Family Britain, 1951-1957 (60 page)

Strong is the sense of moral indignation

    But Britain the realities must face,

Defence remains the first consideration,

    With competition in the atom race.

Our weapons of complete annihilation

    With greater Atom-Powers keeping pace,

To yet more strenuous exertions spurred,

Since in atomic strength we rank but third.

Which way would popular opinion jump? There were as yet few signs, but it did not help the cause of a mature democracy that the BBC refused to air the issue from anything other than an entrenched Cold War position. In particular, Bertrand Russell tried his hardest to get a hearing, but it was not until December that the Corporation reluctantly broadcast his talk ‘Man’s Peril from the H-Bomb’.
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The second April event, three days after Churchill’s parliamentary debacle and an hour or two before the first sighting of the Groves, was the third Comet crash in less than a year. A South African Airways plane came down near Naples, killing all 21 passengers and crew, and almost instantly all other Comets were grounded. Later that year, experts at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough concluded that metal fatigue had caused the disasters – in effect, sending the whole Comet project back to the drawing board and thereby forfeiting the technological lead that the British aircraft industry had enjoyed in the early 1950s. ‘It is not the case that there are better American aircraft either available now, or available in two years’ time, or available in five years’ time,’ blustered Anthony Crosland (whose South Gloucestershire constituency included the company manufacturing Britannias) on
Any Questions?
in January 1955, but 16 months later Tim Raison’s question in
Picture Post
, ‘Is there any likelihood of Britain building a jet airliner capable of competing with the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC8?’, was all too pertinent. By this time the first generation of American jets was expected to fly commercially in 1958, and in October 1956 the British government reluctantly gave permission to BOAC to buy 15 Boeing 707s – provided, of course, they used British Rolls-Royce engines. Meanwhile, there were a couple of other pregnant developments. In 1955 the young, entrepreneurial Freddie Laker began his first scheduled service, using  Bristol freighters to shuttle cars and their passengers between Southend and Calais; while the following year, the creation within the Ministry of Supply of the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee marked the start of the Concorde story, fuelled by the dream of once again taking the transatlantic lead.
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Back in April 1954, the third event was on the 14th, six days after the Comet crash, when the increasingly restless, disenchanted Aneurin Bevan resigned from the shadow Cabinet primarily over the issue of Labour’s support for the NATO policy of rearming West Germany – support that he and his followers portrayed as subservience to, in the words of his biographer John Campbell, ‘the American view of international politics as a holy war against world Communism, controlled from Moscow’. The resignation did not play well even with the usually pro-Bevan
New Statesman
, which accused him of a ‘streak of wilfulness’, while according to Panter-Downes after this ‘second public walkout’ (ie following his resignation from the Attlee government almost exactly three years earlier), ‘there are those who predict that it will prove fatal to the Party’s chances of getting back at the next election, and those who predict (often without displeasure, needless to say) that it will merely prove disastrous to the man’. Next in line to replace him in the shadow Cabinet was Harold Wilson, who had resigned with Bevan in 1951 and been mercilessly tagged as ‘Nye’s dog’. Now he decided to bark and, to Bevan’s disgust, took the place. Wilson’s public letter justifying this action, largely on the grounds of party unity, ‘reeked of humbug’, and that verdict by his biographer Ben Pimlott was shared at the time on both the left and the right of the party, leaving him an isolated, mistrusted figure, though still grudgingly respected for his manifest ability. ‘ “Wilsonism” we read of now in
The Economist
,’ noted the former Labour minister Hugh Dalton. ‘But who is a Wilsonite? He’s a clever little chap, with a sure political touch, but not magnetic.’
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There was also by April the rise of the teddy boys, or the ‘Edwardians’ as they were still usually termed. The widely publicised ‘Battle of St Mary Cray’ late on Saturday the 24th marked their indisputable coming. The
Orpington & Kentish Times
’s horrified headline – ‘ “Gang Battle” At Railway Station: Edwardian Youths In Half-Hour Fight: Wooden Stakes, Sand-Filled Socks As Weapons’ – prefaced an account of a pretty unpleasant half-hour encounter between ‘rival gangs of youths from Downham and St Paul’s Cray’, the gangs ‘sporting “Edwardian” suits with stovepipe trousers and velvet-coloured jackets’. Trouble had started earlier in the evening when ‘a rowdy party of youths and a few girls from Downham Estate, Bromley, arrived at St Paul’s Cray Community Centre, where St Paul’s Cray Sports and Social Club were holding a dance’. At the Centre, ‘a knife was drawn when a member of the band objected to being jostled’, while ‘one man had a glass of orange juice thrown in his face during an exchange of words’. The MC, George Couchman, found himself in an unenviable spot: ‘I warned the crowd police were standing by and also took the precaution of having the band play only calming music – no quicksteps. Several older people felt there might be trouble and left. I felt the few of us responsible for keeping order were in a precarious position, and I breathed a sigh of relief when 11 o’clock came.’ The crowd dispersed quite peacefully – but then came the fight at the nearby station, until broken up by the police, with some 40 youths held overnight. And when the police returned to inspect the damage in daylight, they found a message scrawled on a fire-bucket: ‘It is time St Mary Cray was woken-up’.

