Family Britain, 1951-1957 (7 page)

Forster’s parents were deeply shocked, her father even walloping her for cheek, and in the end she gave her vote to the Labour candidate. It hardly mattered: ‘The Conservative won with the Liberal a close second and Labour a poor third. The outstanding Communist candidate got only three votes and I was ashamed not to have voted for her.’23

‘Polling Day & a fateful one for the Country,’ recorded Florence Speed in Brixton on the long-awaited Thursday. ‘If the Socialists are returned for a third time, it is goodbye to the Empire & to everything it has stood for.’ Three front pages that morning particularly caught the eye. The final Gallup poll in the
News Chronicle
had the Tory lead down to three and a half points; the
Daily Mirror
’s was a ‘Trigger’ special, complete with large drawing of a menacing gun and hand; and the
Daily Mail
featured a masterly cartoon by Illingworth, showing a middle-class couple at breakfast with a polling station visible through the window, the wife reading a paper with headlines like ‘Inflation’ and ‘Cost of Living Soaring’, and the husband getting up determinedly from the table and saying, ‘We Are The Masters Now.’ Among the diarists, Haines in Chingford voted Labour and then did her shopping (‘how they do keep you waiting’), while Lewis delayed until after work and also voted Labour, before going to the Odeon to see
Valley of Eagles
starring Jack Warner. Speed’s brother Fred was a polling clerk. ‘ “All I want is to see England on her feet again,” one old woman said dropping her ballot paper into the box,’ summarised Florence. ‘She was so poor looking, that Fred thought she would be voting for Labour. And a man said, “Third time lucky. But I suppose there are too many b— LCC [London County Council] flats round here.” ’ Naturally, though, most voters kept their thoughts and intentions to themselves during a generally dry if rather chilly day. One among millions was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. ‘I voted Labour in the last election though in my heart of hearts I wanted the Tories to get in,’ he told a friend some months later. ‘But the old spirit of opposition crept up and with all the country shouting for the Tories I determined to be on the other side.’24

The polls closed at nine and the early results started to come through not long after ten – by when, according to Gallup, half the electorate had gone to bed, presumably either calm or indifferent about the outcome. But in Trafalgar Square a crowd of some 15,000 gathered to watch the posting of the results on a large screen, while at the Savoy there were 3,000 guests for the traditional election beano given by Lord Camrose, owner of the
Daily Telegraph
. There the restaurant had been converted into a results room, with cheers every time the Tories won a seat, boos if Labour held on. Cecil Beaton took the visiting Greta Garbo with him. ‘So great were her spirits as the Conservative victories came through,’ he recorded, ‘that she did not seem to mind even the attentions of the photographers.’ Macmillan, though, skipped the crush: ‘I felt I cd not stand it. I do not like the Noel Cowards etc. It is equally bad whether we win or lose.’ Nor was the triumphalism necessarily justified. ‘By 3 am,’ he noted, ‘it was clear that there had really been no swing at all for us’ and that ‘it will be a stalemate, or a small Tory majority’. Everything would turn, all sober observers agreed, on the results declared on the Friday.

Next morning the writer Ronald Duncan was at Charing Cross:

The voracious station disgorged its crowds of office workers as the 8.15 steamed in. The same anxious poker faces looking a little tired from their debauch of statistics on three cups of coffee. As usual they hurried toward the ticket collector, straining the digestion of the gate.

I walked up the platform, watching a ferret-like porter going up the train, slamming the doors of the empty carriages. From one he retrieved a newspaper which had been left on the seat.

As the train shunted out he paused, to study the Stop Press results, and thoughtfully lit a fag-end. I glanced over his shoulder.

‘Good. It looks as if the old man will just get in after all.’

‘Which old man?’

‘Winston, of course.’

‘Did you vote for him in spite of your union?’

‘Of course not. Being a working man I voted Labour, but all the same I ’oped old Winston would get in this time.’

‘You mean to say you voted Labour although you wanted the Conservatives to get in?’

