Family Britain, 1951-1957 (81 page)

Inevitably the new channel got a mixed critical reception in its early weeks. ‘We expected the I.T.A. to borrow ideas, programmes and films from American television,’ Hollowood wrote in
Punch
. ‘We knew that the advertising agencies would fashion their “spots” on the American plan. What we didn’t bargain for was an entire service geared to the American way of life.’ By contrast, Isabel Quigly in the
Spectator
praised the ITA for having ‘managed to shed a good deal of that frowstiness, that mincing intellectual gentility that was rampant and ruining so much that was good on the BBC’, and she gave a particularly high mark to Chataway for his ‘refreshing vigour’ on the news, so different from the BBC’s ‘elegant but often baffling understatement’. Moreover, the advertisements had ‘turned out to be quite inoffensive’, if ‘mostly mediocre’. Against that, she identified an unattractive streak of vulgarity, epitomised by
People Are Funny
, ‘where unfortunate (though idiotic) members of an audience are called up on the stage and subjected to various indignities and then consoled with a washing machine or a wireless or a bunch of pound notes’. This Saturday-night programme was compèred by Derek Roy – ‘a silky, suave operator’, according to
Picture Post
– and amid widespread condemnation of it as tasteless and exploitative was eventually dropped by the ITA.

The viewers themselves seem to have been mainly positive about the new channel. When Gallup in early October interviewed those with access to both services, it found that twice as many thought ITV better than BBC as the other way round. An increasing number of sets, moreover, began to be converted, up to almost half a million by early November. Mass-Observation’s Panel was predominantly middle-class, and thus not wholly representative, but this autumn a quartet of members gave their views:

I can & do receive ITV on my set & except for Professional Boxing & a more lively news service the programmes seem to be inferior copies of BBC ones or moronic public quizzes or filmed series – mostly American. (Though I admit to being a Robin Hood serial fan!) (
Married man, 36, insurance clerk
)

The advertisements are not nearly as obnoxious as I feared – in fact they don’t bother me at all although I hate advertising in general. I just don’t want all their sports and fights, nor their games and knockabouts, but have had – oh quantities of programmes I have enjoyed very greatly (not least the Shell/Betjeman adv. features). But SO difficult now to remember which were BBC and which features were Commercial. I switch continually. Some really excellent plays. (
Widow, 50+, secretary
)

On the whole the advertisements are better than the programmes. They are lively and amusing – eg Westclox on the day when clocks had to be put back. All the family chuckle over Murray Mints. (
44, housewife
)

I think it is one of the most awful betrayals of codes of free speech and decent behaviour. (
Single woman, 57, part-time social investigator
)
¹⁷

‘I have several times suggested that what I call the “Establishment” in this country is today more powerful than ever before,’ Henry Fairlie wrote in the
Spectator
on 23 September, the day after commercial television’s debut:

By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially. Anyone who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of the
Times Literary Supplement
, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

Reactions were predictable. Bonham Carter herself dismissed the idea of an Establishment as ‘a fiction’, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) accused Fairlie of having ‘idiotic bees’ in his bonnet, and John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, implausibly asserted, on the basis of having sat on selection boards for the Foreign Service (according to Fairlie, a male bastion where what mattered was knowing the right people), that ‘candidates from grammar schools, and from working or middle-class homes, have (to say the least) as good a chance of success as others’. Fairlie’s article made a considerable impact and was the first significant post-war attempt to unpick the connections, and penetrate the secrecy, of what was still at the top a very closed elite – or what an exasperated William Cobbett a century and a half earlier had called ‘The Thing’. Fairlie might also have mentioned the Treasury, which on the home front was still a top-drawer institution of great prestige as well as mystique. In 1954 an American political scientist, Samuel Beer, submitted to officials the draft of his book about the Treasury, following several years of diligent, ingenious research, and encountered a nervous, even hostile reaction. The matter passed across the desk of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, who reflected that ‘the real problem is whether we can allow the publication of a book which gets so near the knuckle in describing, evidently on the basis of some inside knowledge, how the Treasury works on the inside’. An essentially secretive, mandarin culture ran very deep, and the eventual upshot was that Beer was able to publish in 1956 only after having made extensive, emasculating revisions. One reviewer, the well-connected economist Roy Harrod, took away from Beer’s study the ‘comforting confidence’ that, whatever else ailed Britain, ‘this country remains supreme in the world in one field – top-level administration’.

