed with friends and comrades. Some of the communists I knew had decided that yes, the reported crimes were true – though
of course
not as bad as the capitalist press said – but that Comrade Stalin could not possibly know about what was going on. The truth was being kept from Uncle Joe. My rationalization, my ‘secret belief’ was that the leadership of the Soviet Union had become corrupt but that waiting everywhere in the communist world were the good communists, keeping their counsel, and they would at the right time take power, and then communism would resume its march to the just society, the perfect society. There was just one little thing: I didn’t realize Uncle Joe had murdered them all.

About the same time that Lessing joined up, the uncompromising, hardline, immensely gifted folk singer Ewan MacColl wrote his ‘Ballad of Joe Stalin’. Sung to a banjo accompaniment, it was a favourite of the future historian – and, at this stage, ardent Communist – Raphael Samuel, who three decades later would quote with honesty but palpable discomfort the final verse:

Joe Stalin was a mighty man and he made a mighty plan;

He harnessed nature to the plough to work for the good of man;

He’s hammered out the future, the forgeman he has been

And he’s made the worker’s state the best the world has ever seen.16

5

What Will Teacher Say?

March 1952 was the month of Barbara Pym’s most popular novel (‘
Excellent Women
is England, and, thank goodness, it is full of them,’ declared John Betjeman), of Richard Gordon’s shrewdly amiable
Doctor in the House
(eighth impression by July), of Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece of repressed emotion
The Deep Blue Sea
(‘Kenneth More is our best answer to Marlon Brando so far,’ Kenneth Tynan) – and of a cri de coeur from a young jobbing actor and would-be playwright. ‘The general policy is reactionary to say the very least of it,’ John Osborne complained in the
New Statesman
about the state of repertory theatre and its managers. ‘Even the plays they present (under admittedly difficult conditions, which, however, they resolutely do nothing to overcome by decent endeavour) have changed little in twenty years. Indeed, so often they are the very same plays, only too familiar to any actor who has had the experience of working for these play factories which turn out their perennial and vulgar farce-drama-thriller cycle twice nightly to audiences who would be as well served by a nude revue.’ The letter ended with an already characteristic mixture of irony and anger: ‘If planned economy ever takes a complete hold upon the resources of this country, it seems almost certain that the Theatre, at least, will remain the jolly playground of free enterprise, the burial ground of art and integrity, and, incidentally, of the artist.’

The revolution that Osborne implicitly called for might have actually happened only three months later. Rodney Ackland’s
The Pink Room
‘gave a glimpse’, Richard Eyre has argued, ‘of what theatre might have been had audiences, critics and the censor been ready to face the uncomfortable truths that he put on the stage.’ A state-of-the-nation play set in a Soho drinking club in 1945,
The Pink Room
dealt among other things with escapism, political apathy and the Holocaust, as well as taking a notably sardonic view of the war as a time of unimpeachable heroism. The London opening was at the Lyric, Hammersmith on 18 June, with a cast including Hermione Baddeley and Betty Marsden, and the critical reaction was merciless. ‘Loneliness whiskey momentary euphoria another whiskey deeper layers of loneliness oblivion loneliness whiskey momentary euphoria more whiskey,’ was T. C. Worsley’s
New Statesman
encapsulation of Ackland’s ‘appallingly relentless eye and ear’; to Eric Keown it was ‘as dreary a collection of human beings as any stage can have carried for a very long time’; Harold Hobson in the
Sunday Times
called it ‘an evening of jaw-aching soul-obliterating boredom’; even Tynan in the
Evening Standard
, instinctively sympathetic to any attempt to break out of the drawing room, asserted that it took a ‘heart’ larger than the playwright’s ‘to write about the small sins of small people without sentimentalism or shallow moralising’. The run lasted less than a month, and a devastated Ackland had to wait until 1988 for a new, uncensored production (the play renamed as
Absolute Hell
) and belated critical acclaim.1

