Family Britain, 1951-1957 (20 page)

All expenditure stopped on sweets, ‘luxuries’ such as ham and fresh fruit. The man changed from cigarettes to smoking a pipe. An effort to maintain spending on necessary clothing for the girl at school was made and also on an occasional visit to the cinema. A small amount is spent on a budgerigar and a dog.
(Unemployed couple with daughter and dependent mother)

The sense of self-respect ran deep. In the words of a 37-year-old widow, who went without proper food to ensure that her 11-year-old daughter had as much as possible, but who was determined to delay getting what she called ‘public assistance’ as long as she could: ‘I’d have to be on my beam-ends before doing that.’17

Inevitably this recession, coming after seven surprisingly prosperous years, provoked much internal conflict and recrimination among the leaders of the different sections of the Lancashire cotton industry. The man with the unenviable job of banging heads together was Sir Raymond Streat, chairman of the Cotton Board since 1940. Perceiving overproduction as the curse of the world industry as a whole, he was largely responsible for initiating and organising the International Cotton Textile Industry Conference, held at Buxton in September and specifically intended to try to avoid a repeat of 1930s-style Japanese competition. Streat’s attitude towards the Japanese was moderate, unemotional and constructive – quite unlike that of one increasingly prominent figure in the industry. This was the short, aggressive, ambitious, bull-like Cyril Lord, who by this time was in his early forties and, in addition to a notable business in Northern Ireland, owned three spinning and three weaving mills in Lancashire. ‘The leaders of the trade here seem to be just flotsam and jetsam,’ Lord told a press conference in July, prompting Streat to arrange a face-to-face meeting. ‘I went to see the little man at his astonishing headquarters at No. 1 Harley Street,’ he recorded afterwards. ‘The conversation was completely devoid of any rationality. He was constitutionally unable to listen to me and there was nothing to do but listen to him until the time came to go.’ Lord was especially scornful, in public as well as private, of Streat’s decision to extend an invitation to the Japanese, and he found a powerful ally in the
Daily Express
. ‘My Friends the Japs by – Sir Raymond,’ was a typical headline in Beaverbrook’s finest. Lord was also critical of Streat for not making a better fist of his representations to government, but here there was an immovable block in the form of Peter Thorneycroft, President of the Board of Trade. ‘No government can in fact sustain your industry unless you yourselves put yourselves into the best competitive situation,’ he almost brutally told Cotton Board members in October. ‘The Government has no feather-bed to offer you and very little shelter in the harsh winds of competition which are blowing through the world today.’18

Streat, unlike Lord, had a sense of perspective, and knew that the slump had a variety of immediate causes – including not just increasing Japanese competition, but also Korean War stockpiling, import controls in Australia and untimely price-fixing arrangements by the Yarn Spinners’ Association. But what no one, including Streat, knew was whether it was just a deeply unpleasant blip or the herald of long-term, irreversible decline. ‘Cotton is far from finished and it may well be a power in the export field again,’ stoutly declared the
Oldham Chronicle
in July. ‘We have had slumps and booms many times before. Cotton will be the staple industry in this area for years to come . . .’ Clearly, though, there was work to be done if Thorneycroft’s bracing yardsticks were to be met. The modernisation of machinery and buildings still had a long way to go; productivity had increased only marginally since the war; and the sociologist Ferdynand Zweig depicted a workforce ‘eager to keep to their traditional ways of doing a job and their traditional standards of performance, such as the “four looms to a weaver system” ’. Nor, according to a US productivity team that toured the industry in 1952, was conservatism confined to the workers. Not only were ‘large elements of both management and labour dominated by an inertia which prevents them from seeing the future clearly’, but ‘their main effort at the moment seems to be directed towards the protection of the least efficient producers and the preservation of antiquated arrangements’.

