Family Britain, 1951-1957 (32 page)

Elsewhere, musical talent could be expressed through the long-established, still vigorous brass-band movement. ‘Fodens Motor Works Band [from Sandbach] defends its national title against 16 contenders in the most open championship since the war,’ the
Daily Herald
announced on the last Saturday of October 1951 (two days after the general election) about its National Brass Band Championship, following exhaustive area contests earlier in the year. Among the bands competing that day at the Royal Albert Hall, in front of an audience of 7,000, were Brighouse and Rastrick, Fairey Aviation Works, Hanwell Silver, St Dennis Silver (from Cornwall, founded 1837), Morris Motors – and, from Queensbury near Bradford, the Black Dyke Mills Band, returning after a rule-enforced absence following its 1947–8–9 triple win. Altogether, the bands included more than 400 men, but only one girl cornetist, Hazel Joll of Falmouth Town Band. Almost inevitably, Black Dyke Mills came through to win, with their acclaimed performance of Percy Fletcher’s
An Epic Symphony
. After their great day out, wrote the
Herald
consolingly, ‘the players go home to re-enter their workaday world as miners, motor craftsmen, china-clay workers, shipwrights and masons’. But for the triumphant Yorkshiremen, mainly textile workers, there was both a victory march back home on the Monday evening – ‘all the village is expected to turn out to cheer’, anticipated the Bradford paper – and, 17 years later, a starring role in the first batch of Apple singles.30

Choral singing and brass bands, though, were not the urban working-class norm. Something else was, as the 15-year-old Robert Douglas discovered in Maryhill, Glasgow:

‘Are you no away tae the dancing, yet?’ Uncle Jack looked at me as though considering reporting me to the police. Every time we had visitors during the summer of 1954 somebody would ask that question. You leave school, get a job and start going to the dancing. It was written down somewhere. Tribal. Another rite of passage . . . ‘Everybody starts going tae the jigging when they leave the school. Best puckin’ night oot in the world.’ He drew on his Capstan Full Strength. ‘Aye, a night doon the Locarno or the Barrowland. Ye cannae beat it. Time ye were away.’

The
Economist
reckoned in 1953 that ballroom dancing was the second-largest entertainment industry, with annual admissions at dance halls running at about 200 million, while that same year the mainly working-class Derby survey found that whereas 34 per cent of the 16–24 age group went dancing regularly, only 6 per cent of the 25–34 age group did, and even fewer as they got older still. Kerr in her study of inner-city Liverpool put it bluntly: ‘Dancing is extremely popular with the girls until marriage, when it is dropped at once.’

What were those dance floors like? Dennis et al in their Featherstone study have a nice description of the large Saturday-evening dances at the Miners’ Welfare Institute – several hundred people, almost all in their late teens, ‘dance floor crowded, conversation not urgently necessary, often limited to a narrow range of remarks on the size of the crowd and the quality of the band’ – but the most vivid evocation is by Steven Berkoff (born 1937), who by his early teens was going to the vast Tottenham Royal, a Mecca in almost every sense. It was a milieu where ‘you were who you wished to be – warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummel’; where ‘in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into with the expectation of a dream’; where as you entered ‘the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin lacquer, cigs, floor polish’; where ‘the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end’; where ‘the Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right’, with ‘no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize’; where the underlying behavioural assumption was that ‘this was the mating game and the locking of horns’; where ‘you wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance’; and where ‘as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11 pm when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gabardine rubbed against her taffeta’.

