Family Britain, 1951-1957 (56 page)

In the course of the winter, Dunn became almost obsessed by the intractable problems of building a community from scratch. ‘Community?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Building just
houses
and a few shops – like building the auditorium of a theatre & no stage – and then making a lot of speeches about “the new theatre”, “the problems of the new theatre” and occasionally getting irritated with the audience for not showing a spirited appreciation of the play.’

Yet it was not just the absence of facilities that vexed Dunn, a theoretically strong supporter of the working class who in practice found it left something to be desired. ‘Parson deeply moved by hearing children sing “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner,” ’ he recorded. ‘Yet it’s
this
parochial chauvinistic ill-founded conceit that works
against
new community. Won’t build a new community until
forget
they’re Londoners & try to be proud of being B Woodsmen.’ And by early 1954, after noting that all the various ‘community’ organisations, including the Community Centre itself, were ‘failures’, he had reached a conclusion that combined pessimism and pique:

I am not at all convinced that the Estate people
want
an organised community life. They are inclined to ‘keep themselves to themselves’ and almost everything in their lives has encouraged them to do so, however gregarious they may have been in the communities from which they came here. There is only one small cinema; in the absence of an Odeon, many of our neighbours have rented a TV set. For this they pay 16/- a week. If they spend up to 5/- a week on the pools, that’s a pound a week out of an average wage of £8. They can scarcely afford any other, communal entertainment; and all the time they are acquiring the settled habit of staying in. Having come from years of living in one room, most families can have only a limited amount of furniture. We suspect that we have not been invited back by the neighbours we have entertained because they are insufficiently proud of their homes. Besides, the rooms are too tiny for big parties. And then there are the kiddies. They are usually too small to be left alone at night; they certainly never are by our neighbours. If M. [his wife] invites a young Mum for afternoon tea, it’s a safe bet that she’ll bring the kiddies as well. And as party manners are not a common attribute of the Estate children, inviting Mum for afternoon tea involves a special effort of the will.

‘It may be,’ Dunn added, ‘that only time can make a community. To create a community out of thousands of adult strangers must need a very special creative effort . . .’
¹⁷

The Magyar magicians were destroying England on 25 November 1953 just as Lord Hailsham opened a two-day House of Lords debate. This followed the recent White Paper that had recommitted the Tory government to commercial television, though now to be supervised by a BBC-style ‘Second Authority’. No one doubted Hailsham’s political loyalty, but he was adamant that ‘you destroy the principle of public service, without securing the advantages of private enterprise, by trying to create competition between a public service and something else which is not a public service’. His eventual peroration could not have been bettered by Lord Reith himself:

We are fighting for our lives in the present generation, no less than in the period of the war. During the period of the war, when in Europe men had to suffer the peril of death to hear the truth, there was a voice of freedom to which attention was universally paid. It was the voice of Britain and it was the voice of Britain’s public service broadcasts. Are we now to condemn this as a dangerous monopoly, as a weapon which we tremble to use in peace as in war? Are objective truth, objective justice, objective standards of duty and of conduct so utterly unworthy of advertisement that we must hand over to purely commercial interests the greatest instrument for good that has been devised since the printing press?

‘They are very high-minded, very sincere – but so were Cromwell and his Puritans,’ countered the Postmaster General, Earl de la Warr, about the government’s critics. ‘These people probably feel that they could run our lives extremely well. But I do not think the British people have the slightest intention of living like that . . .’ Later that afternoon, the Wembley humiliation over, the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed his hostility to the very notion of more programmes on the nation’s screens: ‘I ask: Is it wise to multiply opportunities of spending time in this way at the expense of other possible occupations for reasonable and intelligent persons? So I ask: Do we really need more television? And my answer is, so far: No, we do not.’

Next day, at the end of a debate that had seen the biggest turnout of peers since the American loan debate in 1946, the government comfortably won the vote by 157 to 87. The
Manchester Guardian
– hostile to the breach of the BBC’s monopoly – dubbed the Tory peers as the government’s ‘herd of dumb, driven cattle’. Soon afterwards, the Commons had their own two-day debate. It ran along predictable enough lines, with perhaps Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s the most memorable contribution. ‘The burden of our argument,’ he declared, was that ‘under commercial television there is no room for those who are in television because they believe in its capacity for improving itself in that medium and making a programme for its own sake.’ And after asserting that ‘any programme on commercial television of any country is like a wounded man who has to be carried on a stretcher by his sponsors one at each end’ – on which principle ‘we are bound to get more and more programmes appealing to mass audiences’ – he went on to warn that ‘Ted Ray and Terry-Thomas are going to have to look to their laurels against the canned entertainment programme of Bob Hope and Jack Benny.’
¹⁸
Again, the government won the vote, and the Reithian nightmare moved one stage closer.

If the herbivorian establishment shuddered, there was reassurance in December for the carnivores. Over the autumn it had emerged that two of the financial world’s outsiders, Charles Clore and the property developer Harold Samuel, were between them seeking to engineer the takeover of the Savoy group of hotels, including Claridges and the Berkeley as well as the Savoy itself. This was a source of considerable consternation to many leading City figures. Not only did they (like Churchill) greatly value the hospitality of these places, but the Clore/Samuel move was an ominous sign that the aggressive takeover bid was becoming a regular part of financial life, an assault in fact on the accepted norm of keeping things in the club. However, through some complicated manoeuvres masterminded by the Savoy’s Hugh Wontner and much abetted by the stockbroking firm Cazenove, the bid was thwarted. The dominant mood in the City was one of relief – a mood encouraged by the Bank of England, whose Governor, Kim Cobbold, had been strongly urging the banks ‘to use special caution in respect of any invitations coming before them which appear to be connected with these take-over operations’, on the grounds that ‘in some at least there would seem to be a considerable speculative element’. Accordingly, with the bankers compliant, the nasty, unpredictable threat of hostile takeovers was for the moment stayed.

