David Kynaston
AUSTERITY BRITAIN
1945–51
695pp. Bloomsbury. £25
978 0 7475 7985 4
Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous”, the Minister told the packed meeting in the Town Hall. He was startled to be greeted by loud laughter from the audience. The laughter rippled out to the 3,000 more locals outside listening to loudspeakers. The Minister ploughed on: “People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we here in this country are building for the new way of life”. It was no good. Amid cries of “Gestapo!” and “Dictator!”, Lewis Silkin left the meeting to find that some local lads had deflated the tyres of his ministerial Wolseley and poured sand into the petrol tank. Soon after, the Stevenage signs at the local railway station were replaced by signs saying Silkingrad.
Silkin had promised the House of Commons that the New Towns would create “the new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride”. Clearly there was still some way to go. Nor was the resistance confined to the plebs. Old Stevenage had been the setting for Howards End, and Bloomsbury joined forces with the rougher element when E. M. Forster lamented that the New Town would “fall out of a blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire”.
It was not simply the affront to their landscape, it was the assault on themselves and their way of life that people resented. This resentment runs as a delicious undercurrent through David Kynaston’s masterly account, Austerity Britain. Only an undercurrent, though. For these are quiet and orderly years, the years of PC Dixon and The Blue Lamp, when the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer found plenty of respondents ready to declare the British police “the finest body of men of this kind in the world”, and when the most a Chelsea burglar would steal was some tinned sardines, a pound of tea, two pots of marmalade and an overcoat.
In this age of the queue, patience was the virtue. The waiting time to have a telephone installed was anything up to eighteen months; for a new car it was between twelve months and two and a half years; a new suit could take nine months to be ready. People became so accustomed to queuing that when Alan Sainsbury introduced “Q-less shopping”, otherwise known as self-service, at his Purley store, one housewife threw a wire basket at him, and a judge’s wife swore violently when she realized that she was now expected to do the work of a shop assistant.
Yet, Stevenage apart, the grumbling remained mostly at a muted, private level. When the Quarry Hill Tenants Association met to protest that their famous model estate was becoming a dump, little better than the slums it had replaced, the Leeds Guardian reported, in a pleasing literal, that “the meeting was in unroar”. “Unroar” seems a perfect description of the public’s reaction to the huge ambitions of those who proclaimed that “we are the masters at the moment – and not only for the moment but for a very long time to come” – the correct and no less daunting version of Sir Hartley Shawcross’s famous boast in April 1946.
Some later historians have sought to play down those ambitions and present the Attlee Government as little more than a group of well-meaning but short-sighted social democrats who were undone by their own timidity. Yet, at the start, their hopes were vaulting high. Even Herbert Morrison, the voice of down-to-earth moderation, declared that “part of our work in politics and in industry must be to improve human nature”. The private goal of Sir William Haley, the BBC’s Director-General, was that in time the Third Programme would become so popular that the Light Programme and the Home Service would no longer be required. And when television limped on to the scene, Haley anticipated the time when that medium, too, “working with all the other beneficent influences within the community will have the capacity, to make for a broader vision and a fuller life”.
Along with this idealism went a good deal of contempt for the British people as they actually were. In his Letter to a Returning Serviceman, J. B. Priestley implored: “refuse with scorn the great dope-dreams of the economic emperors and their sorcerers and Hollywood sirens. Don’t let them inject you with Glamour, Sport, Sensational News and all the Deluxe nonsense”. This plea was no more successful than that of present-day Savonarola Browns demanding an end to the celebrity culture. Labour Party documents throughout the decade continued to wail about “the failure of the majority of Britain’s citizens to enjoy a full life through their leisure pursuits”, preferring the movies and the dogs, the latter a particular bugbear of progressives. Midweek greyhound meetings were actually banned, in theory to reduce absenteeism and help the export drive, in truth out of puritanical dislike. Labour MPs like Bessie Braddock fulminated against Dior’s New Look. There was even a move to regulate hemlines.
By the autumn of 1947, Priestley was lamenting that the old neighbourly cooperation of the war years had gone. “People are harder, more selfish, more intent upon looking after Number One.” The spiv was the demon figure of the age – like the hedge funder today. Joining the Labour Party did not always bring with it much admiration for the working class. “The population is as ugly as the buildings”, remarked the redoubtable Naomi Mitchison, after walking down the Gallowgate in Glasgow. Harold Nicolson told James Lees-Milne that he was becoming a socialist because socialism was inevitable, “although no one dislikes the lower orders more than I do”.
This revulsion, also to be found in Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley and as far back as George Gissing, extended beyond the faces of the lower orders to the places they lived in. In Town Planning, a 1940 Pelican which sold a quarter of a million copies, the influential planner Thomas Sharp denounced suburbia (where a quarter of the population by then lived) for “its social sterility, its aesthetic emptiness, its economic wastefulness”. For most forward-looking people, the suburbs were, in Priestley’s words, “tree-lined concentration camps”. Living and working cheek by jowl in multi-storey buildings was the only healthy way. We had to build up not out, and only full-blown national planning could achieve this. After all, had not even that rising young architectural writer John Betjeman proclaimed ten years earlier that “we must build office blocks twice as high as St Paul’s”?