The obvious solution was economies of scale involving the integration of spinning, weaving and dyeing. But for many small, specialist firms in Lancashire, in small, tight-knit towns like Nelson or Rochdale, the prospect of becoming part of a large group was still unthinkable. Yet arguably the Lancashire cotton industry was doomed whatever it (or even the government) did or did not do. Such anyway is the fatalistic view of its most authoritative historian, John Singleton, who in his overview of the post-war years contends that ‘the industry’s failure to modernise its fixed capital stock and to reform its working practices could be seen as the product, not of managerial slackness, but of a judicious assessment of the long-term state of demand’. He adds that ‘Lancashire’s self-confidence had been shattered by the experiences of the 1920s and 1930s, and the events of the 1940s and 1950s failed to persuade its businessmen that there was any alternative to the further contraction of the industry’.19 Pessimism, in short, was an entirely rational response, and ultimately the question was how best to manage decline. Of course, for those depending on the mills for their livelihoods, it was rather harder to take the Olympian view.

From an even more Olympian perspective, transcending Lancashire’s parochial concerns, the 1952 textiles crisis was a clear signal that it was time to stop privileging the great nineteenth-century export staples – coal, cotton, steel – and instead start prioritising the new, scientific, high-tech industries that could realistically be seen as having a future in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the historian David Edgerton has forcefully argued that the British economy was
already
by the 1950s far more technological in character than has generally been assumed, especially with defence production (including for export) running at unprecedentedly high peacetime levels. These Cold War years were, he claims, dominated by ‘the search for what might be called technological security’ – a search that involved massive expenditure by central government on military research laboratories. For those brought up on the familiar trope – Victorian heyday, inter-war trauma, post-war inexorable decline – it is a reading that offers a salutary counter-perspective, even though Edgerton perhaps exaggerates when he dubs the Britain of these years as a ‘warfare state’ rather than a welfare state.

‘Science was big in the 1950s,’ the poet Hugo Williams has recalled about his boyhood. ‘First there were mottled celluloid fish, magnets, Chinese water-flowers, the drinking bird, the diving man, Meccano, metal puzzles, balsa wood, the smell of “dope”. Glitterwax was so modern after austerity Plasticine. Then there was Silly Putty (in a mottled egg), Slime, Mud and that stuff in tubes for making your own balloons . . .’ Son of a distinguished actor-playwright, young Hugo probably did not have Formica in his kitchen at home. Millions, though, did experience the wonders of the brightly coloured, labour-saving, recently developed plastic laminate in the course of the decade. ‘Lucky the mother whose table is Formica-topped,’ extolled an advertisement in the September 1951 edition of
My Home
. ‘No need to scrub – one wipe with a cloth and it’s clean.’ Five months later, on 23 February 1952, came another sign of the popular lure of things scientific when the first issue of the boys’ comic
Lion
featured on its front page ‘Outlaw of Space’, an errant rival to
Eagle
’s Dan Dare. Or take motor racing. The 22-year-old Stirling Moss was one of
Picture Post
’s ‘New Elizabethans’; Raymond Baxter was becoming the usual commentator on both radio and television; and the animated John Bolster, with handlebar moustache and deerstalker hat, gave the latest news from the pits. For Baxter, a suave figure who had been a Spitfire pilot in the war and never lost his schoolboyish enthusiasm for the latest gadgetry, the task of spreading the word about technological prowess, preferably British, would always be more than just a job.20

Another of Baxter’s regular assignments was the Farnborough Air Show, which in September 1952 had everyone, in Mollie Panter-Downes’s words, ‘caught up in a wave of excitement and optimism about what was going on over their heads’. It was a dramatic enough week. ‘All-day wait – then came THE BANG,’ headlined the
Mirror
’s report for Tuesday the 2nd:

Late this evening, when many spectators had gone off home, Neville Duke, flying Britain’s new Hawker Hunter ‘super-priority’ fighter, provided THE BANG – the noise made when an aircraft breaks through the sound barrier.

We had waited for it since the ban on faster-than-sound flying at the show was lifted.

And the bang that Neville Duke gave us was a MAGNIFICENT BANG, one of the experts here said.