In September 1955, ‘Establishment’ was not the only term becoming part of the general vocabulary. The current issue of
Encounter
included a typically witty piece by the novelist Nancy Mitford entitled ‘The English Aristocracy’, with most attention focusing on the passages in which she quoted from the philological work of Alan Ross, a professor at Birmingham University seeking to distinguish between upper-class and non-upper-class English usage, or what he called ‘U’ and ‘non-U’:

Cycle
is non-U against U
bike
.

Dinner
: U-speakers eat
luncheon
in the middle of the day and
dinner
in the evening. Non-U-speakers (also U-children and U-dogs) have their
dinner
in the middle of the day.

Greens
is non-U for U
vegetables
.

Home
: non-U – ‘they have a lovely
home
’; U – ‘they’ve a very nice
house
.’

Ill
: ‘I was
ill
on the boat’ is non-U against U
sick
.

Mental
: non-U for U
mad
.

Note paper
: non-U for U
writing paper
.

Toilet paper
: non-U for U
lavatory paper
.

Wealthy
: non-U for U
rich
.

To these I would add:

Sweet
: non-U for U
pudding
.

Dentures
: non-U for U
false teeth
. This, and
glasses
for
spectacles
, almost amount to non-U indicators.

Wire
: non-U for U
telegram
.

Phone
: a non-U indicator.

(One must add that the issue is sometimes confused by U-speakers using non-U indicators as a joke. Thus Uncle Matthew in
The Pursuit of Love
speaks of his
dentures
.)

The magazine had printed extra copies in advance, but still sold out in days. Or, as Mitford’s friend Evelyn Waugh wrote to her in Paris soon afterwards, ‘In England class distinctions have always roused higher feeling than national honour: they have always been the subject of feverish but very private debate. So, when you brought them into the open, of course everyone talked, of course the columnists quoted you and corrected you. Letters poured in to the various editors, many of them, I am told, unprintably violent.’
¹⁸

Alan Dyer was definitely non-U among the miners at Manvers Main Colliery, Yorkshire. There, on the Silkstone seam, an unofficial strike in October proved shockingly divisive. Seven miners refused to come out, eventually leading, after the strike’s collapse, to a mock trial at which five of the seven confessed their regret for having worked on, one ‘sick’ was excused, and the seventh man, the 27-year-old Dyer, failed to turn up and instead went to the pit, where a Sunday shift earned him £4 overtime for filling 13 tons of coal. Accordingly, in a move that provoked national attention and much criticism, doing considerable damage to the trade-union movement as a whole, he was ‘sent to Coventry’ by his fellow-miners, who refused to work within sight of him. Eventually, the colliery manager weakly agreed to send him away from the pit to dig manholes half a mile from his nearest neighbour. ‘Why should I say sorry?’ an unrepentant Dyer asked the press. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong.’ With no help from the National Union of Mineworkers, but fortified by his mother-in-law’s declaration that ‘he’s a reet good worker is Alan’, Dyer indignantly refuted malicious rumours that he had worked through the strike only because he was in debt. ‘Look at them, all stamped up,’ he said as he showed journalists the hire-purchase cards on which he had bought his furniture. ‘I don’t owe anybody a penny. The television set’s paid for, too, and we’ve had it over two years. I’ve not done bad since I’ve been married, ’ave I? We reckon to put a fair bit by each week. We’re having a baby car in the spring. Though I put another idea into t’wife’s head last night – fourteen days on the Italian Riviera. £32 all in. Mind you, it’ll cost about eighty pounds for the three of us. Must take the kid [his three-year-old daughter]. That’s who the holiday’s for.’ Coming hard on the heels of several other well-publicised victimisation cases – including one in which an ostracised engineering worker in Warrington had gassed himself – it showed ‘the great labour movement’, in
Picture Post
’s words, ‘taking on all the dignity of a lynching mob’.

