Family Britain, 1951-1957 (84 page)

Perhaps the last word, some three months after the announcement, should go to Christopher Isherwood’s mother. ‘M. disapproves of Princess Margaret, thinks her a show-off,’ he noted during a rare visit back home. ‘This is very important – for M. always seems to me to embody British upper-middle-class opinion.’
²⁸

9

Family Favourites

Dab-it-off, Windolene, Dura-glit, Brasso, Brillo, Rinso, Lifebuoy, Silvikrin, Amm-i-dent, Delrosa Rose Hip Syrup, Mr Therm, Put-U-Up, Toni Perms, hair-nets, head-scarves, Jaeger, Ladybird T-shirts, rompers, knicker elastic, cycle clips, brogues, Clark’s sandals, Start-rite (that haunting rear view of two small children setting out on life’s path), Moss Bros, tweed jackets, crests on blazers, ties as ID, saluting AA patrolmen, driving gloves, Austin Cambridge, Morris Oxford, Sunbeam Talbot, starting handles, indicator wings, Triumph, Norton, sidecars, Raleigh, Sturmey-Archer, trolley-buses, Green Line, I-Spy, Hornby Dublo, Tri-ang, Dinky, Meccano, Scalextric, Subbuteo, Sarah Jane dolls, Plasticine, Magic Robot, jumping jacks, cap guns, Capstans, Player’s Navy Cut, Senior Service, Passing Clouds, cigarette boxes, Dagenham Girl Pipers, Saturday-morning cinema, Uncle Mac, Nellie the Elephant, The Laughing Policeman, fountain pens, Quink, napkin rings, butter knives, vol-au-vents, Brown Windsor soup, sponge cakes, Welgar Shredded Wheat, Garibaldis (squashed flies), Carnation, Edam, eat up your greens, Sun-Pat, Marmite sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, semolina, shape, sucking oranges through sugar cubes, Tizer, Quosh, Kia-ora Suncrush, dandelion and burdock, Tom Thumb drops, Sherbet Fountains, Spangles, Trebor Chews, barley twists, blackjacks, fruit salads, aniseed balls, pineapple chunks, Big Chief Dream Pipe, flying saucers, traffic-light lollipops, gobstoppers. The agonising dilemma at the ice-cream van: a big one for 6d or two small ones for 3d each?

None of which quite did it for David Hare, growing up in Bexhill-on-Sea. ‘I think anyone who wants to return to Britain in the Fifties is on to an insane project,’ the playwright declared in 1999. ‘The society was so oppressive and so false, particularly sexually. Neighbours had this prurience and primness and this awful kind of policing of each other’s lives.’ Next year, in another interview, he came back to his unfavourite decade: ‘Nobody could now imagine how dull things were and how respectful people were and how dead they were from the neck up. We knew we were in the trauma of some great event but had missed the event that explained the behaviour; and that was everyone wanted a quiet time.’ The ‘great event’ was of course the war, and in 2004 he reiterated that ‘for most of us’ a reprise of the 1950s ‘would represent a return only to repression, to hypocrisy and to a kind of willed, pervasive dullness which is the negation of life’. It was a very real sentiment that Hare was challenging. ‘We have got to try to recover from the permissiveness of the Sixties,’ Margaret Thatcher had told the
Daily Mail
back in 1988, towards the end of her premiership. She did not need to spell out that ergo the non-permissive previous decade was a good thing.

The 1950s came particularly to the fore during the national soul-searching in the immediate wake of the Jamie Bulger murder in 1993. ‘It was the best of times,’ asserted Ian Jack, warmly recalling full employment, steady material progress and a widely shared sense of certainty about life. ‘It was the worst of times,’ insisted Lynn Barber, ‘the most exciting event of the Fifties’ being ‘the advent of the Birds Eye Roast Beef Frozen Dinner for One’. The debate continued. When in 2007 the BBC’s website magazine sought to create a people’s history of the decade, some contributors were negative, but it was Jill Morgan of Aldershot who spoke for the majority:

I was a child growing up in the fifties. We walked to school, had open fires and no central heating. Sweets were a treat, not part of lunch. We played in the street with our friends and were safe, we climbed trees, skinned our knees and ripped our clothes, got into fights and nobody sued anybody. We got a clip round the ear when we had been naughty, and Mum gave us a teaspoon of malt and cod liver oil each morning before school. Yum! There was no day-time TV, and we played cards and board games and TALKED to each other and our friends. We were allowed to answer the phone on our birthdays as a special treat. It was an innocent time, gone forever . . .

‘Bring back,’ she concluded, ‘the values of the 1950s!!!’

Was Bexhill itself, anyway, quite so awful? ‘I had always rather despised the idea of Bexhill,’ recorded the generally tolerant Madge Martin in February 1954, ‘but in spite of being modern and with no particular charms, it managed to be rather appealing . . . The shops are very good . . .’ Yet Hare had a point, as did the Goons in their choice of staid setting for the terrors of batter-pudding hurling. ‘We all hated getting the Bexhill run,’ the folk singer Shirley Collins remembered about working in the mid-1950s as a bus conductress:

Bexhill was posh, people there were wealthy and generally arrogant and rarely said ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Some ladies were too delicate to give you their fares; they would drop their coins from their gloved hands into your palm as if to avoid contamination. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked one lady. ‘I didn’t say anything,’ replied the customer. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you said thank you.’ It was petty, but reasonably satisfying.1

‘Good Friday: contempt for the real meaning of the day,’ bitterly reflected John Fowles (far from a signed-up Christian) in April 1955. ‘It is no longer remembered for what it is. Now all holidays are the same – relaxation after tension, relief from routine. Strolling crowds, daffodils, spring sunshine . . .’ Was Britain already such a secular society? The historian Callum Brown argues forcibly in
The Death of Christian Britain
(2001) that it was the 1960s that marked the great, sudden step-change in the process of secularisation: ‘People’s lives in the 1950s were very acutely affected by genuflection to religious symbols, authority and activities. Christianity intruded in very personal ways into the manner of people’s comportment through their lives, through the rites of passage and through their Sundays. Religion mattered and mattered deeply in British society as a whole in the 1950s.’ Is he right?

Widespread outrage at the church’s apparently heartless interference during the Princess Margaret affair might suggest otherwise. So do vox-pop findings from earlier in the 1950s, themselves following on from Mass-Observation’s
Puzzled People
survey soon after the war, uncovering deep antipathy to what was seen as the hypocrisy of most Christians. ‘You ask whether religion attracts hypocrites,’ a London carpenter replied to Ferdynand Zweig. ‘I say certainly it does.’ Zweig himself noted how, ‘whenever the problem of religion is raised’ during his interviews with British working men, ‘hypocrisy is mentioned as the chief argument against the organized Churches’. He was also struck by two other strands. ‘The workers often say that “If the Church leaders had their way the world would be too gloomy for words”. Nothing joyful would be allowed.’ And: ‘How often is it repeated: “It doesn’t matter what people believe but what they are and do. The personality is all that counts.” ’ Rowntree and Lavers in their 1951 study
English Life and Leisure
also encountered plenty of mistrust:

Don’t talk to me about parsons! They’ve got a pretty soft job, if you ask me. Telling decent working folk how to behave! What do they know about it? Never done an honest day’s work in their life, most of them. (
Working-class widow in late middle age
)

When I had T.B., mate, and was off work for fourteen months I can tell you who looked after me and the missus. It wasn’t all those ——— people from the chapel. It was my mates from the boiler shop. (
Working-class man
)

My boss is a great man for the chapel but he’ll give short weight if he can, and he makes plenty of mistakes adding the bills – all on his own side. (
Male shop assistant in early middle age
)

It doesn’t encourage you much to go to church, does it, when you see an old skinflint like him? He’d squeeze the last penny out of anybody, and then up he gets on Sundays bold as brass and reads the lessons. I think they’re all the same. (
Middle-class housewife speaking about her landlord
)

Richard Hoggart later in the 1950s found much the same in working-class Hunslet, where phrases like ‘nice work if y’ can get it’ and ‘wonderful what y’ can get paid for nowadays’ were typical of what he called the prevailing ‘cheerful cynicism towards the clergy’.2