An altogether less resistible rise under way by 1953 was, against the helpful background of full employment, that of what would eventually become known as the fifth estate. ‘The most warm-hearted movement in the whole of this country,’ was how Wedgwood Benn on 11 December described the trade-union movement to an
Any Questions?
audience in Waterlooville, a statement greeted with repeated laughter. Three days later the warm-hearted National Union of Railwaymen called, in the outraged words of the journalist and television personality W. J. Brown, ‘a strike on the railways to start next Sunday – 4 days before Xmas day!’ He added that ‘the Railwaymen have, as a matter of fact, a good case on wages’, but that ‘the choice of this date will put the whole country up against them’. ‘Back to 1926’ was the
Financial Times
’s dramatic headline, with the paper declaring on Tuesday the 15th that ‘there can be no pretence that the railwaymen’s conduct is anything but extremely irresponsible’.

Wednesday evening, however, saw a dramatic intervention. From the outset of his return to power, Churchill had been determined to keep on cordial terms with organised labour, a determination reinforced in recent months by increasing signs of industrial militancy, and this dispute was no exception. ‘We cannot have a railway strike, it would be so disturbing to all of us,’ he flatly informed his Chancellor, Rab Butler. ‘You will never get home, nobody will be able to see their wives.’ Churchill knew he could rely on his Minister of Labour, the emollient Sir Walter Monckton, and shortly before midnight Monckton compelled General Sir Brian Robertson, the retired army administrator recently appointed to take charge of the British Transport Commission, to yield to the union demands. ‘Walter and I have settled the railway strike so you won’t be troubled any more,’ Churchill over the phone informed the absent Butler. ‘On what terms have you settled it?’ asked Butler. ‘Theirs, old cock!’ was the insouciant reply. ‘We did not like to keep you up.’ Monckton would subsequently claim that it had been Churchill and Butler who had been ‘weak’, wanting ‘peace at any price’. But either way, there was no doubt about the Churchillian dictat.

‘Monckton has done wonderfully well,’ was Macmillan’s immediate reaction. ‘There will be quite a price to pay – but we all had the impression that public opinion favoured the railwaymen.’ Most of the press did not disagree. ‘Peace With Honour’ was the Conservative-supporting
Sheffield Telegraph
’s headline; the
FT
, though conceding that the settlement was undeniably inflationary and liable to open the floodgates to other unions, insisted that ‘managements as a whole must redouble their efforts to increase productivity’ and that ‘in the last resort, theirs is the responsibility’; while
The Times
, in a bland editorial on ‘Better Railways’, refrained from outright criticism of the government and hoped that ‘this time the promises of higher productivity are not illusory’. Only the
Economist
really put the boot in, using terms like ‘funk’, ‘retreat from reality’ and, most pejorative of all, ‘Munich’.
¹⁹
Over the years it would become one of the mainstays of Thatcherite contemporary history that the government’s craven climbdown in December 1953 had set the tone for the next quarter-century of industrial relations – a version given added teeth by Andrew Roberts’s coruscating 1994 essay on Monckton in his
Eminent Churchillains
. But as Churchill himself had observed, most people just wanted to get home, not least five days before Christmas.

For this year’s Christmas film, there was a runaway winner. On that busy last Wednesday in November, Rank held a sneak preview of
Trouble in Store
– Norman Wisdom’s screen debut – at the Gaumont, Camden Town. The first big laugh (in a screenplay originally written by Michael Foot’s wife Jill Craigie) came at the sight of Jerry Desmonde in his limousine and little Norman being left behind on his bike, and at the end the audience cheered and clapped. ‘If you don’t laugh at Norman’s antics as the downtrodden worker in a big store, trying to get promotion to a window dresser, there is something wrong with your sense of fun,’ insisted the
Daily Mirror
’s reviewer some three weeks later. Not all the critics were completely bowled over. Although acknowledging that ‘he is a funny, endearing little man with a big future’, Virginia Graham in the
Spectator
thought Wisdom’s style overly ‘knockabout’ and wanted him to learn from the performance in the film of Margaret Rutherford, her humour ‘a blend of tones and half-tones graded with infinite cunning’.
The Times
too, though praising ‘an unsophisticated British farce with few inhibitions and, mercifully, no ideas above its station’, thought it ‘a mistaken kindness’ to compare Wisdom, as the
Evening Standard
had done, to the early Charlie Chaplin: ‘His ill-fitting suit, his losing battles against authority, his air of battered chivalry outwardly support the comparison, but as yet Mr Wisdom relies more on grotesque appearance and manufactured situation than inner inspiration.’

Such reservations mattered not a jot as the film (featuring Wisdom’s hit song ‘Don’t Laugh At Me’) was given a blanket release on the vast Odeon circuit and over the next month broke almost all box-office records, including at 51 out of the 67 London cinemas where it played. ‘The most astonishing phenomenon in British post-war entertainment,’ was how
Picture Post
at the end of January called ‘the little man’ with ‘the wondering face and the battered destiny’. Wisdom at this time was also starring every night at the huge Empress Hall, London, in the panto
Sinbad the Sailor on Ice
. ‘He hardly does anything at all, except run about on the enormous stage and in the aisles, shaking an impotent fist at the audience,’ noted the magazine. ‘He skates a little, sings a little, drives about in an old yellow car. Yet whatever he does, or fails to do, the public responds ecstatically.’
²⁰