Family Britain, 1951-1957 (57 page)

The balance between two rival media was shifting irrevocably. ‘It was a T.V. Christmas, which isn’t my idea of Christmas,’ recorded Judy Haines on Christmas Day, but not long afterwards she was enjoying ‘a very fine performance’ by Googie Withers in
The Deep Blue Sea
. ‘I don’t understand unfaithfulness in marriage though & feel it is unnecessary.’ The New Year saw the first weather forecasters on television, the Yorkshireman George Cowling and the Londoner T. H. Clifton. ‘Both have a nice sense of humour, though Mr Clifton sometimes forgets to relax,’ was one viewer’s response. ‘But he and his colleague are so understanding, and have made up to me for all the affronts I suffered in the old days when I listened to the evening forecasts for
farmers
and
shipping
and we poor housewives were forgotten.’ About the same time, BBC’s audience research reflected how the new series of
Have a Go!
had had ‘an audience of 30%’, which was ‘as relatively good in these days of television competition as the previous series in 1951/2’ – adding not only that ‘the reaction of listeners was more mixed than in the past’ but that ‘there were complaints of staleness in the material and of some uneasiness of manner in Wilfred Pickles himself’.

One should not exaggerate the shift – ‘the most relaxed and comforting time of my day’, was how Madge Martin in January referred to ‘my precious “Woman’s Hour” ’ – but at the end of that month there was just a whiff of the last hurrah about
The National Radio Awards of 1953–4
, sponsored by the
Daily Mail
and going out live on the Light Programme from the Scala Theatre. Franklin Engelmann was the MC, Sidney Torch and his Orchestra supplied the music, and Gilbert Harding almost inevitably won the award (voted for by listeners) as Personality of the Year. ‘The Most Entertaining Programme’ was a tied vote between
The Archers
and
Take It From Here
, with the latter’s stars doing a special Glums sketch for the ceremony. One exchange had a particular resonance:

DICK: Dad, Eth doesn’t like wireless. We’re not having one in our home.

JIM: (AGHAST) You’re not having a wireless? Oh, son, a home’s not a home without a wireless. Think of the long winter evenings . . . ! What are you going to listen to while Eth’s talking?

JUNE: I think wireless is just a drug, Mr Glum.

JIM: Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? So me and my family are just drug-haddocks! You listen to me, Eth – wireless is a – is a – a modern
miracle
, it is.

JUNE: But there’s other forms of entertainment, Mr Glum.

JIM: Who’s talking about entertainment? I’m talking about the BBC! The BBC is part of the English heritage. Like suet pudding and catarrh.

The future lay elsewhere, and
Picture Post
had already predicted its ‘bright stars of Television in 1954’. They included Morecambe and Wise (‘streamlined patter and natural, apparently oblivious, craziness’, but no Christian names given), Benny Hill (‘combines personal charm with a gift for mimicry and self-effacing comedy’) and Billie Whitelaw (‘made an immediate impact on viewers when Caryl Doncaster cast her last year as the young wife in the series,
The Pattern of Marriage
’). ‘She takes direction well,’ Doncaster told the magazine, ‘and she has a quality of sincerity which is essential for television. You can’t use tricks on TV – and get away with it.’
²¹

By early 1954 two national champions were in trouble. ‘Awful about that Comet crash in Mediterranean,’ noted Marian Raynham on 12 January, two days after all 35 on board had perished off the island of Elba. BOAC had no alternative but to suspend all Comet services while technical examinations took place. ‘There could be no doubt of the shock it gave everybody,’ reflected a melancholic Raymond Streat a week after the crash:

It was not merely that some people had been killed, though that always shocks everybody’s feelings. It was the awful thought that the Comet aeroplane might not be the successful achievement of British scientists and engineers which we have all believed it to be in the past few years. In a very special way it has comforted us as a country and a people during a period in which so many emblems and tokens of our former power and glory had been stripped away from us.

The other troubled champion was Churchill. The
Daily Mirror
had seldom been friendly, but its headline on the 26th, ‘Should Churchill Retire?’, took its attacks to a new level. Worse, because less predictable, occurred a week later, on 3 February, with the appearance of the latest
Punch
. On one page was a large, striking drawing (unsigned, but by Leslie Illingworth) of an aged, weary Churchill, with the caption, ‘Man goeth forth to his work and to his labours until the evening’; opposite was a signed piece by the editor, Malcolm Muggeridge, about ‘Bellarius’, reputedly an emperor in ninth-century Byzantium. ‘The spectacle of him clutching wearily at all the appurtenances and responsibilities of an authority he could no longer fully exercise,’ he wrote in Gibbonian style, ‘was to his admirers infinitely sorrowful, and to his enemies infinitely derisory.’ The magazine in the past year had sharpened up under Muggeridge, but this was something else. ‘
Punch
goes everywhere,’ an infinitely hurt Churchill next day told his doctor Lord Moran. ‘I shall have to retire if this sort of thing goes on. I must make a speech in a fortnight’s time; it is necessary when things like this happen.’
²²

13

Can You Afford It, Boy?

Things were moving on the literary front. ‘ “Can’t you tell me, Mr Lumley, just what it is that you don’t like about the rooms?” ’ was the opening sentence, set in the dingy Midland town of ‘Stotwell’, of John Wain’s first novel
Hurry on Down
, published in October 1953. ‘There was no mistaking the injured truculence in the landlady’s voice, nor her expression of superhuman patience about to snap at last. Charles very nearly groaned aloud. Must he explain, point by point, why he hated living there? Her husband’s cough in the morning, the way the dog barked every time he went in or out, the greasy mats in the hall? Obviously it was impossible.’ Wain’s own background was solidly middle-class – son of a Potteries dentist, Oxford, lecturer in English at Reading University – but his hero Charles Lumley was, in the words of the
TLS
, ‘in flight from his parents, from academic culture and gentility, from a manner of speech and a way of living’. The review quoted his resolution as a window cleaner – one of several defiantly non-middle-class jobs during a series of picaresque, unmetropolitan adventures – to ‘form no roots in his new stratum of society, but remain independent of class, forming roots only with impersonal things such as places and seasons’. The novel’s reception was broadly positive – ‘Mr Wain, in his grim and gritty and tough-minded way, can be very funny indeed,’ reckoned Walter Allen in the
New Statesman
– but some reviewers could not refrain from moralising. ‘Mr Wain endows his hero with an obscure desire to get outside society, or to live in it without belonging to it, or something of the sort,’ observed Graham Hough in the
Listener
. ‘He has not thought very hard about this, and I don’t think you need either.’ For Geoffrey Bullough in the
Birmingham Post
, the ‘weakness’ of a ‘very amusing’ book lay in the hero’s ‘drifting negativeness’. Still,
The Times
was able to offer reassurance. The hero ‘gets mixed up in some very queer adventures indeed’, it noted, before adding that ‘this is not a sordid book’.
¹

The following month another grammar-school product, Dylan Thomas, died in New York. Barely two months later, on Monday, 25 January 1954, his ‘play for voices’,
Under Milk Wood
, had its British premiere on the Third Programme, starring the young Richard Burton in the part Thomas himself would have played. It proved, despite or perhaps because of its plotlessness, a great moment in radio history. ‘I was spellbound from start to finish,’ declared the
Listener
’s Martin Armstrong, by ‘the gradually unfolding impression of a living community’ (a small fishing town in south Wales called Llareggub, spelled forwards) and a ‘dazzling command of language which kept the listener in a state of delighted surprise’. William Salter in the
New Statesman
found it ‘lyrical, impassioned and funny, an
Our Town
given universality’, asserting that ‘by comparison with anything broadcast for a very long time, it exploded on the air like a bomb – but a life-giving bomb’. Listeners mainly agreed, with the broadcast getting ‘the exceptionally high Appreciation Index of 81’ and being ‘received with a rare enthusiasm’. ‘True,’ the audience research report added, ‘there was a small minority to whom it seemed unedifying, verbose or confusing. But for most of the audience, the wit, vigour and beauty of the writing combined with a flawless production to make a memorable broadcast.’ Sadly, Thomas’s home town of Laugharne was unable to receive the broadcast, and the Welsh Home Service declined to repeat it, on the grounds that it was not ‘for family or home listening’. ‘The chapel influence,’ plausibly reckons one of Thomas’s biographers, ‘balked at suggestions of Welsh hypocrisy and saw only malicious satire.’
²

Thomas’s admirers did not include Kingsley Amis, then a 31-year-old lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea. ‘So that crazy Welch fellow has paid the supreme penalty,’ he wrote to Philip Larkin soon after the news of Thomas’s death. ‘Many were the long faces here, and much anger there was with the English department for keeping their faces short.’ He amplified in a further letter: ‘I think him a bad poet and a bad influence . . . I cannot mourn his passing. A Bloomsburyite to his
dirty
fingernails, that was him, and only sentimentalising, ignorant horsepiss about his Welchness can conceal the fact.’ Two months later, on the same day as the
Under Milk Wood
broadcast, Amis’s first novel,
Lucky Jim
, was published by Gollancz. That evening he and his wife Hilly went out for a celebratory dinner, presumably missing the Third’s finest. ‘Can you afford it, boy?’ the Welsh waiter asked after he ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

As it happened, a hostile review had already appeared the day before in the
Sunday Times
. An ‘ignorant buffoon’ was how the novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross dismissed the central character Jim Dixon, with Amis found guilty of confusing ‘farce with comedy, schoolboy grubbiness with wit’. Thereafter, Amis was able to relax. John Metcalf in the
Spectator
on 29 January called the novel ‘that rarest of rare good things: a funny book’; Allen in the
New Statesman
acclaimed Amis as ‘a novelist of formidable and uncomfortable talent’; Anthony Powell in
Punch
(the Churchill issue) reckoned him ‘the first promising young novelist who has turned up for a long time’; and John Betjeman in the
Daily Telegraph
on 5 February thought
Lucky Jim
the funniest novel he had read since Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline and Fall
. A certain staidness might have been expected from the
TLS
, but its reviewer found the book ‘often richly comic’ and ‘extremely enjoyable’, while detecting in Dixon part of an emerging pattern: ‘He is the anti- or rather sub-hero who is beginning to figure increasingly as the protagonist of the most promising novels written by young men since the war – in, for example, the work of Mr Ernest Frost, Mr William Cooper, and Mr John Wain – an intelligent provincial, who, after getting a scholarship and an Oxford or Cambridge degree, finds his social position both precarious and at odds with his training.’ Arguably the most pregnant response came, late in the day, from a rare female reviewer. Amis, reflected the historical novelist-cum-biographer Hester W. Chapman in the
Listener
in March, ‘knows so much already about the vagaries of the human heart that one feels a little anxious that his eye should one day become dulled, his resilience slacken’.
³

At the risk of reductionism, where exactly was Jim Dixon to be ‘placed’ in the political, social and cultural landscape of 1954? The
TLS
reviewer made an attempt, but it was Amis himself some four years later – in a surprisingly full response to an inquisitive American academic – who offered the definitive analysis:

Dixon is supposed to be the son of a clerk, an office worker (like myself). He is a Labour Party socialist and probably took part in student politics when younger (like myself). One is meant to feel that he did well enough in his student academic career to make it natural for him to become a history lecturer, which he did without much thought. Though he finds the academic world decreasingly to his taste, he sticks at it because he does think university teaching an important job, and also because he is afraid of venturing out on his own. I think he is a plausible figure in his world: there are certainly many like him in that they are the first generation in their families to have received a university education, they have won their way up by scholarships all through, they are not the conventional Oxford–Cambridge academic type, they don’t embrace the manners, customs and pastimes of that type (sherry, learned discussion, tea-parties with the Principal’s wife, chamber concerts) but stick to their own, to the ones their non-academic contemporaries share (beer, arguments in pubs, amorous behaviour at – and outside – dances, jazz). Dixon has seen, throughout his life, power and position going to people who (he suspects) are less notable for their ability than their smooth manners, their accents, the influence they or their fathers can wield. The money thing is less important; Dixon is hard-up himself, and is a bit suspicious of the rich, but is far more so of Oxford-accented ‘culture’.

That was surely the crux. ‘If he were closely questioned about this,’ the Oxford-educated ingrate concluded with a typically light touch, ‘he would probably admit in the end that culture is real and important and ought not to be made the property of a sort of exclusive club which you can only enter if you come from the right school – culture ought to be available to everyone who can use it; but such an avowal would be very untypical of him and you would probably have to get him very drunk first.’