Nevertheless, for all the sexual subtext, most dance halls were essentially respectable: managements imposed minimum sartorial standards, including collar and tie for men; they were not licensed for alcohol; and, until the more gymnastic jive gradually took over in the course of the 1950s, they tended to be places where the patrons followed the strict, graceful codes of ballroom dancing (‘slow, slow, quick quick slow’) as ordained in print and broadcasting by Victor Silvester. Anyway, a glance at one of the best-known bandleaders of the day – the shrewd, dapper, smiling, indefatigable Joe Loss – was enough to demonstrate the underlying conservatism of the milieu.31

Nothing yet, though, rivalled the appeal of the flickering screen:

Every day of the week [noted PEP (Political and Economic Planning) in 1952, several years after the medium’s all-time peak] there are, on average, about 3¾ million admissions to the 4,600 cinemas in Great Britain, which is roughly equivalent to every person in the country going to the cinema twenty-seven times a year [easily more than anywhere else in the world]. Not everyone, of course, goes to the ‘flicks’, but four out of ten adults and five out of ten children do so at least once a week. In all, the British public spend over £100 million annually on cinema-going, which is twice as much as the total amount they spend on going to theatres, concert-halls, music-halls, dance-halls, skating-rinks, sporting events and all other places of public amusement.

Within that huge overall audience, there were certain clear patterns and trends by the early to mid-1950s. The preponderance of women had almost disappeared; the lower middle-class component was declining, the working-class component rising (to 82 per cent of the adult audience by 1954); and there were signs that the cinema would increasingly be a place for the young, among whom pupils from secondary moderns were three times more likely than grammar-school swots to go more than once a week. There were also telling regional variations: annual admissions per person ran at around 36 in Scotland and the north of England, around 26 in London and the Midlands, and only about 18 in the altogether less urban south-west and East Anglia. What about the refuseniks? ‘No, I’ve gone right off it,’ a 30-year-old working-class London woman told Mass-Observation in 1950. ‘They just don’t convince you. Look at the maids in Hollywood films. Do they look as if they’ve ever done a hard day’s work?’ A 40-year-old working-class woman was similarly disenchanted: ‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen the lot, and too many of the same type just gets on my nerves. They’re all the same, either murder, or mystery, or something to do with shooting and killing. Well, we’ve lived through enough of that.’ And a 25-year-old working-class woman had the best of reasons: ‘It’s baby – since I’ve had baby, and she’s seven months, I don’t think I’ve been once . . . Well frankly, it doesn’t worry me whether I go or not . . . I’d rather sit by the fire and listen to the wireless.’32

What were the 4,600 cinemas (of which the majority seated over a thousand) like? A handful of memories give the distinctive flavour:

In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just a walk or a tram-ride away – the Lyric down Tong Road, the Clifton at Bramley, the Palace off Stanningley Road and the Western a bit further on . . . Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing with the box office generally at the top of a flight of white marble steps, presumably to accommodate the rake, the auditorium itself was often not much more than a hangar, the aisle carpeted but the seats on lino or even bare concrete . . . We always called it ‘the pictures’, seldom ‘the cinema’ and never ‘the movies’. To this day I don’t find it easy to say ‘movies’ . . .
(Alan Bennett)

Colchester boasted five cinemas. They ranked hierarchically, from the Regal (a custom-built picture palace, with restaurant, portraits of stars, pile carpet), the Playhouse, the Hippodrome (the last two converted music halls, the latter with some fine interior décor), the Headgate (a converted chapel) to the Empire, the town fleapit – still gaslit in the 1950s. And I seem to recall the usherettes going up and down in the intervals with Flit guns. Perhaps there really were fleas.
(John Sutherland)

The only downside, so far as I was concerned, was the continuous performance where the main film and the ‘B’ movie (usually a black and white British cop drama), together with the newsreel, just kept rolling from 2 pm until the stampede to beat the National Anthem at about 10 pm. My father was a man who wouldn’t be hurried, so instead of dashing to make the start of the main feature, we’d always arrive in the middle of the film. The whole programme would continue until the point I always dreaded, when my father would nudge me and say, ‘I think this is where we came in.’ Up we’d get and stumble out in the dark . . .
(Anton Rippon, Derby)

