Family Britain, 1951-1957 (76 page)

The other candidate was the 24-year-old Shirley Catlin (the future Shirley Williams), standing for Labour at Harwich. ‘I enjoy the campaign very much,’ she told the local paper, ‘but sometimes when I’m in a hostile neighbourhood speaking in the van, and never get a friendly wave, I feel after about ten minutes I could give up politics altogether. But you just have to carry on.’ The paper itself praised her as ‘a mistress of the apt phrase’ and gave an example: ‘ “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she announced on a cold, grey morning in Brightlingsea. “It’s a windy day, isn’t it? Vote Labour and temper the wind to the shorn lamb.” ’ The
Harwich & Dovercourt Standard
was, like most local papers, far from Labour-supporting, but after it was all over felt moved to observe that ‘there is no doubt that N.E. Essex has a soft spot for “Shirley” ’.

At her nomination meeting, Catlin had hard words to say about the Tories: ‘Out of the 600 candidates they are putting up, no less than 80 went to Eton and 80 per cent went to public schools. They are still a party of a small class.’ She might also have mentioned that ten members of Eden’s eighteen-strong cabinet were Old Etonians, with five of those ten, including Eden himself, having then gone on to Christ Church, Oxford. ‘Gravy for Etonians: thin gruel and skilly otherwise,’ subsequently noted the colourful, proto-Thatcherite Tory MP Gerald Nabarro (educated at a London County Council school), adding that ‘the rest of the Eden Cabinet, with the exception of the Mancunian Lord Woolton, were almost as well born’. Nevertheless, if there was an emblematic Tory candidate in this election, it was not one of the silver-spooned, but Barnet’s candidate, the solidly upper-middle-class, but far from upper-class, Reginald Maudling. Still in his 30s, he had just been made Minister of Supply, prompting the
Spectator
’s gifted new political commentator, Henry Fairlie, to call him ‘the first dimpled child of Butskellism’, in tribute to his consciously moderate, progressive brand of Conservatism. During the campaign he spoke widely in other constituencies, but was also conscious of potential danger in Barnet itself, which now included the LCC out-county estate of Borehamwood – politically an unknown quantity. ‘We have done the things we have said we would do,’ he proclaimed at a meeting in Cockfosters the Saturday before polling day. ‘At home, taxes have been cut, controls lifted and more houses than ever built. The charge of being warmongers was made against the Tories, but we have ended the wars we inherited. It was said that there would be a million unemployed under a Conservative administration. In fact, employment is at a record level.’
⁸
Maudling, one of life’s optimists, trusted it would be enough.

‘General Election: the futility of politics,’ John Fowles bleakly reflected, not so far away in Hampstead, in a diary entry covering both polling day and the next day, Friday the 27th. ‘The helplessness of the self before the vast mass of blind public opinion. In this election, too, the apathy is significant and healthy; people are no longer interested in politics . . .’ Judy Haines, unusually for her, did not even mention the election. ‘I was very keen to see Alistair Sim & Joyce Grenfell in “The Belles of St Trinians” at Highams Park, Regal,’ she noted on the Thursday. ‘Decided, therefore, to miss Keep Fit and take girls [whose school was being used for voting]. Very disappointed, and I dropped off to sleep here and there.’ Three other diarists – unlike her, all Conservative-supporting – were more engaged. ‘I
would
have loved to stay up till 12 o’clock, but my husband said the wireless would disturb him, so I’ll have to be patient,’ recorded Nella Last. Florence Turtle, a 58-year-old buyer for British Home Stores, who lived with her two brothers in Wimbledon Park, had not only no husband to make a fuss but also a television to watch:

Thursday night:
At 9.30 pm Richard Dimbleby started to broadcast the Election results. Cheltenham was the first to come through with a 2 per cent swing to Conservatives – the same trend was notable at Salford East & West . . . I retired to bed at 3.0 am as we could keep awake no longer. We got rather excited when first Watford & then Central Wandsworth fell to the Conservative & celebrated accordingly.

Friday:
Well the Country is saved from bankruptcy for a bit. One thing the Conservatives are more efficient than the others & also for the good of the whole nation . . .

That Friday in Barrow, Last had a chat ‘over the fence’ with ‘the two old women next door’ (presumably not the Mrs Atkinson side): ‘Poor old dears. “It had made us real poorly last night after watching T.V. We were sure that Labour were going to win, & oh dear if that nasty fat Bevan had got any power, it would have been really dreadful.” ’ Or, as Anthony Heap in London concisely put it a few hours later, ‘Hap-hap-happy day.’
⁹

The Tories had won a very comfortable overall majority of 58 (including a majority of seats in Scotland), with Labour having lost sixteen seats, the Liberals staying on six seats, and seventeen unsuccessful Communist candidates managing only 33,000 votes between them. Turnout was down from 82 to 76 per cent, with Labour having lost a million and a half votes, the Tories half a million. Among the individual outcomes, neither Arlott nor Catlin were close to winning; the voters of Borehamwood failed to come out for Labour and thereby ensured an easy win for Maudling; Barbara Castle just squeaked home in Blackburn; Michael Foot lost his seat at Plymouth Devonport; Anthony Crosland also lost (at Southampton Test, having at almost the last minute ditched South Gloucestershire because of redistribution worries); and Willie Whitelaw was the new MP for the safe Tory seat of Penrith and the Border, despite a heated scene at the count when William Brownrigg, a Carlisle farmer standing for Cumbrian Home Rule, accused Whitelaw of filching ‘bundles and bundles’ of his votes. Particularly telling were the results in prosperous, emblematic Coventry: all three seats stayed Labour, but in each there was a disconcertingly large drop in the majority. ‘The factory gate meetings were moderately attended,’ one Coventry MP, Richard Crossman, wrote soon afterwards about his campaign, ‘but with very small collections and no sign of enthusiasm and for the first time since ’45 we had workers returning from the factories turning thumbs down when they saw a socialist car.’
¹⁰

Some 17 months after the youngish Labour MP Roy Jenkins had remarked to Crossman that ‘the electorate is extremely Conservative-minded and we can never win except with the kind of attitude represented by the right-wing leadership’ – by which he meant Gaitskell and followers like Crosland and himself, all united in opposition to Bevan – Labour’s decisive defeat in May 1955 inevitably provoked internal analysis. None of that analysis quite got to grips with the clear evidence of a continuing gender gap (ie with the Conservatives now far better than Labour at tapping into the concerns of women in general and housewives in particular), but three early contributions made important, valid points.

‘Since 1951 the Tories have had good luck with the economic climate, people are generally better off and the end of most shortages has enabled rationing to be ended on everything but coal,’ privately reflected an even younger Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, in June. ‘There has been no unemployment. A family in a council house with a TV set and a car or motorcycle-combination on hire purchase had few reasons for a change of government.’ Soon afterwards, a leading article on ‘Equality with Quality’ in
Socialist Commentary
, the magazine of the right wing of the party that was edited by Rita Hinden, argued that what was needed in society (and therefore in Labour policy) was a levelling up, not down:

Despite the rise in material standards and welfare, this is still a squalid country and all too many people are still compelled to lead squalid lives. Look at the ugly towns, at the mean streets, the cramped and shoddy houses. Look at the crowded classrooms, the scarcity of teachers and the wretched playgrounds. Look at the amenities for community life offered to most of our people. Then ask how near we have come to building Jerusalem ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Even so, the editorial insisted on limits to any future Labour revisionism, despite the clear evidence of lack of public enthusiasm for nationalisation: ‘Equality with quality can only be won through increased public ownership, public enterprise and public expenditure. This must remain the crux of any socialist programme.’

The July issue also included a piece by Gaitskell himself, ‘Understanding the Electorate’, in which he noted that during the campaign he had ‘never known so few people seem to feel themselves really involved’. As to why Labour had lost, the crux – he asserted in italics – was ‘
the lack of fear of the Tories derived from the maintenance of full employment, the end of rationing and the general feeling that “things were better”
’. He then tried to explain what lay behind all this:

I fancy that in the last year or two more and more people are beginning to turn to their own personal affairs and to concentrate on their own material advancement. No doubt it has been stimulated by the end of post-war austerity, TV, new gadgets like refrigerators and washing machines, the glossy magazines with their special appeal to women, and even the flood of new cars on the home markets. Call it if you like a growing Americanization of outlook. I believe it’s there, and it’s no good moaning about it . . .

Gaitskell, his eyes on 1959 or 1960, ended with a prediction that was also a warning: ‘We certainly cannot assume that the next General Election will be nicely timed to coincide with an economic crisis.’
¹¹

PART TWO

7

A Fine Day for a Hanging

On May Day 1955, as Stirling Moss was becoming the first Englishman to win the Mille Miglia (a thousand miles of open roads in Italy), the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G), Arthur Deakin, collapsed and died while addressing a rally at the Corn Exchange, Leicester. He had been more responsible than anyone for delivering the trade union moderation of the immediate post-war years, and amid an increasingly acrimonious industrial scene it was hard not to see his death as symbolic of the passing of an era. Over the next month, even during an election campaign, the atmosphere continued to deteriorate: in early May an unofficial strike in the Yorkshire coalfield, at one point involving some 115,000 workers at 95 pits, marked the start of a long leftwards journey on the part of the Yorkshire section of the National Union of Mineworkers; on 24 May there began a six-week dock strike, centring on Merseyside, that was essentially another bout of inter-union turf warfare between the T&G and the much smaller National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers; and then from midnight on the 28th, two days after the election, there was a national rail strike, as the footplatemen (ie drivers and footplate staff) who belonged to the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) sought to re-establish their pay differentials over the much more numerous, generally less skilled members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). ‘At Ealing Broadway main line station,’ noted Henry St John on Whit Sunday (the 29th), ‘a chalked-up notice stated: “Owing to labour trouble all advertised services are cancelled.” ’

A hapless victim of the strike was Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, the former royal governess who long after she had become persona non grata on account of her revelations in
The Little Princesses
continued to write her
Woman’s Own
column based on the fanciful premise that she was still on the inside track. ‘The bearing and dignity of the Queen at the Trooping of the Colour ceremony at the Horse Guards’ Parade last week,’ she wrote authoritatively in the issue dated 16 June, ‘caused admiration among the spectators’, before going on to describe, with a similar show of intimacy, the scene at Royal Ascot (‘an enthusiasm about it never seen there before’). Unfortunately, the issue had already gone to press
before
the rail strike – consequent on which, the Trooping of the Colour was cancelled and Royal Ascot postponed. Unmourned by the unforgiving Palace, it was the end of Crawfie the scribe.
¹

Although declaring a state of emergency on 31 May, the government’s approach remained essentially non-confrontational. This was especially so in relation to the economically more damaging dock strike, where Sir Walter Monckton (still the Minister of Labour) relied on a mixture of personal mediation and the good offices of the TUC, with the Cabinet apparently not even considering the possibility of bringing in troops. As for the railway strike, Eden did in a radio broadcast insist – at his wife’s urging and against the strong advice of Monckton and senior civil servants – that the railwaymen had to return to work before negotiations could begin, but in the event it ended on 14 June in the familiar manner of Monckton effectively buying it off, on what Macmillan next day privately called ‘satisfactory terms’. Eden himself seems to have gone quietly, perhaps conscious of Cabinet unease (‘it is very dangerous to take up too firm a position in these affairs’, reflected Macmillan on the 13th), but did for a moment look as if he was going to try to do something big about the whole issue of strikes, with compulsory secret ballots the most mooted option. However, when he set up a special ministerial committee, the overwhelming weight of evidence, particularly from Monckton and the British Employers’ Confederation, emphasised the intractable practical and political problems involved in enforcing such legislation, and Eden decided to shelve the matter. Monckton instead, conscious that a full employment environment was always likely to give organised labour the whip hand, pinned his hopes on a more gradual, intangible process, telling colleagues in July that it was ‘desirable to educate public opinion about the problems of industrial relations in contemporary society, and particularly about the limitations of the strike as an industrial weapon’, adding that through discussions on radio and television ‘much could be done’. A well-meaning paternalist to his highly intelligent fingertips, he presumably believed this could really happen.