Few of the new elite would have agreed with Frederic Osborn, writing to Lewis Mumford: “I don’t think philanthropic people anywhere realise the irresistible strength of the impulse towards the family house and garden as prosperity increases. They think the suburban trend can be reversed by large-scale multi-storey buildings in the down-town district, which is not merely a pernicious belief from the human point of view but a delusion”. The vogue for planning and the revolt against suburbia coincided with two other irresistible forces: the preference for public ownership over private speculative building and, above all, the need to cope with the desperate housing crisis.
The Attlee Government is best remembered today for nationalization and the National Health Service. But, as Kynaston makes clear in his wonderful melange of statistics, gossip and quotation, housing was easily the top issue throughout the 1945 Parliament and at the 1950 general election. A quarter of Britain’s dwellings did not have their own lavatory, nearly half lacked a fixed bath. The shortage of homes was estimated at somewhere between 700,000 and double that figure. In Glasgow, nearly half the population were thought to need rehousing. And the progress made under Labour was impressive. By 1951, a million new homes had been built, four-fifths of them for local authorities. When Harold Macmillan went on to set and meet a target of 300,000 homes a year, the majority too were council-owned. The trend continued under later Tory and Labour administrations, so that by the 1970s a third of the total housing stock was owned by the council – a transformation of the pattern of housing tenure more revolutionary in its implications even than the arrival of the National Health Service, which was, after all, a development of existing publicly financed health services along lines set out, though less ambitiously, by H. U. Willink (later Sir Henry) for the wartime Coalition.
The NHS in fact plays a strangely minor part in Kynaston’s account – nothing like the iconic prominence it occupies today in our recollections. The public reaction he describes was one of weary gratitude, with only a little muttering about the inevitable shortcomings of the service and those who abused it. Much the same is true of the other great new arrival of 1948, the introduction of the national insurance scheme. In the dark days of the war the Beveridge Report had sold 630,000 copies, but now the enthusiasm had settled down into a placid acceptance of what were pretty modest levels of benefit.
Altogether, what strikes one looking back is not any great splurge on the “welfare state” – a term which Lord Beveridge himself disliked as a distortion of his intentions – but rather the tight-fisted caution with which it was introduced. The NHS never looked like meeting Aneurin Bevan’s innocent hope that the service would make the nation so healthy that its costs would eventually come down. But the government made strenuous efforts to control the cost overrun (£50 million on an estimate of £176 million) and did not hesitate to overrule Bevan and bring in charges for false teeth and spectacles. By severely rationing treatment, it proved possible to keep the service more or less affordable, until several decades later the expectations of affluence broke the dam.
Kynaston is surely right in saying that “if the Tories had been returned to office in 1945, they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognisably different”. As it was, Britain was spending less of her GDP on social welfare than Belgium, Austria, or West Germany. This part of Correlli Barnett’s argument – that the British voted themselves too comfortable a peace – is not wholly convincing. After all, the queues and shortages of the Labour years were largely due to the determined diversion of almost all manufactures to export. Britain’s share of world trade in manufactured goods actually rose under Labour. In 1950, the British motor industry enjoyed a startling 52 per cent of world exports.
But if the costs of welfare did not cripple the British economy, Barnett was surely right in arguing that imperial overstretch did. As Maynard Keynes bitterly observed in 1944, “all our reflex actions are those of a rich man”, whether in insisting that the sterling area must play a leading role, or that the atomic bomb must have a Union Jack on top of it, or that that not a single brick in the imperial arch be abandoned, for fear that the whole lot would come tumbling down. Doubling defence expenditure from the pre-war level of 7 per cent, to meet the demands of the Korean War, was a breathtaking piece of bravado for a country still so ravaged by war and in hock to its creditors.
Yet the most corrosive causes of long-term decline surely lay within the structures of industry rather than springing from the overblown pretensions of government. It was not so much the obsession with occupying the commanding heights of the economy that did the damage. It was the failure to attend to what was going on down below. In manufacturing, for example, competition on price was virtually defunct. Collusive price agreements covered about 60 per cent of output, as against 25–30 per cent before the war. The clearing banks too had come to operate as a dozy cartel. Oliver Franks recalled that being Chairman of the Midland Bank “was like driving a powerful car at twenty miles an hour”. Restrictive practices such as working to rule, overtime bans and the closed shop were spreading fast. And there was more to come, as trade union membership hit a peak of 9.3 million in 1951. In the Coventry car plants it was the shop stewards who called the shots. Labour in the docks had been decasualized, but far from improving as predicted, the turn-round time had fallen off badly. Most managers had little appetite for reform, since they had it relatively easy in a world where the United States was still struggling to supply its home market, and Germany and Japan were flat on their backs. Even Geoffrey Crowther, Editor of the Economist, who denounced the British system as “stiff, rigid and unadaptable”, did not greatly care for the American system either, “where to my mind they have too much competition and pay too high a price for their wealth”. All in all, what Bevan slightingly described as “the light cavalry of private industry” seemed to be trotting, quite blithely, into the Valley of Death.
Roy Hattersley has complained that David Kynaston misses the essential point, that those years were a time not only of austerity but of hope. For those whose hopes were bound up with the Attlee project, that was no doubt true, and such voices are to the fore in histories of the period from that quarter – such as Peter Hennessy’s Never Again and Kenneth O. Morgan’s The People’s Peace – but for a great part of the population hope was dulled by sheer exhaustion. Britain was a desperately tired nation, as short of energy as it was of cash. This overwhelming fact glimmers forth from every page of Kynaston, as it does from other predecessors in the field, such as Robert Kee’s 1945: The world we fought for, T. E. B. Howarth’s Prospect and Reality, and, not least, from Nineteen Eighty-four. Orwell wrote, “Everyone wants, above all things, a rest”. George VI spoke for his subjects when he wrote to his brother at the beginning of 1946: “I have been suffering from an awful reaction from the strain of the war, I suppose, and have felt very tired. Food, clothes and fuel are the main topics of us all”. A feeling of anticlimax and let-down overwhelms Nick Jenkins during the victory celebrations in A Dance to the Music of Time. Mass-Observation’s investigator in Chelsea remarked after the Victory Parade how “almost everybody I met on the 10th and 11th, whether friends or tradespeople or strangers in shops, were saying loudly how utterly exhausted and washed-out they felt”. It was ITMA’s Mona Lott rather than Vera Lynn who spoke for the nation now.
This exhaustion was deepened by the shabbiness of every town and city, even those that Hitler had not flattened. Every post-war visitor to London – Christopher Isherwood, Ronald Reagan, Doris Lessing, Dan Jacobson – was suffocated by the smog and dirt and not least the smell. Kynaston’s excerpt from the diary of a housewife in Surbiton reminded me how awful the radio smelled when it blew up. “This is a dying city”, someone told Isherwood, and when the snow came in the terrible winter of 1946–7, it came like an invading enemy. There were times during Mannie Shinwell’s power cuts that year when all anyone had the strength to say was, as Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin, “CHRIST ITS BLEEDING COLD”.
The prophets of gaiety were few and far between. Evan Durbin was tragically drowned. Not many other politicians would have sided with the young Tony Crosland, first elected for South Gloucestershire in 1950: “I want more, not less spooning in the Parks of Recreation and Rest, more abortion, more freedom and hilarity in every way; abstinence is not a good foundation for socialism”. For this was a serious and strait-laced nation in which the BBC’s Green Book forbade any suggestive references to lodgers, ladies’ underwear, or rabbits, and ruled out not only the mildest swearing but the vulgar use of words like “basket”. Under the Fourteen-Day Rule the BBC also forbade discussion of any matter due to be debated in Parliament over the next fortnight. The actor who played Jock in Dick Barton was sacked for being a Communist, and staff at John Lewis department store had to sign a declaration that they did not belong to the Communist Party. The cox of the British Eight at the 1948 London Olympics was banned from the athletes’ parade because he had lost a leg as a boy.
Austerity Britain has a marvellous flowing sweep to it. Those gruelling years seem to flit by. Kynaston does not press his opinions on us, but they emerge sharply enough from the weight of evidence he marshals and the expertise he deploys as a leading historian in so many different fields: the City of London, cricket and the British working class. He is not the first historian of this period to put the People first in what, after all, was meant to be their day of days. Mass-Observation, rather than Hansard or the Financial Times, is the prime register of the times. Yet David Kynaston is, I think, especially alert to the way in which the masses resist massification. The irony is that Mass-Observation becomes a record of the intense privacy of the British people rather than a diary of the general will. As the politicians blatter on about planning, and the people firmly continue to talk about hemlines and the meat ration, it is hard not to be reminded of the dying Disraeli’s famous words to his socialist interviewer H. M. Hyndman: “It is a very difficult country to move, Mr Hyndman, a very difficult country indeed, and one in which there is more disappointment to be looked for than success”. Perhaps the most evocative feature of this unfailingly evocative book is the select handful of black-and-white photos, especially the pictures taken by Bert Hardy for Picture Post: wet streets, back-to-back houses, men in ties and hats, and in the background smoking chimneys and stooping cranes, a land of lost continence, where the windows were too grimy to see the New Dawn.
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Ferdinand Mount's new novel, The Condor's Head, will be published next month. His recent books include Mind the Gap: The new class divide in Britain, 2004.