Four days later, a Saturday crowd of 120,000 watched aghast as a prototype de Havilland 110 jet fighter broke up after going through the sound barrier, with an engine ploughing through spectator stands and a car park. The test pilot John Derry, his observer and 26 spectators were killed, including 14-year-old Ray Lord from Wallington. ‘Raymond was a grand kid,’ a family friend told the press. ‘He wanted to be an aircraft designer.’ Next day was the last scheduled day, and, despite the tragedy and heavy rain, the show went on, with 150,000 attending. ‘I shall press on as usual,’ Duke said before he took off in the supersonic Hawker Hunter and again went through the sound barrier. On Monday he received a short, heartfelt note from Churchill: ‘Accept my salute.’

The glamour of aviation – typified by the ambition of many adolescent girls to become air hostesses – was seemingly matched by a vibrant, successful British aircraft industry. ‘As the weird and wonderful prototypes flashed across the sky above the placidly earthbound cows munching in the quiet Hampshire pastures,’ reflected Panter-Downes of her inspiriting Farnborough experience, ‘the ordinary English were enormously heartened by the feeling that the peculiar national inventive genius for machines, which created so much wealth in the steam age, is as good as ever in this uncomfortable atomic one.’21 In fact, certainly as far as the civil-aviation side was concerned, some serious negatives were already apparent.22 Several immediate post-war projects had ground to a sticky, embarrassing halt, typified by the prestigious but fatally lumbering Bristol Brabazon; the industry was badly fragmented, with some 20 different aircraft companies; overly close government involvement, partly in the context of the main airlines (BOAC and BEA) being nationalised, meant an overemphasis on ‘prestige’ considerations as well as a tendency to featherbed; and, above all, in terms of matching the American aircraft industry, there was nothing like the huge, competitive domestic market that US manufacturers enjoyed. In practice, much rested on the fate of one particular pioneering British plane – a plane rushed through by de Havilland from drawing board to commercial operation in record-breaking time.

The Comet, the world’s first passenger jet aircraft, entered service on 2 May 1952 with a flight from London to Johannesburg, though with several stop-offs on the way. An event that generated huge media attention and popular enthusiasm, it was the subject of the television documentary
Comet Over Africa
(1952), described by one member of the Viewing Panel as ‘a memorable record of an historic occasion, that gave us all a great thrill’. It seemed that Britain had a world-beater – ‘We may have ordered the market for a generation,’ Lord Swinton, Minister of Materials, claimed in July after Pan Am had ordered ten Comets – and Panter-Downes soon afterwards at Farnborough unsurprisingly noted how every morning there were queues ‘to clamber aboard the Comet’. Most pundits reckoned that the Comet had a lead of about three to four years, ie before the production of rival American jet planes, and a flurry of articles examined whether production difficulties would be sufficiently overcome for this window of opportunity, in terms of capturing world markets, to be exploited to the maximum. The question, however, that no one in the press raised was whether the Comet itself, for all its elegance and smoothness, was technically sound. The fact that there were fundamental doubts on the part of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) about the plane’s ability to withstand metal fatigue – and that de Havilland, BOAC and the Ministry of Supply had between them connived to postpone exhaustive tests until after the plane’s keenly awaited commercial launch – was known to few indeed.23

For a boy in the 1950s, if being an airline pilot seemed too nerve-racking, there was now the dream of becoming an atomic-energy engineer. ‘Andrew is intelligent and go-ahead,’ started a typically improving strip cartoon in the
Eagle
. ‘He thinks there is a great future for Engineers in this Atomic Age.’  Mary King in Birmingham, approaching the end of her life, found moral comfort in the new age. ‘The first Atomic Power Heating apparatus was opened today at Harwell [the nuclear research station near Oxford],’ she noted in November 1951. ‘I cannot carry the details in my mind, but it is so good to hear of these wonderful researches by man being put to use for the good of man, and not fiendish War bombs.’ She was only half right. Certainly there was a civil nuclear energy dimension to the unfolding technology – reflecting not so much a fanciful mirage of some golden age of cheap, limitless power as a pragmatic concern about the future of coal supplies in the context of significantly increasing electricity consumption – yet military considerations were paramount. ‘The first small and impure billet was produced at Windscale,’ Sir Christopher Hinton recorded in his diary in March 1952. The gifted, demanding Hinton had been charged soon after the war with the task of producing fissile material for bombs; the billet was of plutonium, with the first consignment travelling south the following month under police escort to Aldermaston.