Austerity ~ British style. 2 perspectives

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 2^nd 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.