Family Britain, 1951-1957 (64 page)

We’ve never failed to get a good meeting since we put the loud-speaker at the bus-stop, facing across to the pub, which has a huge garden outside, and they come out with their mugs of beer, sit on a little wall and ask questions. I had all three Councillors, and the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
had had the whole front page announcing that the Home Secretary had appointed three Civil Commissioners to take over Coventry’s civil defence, so heaven knows there were enough things to talk about. We talked for an hour and a half, and there were never more than five people listening.

‘True,’ added Crossman, ‘it was the first night of the holiday fortnight and 25,000 people had left Coventry station, but there were probably 180,000 people left in the city . . .’

Next week, for Madge Martin and her clergyman husband, it was a few not wholly satisfactory days in London in late July before the real holiday began. On one day: ‘We hadn’t time for a leisurely dinner, so I had a revolting sandwich at Fortes . . .’ And on another, on a bus along the Finchley Road, fondly remembered from pre-Blitz days: ‘All the large, romantic houses were shattered, and now just blank spaces, surrounded by dense foliage. I expect the next step will be blocks of horrid flats.’ Still, on Saturday the 31st it was off to Scarborough, as usual staying at the Burghcliffe Hotel. Then came the big disappointment:

We heard horrid things about the new Spa arrangements, but didn’t dream just
how
awful the changes were. There is an Ice Show – entirely covering the old space around the open-air band-stand, and enclosed in huge, disgusting striped awning, cutting off the lovely sea-view . . . The Spa has always been our great joy, and we never asked for anything different – and now, to see it so devastated and made so common . . . We could have screamed . . .

That same Saturday, there were mercifully no flies in the ointment, or clouds in the sky, at Loders Fete. ‘To have got a fine day in this wettest of summers for fifty years was luck superlative,’ recorded the grateful vicar, Oliver Willmott, in his next Parish Notes:

To match the occasion the organisers presented the best entertainment they have ever concocted. First, the Mayor of Bridport gave a sample of the town crying that has more than once made him champion town crier of England. Then he adjudicated the efforts of eight miserable locals who had been compelled by Miss Randall to dress up, march to a rostrum and imitate the Mayor. They looked like state prisoners going to the block, but the crowd enjoyed it hugely. Green draperies suggestive of the toga and a little cross-gartering had transformed the ample figure of our worthy village butcher into another Nero; academic cap and gown had changed the Vicar’s churchwarden into another Frank Sinatra as he would look in the act of receiving an honorary doctorate of Law at Chicago University; and a greenish bowler hat capping the moustachios of the sporting landlord of The Crown had converted him into Old Bill of the 1914–18 war. Old Bill was an easy winner, and with native generosity he tossed the fruits of victory into the treasurer’s lap for the good of the cause. Then followed a display of dancing typical of various nations by Miss Sally Bryant’s school of dancing. Loders Court [home of Sir Edward and Lady Le Breton] made the perfect background for this, and the dancers delighted the crowd by doing much more than they had promised. A tent-pegging race in which the horses were gentlemen, the chariots wheelbarrows, and the charioteers ladies, leavened the decorous proceedings with spills and thrills. For the aesthetically minded there was a ladies’ ankles competition won by Mrs Rudd junior (who, we hear, always wins, at any fete). In a competition for the knobbliest male knees the Vicar’s churchwarden came into his own . . .

The profit was a record – more than £160 – and ‘another such fete next year should complete the amount needed for the overhaul of the organ’.
⁵

During these mostly damp summer weeks there was plenty of theatrical interest – a Home Service run-out for Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons
(‘some quality in its rather stolid way’, according to the critic J. C. Trewin), with Noel Johnson of Dick Barton fame as Henry VIII; the sad demise of the Bristol Empire as a live theatre, with a last Variety hurrah featuring among others the impressionist Wally Athersych, renowned for his air-raid noises; curtain up at the Whitehall, with Brian Rix as actor-manager, for John Chapman’s hugely successful
Dry Rot
, a farce about dishonest bookmakers – but no serious competition, among theatre-goers anyway, for the star event. This was the musical
Salad Days
, principally the work of the 24-year-old, Eton-educated Julian Slade and performed at the Vaudeville by the Bristol Old Vic company. As usual, there on the first night, 5 August, was Anthony Heap. ‘This quaint little musical fantasy’, he called it in his diary, with ‘a plentiful supply of gay little lyrics set to nimble little tunes’, and altogether ‘quite a captivating little frolic’. Even so, the curmudgeon in him added: ‘I don’t know that it called for such an excessively ecstatic reception as the exceedingly well-disposed first night audience saw fit to accord it.’ Just over a fortnight later, passing through London on their way back from Scarborough, the Martins went to it. ‘A most unsophisticated, almost amateurish, but fresh, unusual and charming little musical, which seems to have caught on with sophisticated audiences,’ was her verdict, adding that ‘this one was rapturously enthusiastic’.

Salad Days
was set to run and run – fittingly until 1960, for no show was, at least on the face of it, more quintessentially of the 1950s. ‘It is winsome, coy, escapist, terminally adolescent, pathetically repressed, and, in its artfully wide-eyed way, exceptionally camp,’ declared a fiercely hostile critic, Alastair Macaulay, about a 1996 revival of what for him was clearly something from a distant, pre-enlightenment world. But Macaulay might also have noted not only that – for all their refined voices – the central characters Jane and Timothy, just down from university, marry secretly and look after the magic piano because she does not want to be married off by her mother to a suitable husband while he cannot face being fixed up with a safe job by one of his influential uncles, but also that the piano’s infectious ability to make people dance is a severe affront to the hypocritical Minister of Pleasure and Pastime. It was, all in all, a thoroughly English piece – though failing, perhaps inevitably, to break the stranglehold of the American musical.
⁶

A week or so after Jane and Timothy found themselves something to do, George Allen & Unwin published
The Fellowship of the Ring
, the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Naomi Mitchison, along with Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, had already contributed praise to the dust jacket, and now they wrote appropriately laudatory reviews. ‘Like lightning from a clear sky,’ declared Lewis in
Time & Tide
, while Mitchison in the
New Statesman
called it ‘a story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and graveness’. Most reviews were positive, though not uncritically so. ‘Whimsical drivel with a message?’ asked J. W. Lambert in the
Sunday Times
. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘It sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above that level.’ He did, however, note that it had ‘no religious spirit of any kind, and to all intents and purposes no women’. The
Daily Telegraph
’s Peter Green claimed that the prose style ‘veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy’s Own Paper’, albeit conceding that the novel had ‘an undeniable fascination’. And in
Punch
, where under Anthony Powell’s literary editorship it received the briefest of reviews, Peter Dickinson frankly stated: ‘I can think of nothing in the book to account for the fact that I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, despite some of the most infuriating fine writing.’ The most heavyweight critique came from a major literary figure, the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir. ‘To read it is to be thrown into astonishment,’ he gladly conceded in the
Observer
, but insisted that in terms of ‘human discrimination and depth’ there was a fatal shortfall: ‘Mr Tolkien describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil, on which hangs the future of life on earth. But his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immutably evil; and he has no room in his world for a Satan both evil and tragic.’ Commercially, the book flourished, being reprinted after six weeks, ahead of the publication in mid-November of
The Two Towers
, second in the sequence. It was not yet a cult, though, nor – away from the public prints – was it everyone’s cup of tea. ‘Don’s whimsy’ was the private verdict of Angus Wilson, to whom in his own mind the future belonged.
⁷

A different sort of saga rolled on at Ambridge. ‘Dan and Doris Archer seem to be universally popular figures, old friends, with familiar but by no means unpleasing idiosyncrasies,’ an internal BBC report on
The Archers
noted in August. ‘They are a solid, sensible pair, “absolutely real” to listeners.’ Other characters, though, were not wholly above criticism from the 756 listeners, the great majority of them regular followers of the series, who had completed questionnaires. Peggy Archer, ‘in the throes of marital unrest’ with Jack Archer, was seen by a minority as ‘an unsympathetic wife, shallow and shrewish’, while a minority also criticised Jack himself for ‘behaving too queerly and unreasonably for too long’. Even Walter Gabriel, for all his ‘hosts of admirers’, had his critics, with his ‘gravelly tones’ being ‘the source of irritation (and alarm) in certain quarters’. There was also annoyance about the love angle. ‘Phil’s protracted romance with Grace has evidently become too much of a good thing,’ found the report. ‘Listeners do not always want to see the couple married but there is a strong feeling that Grace should return from exile so that the matter can be settled once and for all.’ These, however, were all minority grumbles – and the report’s conclusion did nothing to dent BBC confidence that
The Archers
had become a permanent fixture of daily life: ‘For 90% of the regular listeners this serial continues to be as interesting as ever.’