There was always a queue if the film was at all popular, which invariably resulted in fights as people tried to push in front of others, and even inside no one was safe. Every cinema had its share of gropers prowling the dark looking for young women sitting on their own, and these encounters would erupt like mortar-bomb explosions all through the film. Suddenly there would be a screech and the sound of a face being slapped followed by a lady shouting: ‘You dirty fucking bastard!’ Ushers would arrive and the shame-faced dirty fucking bastard would be thrown out.
(Michael Caine, Elephant and Castle)

‘I always went the same way to every cinema, and I could traverse those same streets now,’ is how the film director Terence Davies recalls his picture-going Liverpool childhood. ‘I can still remember where I saw certain films, where I sat, who I went with. It’s
still
that vivid.’33

Cinema-goers fell into different types. Two film historians, Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, have usefully distinguished between the indiscriminate, the regular and the occasional, while Peter Miskell in his study of the cinema in Wales (where the habit was broadly in line with the British average) has emphasised the intensity as well as the breadth of the medium’s appeal, with at least half of a typical audience comprising those who went at least twice a week. How important was the actual film? Kathleen Box’s 1946 inquiry into cinema-going, based on adult samples, found that more than two-thirds either went to the same cinema ‘whatever the film being shown’ or chose a film from a limited range of local cinemas, with fewer than one-third making the film itself the sole criterion of choice. ‘Broadly speaking,’ commented Rachael Low in 1948 in
The Penguin Film Review
on the implications of Box’s findings, ‘the lower economic and education groups show the greatest rigidity in their cinema-going, tending to go very often and without exercising much choice.’ She went regretfully on:

To them the all-important thing is that films should be available in sufficient quantity to provide one or two full evenings a week at the pictures, with all that this implies of escape from home and job, outings with friends and, for the young, a comfortable and socially accepted place for wooing. The unimportance of artistic nuances is nowhere so marked as in the Sunday-evening houses in such an area, where bad reissues and worse second features are received with indifferent tolerance by a skylarking audience, whose sole expression of emotion, whether of amusement, embarrassment or even surprise or tension, seems to be an uncontrolled guffaw.

Low drew a contrast with those from ‘a financial and educational background’ encouraging ‘more diffused cultural interests’. They, happily, were ‘inclined to exercise more rigorous selection, only going to the pictures when there is a particular film they wish to see’.34

Examined close-up, the whole business could have an undeniably haphazard feel to it.
London Town
, starring the comedian Sid Field, was Britain’s first major Technicolor musical; in the autumn of 1946, at the time of its much-publicised release, Mass-Observation elicited a range of working-class responses, mainly from the King’s Cross, Battersea and Waterloo districts, as it asked how people had heard about the film, what they knew about it and whether they wanted to see it:

Well Missie you see, I don’t know much about them things, but if you say it’s Sid Field, I might take the missus of a Saturday afternoon – she’d enjoy it you know – she likes something cheery over the weekend.
(M50)

No, I don’t know nothing about that sort of thing.
(F50)

No! – I can’t talk ducks – look! I’ve got no teeth.
(F55)

I don’t get much time to find out about these things really – being at work all day.
(F55)

I’d be very keen on seeing it – especially the wife – frankly between you and I it’s the cheapest form of entertainment for the working man. I go with the wife and kid once a week – usually on a Saturday, and we go out to tea, and that’s about as far as the pocket will allow.
(M30)

Well, I expect we shall go and see it because of my wife. Yes, it’s a pity she isn’t here really – she’d tell you all you want to know – she’s a great film fan. But being a
dutiful
husband as I said – I expect I shall have to go.
(M35)

I don’t really care one way or the other.
(M35)

Well as a matter of fact, the daughter came round on Sunday and suggested we should go, but the missus was feeling a bit off colour and didn’t want to go so far – you know as how it is.
(M65)

The generally downbeat tone accurately presaged
London Town
’s fate: despite the best efforts of Field himself, Kay Kendall, ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea and a 14-year-old Petula Clark, as well as a clutch of supposedly favourite ‘Cockney’ songs, it proved a resounding flop.