Book Review

Alexander Lucie-Smith

Family Britain 1951-57

In 1952, two young men were almost lynched by a furious mob when they sauntered along Fleet Street, London, having refused to keep the two-minute silence that marked the death of King George VI. It is difficult to think of such a thing happening today: as Professor David Kynaston’s marvellous new book makes clear, the 1950s actually marked the beginning of the end of the kind of deference which had marked pre-war Britain.

All sorts of myths have grown up around this decade that lies between a Britain ravaged by war and privation and the 1960s. It is characterised as the age of the masses, the new Jerusalem of welfare-state protection, indoor bathrooms and a television in every sitting room, but also as a bleak, dull time of Cold War fears, of provincial conformity, of young people desperate to break free.

Using an enormous range of diaries, letters, reports, newspaper articles and socio- logical (the new discipline) studies, Kynaston (who teaches at Kingston University) demonstrates that the 1950s, like most ages and certainly like most people, was one of many contradictions.

Opinions were as various as they usually are, and people less inclined to herd-thinking than we might, condescendingly, assume 50 years later. Like Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, which covers the years just after the Second World War, this vast book is a clamour of voices from a different world.

Certainly the mood among many people in 1951 was of cautious optimism. The infamous urban slums, the tenements and back-to-backs, those that survived the German Luftwaffe, were to be replaced by “streets in the sky” – the homely values of street life transferred to mighty modernist tower blocks, with terraces of front doors 10 floors up.

Then there were new or expanded towns such as Stevenage or Borehamwood, trying to imitate village life on a functionalist modern scale. While some buildings went upwards, others were built outwards. It became an ideological battle of vertical living versus suburban sprawl. But both options proved in many cases (not all) to be lonely and treeless, not at all the humming communities imagined by sociologists and town-planners. Journalist Cyril Dunn, who made a study of Borehamwood, concluded: “I’m not at all convinced that the [people] want an organised community life.”

In 1945 the mood had been for change, with Clement Attlee’s Labour Party voted in on a post-war landslide that saw the defeat of Winston Churchill. His tenure saw the beginning of the welfare state and the launch of the NHS, surely the hugest and most daring social project of the century. But then Labour, beset by infighting, began to look as if it were running out of ideas and the Conservatives under Churchill, now in his late 70s, returned to power in 1951.

At times the concerns of the mid 1950s look remarkably like our own. Then, with car manufacturing booming, it was not global warming that was seen as the harbinger of apocalypse but the hydrogen bomb. Newspaper commentators worried about the threat posed by gangs of youths dressed in velvet-trimmed suits and pomaded, upswept hair – known first, because of their dress, as “the New Edwardians” and then as Teddy boys. Then, of course, there was the winking screen in the corner of family life. “Is it wise”, said the Archbishop of Canterbury at the emergence of independent television, “to multiply the opportunities of spending time in this way at the expense of other possible occupations for the reasonable and intelligent person?” Isabel Quigly, however, writing in The Spectator, thought the new television channel a welcome change from the “frowstiness, the mincing intellectual gentility” of the BBC. Critics were, then as now, often out of step with public opinion. Reviewing Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, John Bateman dismissed its characters as “intellectuals, washouts and seedy characters in general”. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened in the West End and was panned by the critics: the patrician character actor Robert Morley thought it, probably correctly, “the end of theatre as we know it”. But the play was a sell-out.

It was an age of terrible disquiet over miscarriages of justice. Capital punishment began to appal. Timothy Evans had been hanged when the killer of his wife was his neighbour, John Christie; Ruth Ellis was hanged in 1955 and the weak-minded teenager Derek Bentley in 1953. Albert Pierrepoint, the country’s last hangman, whispered, “It’s all right, Derek, just follow me,” as he led Bentley to the gallows. The death penalty was eventually abolished in 1965.

Surveys (the book has some fascinating ones) show that church-going among Anglicans declined after the war – but in 1954, the young American evangelist Billy Graham came to London with microphones and massed choirs 2,000-strong: he drew a crowd of 12,000 on his first night. Princess Margaret Rose’s relationship with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend filled miles of column inches – before (defying tabloid pleas to “follow her heart”) she opted for unhappy duty.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Kynaston records all the contradictions of the age without comment, leaving a great mass of information, colour, chatter and the world of real life to fill in the gaps of the 1950s. In doing so, Family Britain tells us much about our own age.

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