The summer holidays were drawing to an end when on the last Monday of August (not yet a Bank Holiday), Judy Haines in Chingford, her two daughters and her friend Phyllis took a trip to the Tower of London:

We arrived dead on time – 10.30, having bought a film for camera at Liverpool Street, which we reached by trolleybus. After seeing the shipping from London Bridge we went to Lyons for coffee and orangeade. Then we saw the Tower. Armour very interesting. Picnicked in the grounds. It’s getting very warm and I’m in a muddle with the lunch – hard boiled eggs, cut loaf, butter, tomatoes, jelly and swiss roll. I have three little buttons off my green coat, which I am unhappy about. Lunch over & I’m just as cluttered up with my one long and two short frig. boxes. After buying jumping beans we went aboard Thames boat to Westminster Pier. Phyllis suggested Battersea Park from there. We waited ages for bus & then it was a dickens of a way. We ‘did’ the fun fair in Park – girls wanted everything. (I’m hard up and hadn’t bargained for this.) Called a halt after train ride, ride on Muffin [ie the Mule] and horse respectively, ride on swan round Fairyland, ice cream and candy floss. Came out of F.F. and sat in Park – too long! Mistook time by 1 hour. Arrived home par-boiled and exhausted at 6.45 pm!

Most of the holidays had been spent without an increasingly ubiquitous parental aid. ‘Television comes home after being away about 4 weeks!’ she noted a few days later. ‘New transformer.’
⁸

By now the new football season was under way, including in Scotland. ‘Woodburn ran the soles off his boots trying to cover up the mistakes of everybody around him,’ ran the
Sunday Post
report of Rangers losing 3–1 at home to Clyde on 21 August. The praise was typical: the 35-year-old Willie Woodburn had been at the heart of the usually formidable Rangers defence (the ‘Iron Curtain’) for many years. ‘Always a fiercely uncompromising tackler,’ in an obituary’s words, ‘the worst of his fouls were committed in retaliation’ – none worse than at Ibrox a week later, with Rangers two up against Stirling Albion:

In the very last minute [reported the
Sunday Post
] Woodburn became involved with young Patterson in the game’s only nasty incident, and was ordered off. Mr Young [the referee, from Aberdeen] seemed to hesitate before sending the pivot indoors.

Query, just how biased can a football crowd get? They loudly booed the referee for this decision. The poor fellow had no option.

Woodburn had been suspended for violent conduct several times before, but this was something else – a punch (admittedly in retaliation after a foul) on a 19-year-old debutant who, ironically, had idolised Woodburn. Over the next few days, nursing a burst lip and three dislodged teeth, a disenchanted Alec Patterson needed much persuasion from his manager before he agreed to go on playing senior football.

Then on 14 September came ‘The Woodburn Bombshell’, as the Referee Committee of the Scottish FA decided – by the chairman’s casting vote – to suspend Woodburn
sine die
. The news was instantly a national talking point, and the
Sunday Post
took some vox pop:

He’s a quick-tempered player, not a deliberately dirty one. His punishment is too harsh.
(Alec Sprul, 82 Bellrock St, Cranhill, Glasgow – a Clyde supporter)

There’s only one man to blame and that’s Willie Woodburn himself. He’s the guilty man and now he should take his punishment . . . I’ve seen youngsters hero-worship Woodburn. For their sakes, he should accept his punishments for his indiscretions.
(John Fox, Maltbarns St, Glasgow)

This sentence is far too drastic. I’ve never seen Woodburn play a dirty game.
(Thomas Henderson, 13 Minto St, Edinburgh – a Hearts supporter)

Most people seem to have agreed that the punishment was unduly severe, but by the time the SFA revoked the ban, three years later, Woodburn was too old to resume his career. Roy Race, by contrast, would prove ageless. In early September, while Woodburn waited to hear his fate, the boys’ comic
Tiger
– billed as ‘The Sport and Adventure Picture Story Weekly’ – made its bow, featuring Roy of the Rovers on an all-colour, all-action front page. ‘Only two minutes to go in the local Cup-Tie . . . And the score 0–0! With all his pals of the Milston Youth Club F.C. played to a standstill, centre-forward Roy Race was the one member of the team still tireless and on his toes. Could he score before the final whistle blew?’ The outcome was never in doubt, but, unknown to Roy, watching on the touchline was the pipe-smoking, green-felt-hatted Alf Leeds, talent-spotter for mighty Melchester Rovers. ‘He’s got talent,’ he sagely remarked to a spectator, as Roy and his teammates celebrated in the background, ‘but he’ll have to work hard and take knocks to become a pro.’