Perhaps back in 1952 it was the homely touch that was missing. ‘They are my friends,’ one housewife told the BBC that spring. ‘I find myself thinking of them at all times.’ Another housewife agreed: ‘I feel as if the family were relations of mine or very close neighbours. I know how they will react to any given situation. Each of them is such a definite character.’ The Listening Panel had been asked why they went on listening to
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, by now in its fifth year. ‘ “Everyday” events, rather than sensational stories, are probably most welcome to Panel members,’ the report concluded. ‘For instance, one group mentioned the episode in which Gwen discovered a missing pearl necklace and won a reward. This, they felt, struck completely the wrong note.’ Tellingly, the only disliked character was the unpleasant Mrs Mountford. It was much the same with
The Archers
: ‘Again the appeal of “real” people and ordinary, homely credible incidents was very much in evidence, so also were the objections to unusual happenings and excursions outside the stereotype formed of the Archer family circle. In addition, however, there was much appreciation of the country atmosphere and the “little lectures” on farming: this gave many towndwellers a pleasurable feeling of contact with rural life . . .’
The Archers
was only in its second year, but in a recent poll conducted by the
Daily Graphic
, asking its readers to choose between the two radio soaps, some 78 per cent had plumped for it. William Smethurst, in his demythologising history of the programme, is at pains to demonstrate how in fact there was a strongly melodramatic element to the storyline in these early years, but that was not why the 19 per cent of the adult population who listened to it on any one day liked to think they tuned in.

Although the travails of the mentally ill featured in neither soap, in March the BBC did broadcast a groundbreaking talk on the Third Programme by the Scottish poet and critic G. S. Fraser. After sensitively, non-emotively describing his recent experience in a mental hospital, he finished by asking listeners to ‘remember the mentally sick sometimes in your prayers’. It was a timely plea. Another Scot, Ronald Laing, fresh from studying medicine at Glasgow University, was spending part of his National Service working at the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley, near Southampton. There he encountered a grim world of insulin shock therapy being applied to patients in deliberately induced comas, of indiscriminate ECT treatment, of routine lobotomies, of padded cells, of a huge, unbridgeable gap between staff and patients. By the time he left in the summer, Laing was deeply perturbed. These seemed to be ‘ways of destroying people and driving people crazy’, he recalled. ‘How could the whole of psychiatry be doing the opposite of what I assumed psychiatry was about – treating, curing if possible, arresting the course of mental illness?’2

At least the mentally ill were not actively targeted as criminals – unlike homosexuals in 1952. The much-publicised flight to Russia the previous year of the two spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, both homosexual, had badly rattled the establishment, and the new Tory Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, was now making the active prosecution of homosexuals almost his highest priority, allied to the introduction of ‘positive vetting’ in the Civil Service in order to unroot ‘serious character weaknesses’. Police activity hit a new, startling intensity, reflected in the comparative England and Wales figures for 1938 and 1952: cases of sodomy and bestiality up from 134 to 670; attempts to commit ‘unnatural offences’, including indecent assaults, up from 822 to 3,087; offences of gross indecency between males up from 320 to 1,686. Behind these and similar figures lay many, many human tragedies, typified by a trio in 1952. Alan Turing, tried at the Quarter Sessions in Knutsford, Cheshire, some seven weeks after his arrest on the evening of the King’s death, was humiliatingly sentenced to a course of organo-therapy treatment at Manchester Royal Infirmary, rendering him impotent and making him grow breasts; the camp, highly popular Lancashire comedian George Williams (‘I’m not well . . . I’m not well at all . . . In fact I’m . . . proper poorly!’) was charged with a homosexual offence and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, effectively ending his career as a top-of-the-bill performer; and the much-decorated war hero Michael (‘Mad Mike’) Calvert was court-martialled for ‘gross indecency with male persons’ and dismissed from the army, quite possibly on trumped-up charges. Progressive opinion, moreover, was not always as progressive as it might have been. About this time the liberal-minded man of letters Stephen Spender asked the leader of the British Communist Party about its attitude to legalising homosexuality. ‘’Ec!’ replied Harry Pollitt. ‘We’ll have noon o’ that filth and roobish, when we coom to power.’

Nor was it generally a subject for bold, uninhibited treatment. ‘He isn’t married then?’ one of the characters in
Excellent Women
asks of the vicar. ‘One of
those
. . . I mean,’ she adds apologetically, ‘one of the kind who don’t marry?’ Or take
The Deep Blue Sea
, written by Rattigan after his male lover had begun an affair with another man and eventually gassed himself to death. Rattigan knew, though, that neither the Lord Chamberlain nor the theatre-going public would accept such an explicitly homosexual drama, and the result was a heterosexual adjustment. By contrast, there were few punches pulled in either Angus Wilson’s first novel,
Hemlock and After
, published in July, or the
Sunday Pictorial
’s ‘Evil Men’ series appearing a few weeks earlier. ‘His picture of homosexual relations – and it is a very large and striking picture – is one of utter desolation, a life without love or satisfaction,’ reassuringly argued J. D. Scott in his
New Statesman
review of the Wilson – true only up to a point. As for ‘Evil Men’, a three-part investigation by Douglas Warth, it began as uncompromisingly as it intended to go on:

The natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence is providing cover for an unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip on this country.

I have watched it growing – as it grew in Germany before the war, producing the horrors of Hitlerite corruption, and as it grew in classical Greece to the point where civilisation was destroyed. I thought, at first, that this menace could best be fought by silence – a silence which Society has almost always maintained in the face of a problem which has been growing in our midst for years. But this vice can no longer be ignored. The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.

Homosexuality is an unpleasant subject, but it must be faced if ever it is to be controlled . . .

Most people know that there are such things as ‘pansies’ – mincing, effeminate young men who call themselves ‘queers’. But simple, decent folk regard them as freaks and rarities. They have become, regrettably, a variety hall joke.

There will be no joking about this subject when people realise the true situation.

Public schools and Oxbridge were identified as particularly virulent breeding grounds, while garrison towns, resorts like Bournemouth and particular quarters of big cities (though ‘Chelsea, once notorious, has been cleaned up’) were apparently where male prostitutes especially flourished. Prisons were also hotbeds of homosexuality, and in the final article Warth argued that homosexuals should instead be sent to special clinics where ‘they may be kept in treatment and custody until they threaten society no more’. In short, he declared, ‘society must demand that the doctors and police work together to find a final cure’.3

For Anthony Heap in St Pancras, writing his diary in May, there were other candidates for the ‘evil men’ tag:

Apparently it is not enough that black stowaways should be allowed to flock into England in their thousands, remain here to live on public assistance funds or the proceeds of dope peddling, occupying housing accommodation sorely needed by our own population and cause still further overcrowding through having half-breed children by the filthy white sluts who live with them, but we must needs have – according to this morning’s papers – a nigger preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral to a mixed congregation of blacks and whites . . .

It is impossible to know how representative Heap’s views were, but it is clear that by 1952 the question of West Indian workers migrating to Britain was starting to be seen as a ‘problem’, even though the actual numbers were still only about 2,000 a year. In June an American academic, Ruth Landes, argued at the Anthropological Institute that the British were fundamentally ‘inhospitable’ to ‘everyone who did not speak English and who were not born on the isles’, adding that ‘the Negro’s incomprehensible and perhaps theatrical zest and spontaneity challenged the English at some vulnerable level’; the same month, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham referred to ‘semi-foreign areas’ and to how ‘in districts where there is a considerable foreign element in the population, neither moral standards nor social behaviour are satisfactory’; in July
The Times
insisted that the key to racial harmony lay ‘less with Governments than with ordinary people’ and emphasised ‘the supreme importance of spontaneous social contacts’; and in September a piece in
Picture Post
, ‘Breeding a Colour Bar?’, focused on ‘Brixton’s Little Harlem’ and was reasonably optimistic, though it did show a wall daubed with the initials ‘K.B.W.’, short for ‘Keep Britain White’. It is even possible that the Rev. W. Awdry’s
Toby the Tram Engine
, published in 1952 and featuring ‘a funny little engine with a queer shape’, drawn as brown by the illustrator C. Reginald Dalby, was intended as a story of racial marginalisation and assimilation. Police attitudes seem to have been mixed. Officers in the Met, to judge by their reports, were generally hostile towards West Indian immigrants, described as ‘loathsome creatures’ and as ‘cunning unprincipled crooks living on women and their wits’. The Chief Constable of Sheffield described to the Home Office how the Jamaicans in his city ‘use face cream, perfume etc. to make themselves attractive to the females they meet at dances, cafés etc.’ but his counterpart in Middlesbrough, also reporting in October 1952, was adamant that ‘on the whole the coloured population are as well behaved as many local citizens’, with no evidence of unduly high rates of criminal activity.