Churchgoing figures are also a problem for the Brown thesis. Geoffrey Gorer’s extensive
People
survey in 1950–51 revealed that only 15 per cent attended a church or religious service at least weekly, 45 per cent intermittently (less than weekly, but at least once or twice a year) and 40 per cent never, unless for a wedding or a funeral. Just over two years later, a detailed survey of leisure habits in Derby found that 27 per cent of people never went to church, while only 13 per cent went once a week or more. Women accounted for almost two-thirds of church attendances, with a bias towards the elderly, and a middle-class person was at least twice as likely to go to church each Sunday as a working-class person. In December 1954, the BBC commissioned Gallup to undertake a major nationwide investigation. ‘If the decline in churchgoing needed confirmation it obtains it from this survey,’ declared the ensuing report. ‘Six out of ten non-churchgoers say they “used to go”, seven out of ten occasional churchgoers say they used to go more often and so do three out of ten frequent churchgoers. Yet the vast majority of all three groups went to Sunday School or Bible Class in their youth – most of them for several years.’ As to the headline figure, 63 per cent attended religious services either never or only once or twice a year. Finally, in February 1957, another Gallup survey found that only 14 per cent had been to church the previous Sunday.3

The rites of passage, however, tell a rather different, less secular, more nineteenth-century story. Take the proportion of infants baptised in the Church of England. Whereas in 1900 such baptisms had run at 609 out of every 1,000 live births, by 1956 the figure was 602. The decline was more marked – but still relatively mild – in the case of religious (as opposed to civil) marriages: between 1900 and 1957, a fall in England and Wales from 85 per cent to 72 per cent, in Scotland from 94 per cent to 83 per cent. In other words, a church wedding remained the overwhelming custom. As for the third rite, cremations increased notably after 1945 (up from 4 per cent in 1939 to 50 per cent by 1966), but in the 1950s anyway, Hoggart’s finding in Hunslet that most people disliked them as ‘unnatural’ was probably widely shared. And he detailed the elaborate provisions that ‘the more careful families’ made towards what was called a ‘proper’ funeral or a ‘decent burial’ or even ‘putting ’im away splendid’, usually involving the parish church.4

And belief? ‘He has doubts about whether the supernatural parts of Christian teaching should be taken literally but “cannot imagine” himself just vanishing when he dies,’ reported Rowntree and Lavers about a middle-aged, self-made engineer. ‘He thinks there must be some other existence. He attaches great importance to the part of Christian teaching that says one should love one’s neighbour, and he claims that he has tried to practise it all his life.’ Other interviewees offer a flavour of the faith/non-faith spectrum:

She is not interested in religion. She says if saying her prayers would get her a house she would say them, but ‘everyone knows it’s all nonsense’. (
Labourer’s wife
)

Mrs O. says she is a Christian. She does not bother to go to church but she was brought up as a Christian, and is sure the Bible is true. (
Bus driver’s wife
)

He is not an atheist and he believes in some Supreme Power that he calls fate. He thinks nobody can alter fate and therefore it is no use praying. He hardly knows what to believe. (
Bus conductor
)

Mr H. does not call himself a religious man and he never bothers to go to church, but he thinks it important that people should act decently towards those whom they meet because otherwise the world would be an impossible place. (
Milkman, 45
)

Mrs R. has absolutely no religious beliefs and thinks that going to church or not is just like going to a cinema or not, ‘It’s a matter of what suits you.’ (
Female factory worker, 30
)

She hardly knows why she does, but she thinks that Christianity really corresponds with the good life she would like for herself and her family. But she does not believe in the ‘supernatural’ parts. (
Professional man’s wife
)

‘I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe all this ‘‘God is Love’’ stuff. When I was a kid I had a text in my bedroom, ‘‘God is Love’’. Since then I’ve been in two wars, been unemployed eighteen months on end, seen the missus die of cancer, and now I’m waiting for the atom bombs to fall. All that stuff about Jesus is no help.’ (
Lower middle-class man
)