‘It’s like this mate. I ’ad to vote for me own side out of loyalty like, but what I say is this’ (and here he whispered lest his mate should overhear), ‘the proper bloke to have on a footplate is an engine driver, and that’s why I’d like to see old Winnie back at No 10, ’cause he knows his way around, having been brought up to it like.’

‘It looks as if it will be a narrow thing,’ I said.

‘So it was at Dunkirk. The old b— likes it narrow.’

At which point ‘the noisy arrival of the 8.35’ ended their conversation.25

In the event it did prove a close-run thing, though in terms of seats not as close as the previous election. ‘At 1.0 the two parties were neck and neck,’ recorded Anthony Heap in his flat off Judd Street, St Pancras, ‘and by 5.0 when the Conservative score reached 313 against Labour’s 292 and the Liberals’ 5, it was all over bar shouting.’ By about six Churchill was Prime Minister, having driven to the Palace in a car flying the flag of the Warden of the Cinque Ports. The eventual Tory overall majority was 17 – a majority achieved despite the somewhat startling fact that, on an impressively civic 82.5 per cent turnout, they had received almost a quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour. Among the youthful losers were Margaret Roberts in Dartford and Peter Parker in Bedford; Willie Hamilton won comfortably in West Fife; Charles Hill in Luton and John Freeman in Watford were re-elected, the latter narrowly; and W. J. Brown lost in Fulham West. If for some Tory supporters there was a sense of disappointment, even anti-climax – ‘Conservatives are “in”, but alas! only just,’ reflected Florence Speed at 6.30 that evening – for others there was an irresistible feeling that the natural order of things had been restored. ‘I can date my political awakening,’ the theatre critic Michael Billington would recall, ‘from the moment a peculiarly detested fellow pupil burst into my public school classroom the day after the 1951 general election shouting: “We’re in” – meaning, of course, the Tories. His arrogant assumption that we were all of the same persuasion meant I became a lifelong Labourite on the spot.’ Or as Vere Hodgson put it less rebarbatively next day in her West London diary: ‘At last I can write it. MR CHURCHILL IS AGAIN PRIME MINISTER. How wonderful!’26

During the Cabinet-making that ensued over the weekend, two appointments particularly reflected the less than commanding mandate that Churchill had received. One was for No. 11, where almost everyone had expected Churchill to put in the strongly free-market Oliver Lyttelton, a prominent City figure. Instead, he gave the job to the younger Rab Butler – ‘the architect’, in his biographer’s just words, ‘behind the rebuilding of the Tory Party’s entire post-war fortunes’. The other crucial appointment, especially in terms of seeking to create the right climate for the new government, was the Minister of Labour. Again, everyone expected a hardliner, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, but instead Churchill turned to the more emollient Sir Walter Monckton, rather cruelly nicknamed ‘the oil-can’ and now given express orders not to upset the unions. Churchill also offered a position (Minister of Education) to Clement Davies, the Liberal leader whose party had won only six seats. Davies, at the age of 67, was sorely tempted, but, after referring the question to his executive, he regretfully turned it down. ‘Had Davies surrendered to Churchill’s blandishments,’ Anthony Howard plausibly claims, ‘the Liberal Party as an independent entity would have ceased to exist.’27

In fact, the Tories would almost certainly not have won the election if the Liberals had not fielded such a puny number (109) of candidates. It was a shortfall largely caused by financial constraints, and the majority of disenfranchised Liberal supporters plumped for the Tories as second-best. Even so, it had needed a makeover for Churchill and his party to return to power. ‘I have not given my vote to Die Hard Tories, but to Progressive Conservatives,’ Hodgson reflected after her jubilant declaration. ‘I don’t like profiteers and huge dividends.’ Her sentiments perhaps accurately reflected the sentiments of much middle-ground opinion – people who may or may not have actually voted Labour in 1945, but who in that unique context had not been too unhappy about a Labour victory. More generally, it seems that whereas the working class stayed broadly loyal to Labour – though no more than broadly, given that 44 per cent of it voted Conservative – the middle class continued, following on from the February 1950 election, its rightwards drift, especially in suburban seats. As for gender, the Conservatives had a 4 per cent lead among women, in part reflecting the party’s sustained emphasis on the whole area of consumption.28