The appearance of the Edwardians was undeniably distinctive. ‘Round the fire stood a few youths dressed in the Edwardian style and with fabulous hair-dos, of the American fashion known as D.A. [short for “duck’s arse”, reputedly pioneered in Britain by the Hounslow hairdresser Len Pountney],’ recorded the somewhat misanthropic Cyril Dunn in his Borehamwood diary the previous winter about ‘Saturday Night in the Elstree Way’:

This hair-do is unbelievable, a huge
helmet
of hair. It grows thick down the back of the head and is brushed in from each side towards a centre-line. Over the crown of the head it is swept back, but allowed to grow long and high, and to fall forward in front like the brush-plume of an ancient Greek helmet. The effect is of infinite and mannered attention. In fact, the result is wholly feminine, but without making the youths look effeminate. The clothes are black. The jacket is long, coming down well below the buttocks; the trousers are narrow and taper to the ankles. Here the whole elegant ensemble is suddenly and wildly contradicted. Where one expects something slender and pointed, there are bright socks and cumbersome crepe-soled shoes. The effect of the whole décor is thin, mean and sinister, and is obviously meant to be.

Dunn also watched them in action. ‘They never for a moment stopped acting,’ he observed. ‘The model is patently a screen villain; with a little repellent research one might even identify the actor, though it could be a composite of several actors. The role evidently has several simple conventions. When “the men” are talking to each other, they never smile; the face muscles are held rigid, as if the mood is one of controlled and watchful hate.’

Unsurprisingly, they were not the flavour of the month after the St Mary Cray episode. ‘It is about time drastic action was taken to put a stop to these scenes of violence caused by irresponsible youths called “Edwardians”,’ wrote Robert Hadden of 3 The Avenue, Bickley to the local paper. ‘The only remedy now is imprisonment and the birch. Fines are useless.’ Elsewhere in suburbia, the Mayor of Kingston upon Thames agreed. ‘Directly these silly young idiots get out of hand,’ he publicly declared, ‘then I’m coming on them with a bang. I don’t agree with this rot about spoon feeding.’ In late May an investigative article by
Picture Post
’s Hilde Marchant – ‘The Truth about the “Teddy Boys” ’, based on several visits to the Mecca Dance Hall in Tottenham – sought to allay fears. There she had found ‘little to criticise – a touch of vanity, perhaps, a gesture of exhibitionism’, but ‘harm and violence did not seem to be among them’, while she quoted how the manager kept saying to her, ‘No trouble at all, these boys.’ She did not deny the existence of
gangs
of teddy boys, sometimes leading to criminal actions, but they, she insisted, were the minority. In short: ‘Of course, there are “Teddy Boys” with evil ways; but there is a vast majority of young men who merely wish to wear Edwardian clothes as a change from boiler suits and factory overalls.’
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The younger generation was – up to a point – better behaved at St Swithin’s.
Doctor in the House
, based on the novel by Richard Gordon, was released this spring and proved
the
box-office smash of 1954. On a Wednesday evening in late April, the civil servant Henry St John intended to see it at the Gaumont in Acton, ‘but there were queues outside, no seats under 3s 1d, and apparently few of those’. He then tried Ealing, but the queue ‘stretched from the Broadway Palladium to Bentalls’. A trio of diarists did manage to watch it, starting with Gladys Langford at the Highbury cinema on the evening of St John’s frustrations. ‘I did not care for it,’ she recorded. ‘The technicolor effects were not pleasing to me,’ while ‘the girls all looked like advertisements for sun-tan cream’. Three days later, the local government officer Anthony Heap was at King’s Cross Gaumont and found it ‘gay, bright, witty, cheery and joyously irresponsible’ – in fact, ‘the best and funniest British screen comedy since “Genevieve” ’, with Kenneth More and Kay Kendall in both. A youngish writer in Hampstead, earning his crust teaching foreign students, disagreed. ‘How banal British films are, how overpraised,’ complained John Fowles on 12 May. ‘A futile chain of stock situations, played out by stock characters.’

Notwithstanding which, if there was one of the four trainee doctors who made the film, it was undoubtedly diffident Simon Sparrow, played by Dirk Bogarde in an overdue break from his gangster and/or neurotic roles. ‘Sparrow has no family money to support him and has arrived at St Swithin’s on merit,’ astutely notes the film historian Christine Geraghty. ‘He is training to be a GP rather than the more traditionally powerful surgeon and his major success is in helping with a home birth.’ Bogarde himself during the filming (at Pinewood and University College London) had tended to keep himself apart, retreating to his Rolls-Royce. ‘Oh, he’s Ginger, inne?’ the camera crew sometimes called out – as in ‘Ginger beer’, cockney rhyming slang for ‘queer’ – but Bogarde was always a cat who walked alone.
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It was about the time that his Simon Sparrow was starting to woo audiences – as the very model of the idealistic young doctor in the new, inclusive NHS – that the acclaimed, also youngish writer Angus Wilson considered on the Third Programme the future of the English novel in the context of the Welfare State. He was broadly positive, arguing that that future lay with ‘a new generation’ of novelists coming from ‘the new ruling class – that strange mixture of business experts, bureaucrats, social scientists, and the rest of the Welfare set-up’. There ensued an unusually lively correspondence in the
Listener
. ‘For novelists who will have perforce to embrace the values and outlook of the Welfare State,’ asserted ‘a young critic’ called R. C. Burlingham, ‘there offers in all probability a prospect of arid, conforming Byzantinism.’ Kingsley Amis, fresh from his
Lucky Jim
triumph, took issue. ‘Does Mr Burlingham believe all that stuff about the thought police and the Ministries of Culture and
1984
?’ he asked, before concluding that ‘Mr Burlingham should stick to complaining that he does not want to pay for other people’s wigs and false teeth.’ In his riposte, Burlingham accused Amis of being ‘insufficiently aroused’ to the fact that ‘the Robin Hood State – whichever party governs – is the clear heir to the future’, and he declared that in an ever-more egalitarian society, ‘the middle-class phenomenon of a liberal, lively, curious, disinterested, travelled, cultivated novel-writing intelligentsia and novel-reading
literati
’ was ‘unlikely to be among the amenities provided by this secular heaven’. At which point in the controversy, Amis let it rest.

Something was stirring on the right flank, albeit heavily camouflaged by the ruling orthodoxy that there existed between the main parties a broad Keynesian-cum-welfare consensus on domestic issues – a somewhat misleading orthodoxy recently embodied in the
Economist
’s February coinage of the celebrated ‘Mr Butskell’, a play on the Conservative Party’s leading moderate, Rab Butler, and Labour’s leading moderate, Hugh Gaitskell. But in his riposte, Burlingham noted how ‘an attack on the Welfare State’ had ‘been recently undertaken with devastating point and with no concessions to fashion by an able economist, Mr Colin Clark, who has presumably taken his life in his hands by doing so’. Clark’s attack was in the form of a well-publicised pamphlet, ‘Welfare and Taxation’, in which as a conservative Catholic (in his case Australian) he argued that there was a moral as well as economic imperative to reduce taxation, and that social services should as much as possible be provided by a mixture of local authorities and voluntary associations rather than by the centralised, dictatorial state. Not long afterwards, in May, the One Nation Group in the Conservative Party published a collection of essays,
Change Is Our Ally
, whose contributors included Enoch Powell and which placed much stress on the virtues of free-market competition. Even so, an explicit distinction was made between those virtues and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism. ‘To the Tory the nation is not primarily an economic entity,’ asserted Powell with deliberate emphasis. ‘It may place political and social ends above economic ones, and for their sake may justifiably on occasion seek to prevent change or divert it.’
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