Family Britain, 1951-1957 (59 page)

The good times were coming, for earlier in the week the government had announced that meat and bacon rationing would at last end during the first half of July, in effect the final major step in the dismantling of the wartime rationing system. Arguably those good times had already started to arrive; yet when Nella Last in Barrow went shopping about the same time as the Haines girls were enjoying their choc-ices, the experience proved curiously deflating for a diarist (by now in her mid-sixties) who had recorded more faithfully than anyone the long years of austerity:

There was very little doing in the market. I reflected how ‘blasé’ we get & so quickly – though rising prices would account for ‘indifference’ to the piles of ‘top grade Lakeland eggs’ 3/3 a dozen? ‘Best’ bananas at 1/2, & two grades of ‘seconds’, one of brown skinned ones, were actually marked
6d
a pound. Pork, rabbits, boiling fowls were plentiful. Meat too was apparently off ration with it getting towards the market closing.
Such
good woollen & rayon remnants left me utterly indifferent. I wish I could feel a bit more interest generally, things don’t seem ‘worth worrying over’ & I so
quickly
tire.
⁴

2

Butter is Off the Ration

‘Every night the Harringay arena is packed; every night throngs of converts – mostly young people – crowd up at the end of the service to the bare space below the rostrum, thence to be conducted by “counsellors” to a room where they are interviewed and given tracts.’ John Betjeman, writing soon after the start on 1 March of Billy Graham’s Greater London Crusade, was as an Anglo-Catholic personally unsympathetic to the Evangelical, revivalist approach – ‘the technique of microphones, massed choirs, trumpets and advertising campaigns’ – but found in Graham himself ‘a humble likeable young man who regards himself merely as an instrument of the Holy Ghost’. Another observer, Trevor Philpott, was there on the first night and noted how all 12,000 seats were filled, how the 2,000-strong choir comprised mainly young women and how several hundred converts came forward. Over the next 11 weeks or so, the arena continued night after night to be full to overflowing, with from late March landline relays to packed churches, halls and cinemas. There was also the nightly ritual on the way back from Harringay. ‘The trains are packed with these singing multitudes,’ a letter explained to the
Daily Telegraph
’s largely non-revivalist readership. ‘One cannot fail to observe the effect it has on the passengers who board the trains at subsequent stations. After the first surprise many smile sympathetically and often enter into conversations; others begin with disapproving looks but soften considerably during the journey.’ What accounted for the whole phenomenon? ‘Many people’, remarked Mollie Panter-Downes in her invariably shrewd ‘Letter from London’ in the
New Yorker
, linked it to anxiety about the hyrodgen bomb – tested by the Americans at Bikini Atoll on the very day that Graham began his crusade – and given that that explosion was some six hundred times as powerful as the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima nine years earlier, it was a plausible connection.

Graham during his visit was careful not to be drawn on the vexed issue of homosexuality. ‘I cannot see what homosexuality has to do with the State,’ Gladys Langford in north London had privately reflected in January, while in early March an interim report by the Church of England Moral Welfare Society, consisting of Anglican clergymen and doctors, had explicitly recognised that though homosexual acts were a sin in the eyes of the church, this did not mean that they should be treated as crimes punishable by the state. Soon afterwards, on 15 March, the eight-day trial began in Winchester of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and the
Daily Mail
’s Oxford-educated diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood. ‘Poor Wildeblood is sensitive, nervous, emotional and intelligent,’ recorded the ‘Bloomsbury’ diarist Frances Partridge after a day at the Assizes. ‘He clasped the edge of the dock with long thin fingers and listened intently to every question before quietly and thoughtfully replying.’ The key prosecution witnesses were two airmen, John Reynolds and Edward McNally, who in reward for turning Queen’s evidence were granted immunity despite having been involved in 24 other homosexual affairs. The proceedings were shot through with class, as when the prosecuting counsel, G. D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts, fruity-voiced and with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand, cross-examined Wildeblood:

It is a feature, is it not, that inverts or perverts seek their love associates in a different walk of life than their own?

I cannot accept that as a deduction. I have never heard any suggestion that that is the ordinary rule.

I mean, for instance, McNally was infinitely – he is none the worse for it – but infinitely your social inferior?

That is absolute nonsense.

Well, perhaps that is not a very polite way of answering my question.

I am sorry, I apologize.

Please do not apologize. I know very well you are under a great strain.

Nobody ever flung it at me during the War that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social inferiors.

At the end, after a summing-up in which Mr Justice Ormerod all but directed the jury to reach verdicts of guilty, there were prison sentences of between 12 and 18 months for all three. ‘The case for the reform of the law as to acts committed in private between adults is very strong,’ commented the
Sunday Times
, far from renowned at this time for its social liberalism. ‘The case for an authoritative enquiry into it is overwhelming.’
¹

Another controversial topic had mercifully gone past the inquiry stage, for the time being at least. The Television Bill published by the government on 4 March contained, in Asa Briggs’s words, ‘far more don’ts than do’s’ and was aimed foursquare at defusing the opposition towards commercial television on the part of some Tory MPs. ‘The ITA [Independent Television Authority] is to have greater supervisory powers than anybody had expected,’ the
Economist
somewhat regretfully noted, while the proposed legislation made it unambiguously clear that there would not be US-style programme sponsorship, but instead ‘spot ads’ judiciously inserted in programmes at ‘natural breaks’. None of this stopped some predictably bitter Parliamentary debates, but Richard Crossman’s observation in May – two months before the bill became law – that ‘there are far more Conservative voters who object to commercial television than Labour voters and there is no sign that the Labour Movement as such feels strongly about the fight against the Bill’ was merely an acceptance of reality, by this time very much in line with opinion-polling evidence.

Increasingly, as sets mushroomed around the country and the prospect of a commercial rival to the BBC hove into view, there was a tendency, in both progressive and establishment circles, to disparage the medium itself. ‘People are glued to their television sets and are more interested in the latest rude remark of Mr Gilbert Harding than in what is being said and done around them,’ complained one of Labour’s rising stars, Barbara Castle, in a March speech at Newtown in Wales, while in April a poignant picture by the diarist James Lees-Milne of the attritional struggles of an impoverished country gentleman called Major Edmeades – ‘The place [Nurstead Court, near Gravesend] terribly down at heel, messy, smelly . . . I went on the roof. It is perished, tiles off, lead rotten, water pouring through in wet weather. No servants. Poor major! How are the gentry fallen . . .’ – included the detail that ‘he showed me some of his trim labourers’ cottages, all with television’. That summer, after the art historian and unimpeachable upholder of high-cultural values Sir Kenneth Clark had been announced as the ITA’s first chairman, he entered the dining room of the Athenaeum, as a guest, and was roundly booed. He may or may not have taken comfort from a letter published not long afterwards in
Picture Post
from Harry Ward of Evesham, Worcs: ‘Sponsored TV, if not strangled at birth by the dead hand of the State, will give people what they want, and not what the “long hairs” think they jolly well ought to have. Heigho, then, for sponsored television. Bring on Les Girls – and the BBC can keep Science Review.’
²

It was perhaps with the threat of commercial television in mind that the BBC on the second Thursday in April had already launched the Groves on the viewing public. ‘Everything that happens
could
happen, but we shall show the highlights rather than the humdrum,’ explained their creator, Michael Pertwee, in advance. The family, living in Hendon, comprised Dad (a middle-aged jobbing builder, played by Edward Evans, with steak and onions as his favourite food), warm, plain-speaking Mum, irascible Greatgrandma Fagg, Jack (24), his sister Pat (21), and the two youngsters, Daphne (13) and Lennie (12, played by Christopher Beeny, the future Edward in
Upstairs Downstairs
) – and for ten minutes Pertwee introduced them in brief, character-establishing scenes. ‘Tell him to keep his passes for the football field,’ grumbled the normally good-natured Bob Grove on hearing that his elder daughter had been asked to dinner by a local centre forward.

Next evening, at 7.50 on the 9th,
The Grove Family
, British television’s pioneer adult soap, had its first episode proper. Called ‘A House of Your Own’, it centred on Mr Grove in upbeat mood, having just paid off the mortgage after 20 years, and his wife starting to get ideas about washing machines and new curtains. Early reaction was mixed – ‘A catchy signature tune, an admirable cast, sensible settings, efficient production, and a twenty-minute parade of the accepted suburban lower middle-class virtues, chores, domestic economics and humour,’ was Bernard Hollowood’s rather non-committal, not unfriendly verdict in
Punch
– but from about the fourth episode the members of the BBC’s Viewing Panel started to become positively enthusiastic. ‘Look forward to meeting this family and feel we know them now,’ wrote one, another that ‘it is very natural and human’, with the only flaw being that ‘some of the aged people looking in may wonder if they appeared quite as selfish and trying as “Grandma” to their families’. The series had initially been commissioned for only 13 episodes, but by the 12th the panel’s Reaction Index was up to 70 (out of a possible 100), a typical response was that ‘the Groves are very real and homely’, and they and their fans were apparently settling in for the duration. One humane but demanding critic, Philip Hope-Wallace, was perhaps less ecstatic about the prospect. ‘What will happen next week?’ he rhetorically asked in the
Listener
. ‘Will Gran have caught a chill? Will Pat come back from Paris using too much lipstick? And whatever will those two little mischiefs get up to next? The suspense is almost intolerable.’ Still, far more important was the fact that one of the soap’s many regular viewers (up to a quarter of those with a television) was the Queen Mother. Few would have demurred from her reputed verdict: ‘So English! So real!’

There was no royal imprimatur yet for Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. ‘A real lusty-laughing audience – that’s what we want,’ rather nervously declared their producer, Bryan Sears, in the
Radio Times
ahead of the launch of their first television series,
Running Wild
, on 21 April. The series – six fortnightly shows, with Alma Cogan as ‘resident songstress’ – flopped resoundingly, as the critics from the start put their knives in: ‘Their gags were weak, their sketches corny’ (
Daily Sketch
); ‘TV’s worst effort for months’ (
Daily Herald
); ‘TV should try to hammer out its successes in the rehearsal rooms – NOT drawing rooms’ (
Reynolds News
). The Viewing Panel agreed. ‘Poor in the extreme – even the few novelties were ruined by “amateur” treatment and poor comedy,’ asserted one member. ‘This was a third-rate seaside concert party show!’ The Reaction Index level did pick up a little (having started at a dismal 43), but by the time that one newspaper critic in late May reckoned that ‘it looks as though Morecambe and Wise might have a good show just as it’s due to be brought off’, it was too late. For the two comedians personally, both still in their twenties, it was a demoralising time, not helped by Eric’s mother, Sadie. ‘What the devil are you two playing at?’ she screamed down the phone from Morecambe after the first show. ‘I daren’t show my face outside the house. We’ll have to move. We’ll have to change our name.’ In the ensuing post-mortems, some attributed the flop to Morecambe and Wise being too ‘Northern’; but their biographer, Graham McCann, as plausibly pins the blame on Sears’s lack of faith and scriptwriters who did not understand them.
³

There was more to April 1954, though, than small-screen ups and downs. In fact, three events had significant implications.

There were, Churchill told the Commons on 5 April during a debate on the H-bomb, ‘two main aims’ of British policy: ‘One is to lose no opportunity of convincing the Soviet leaders and, if we can reach them, the Russian people, that the democracies of the West have no aggressive design on them. The other is to ensure that until that purpose has been achieved we have the strength necessary to deter any aggression by them and to ward it off if it should come.’ This statement of the latter aim clearly presaged the Cabinet’s decision, taken that summer, in favour of Britain manufacturing its own H-bomb – the rationale being, as Churchill put it, that ‘we could not expect to maintain our influence as a world power unless we possessed the most up-to-date nuclear weapons’. More immediately, two main consequences flowed from Churchill’s unusually plodding, unnecessarily partisan Commons performance, a display that led to shouts of ‘Guttersnipe!’ and ‘Swine!’ ‘Things didn’t go as well as I expected,’ Churchill said next morning as he looked at the highly critical press, failing to comprehend the widespread acceptance that his days at No. 10 were numbered. The other consequence was the politicisation of the whole question of the bomb – already under way since Bikini Atoll, but now accelerating. Later in April, over the issue of establishing an Atomic Energy Authority, some 60 Labour MPs sought to prevent it from being able to manufacture hydrogen bombs; and in Coventry, the Labour-controlled city council decided to abandon civil-defence preparations, on the grounds that they were futile in the H-bomb era, leading to instant accusations in the local press of ‘throwing in the sponge’. The emerging progressive orthodoxy was well caught by the bitterly sarcastic lines of ‘Sagittarius’ (Olga Katzin), the
New Statesman
’s resident versifier: