Family Britain, 1951-1957 (86 page)

‘We were never encouraged to think that we were better than anybody else,’ Alan Titchmarsh reflected in 2006 about his Ilkley childhood, as a plumber’s son. ‘If anything, we were taught that we were just the same. The most important thing in life seemed to be to blend in and get on with everybody, and I suppose that’s what I’ve spent the rest of my life doing. Blending in.’ The conformist ethos in the 1950s was much the same in Stockton-on-Tees. ‘It was certainly not a place, in those days, for much deviation from a pretty dour norm, let alone for anything in the nature of artistic affectation,’ recalled the novelist Barry Unsworth. ‘To carry an umbrella or ask for wine in a pub was to put your virility in question. Suede shoes were for “lounge-lizards”. Beards were out of the question.’

Dress, indisputably, was the crucial shibboleth, however uncomfortable it might be to wear. ‘There are many branches,’ noted the Westminster Bank’s house magazine, ‘where the putting on of a soft collar instead of a stiff white one will mark a man down as unambitious and unworthy of the higher reaches of his profession,’ while on the Stock Exchange the insistence on sartorial uniformity was even more exacting. As well as the regulation bowler hat and rolled umbrella, remembered the stockbroker Dundas Hamilton, ‘I came to work in a short black jacket and striped trousers, and we all wore white shirts and stiff white collars. We also had a ban on the soft shirt or the coloured shirt, and if I’d worn a striped shirt and a soft collar people in my office would have said to me, “Why haven’t you got out of your pyjamas yet?” ’ Dirty looks greeted the young Brian Thompson when he wore a green thornproof suit and Hush Puppies on the Central Line, and another writer, Derek Robinson, recalled how, growing up in Bristol, men’s clothing ‘boiled down to sports-jacket-and-flannels or single-breasted suit’, though ‘you could get away with a sweater in the countryside’. Suits tended to be from Burton’s, and for much of the decade being measured for a first suit at one of its many shops remained a classic male rite of passage for the ‘trainee adults’ (in Thompson’s resonant phrase) that mainly comprised British youth. Still, by the mid-1950s, there were signs of change, for women as well as men. The image projected by Burton’s in its advertising started to have a less regimented feel, while in London a young Mary Quant, just out of art college, was looking with dismay at what most women wore. ‘What I loathed was the unsexiness, the lack of gaiety, the formal stuffiness of the look that was said to be fashion,’ she recalled. ‘I wanted clothes that were much more for life – much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in.’11

Not much, apart from the Monday washing, was yet being hung out. ‘Life in London, even in the most crowded streets, seemed like a film of pre-talkie days,’ recorded the Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri about his visit to England in 1955. ‘I had an uncanny sensation when I saw unending streams of people going along Oxford Street, and heard no sound. As they moved into the Underground stations they looked like long lines of ants going into their hole.’ He met ‘the same silence’ in pubs, restaurants and buses – a silence, a ‘dreariness of public behaviour’, utterly different from what he was used to in India. The English were no less reserved, he found, when they did speak, with ‘their habit of tacitness, which they call understatement’.

Yet it would be wrong to assume that Britain in the 1950s was invariably a land of self-restraint and a carefully calibrated politeness. Philip Larkin’s Scottish holiday in July 1953 was significantly spoiled, he grumbled to friends, by first ‘the drunk man in the train from Shotts, Lanarkshire, with no teeth & very few fingers, who engaged me in incomprehensible bawdy jesting’, and then ‘
two
drunk men in my sleeping compartment, Glasgow–Birmingham, who smashed a bottle, threatened me with a niblick, sang, & had me swallowing tea & White Horse at 6 the next morning’. Or take the emotive issues of litter and bus queues. ‘It took me five minutes to find a litter basket in London’s big Victoria Station,’ a reader from Herne Bay complained to the
Daily Mirror
in August 1955, the same year as the formation (owing much to Elizabeth Brunner, chairman of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes) of the Keep Britain Tidy pressure group. ‘Good job I wasn’t in a hurry to catch a train,’ continued Mrs I. S., ‘or I might have been tempted to add my junk to the awful mess on the floor.’ As for bus queues, it seems there was a particular problem in the capital. ‘There is some order until a bus arrives at a stop, but that little goes then,’ a Burnley clergyman informed
The Times
the previous autumn. ‘If two arrive together, the situation is worse. It is true there is no violence, but a lot of people sidle on the buses out of their turn with great skill and an appearance of disinterestedness. It would not come off in these parts.’ A letter to the
Sunday Express
almost exactly a year later took up the charge. ‘What has happened to the shape of the bus queues?’ asked Morris Aza of 8J Hyde Park Mansions, N1. ‘I recall their neat and orderly double-file formation during the war. Today they straggle and lack not only their former parade-ground precision but also bonhomie.’12

Helped by informally policed public spaces – by bus conductors, by park-keepers, by lavatory attendants – and by a police force that was largely admired, this was for the most part an era of trust. ‘I liked my half-hour’s walk through the quiet suburban streets,’ Jacqueline Wilson recalls about being a six-year-old in Kingston-upon-Thames, adding that ‘it wasn’t that unusual to let young children walk to school by themselves in those days’. Ken Blakemore, who grew up in a large Cheshire village, remembers not only the front door of his home being left unlocked, but bikes generally being left untouched or unchained at the bus stop or the railway station. This even applied to motorbikes, for, according to John Humbach, it was not until about 1957 that British motorcycles were fitted with locks or keys of any kind. Humbach himself had a Triumph 500cc bike. ‘It had no locks and I never had a chain and padlock (and never knew anyone who had),’ he wrote in 1996. ‘Yet this bike remained parked every night outside my house in a street which was then pretty slummy (Stadium Street, London SW10). The bike was never stolen and I was never worried that it might be.’

It would be easy to exaggerate levels of honesty – Rowntree and Lavers in their 1951 survey
English Life and Leisure
reported quite widespread minor dishonesty – but the fundamental fact was that, following the quite sharp upward spike in the immediate post-war years, crime declined markedly during the first half of the 1950s, before starting to move up again from 1955. The figures for 1957, the end of the ‘high’ fifties, are striking, indeed startling, compared with 40 years later. Notifiable offences recorded by the police: a little over half a million in 1957, almost 4.5 million in 1997. Violent crimes against the person: under 11,000 in 1957, a quarter of a million in 1997. It was, in short, a different world – a world, at its trusting best, evoked by S. Hickson, a Prudential agent (‘The Man from the Pru’) servicing the market gardeners and bulb growers of Spalding in Lincolnshire during the 1950s:

Although at first, when I used a push-bike, I could not get home to lunch, there was never any need to take sandwiches. There was always a place set for me and I can still see those heaped plates of steamed apple puddings, followed by an equally generous plate of meat, often home-cured bacon, and vegetables. Invariably they served the pudding first. How many cups of tea I swallowed on a cold day rather than refuse the hospitality so generously given! . . . Later, when I acquired a bright yellow Austin Seven of very ancient vintage – which the local folk referred to as ‘the flying bedstead’ – it sometimes resembled a greengrocer’s cart when I arrived home from my day’s collecting. Then there were the places I used to get the key: in the spout over the kitchen window; under a piece of brick near the side door; on a nail in the shed; and then I would let myself into the house and find the books and premiums which had been left in some convenient place. All this was to save me a back call when the housewife was working in the fields. Many times I would find also a hastily scribbled note: ‘Please take an extra sixpence and post these letters’ . . . ‘Fill in this form’ . . . ‘Tell the doctor Johnnie is not so well’ . . . ‘Tell my mother I cannot get home this week’ . . . ‘Leave this parcel at Mrs Brown’s’ and many others of like sort.13

1950s Britain was also an authoritarian, illiberal, puritanical society. Not entirely, of course, but the cumulative evidence is overwhelming.

School life set the tone. David Jones (later Bowie) peeing on the classroom floor soon after he had started school in Brixton and being too scared to tell anyone, a tearful Jacqueline Aitken (later Wilson) being forced to eat up the fatty meat at her school dinners before going to throw up in the smelly lavatories, John Major-Ball (later Major) hating the institutionalised bullying at Rutlish in south-west London, Peter Cook at his public school (Radley in Oxfordshire) being tormented and beaten by an imperious, cricket-playing prefect called Ted Dexter – the consolations of fame were still a long way off. Inevitably, memories have loomed large:

School discipline was strict and the boys were caned and the girls got an occasional rap on the knuckles with a ruler. Things were learnt by rote and the tables test, once a week, was a nightmare. No one questioned authority then, but it didn’t mean to say that we weren’t resentful at times. (
Pamela Sinclair, junior school, London
)

Being caned was a particular preoccupation. Depending on the teacher, you could be caned for any infringement of school rules – like being inside the school buildings at playtimes. Who used a cane, who used a rubber strap, if you could make it sting less by pulling your hand back at the moment of contact or spitting on your hand before, were all subjects of endless discussion. (
Rosalind Delmar, junior school, Dormanstown
)

Our Latin teacher, Westy, was a grizzled veteran of the Great War who wore woolly combinations and chewed garlic in class. ‘Got a cherry bottom, have you? Well, here’s sixpence to let me have a squint.’ Sixpence bought two Mars Bars in those days, so Westy did a brisk trade. (
Michael Barber, prep school, Thanet
)

Teachers thumped kids quite frequently. The PT master beat boys on the backside with a large wall-map of the world, rolled around the strip of wood from which it normally hung. He was short and stout, and the map was very long, so he had to stand well back in order to make his swing, a bit like W.C. Fields playing golf. When he got his follow-through right he could knock a boy clean off his feet. (
Derek Robinson, secondary school, Bristol
)

There was no talking, no running, and you had to wear your hat and your gloves in the street or you used to be reported, and then you’d be in for it! I always had trouble with the uniform and I remember once they made me kneel for three hours on the hall floor for not having a white collar: I didn’t have one because we couldn’t afford one. (
Dorothy Stephenson, girls’ convent school, Sheffield
)

The ogre, the teacher everyone feared and loathed, was Mr Garrigan who taught maths. He was small, ugly, bespectacled, very sarcastic. I had only been at the school a few months when he called me out for some reason and made some catty comment about my accent, asking where I had come from. I said Dumfries. He asked which part. I said the outskirts of Dumfries. ‘I never knew Dumfries had skirts.’ A really stupid, obvious, banal joke, but of course the whole class laughed uproariously, keeping in with Garry, enjoying my discomfort, glad that they were not being picked upon. I used to dread his lessons so much that I often bunked off, sitting in the drying room of the cloakroom in the dark, along with a few other pathetic specimens, in order to miss his lessons, shaking in fear in case we got found out. (
Hunter Davies, secondary school, Carlisle
)

It really wasn’t very pleasant. There was far too much pen-pushing and masses of homework. And far too much petty discipline. Incredible petty rules about uniforms and stuff. (
Mick Jagger, grammar school, Dartford
)

Not all memories are negative, but relatively few seem to be positively enthusiastic. ‘Little boys wore grey school shorts and long grey socks all year round and little girls wore dresses or pinafore dresses and blouses,’ Sheila Ferguson recalls in neutral mode about her junior school at Harringay in north London. ‘The school cap and beret were de rigueur. We learned to write with nib pens on wooden holders which we dipped in ink wells and learned from Janet and John books.’14

Education in theory was becoming less Victorian – by 1957 the Ministry of Education would be noting that it saw a school ‘no longer as a mere machine for giving lessons but as a social unit concerned with the all-round developments of boys and girls’ – but on the ground, especially in secondary schools, the main progressive, child-centred push still lay ahead. Take for instance the no-leeway, almost militaristic tone to the timetable for a Birmingham secondary modern’s visit to London in 1951. ‘Rise, wash and visit lavatories,’ it began. ‘Make your bed, pack your belongings in haversack and take it with you.’ Then, in London itself, there were visits to the Houses of Parliament (‘Pay great attention to your hosts and guides’), Westminster Abbey (‘Keep with the official guide’) and St Paul’s (‘Keep with your leader’), lunch at Trafalgar Restaurant (‘Choose a main course dish at 1/1d, a sweet at 5d, tea 2d or coffee 2½d. Your leader will pay. Choose tables as close together as possible . . .’) and two compulsory lavatory stops (by Westminster underground station and near Tower Bridge). Three years later a diarist’s six-year-old daughter was being little encouraged to express herself. ‘Pamela said she felt simply awful when they weren’t allowed to talk – penalty name on paper,’ noted Judy Haines after the third day of term in September 1954. ‘She said she felt stifled.’ About the same time, at Colston’s School in Bristol, an independent, these were some of the strictly enforced rules: