AUSTERITY ~ BRITISH STYLE. TWO PERSPECTIVES
HAVING IT SO GOOD, BRITAIN IN THE FIFTIES
by Peter Hennessy
Ask
someone under thirty years old to list a word association stimulated
by the 1950s and they will reply ’black & white television’
and possibly not much else. For anyone born in that decade or
earlier the iconography is almost limitless; the Atom bomb, walking
to school, Bill Haley, horse-drawn deliveries, National Service, the
Korean War, Teddy Boys, the Suez crisis, the Festival of Britain,
Sputnik, the Stanley Mathews final, rationing, the Goon Show,
austerity, and black and white television (including the potter’s
wheel). Peter Hennessy’s ‘Having
it so Good, Britain in the Fifties’
lists the lot, alongside a detailed chronology of Governmental change
and policy shifts.
Chopping British history into
decade-sized chunks imposes artificial faultlines in the telling of
our Island story. What began as journalistic shorthand has found a
permanent residency in our lexicon of national introspection; the 50s
were austere, the 60s were swinging, and the 70s were naff. However,
global and national events, processes and trends that adhere to their
own logic and timescales pay no consideration to the arbitrary
falling of a copy-editor’s axe. History thus shoe-horned into
convenient media friendly packages is necessarily compromised.
Or
is it? There is no one better placed to attempt the task of squaring
this circle than writer and broadcaster, journalist and historian,
Peter Hennessy. He currently holds the oxymoronic title of Attlee
Professor of British Contemporary History at Queen Mary London
University, having previously worked 20 years as a heavyweight
journalist for The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist. Hennessy’s
published track record detailing the Machiavellian machinations in
the corridors of power is exemplary. He has examined and dissected
the body politic organ by organ; ‘The Cabinet’(1986), The Prime
Minister’(2000), ‘Whitehall’(1989), ‘The Secret State’
(2002).
‘Having
it so Good’ is the natural successor to his 1993 publication ‘Never
Again; 1945 to 1951’ and is the second in a planned sequence of
titles that will climax with the Thatcher ascendancy. At a stroke
Hennessy slays one of the dragons of ahistory; his decade sized
chunks are merely parts of a greater all encompassing oeuvre.
‘Having
it so Good’ is a thoroughly researched, well documented rifle
through government records and papers. This audit trail of primary
sources is augmented by contemporaneous comment from the printed and
broadcast Press and enlightening and entertaining interviews with key
Government and Whitehall players. Hennessy comes across as more than
inquisitive, nosy even, in his search for the fuller story. The
mental picture is of him rumaging through the drawers in the PM’s
desk like Dick Barton, Special Agent. The results of his digging are
terrific; not only do we read Winston Churchill’s confidential
minutes to and from his atomic advisor re the British H Bomb, but we
also get Churchill’s handwritten underlinings and crossings-out
from those same annotated minutes. This is the equivalent of the
stump-camera in TV cricket coverage. Hennessy gives us detailed
slo-mo replays of key decision making moments in history from the
heart of the action.
Initial
stereotypical impessions of the 50s suggest drab austerity slowly
lightening-up towards the end of the decade to allow colour and
prosperity to enter everyday life. Hennessy paints a detailed canvas
detailing the major national events and geo-political crises
interlaced with the gradual improvement of the lot of the general
population, viz Atom bombs and Gaggia Coffee bars, Suez and Jazz,
the Korean war and the Coronation..
The
Coronation of Elizabeth 2nd
works well as a vehicle for exploring life in Britain in 1953.
Hennessy is able to examine the diminishing significance of the
Commonwealth (the Empire as was), the role of the monarchy, and our
own sense of self in a world pulled between emerging superpowers. As
news of Edmund Hilary reaching the peak of Everest coincided with the
ascendancy of a young queen, Britain took comfort from some old
fashioned national pride – even adopting the New Zealander Hilary
as an honorary Brit. Meanwhile the global forces reshaping the
postwar world continued unabated with no reference to Britain. We
found ourselves not knowing where we fitted between the decline of
Empire, the dominance of the US, the emergence of the Warsaw Pact
(1955) and the nascant European Union.
Hennessy’s
account of the 50s is largely the story of three Conservative Prime
Ministers and how their individual qualities and fortunes coincided
with the fate of the nation. Winston Churchill was an ageing force
during his final term in power and manifestly was no longer capable
of the job, physically or mentally. Unable to cope with briefs more
than one side of paper in length, he increasingly regressed into
wartime mode, wishing for a government of national unity. His slump
into irrelevance mirrored the imperial decline of Britain and lack of
global punch. Hennessy documents Churchill’s incredulity that the
US would no longer co-operate on nuclear matters, convinced as he was
that wartime alliances and understandings still held.
The
debate about imperial decline, whether real, imagined or exagerrated
hangs over the early part of the book. In Hennessy’s decade Anthony
Eden is at the helm when the tipping point finally arrives. The 1956
Anglo-French invasion of the Suez canal zone was a military and
political disaster that definitively signalled the end of Britain’s
aspirations for world power status. Eden’s fate and Britain’s
imperial dreams collapsed together in ignominy. Hennessy unearths a
gem from the declassified records. On receiving his orders the
British Chief of Air Staff briefs his men with the stirring crie
de combat
: ‘The Prime Minister has gone bananas’.
The third Tory Prime Minister
is the dominant character of the book, whose famous quote gives the
book its title, and again journalism and history conflate in the
media creation of ‘Supermac’. Just as Churchill had shied away
from the radical economic policy of a free floating pound (aka ROBOT)
to safeguard the middle ground of Hennessy’s British New Deal, so
in 1958 Harold Macmillan dispensed with his treaury team, including
his chancellor Thorneycroft, in order to pursue reflationary
policies. Macmillan had witnessed the consequencies of a deflated
economy as an MP in the interwar years and was determined that
Britain would never experience such rampant unemployment and dire
deprivation again.
Macmillan’s fortune was to
stoke the economic fires at a time of global economic growth. The
decade closed out with output up 10%, unemployment down 100,000 and a
record drop in the Balance of Payments deficit. There was an
electoral dividend to be reaped from having it this good in the form
of an emphatic Parliamentary victory in 1959.
Interspersed
with the Cabinet minutes and the tables of economic output are
lighter analyses of newspaper reading habits, cinema attendences,
changes in musical taste, and patterns of worship. However the
overarching shadow of the Bomb is never far away. Hennessy makes the
extraordinary revelation that in 1951 Churchill inherited a
clandestine H Bomb programme that Parliament had known nothing about
that included a hidden £100 Million annual spend.
Hennessy’s
great attribute is as one of the power elite. From his university
education, via his prolonged stint as Whitehall correspondent, and
the comprehensive research undertaken repeatedly for his numerous
books and broadcasts Hennessy has become part of the world he
observes. This is another of his productive contradictions as a
social commentator; not only is he a contemporary historian but he is
an objective insider.
So
he is able to lunch with Mervyn King, one-time Governor of the Bank
of England and one-time student flat-mate, and elicit responses
others would not be able to. In a neat journalist trick Hennessy
asks King to jot down on the back of the menu those defining
challenges that characterised Britain’s Post-War economic
peformance. Without warning, and without hesitation or
prevarication, Mervyn King lists seven bullet points which Hennessy
is later able to digest and test at his leisure. He finds King is on
the money, literally.
He
plays a similar trick on former Tory Education Secretary Gillian
Shepherd. He asks for an off-the-cuff word association on the
landmark 1944 Education Act and gets an instant, no-hesitation reply
which stands up well to subsequent cross-examination. In a book that
is not short of tables of statistics and indepth explanation and
exploration of government policy these human yet telling observations
add spice to the fare.
Peter
Hennessy grew up in the fifties and admits a nostalgia for steam
trains and the smell of woodsmoke from allotment bonfires. He has
used his childhood memories, his first hand experience, his
journalist’s cunning and the craft of a skilled historian to
produce an excellent account of the early years of our postwar
experience.
AUSTERITY BRITAIN 1945
– 1951
by David Kynaston
After
six years of war the population of Britain, anxious for circumstances
to improve, had to endure hardship for a further decade; rationing
for some products continuing well into the fifties. David Kynaston
has homed in on this key aspect of immediate postwar life for the
title of his new book ‘Austerity Britain’ - the first in a
series of histories comprising a larger work titled ‘Towards a New
Jerusalem’.
Hennessy’s
book is a model of construction; a journalist marshalling diverse
content with academic rigour. Facts and figures, attitudes and
opinions, events and their outcomes are collated, ordered and
presented with elan and enthusiasm. David Kynaston has taken a
different approach; he has stood in front of the massive tide of data
and welcomed the deluge as he opens the flood gates. Forsaking the
dry burrowing through dusty archives, looking for telling minutes
from forgotten meetings, Kynaston stands drenched to the bone in a
tsunami of anecdotal firsthand accounts.
In
contrast to the journalistic immediacy of the Hennessy ‘decade’
approach, Kynaston has chosen to examine one particular historical
trend – the political concensus that prevailed from 1945 to 1979.
The war experience convinced economists, town planners, politicians
and not least the majority of the population, as witnessed by
Labour’s landslide victory, that there was to be no return to
interwar social inequality. Across the party divide it was generally
agreed that private capital on its own had failed and a more
centrally planned economy, as practised successfully during the
second world war, and given a social conscience by the Beverage
Report, was the way towards a more stable economy and a more just
society. This concensus informed the policies of the Attlee,
Churchill, and Macmillan administrations most noticeably, and was
still in evidence until dramatically and aggressively thrown out by
Thatcher’s first term in 1979.
Kynaston
has not mined the same mother lode of primary data that Hennessy dug
so productively – Government papers and the documented thoughts,
words and deeds of the key dramatis personae of public life – but
has instead used the first hand accounts of the everyman and
everywoman. The submissions of the contributors to Mass Observation
get so frequent an airing that the source is soon abbrieviated to M-O
in Kynaston’s text. He has also raided the autobiographies of the
postwar literati; Alan Bennett and Kenneth Tynan for accounts of VE
day celebrations and Glenda Jackson recalling her 11+ exam; just
three among hundreds quoted. The early inference is that the 75% of
the population categorised as working class at war end were not able
to articulate political desires in tune with the Parliamentary
consensus beyond demanding a vague ‘change for the better’. The
discrepency between government rhetoric and street level testimony is
a recurrent theme for Kynaston.
These
individual musings on the great events or the big ideas of the day
are more than numerous but add little to our existing understanding.
In contrast the experiences of returning from the forces that
occurred within the privacy of the marital home reveal a fascinating
negative dividend to victory. Adjusting to longterm separation was
difficult enough but in addition many couples struggled with the
return to the prewar domestic status quo. Many women had gone into
wartime employment as well as taking responsibility for home and
children and were not willing to abandon this autonomy on the
husband’s return. Some of the most poignant testimony is from
children who could not warm to or even recognise this stranger that
re-entered their lives – their long absent father. In 1939 the
number of divorces was 6,000 – eight years later the rate had
increased tenfold and the total number for 1947 exceeded 60,000.
Kynaston
has chosen to plough through his collection of personal testimonies
in linear fashion, clocking off the years chapter by chapter. One
year on from victory and shortages for clothes and food are
continuing and in some cases worsening. This lack of improvement in
basic living conditions created much resentment and on Kynaston’s
evidence there was little hesitation in expressing it - by all
sections of society. The introduction of bread rationing –
something that had never happened during the war – was particularly
unpopular. Kynaston’s methodolgy of relying principally on
contemporary verbal testimony or personal diary entries highlights
well the potential disparity between real hardship and the perception
of it.
Public
perceptions of hardship had every reason to escalate as 1947 then
1948 witnessed worsening experiences. The weekly bacon ration was
cut to just 1oz and potatoes were rationed for the first time. A
survey in this year reported that 53% of the British population
wished to emigrate. The Government seemed unwilling to address this
low morale – the restrictions of football matches and cinema
showings seemed petty and ineffectual and certainly contributed to
the austere atmosphere. The blackmarket and crime generally
flourished in the environment of scarcity and resentment. The value
of stolen goods in 1948 was four times the level of ten years
earlier, adding to the sense of despair.
During
the first half of the book Kynaston repeats his assertion that the
visionary enthusiasm of those planning a postwar socialist utopia was
not always shared by the population as a whole, or even by the
working class – that sector singled out to most benefit from a more
equitable society. Kynaston illustrates his point with genuine
poignancy when contrasting opinions at the pithead and down the mine
with the sentiments of the Labour politicians who had secured the
nationalisation of Coal. While those ex-mining MPs went through the
division lobby voting ‘aye’ with tears streaming down their faces
and singing ‘The Red Flag’, the miners themselves effectivley
shrugged their shoulders – it made no difference to them who owned
the mine; they still had a filthy dangerous job to do and they did
it.
This
is Kynaston’s only point of analysis and he repeats it less often
as he progresses into the second half of the book. The intial
premise of analysing the political concensus that prevailed is not
addressed. It is as though Kynaston has willingly succumbed to the
tidal wave of subjective testimony. Swamped by the huge number of
individual voices he is unable to channel the flow so he goes along
for the ride. This broad and unstoppable river meanders through the
six years until 1951 touching on the Korean War, the Cold War and the
threat of nuclear war on one bank and depositing cultural ephemera,
such as the universal popularity of radio and the emergence of TV, on
the other.
This
work was a manifest herculean task to assemble and at 600 pages it is
a task to read as well. Kynaston’s approach lacks the academic
rigour of the Hennessy book; the reader is invited to join him as he
surfs this huge wave of anecdotal history but is given no direction
nor critical examination of the source material. The frequency of
referral to Mass Observation merits an indepth critique of this
source at least. The immediate postwar years were formative for all
of us, even those born decades later, and although this collection of
testimony is important and fascinating it could have been doubly so
if half the length.