Ultimately, of course, men and women alike had for more than six years since the war been feeling the squeeze. ‘The electorate was generally fed up with its wartime regime,’ reflected Peter Parker in later life on his Bedford experience, ‘and Labour was seen to be the party of boring rationing and planning regulations. Their continued existence infuriated a people who had fought nobly, had come through the siege of the immediate post-war reconstruction, and as I heard regularly on the doorsteps, were now buggered if they knew who had won the war.’ In the face of such grumbling, it was in vain that Parker and his colleagues claimed that the Tory pledge to ‘set the people free from controls’ – a pledge that involved ending bulk-buying of foodstuffs by the government, abolishing price controls, reducing subsidies and scrapping the wartime utility scheme – would lead to an explosion in the cost of living. No doubt there was widespread scepticism as to whether a change of government would really lead to a more bountiful, less restrictive future, but enough voters were willing to take the chance.

For much of the middle class, the outcome was a sweet moment. ‘What do you think the Labour party stands for?’ Gallup had asked during the campaign:

More money for less work.
(Headmaster’s wife)

Giving the working classes power they are not fitted to use.

They say social security but I think class warfare.
(Solicitor’s wife)

Pampering the working man.
(Dentist)

Class hatred, revenge, and grab.
(Engineering technician)

To keep down the people with money.
(Butcher’s wife)

Fair shares for all – if they are working people.
(Managing director)

During the weeks afterwards there lingered in many middle-class breasts a visceral satisfaction that Britain had at last expelled its socialist rulers. On Guy Fawkes Night at one prep school in Shropshire, the headmaster Paul Denman Fee-Smith (nicknamed ‘Boss’) solemnly threw effigies of Mr and Mrs Attlee on to the bonfire – a spectacle, especially Mrs Attlee’s blazing pumpkin hat, that (according to his biographer) ‘deeply distressed’ the 11-year-old Bruce Chatwin. ‘Mummy, how could he do-o-o this?’ he would later say in tears to his mother. But at the time, not wanting to rock the boat, he wrote home circumspectly: ‘I enjoyed the fireworks last night. They made a very good display indeed.’29

3

You Can’t Know Our Relief

In 1951 the Prescotts – father Bert (a Liverpudlian railwayman), mother Phyllis, 13-year-old John and three other children – took their summer holiday at Brighton. There they qualified as finalists for a competition to find the ‘Typical British Family’, with all the finalists having to return to Brighton for the judging on the first Saturday in November. With a mouth-watering prize of £1,000 at stake, the Prescotts naturally did not hesitate to travel down from their home near Chester. That morning the Corporation gave the nine families a guided tour of Brighton and the Downs, in the course of which Bert spoke freely. ‘I won a £206 Tote double at Ascot this year,’ he told a local reporter. ‘I backed Fleeting Moment in the Cambridgeshire and won £14 having seen it win at Brighton – and now we’re hoping to pull this off.’ Within hours the interview had appeared in the
Evening Argus
– certainly by the time the judges (mainly local councillors but also including the two impeccably middle-class radio stars Anona Winn and Jack Train) got down to business that afternoon at the Dome in front of an audience of about a thousand people. All nine families were interrogated. ‘They were quizzed on such thorny family subjects as washing-up, shopping, making the morning tea, and for the younger members there were questions of school, home life and did Dad use the slipper?’ another local paper subsequently related. ‘Most of the girls said they wanted to be nurses; nearly all the boys disliked school.’

That evening, as part of a variety show that included Tony Hancock on the bill as well as Winn and Train, the judges gave their verdict. Unanimously they chose the Newcombs, comprising Chief Inspector Frederick Newcomb, his wife and their 12-year-old son Raymond, living in Hemel Hempstead. The tenor of their replies can be gauged from the
Argus
report on what ‘Brighton considers the typical British family’: