Family Britain, 1951-1957 (27 page)

Liverpool’s Scotland Road, heartbeat of that city’s working-class life and close to both the centre and the docks, was almost as emblematic. ‘A city within a city’, with distinct Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Italian migrant communities as well as the native Scousers and pockets of Germans and Poles, it was still imbued in the early 1950s with strong sectarian divisions. Two young Catholics, both attending St Antony’s School, were James Melia (born 1937, one of eleven children of a cobbler) and Priscilla Maria Veronica White (born 1943, daughter of a docker): the former became a scheming, prematurely balding midfielder for Liverpool; the latter, Cilla Black. ‘Home was our flat at 380 Scottie Road, above George Murray’s barber’s shop, behind a branch of Midland Bank and next door to Mrs Lee’s Chinese laundry,’ she recalled. ‘Our home was full of music when I was a kid. We listened to records, and always had the radio on . . . Me mam was always singing, especially on Monday mornings, which was washday in our home; and me dad was forever playing his mouth organ when he wasn’t tending his budgerigars.’ He was also ‘a very dapper man who loved his waistcoats’ and ‘a very quiet, shy man until he was in the company of men’, especially in the pub. For his wife, though, there was just one all-consuming ambition. ‘We didn’t have one of the highly prized two-up, two-down terraced houses. Me mam would have killed to have one of those, because living in the flat meant we didn’t have our own front door. We either had to come in through the barber’s shop, which me mam hated doing, or when the shop was closed we came in through the back entry on William Moult Street.’ And one day, after it transpired that the flat was to be ‘upgraded’ (including a new bathroom), young Priscilla returned from school to find her mother ‘crouched on the stairs crying with frustration’ – because this meant that the family would slip down the queue for a council house with its own front door.

The mother is a figure writ large in most memoirs of a working-class childhood.
An Immaculate Mistake
is a marvellous evocation by Paul Bailey (born 1937) of growing up in Battersea during and after the war – a two-storey terrace, with poky rooms, by the railway; the application of Lifebuoy soap each Friday evening on the visit to the public baths; Maggy Brown’s pie-and-eel shop; magazines as ‘books’, with hardly any real books in the houses in Bailey’s street; cold rice pudding left out in case he got back late – but it is his mother who is the emotional centre. She was a domestic help, her husband was a roadsweeper; ‘if people ask you what your father does for a living’, she would instruct the young Paul, ‘tell them he works for the council.’ The gods she worshipped were tidiness and cleanliness; books were ‘dust traps’; Churchill she disparaged as a warmonger; her views on the aristocracy were mixed, but ultimately she was a ‘feudalist’; an obsession with money and not being in debt involved methodical saving for her funeral (‘the day of your funeral is the most important day in your life’); and her reaction to the subject of sex was profoundly negative. ‘If your poor father hadn’t gone and died [in 1948], you would be dancing to a different tune, make no mistake,’ she would say to the book-reading, classical-music-listening, actor-aspiring and generally moony, moody adolescent Paul. ‘Why is that?’ ‘The back of his hand is why. You’d soon keep a civil tongue in your head if you knew he was there to clip your ears.’ Paul was also realising in his teens that he was homosexual – a realisation provoking, unsurprisingly in that milieu, ‘feelings of confusion and shame’ that lasted until his early 20s.

There seem to be, sad to record, conspicuously few authentic working-class diaries for these years. One that does exist is by William Hayhurst, who lived at 8 Parcel Street, Beswick, Manchester 11, and was employed by a local coach and bus company (A. Mayer & Son) as a driver, usually for day excursions. The entries tend to be bald, with little in the way of either description or reflection, but cumulatively they yield an impression of a hard-working, self-respecting working man of the period. They also, more disconcertingly, remind us through their very baldness of how little we really know about these distant lives and almost still voices:

16 August 1945, Wednesday
. Garage 7.30 am. V.J. party for all the street. Fine weather. Had a real good time. Beer. Fireworks. Dancing round bonfire. 12 midnight.

3 June 1946, Monday
. Kendall St. Private to Blackpool. Dead end kids.

24 July 1950, Monday
. Day off. Sunny. Hannah [his wife] & I go to town. Bought chip pan. Go to New Royal at night. Bill [probably their son] booked railway tickets for holidays.

24 November 1950, Friday
. Stayed with Dad afternoon . . . Said goodnight Bill, God bless. These were his last words.

4 November 1952, Tuesday
. Day off. Raining all day. 11.00 am City Hall exhibition. Women & Home. No good. Go to Hippodrome. Charlie Chester etc. Very good.

8 January 1953, Thursday
. Foggy. Up at 5.00 am. Garage 6.30 am. No 3 Duty. Called for haircut on way home. Mother called at night with firewood. All at home. Made football coupon out.

14 January 1953, Wednesday
. Up at 5.00 am. Garage 6.20 am. Number 4 Duty. Hannah went to Lewis’s for cotton 5½d. I dressed aunty’s foot again. Little better. Mother brought a bag of coke. On our own, Bill out.

28 January 1953, Wednesday
. Day off. Hannah & I go to circus at Belle Vue matinee. On our own at night.

28 March 1953, Saturday
. Backed winner of Grand National ‘Early Mist’ 20 to 1.

15 June 1953, Monday
. Rainy. 11 coaches for old age pensioners. Manley Park [Manchester] & Albert Park [Salford]. Police escort through B/pool. Raining. No meals. They had meals at Woolworths. Left 7.00 pm. Home 10.00 pm.

16 June 1953, Tuesday
. 8.15 am. 5 coaches to Rhyl. Brooke St old age pensioners. Dinner & tea at Ira’s Café. Raining slightly all day. Left at 7.00 pm. Home 11.00 pm. OK.

22 April 1954, Thursday
. Up at 5.15 am. Made fire. Garage 6.25 am. No 5 duty. On our own at night watching T.V. Mother called with coupons.

8 May 1954, Saturday
. T.V. poor.3

Papers, cigarettes, drink: those were the three staples of the working-class, especially male working-class, way of life – call it ‘culture’.

Despite up to a fifth of the adult population being illiterate or semi-illiterate, the reading of newspapers was a boom activity in post-war Britain: by 1952 the average total weekday circulation was 29 million, comprising 16.1 million for national morning papers (almost double the 1930 average), 2.5 million for provincial morning papers, 3.4 million for London evening papers and 7 million for provincial evening papers. On Sundays, when most people read more than one paper, the average total circulation was an extraordinary 31.7 million, more than double the 1930 average. UNESCO figures around the same time revealed that daily newspaper circulation in Britain, about 610 per 1,000 inhabitants, was decisively ahead of all other countries, with Sweden next on 490 and France on only 240.4

Which papers did the working class favour? The following, according to the authoritative Hulton Survey of 1949 (based on a national sample of more than 7,000 people), were the most popular six titles:

News of the World
: 55.0 per cent (ie read by 55 per cent of the working class)

People
: 35.9 per cent

Sunday Pictorial
: 33.8 per cent

Daily Mirror
: 28.6 per cent

Daily Express
: 25.7 per cent

Sunday Express
: 15.1 per cent

By contrast, only 3.4 per cent of the working class read the
Daily Telegraph
and only 1.2 per cent the
Observer
, while men read more than women, with 59.3 per cent compared to 51.3 per cent in terms of the
News of the World
.

The Press and Its Readers
was the title of Mass-Observation’s illuminating 1949 survey. ‘You know it is all reading, sort of thing, something to read,’ an unskilled working-class woman explained about her
Daily Mirror
habit. ‘To see how things are going on in the world. I like to hear about murders, I hear about all the murders going on, how it all happened. Proper blood curdler for that sort of thing I am.’ The survey included a rich array of other testimony:

I read the
Mirror
. Not anything particular I like about it at all, except the cartoons. I don’t read any particular page, just if anyone says anything interesting I pick it up and read it, but I don’t bother with it much.
(Unskilled working-class man, 45)

I’ve had the
News of the World
for years. I like to read all the crimes and sensational things, and the medical part too.
(Unskilled working-class woman, 35)

I read the
News of the World
. It seems to me to have all straightforward news in it, and we’ve been having it for years.
(Artisan-class woman, 50)

I read the
People
. I like the fashions and all that.
(Unskilled working-class woman, 36)

I read the
Express
. . . All the sport, see?
(Unskilled working man, 19)

I read the
Mirror
. I open it at the Live Letters – I read that when I’m feeding the baby.
(Unskilled working-class woman, 30)

I read the
Sunday Express
. . . I always read the letters – that’s the first thing I always read – they have columns about tittle tats from all over the world.
(Woman, artisan-class, 19)

I read the
Pictorial
. I buy it for the baby to look at the pictures.
(Housewife, unskilled working-class, 30)

When I’ve the time, I look at the
Mirror
– Live Letters – they seem to learn you a bit, they give you the answers, you know. And Jane! I’ve not much time to read really, but when I do I prefer the
Mirror
.
(Unskilled working man, 35)

The last word went to a middle-aged charwoman. ‘Lord love a duck!’ she replied to being asked why she read her local paper. ‘What a lot of silly questions. Just for curiosity of course. Not for anything in particular.’

The undaunted investigators also watched readers in action in public libraries. A couple of examples were reasonably typical:

Picks up the
Daily Graphic
[forerunner of the
Daily Sketch
] and looks at front-page headlines. Reads ‘Woman Recluse 89 Dead in Trunk’. Reads length of column, turns to back page and continues to read further column (as continued from front page) about the murder (time 4 minutes). Reads column ‘Anne’s Wedding etc.’ (1 minute), back again to front page – reads column on extreme right ‘The Dyke’, etc. Turns to centre pages, looks at pictures (another minute). Turns to page 2 and reads ‘Money is no object’. Puts elbows on table. Also reads article on lower page 2 – ‘20 years on your age’ (5 minutes). Turns over to page 3 – reads cartoon ‘Blondie’. Looks up and sees that another woman has finished with magazine
Britannia and Eve
– leans over and takes it. (
Skilled working-class woman, 45
)

Picks up
Daily Mirror
, glances at front page news items (headlines only). Opens
Daily Mirror
to page 3 and reads cartoon – glances at remaining reading matter but doesn’t settle down to read anything special. Turns to page 4 – reads ‘Jane’ – looks at pictures. Leaves
Daily Mirror
open centre page – walks away.
(Unskilled working-class man, 30)

‘On the whole, although the majority of people look at the political news, it is only to glance at it,’ was M-O’s key, unambiguous conclusion. ‘Relatively few ignore it completely, but on the other hand equally few show signs of any real interest in it. And although most of people’s reading time, insofar as dailies are concerned, is devoted to news, it is largely the sort of home news that is partly gossip, and that has an easy personal appeal.’5

By far the two most popular dailies in the country as a whole were the
Daily Mirror
and the
Daily Express
, each selling around four million copies by the early 1950s. But whereas the
Mirror
’s readership was overwhelmingly working-class, the super-patriotic, drum-beating, right-wing
Express
enjoyed a strong following across the classes – helped by its three leading adult cartoons (Osbert Lancaster, the Gambols and Giles), each having a different class subject matter and, presumably, appeal. The paper’s editor was the legendary Arthur Christiansen, for whom the test of a story was reputedly whether it would appeal to someone living in the backstreets of Derby. As for the
Mirror
, two of its most distinctive features were its American-style strip cartoons – usually about seven on any one day, including ‘Buck Ryan’, ‘Belinda’ and ‘Garth’ as well as ‘Jane’ – and its ‘Live Letters’, answered since 1936 by the Old Codgers, definitely not American. ‘I am informed by my comrades that I could be fined £2 for taking my place in a fish and chip queue out of turn. Is this true?’ asked ‘Fishy’ from RAF Hednesford in July 1951. ‘If we had a queue jumper to deal with we’d tell him the same,’ was the reply. ‘No, laddie, we’re not spoiling it for your comrades.’ Celebrity featured strongly – in this same issue Judy Garland and Noël Coward on the French Riviera, Vera Lynn’s summer season at Blackpool and ‘freckled’ Glynis Johns’s make-up for her latest film role – while editorial space devoted to hard news (excluding crime and sensation) was significantly less than in the worthier, TUC-backed, commercially struggling
Daily Herald
. ‘We’ve taken the
Mirror
since 1940,’ a 30-year-old gas fitter explained to M-O. ‘I forget what particular reason it was now, I believe it was something to do with some women’s patterns that my wife liked . . . Well, myself I like it because the sports page is quite enterprising, and we all clamour for Jane, and the comic strips.’6