Family Britain, 1951-1957 (70 page)

In fact, Bratby was part of a loose quartet of young, broadly social-realist painters from the Royal College of Art who had all recently exhibited at the Beaux Arts – Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith being the others – and in December probably the most influential art critic of the day, David Sylvester, grouped them together in an
Encounter
article, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, that gave the name to a movement for which the everyday was paramount. ‘If there is life and exultation in Bratby’s work,’ Sylvester noted in a largely hostile piece, ‘there is also the drawback that in expressing the disorder of reality it is itself disordered.’ Bratby himself the previous year had married the talented painter Jean Cooke (after first locking her in his room in case she escaped), and over the years, as his own fortunes dwindled, he would treat her appallingly, permitting her to paint for only three hours in the morning, slashing her pictures if he disapproved of them and painting over them if he had run out of canvas. ‘A tiny woman,’ noted an admiring obituarist in 2008, ‘she had an indomitable spirit, and was affectionately celebrated for always having her say at Royal Academy meetings.’
¹⁰

Sylvester’s ‘Kitchen Sink’ article was just about to appear when on 30 November, to mark Churchill’s 80th birthday that day, there took place in Westminster Hall a ceremony that Macmillan called ‘dignified, restrained and noble’. Apart from speeches by Attlee and Churchill himself, its main elements were Parliament’s two presents: an illuminated book signed by almost every MP and a portrait of Churchill painted by Graham Sutherland. ‘He is a magnanimous man & a great one,’ reflected Marian Raynham after listening to the ceremony on the radio. ‘Some did not sign in the book of names presented. To him that meant, I don’t know how to put it, freedom & the right of the people to make decisions.’ There was less magnanimity about the portrait, which Churchill had first seen a fortnight earlier and immediately loathed, partly because it made him look as if he was straining on the lavatory. ‘One painful moment when the curtain concealing Sutherland portrait was drawn back,’ recorded Clarissa Eden (wife of Anthony) in her account of the ceremony, ‘and Winston turned to look at it with loathing, and he then said, “This is a remarkable example of modern art,” whereupon the blimpish Tories let out a yell of laughter & Sutherland blushed.’ Attlee privately sympathised. ‘I don’t like Graham Sutherland’s stuff,’ he wrote to his brother soon afterwards. ‘I tell people that it’s lucky that he did not depict the Old Man in plus-fours with loud checks with one foot in a grave. That’s his usual style.’ The painting was never displayed in public, and after a year or so Clemmie Churchill had it secretly cut up and burned. As for Churchill himself, all the birthday fuss had, despite the disagreeable portrait, a rejuvenating effect. ‘He now has a firm reputation – for the first time in his life – as a reliable and far-seeing statesman
in peace
,’ Henry Fairlie observed a few days later in his first political commentary for the
Spectator
, arguing there was no reason why Churchill should not lead the Tories into the next election.

English football, after a rocky time, was returning to Churchillian form – and although the national team beat West Germany 3–1 in a Wembley friendly the day after his birthday, the principal flag-bearers were the pacey, muscular, long-passing Wolverhampton Wanderers, under the authoritarian management of Stan Cullis. Floodlit friendlies against prestigious international opposition were a considerable novelty, but in late 1954 there were two at Molineux, in both cases the second half being televised. ‘RUSSIANS FEAR WRIGHT’ was a confident headline on 16 November before that evening a crowd of 55,184 saw Billy Wright’s team thrash Spartak 4–0, making (in Geoffrey Green’s euphoric words in
The Times
) ‘the sort of history that has been awaited by Englishmen chafing under the yoke of Continental dominance in the whole wide field of football’. On 13 December the visitors were Honved, six of whose team (including Puskas) had played in Hungary’s historic 6–3 victory against England just over a year earlier. Honved were two up at half-time, but then the nation cheered as it watched, to words by Kenneth Wolstenholme, Wolves turn it round on a quagmire of a pitch and win 3–2. Hailing ‘another decisive blow for British football’, Charles Buchan in the
News Chronicle
claimed that Wolves in the second half ‘not only got on top, but rubbed the noses of the Honved players in the Molineux mud’. And he explained how they did it: ‘By close marking and quick tackling, they cut all the rhythm out of the Honved team and then sledge-hammered a way past their defenders. It was British football at its best.’

Christmas was approaching, the first one since the end of rationing. ‘We went out early by car this morning to get the last of the shopping for the holiday,’ Phyllis Willmott recorded in Bethnal Green on Christmas Eve, a Friday:

We went to Roman Road. It was not crowded, but there were people about. The women were out with their big, flat bags. And the husbands were out with packets in their hands, looking as if they were really enjoying this day off work.

At the end of the road we parked for a moment, and I watched the world go by. We were outside a butcher’s. A big, well-made woman pushing a pram stopped outside. She was shabbily dressed. Two children were walking with her – a boy of about nine or ten, in long trousers; a girl of about six with thin, white legs, cotton socks, and a coat with the hem let down badly. She had her hands in her pockets and looked cold in the sharp wind. ‘You stay outside,’ said the mother to her. The girl stayed, holding the pram, while the boy followed his mother into the shop. At first, I thought there were two children in the pram. Another look showed that there were three: a boy of about four, a girl of three (with a dummy in her mouth and a rosy, bonny face) and a baby under the hood of perhaps a year or fifteen months. The girl standing holding the pram stared in at us; she didn’t smile. I felt how unfair life is. More so now, perhaps, than ever. They are becoming such a minority group, the large ‘poor’ families.

It was, on the whole, an easier life in Chingford. ‘Abbé has today off, too,’ noted a contented Judy Haines four days later. ‘How I do love to have him at home. He took us to see Glynis Johns in “Mad about Men”. All about a mermaid. We all thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am resolved to wear lighter colours and step up the glamour a bit. Resolution No 1 for 1955.’
¹¹

5

A Fair Crack at the Whip

Modernisation was in the air in early 1955. On Monday, 24 January – hours after 17 had been killed when a diverted York–Bristol express jumped the points at Sutton Coldfield – the British Transport Commission’s chairman, General Sir Brian Robertson, unveiled a £1,240 million
Plan for the Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways
that aimed by 1970 to electrify the main lines and many of the major suburban lines, make increasing use of diesel, and phase out steam trains. Against a background of rising coal prices, the strategy made obvious sense, whatever the undoubted widespread emotional attachment to steam, for all its dirtiness. Press reaction was generally positive, if somewhat sceptical of the ability of the ossified BTC to deliver change. Moreover, as the
Economist
fairly pointed out, ‘the measures that are proposed will, after fifteen years, put this country’s railway system no further ahead than, say, the Dutch railways today’. There was also the continuing here and now of a badly rundown, poorly performing network. ‘In 1962 the train now standing at Platform 6 will be air-conditioned, radar-equipped and faster than sound,’ announced a station loudspeaker in an Osbert Lancaster pocket cartoon a few days after the plan, ‘but tonight it will be running a leetle behind time!’

A large part of the problem facing the railways by 1955 was increasingly intense road competition, especially in freight, and on 2 February the Transport Minister, John Boyd-Carpenter, announced a major programme of expenditure on roads over the next four years. This would include the start of construction of London–Yorkshire and Preston–Birmingham ‘motor roads’ (ie motorways), a crossing of the Firth of Forth, the Dartford–Purfleet tunnel and the rebuilding of London’s Albert Bridge. ‘Throughout its length it will have two carriageways,’ helpfully explained
The Times
about the London-to-Yorkshire project. ‘The motor road will be carried over or under all existing roads and at important junctions there will be fly-overs or under-passes.’ Against a background of the number of motor vehicles having nearly doubled since 1938, Britain’s roads were, by common consent, inadequate and dangerous – epitomised by the A1, or Great North Road, condemned by
Picture Post
later in 1955 as ‘the bloodiest country lane in Britain’ – so, as with the rail plan, there was little opposition. However, the town planner Colin Buchanan offered a word of caution. ‘The road improvements will be, in the main, open-country schemes, and they will benefit the motorists, industry, and indeed the country,’ he wrote in early 1956. ‘But in the towns, where journeys begin and end, the extra motor vehicles may come to be regarded as a very mixed blessing.’
¹

Less than a fortnight after Boyd-Carpenter’s announcement, it was the turn of Geoffrey Lloyd, Minister of Fuel and Power, to flourish a ten-year plan. ‘This is a historic day for Britain,’ he declared. ‘It offers the possibility of a continuing increase in the standard of living of our country . . . Here is new scope for our traditional genius – the mixing of a small proportion of imported materials with a large amount of skill and ingenuity.’ Lloyd was announcing the building of 12 nuclear power stations, a programme ahead of anywhere else in the world. The new stations (known in time as the Magnox stations, after the special alloy of magnesium in which the uranium fuel rods were clad) were to be built by private enterprise but operated by the Central Electricity Authority, reconstituted in 1957 as the Central Electricity Generating Board. That body’s first chairman would be Sir Christopher Hinton, who in 1955 itself was, as a key figure at the Atomic Energy Authority, the public face of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. His arguments were compelling and seldom criticised: not only was the demand for conventional fuels growing rapidly, but the more easily worked coal deposits were becoming depleted, the price of coal was inexorably increasing, and there were continuing recruitment problems in the mines. Moreover, construction work at Calder Hall in Cumberland, intended to be the first station to generate large quantities of electrical power from atomic energy, was progressing satisfactorily, while in the north of Scotland, work was under way at Dounreay to build a ‘breeder reactor’. In March, Marian Raynham in Surbiton heard Hinton give a typically authoritative talk on ‘Atomic Energy in Industry’ on the Home Service. ‘I loved to hear it all just roll off his tongue about the Calder reactor & uranium & gases & power & fission material etc,’ she recorded. ‘All so easy it sounded.’
²

Inevitably, the question began to be asked, especially in relation to the nationalised sector: would modernisation work without higher productivity and improved industrial relations? The railways were now temporarily replacing the coal mines as the focus of most attention, especially in the wake of a threatened national strike in the second week of 1955 that had, as was becoming a familiar pattern, been averted only by the deft ministerial use of a tame Court of Inquiry. The Cabinet was divided about its recommendations, but most knew that public opinion (74 per cent according to Gallup) was firmly on the side of the low-paid railwaymen. Churchill had no appetite for an industrial fight, and, as Macmillan put it in his diary to justify acceptance of significant pay rises for little or nothing in return, ‘we are enjoying the greatest boom in history’, so ‘how can 700,000 industrial workers be asked to forego their share?’ The
Economist
as usual fulminated – ‘There is no substitute for competition . . . One of the dreams that finally died last week was the dream that industries could be planned or rationalised or co-ordinated into efficiency’ – while Enoch Powell warned in a speech in his Wolverhampton constituency that without greater financial realism ‘we shall get into the nightmare situation of everybody subsidising everybody else’s wages’, but as yet there was zero political traction for the concept of extensive denationalisation. Instead, Tory hopes were pinned on the leaders of organised labour doing their honourable bit as they saw the fruits of the government’s capital investment coming through. ‘There is really a great opportunity here of doing a big thing,’ Macmillan privately reflected shortly before the announcement of the rail plan. ‘We
must
– at all costs – get the Unions on our side from the start, if we are to get the benefit of modernisation.’

Among railwaymen themselves, morale was near rock-bottom. Their relative standard of living had deteriorated sharply since the war, skilled men (including drivers and firemen) were leaving in droves, and too many recruits were of questionable quality and being promoted too quickly, compromising safety standards. Brian Thompson’s first vacation job as a Cambridge undergraduate was to work as a relief porter at sooty, sulphurous, ‘massively overmanned’ Liverpool Street station in the run-up to Christmas 1955. The prevailing cynicism, he found, was total:

You could describe railway portering of the period as money for Old Holborn. It was unskilled labour in all but one regard: there was a knack in dropping a promising-looking box just hauled from the goods van at exactly the right height onto its most vulnerable corner. When it was done properly, the packaging shattered and the contents were revealed. The rest was sleight of hand. The first time I saw this done, I had to blink twice to believe it, the more so because it was effected under the nose of a foreman porter there on purpose to prevent it. The theft that followed was accomplished as smoothly and routinely as a laundress folding sheets.

We took our breaks in an underground mess at the end of one of the platforms, an unheated hell-hole littered with the crusts of sandwiches, newspapers and cigarette packets. Rats ran round the walls the way they do in pantomime sketches, as if drawn by strings; nobody seemed to notice. Some had come to work only to sleep, others to add to an open-ended seminar on horse-racing . . .