‘A fine semi-documentary film with Michael Redgrave acting splendidly,’ noted Madge Martin in Oxford on 18 October after going with her husband to see
The Dam Busters
. It was already five months since the royal premiere (Princess Margaret present), but only six weeks since the film had gone on general release.
The Dam Busters
was not every critic’s all-time favourite – the young Alan Brien rated it in the
Evening Standard
as only ‘a near miss’ – but elsewhere there was almost uniform praise: ‘One of the best war pictures yet made’ (
Daily Mail
); ‘The finest war picture’ (
News Chronicle
); ‘Excuse me while I rave’ (
Daily Mirror
). There was special praise for the film’s restraint, with Richard Mallett observing in
Punch
that ‘almost the only attempt at an emotional effect comes with the death of a favourite dog’, but seeing no need to mention that the dog’s name was Nigger.
The Dam Busters
proved an irresistible success – in commercial terms, definitely the British film of the year, arguably of the decade – and much of its appeal was down to a skilful script by R. C. Sheriff and ‘The Dam Busters March’ by Eric Coates, soon a hit record. Redgrave played Dr Barnes Wallis (creator of the bouncing bombs that breached the Ruhr dams), Richard Todd was Wing Commander Guy Gibson, in charge of 617 Squadron, and there were parts elsewhere in his crack team for Nigel Stock, Robert Shaw and Bill Kerr. It was not a film that even for a nanosecond questioned the existing class structure, with a strong showing in 617 for Oxbridge blues, while to convey the theme of imperial unity there was also a sprinkling of Australasians. ‘Hardly a Welsh or a Scottish accent to be heard,’ observes John Ramsden in his acute study of the film, ‘nor indeed one from the East End, the West Midlands or the North.’

The Dam Busters
was of course only one example of the genre. At least 29 war films had already been released earlier in the 1950s, including
The Wooden Horse
(1950) and
The Cruel Sea
(a huge box-office success in 1953, starring Jack Hawkins), while immediately ahead would be at least 17 others in the next two years, including Kenneth More as Douglas Bader in the big 1956 hit,
Reach for the Sky
. For the most part with only minor variations, the formula was tried and trusted: plenty of action and plenty of insouciant, stiff-upper-lipped British heroism in a noble cause. Nor was it just films, given the ubiquity of ‘The War’, possibly even more in children’s lives and imaginations than their parents’. ‘As a child all the games I played were war games,’ recalled Richard Eyre (born 1943). ‘I fired sticks and mimicked the high stutter of machine guns in the woods, and flattened the long grass as I dive-bombed my friends with ear-damaging howls and flung my small body into the arc of heroic death. Or I sat in the cockpit of a large paratroop glider, whose still intact but inert carcass lay in an orchard at my friend’s house, wearing a gas mask as a pilot’s helmet and taking turns to sit in the pilot’s seat and steer the flak-torn fuselage through heavy bombardment towards its target.’ Or take Airfix Spitfires: sold by Woolworths for 2s, they proved to be, after their introduction in 1955, the toy firm’s most popular model, prompting Robin Blake to remember half a century later how he had ‘spent many a short-trousered hour, half stoned on glue, clumsily cementing together the moulded plastic sections’. Among boys’ comics, the issue of the
Rover
for 29 October 1955 was pretty typical. ‘3 FULL PAGES OF WAR PICTURES’ promised the front cover, while stories included ‘The Battle Against the Flying Bomb’ (‘Braddock, Ace Pilot of the Last War, is in Action against this Deadly German Weapon’), ‘Sergeant Allen of the Fighting 15th’ (‘The sky over Holland is dark with aircraft as the British Airborne Division drop in on Arnhem to write a glorious page in their history!’), and ‘The Eyes that Never Closed’ (‘How the Allies sought out and destroyed the German Submarines’), beside all of which the football story, ‘It’s Teamwork that Counts’, rather paled into insignificance.
¹⁹