THE PREFACE TO David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain – his history
of the six years that followed the Second World War – is explicit.
In this, the first of a planned four-volume series, Tales of a New Jerusalem,
that will cover the years from 1945 to 1979, the author aims to tell “the
story of ordinary citizens as well as ministers and mandarins” and it is
told – more often than not – in the words of the men and women whose lives
it chronicles. The result is a jigsaw of information which, at times,
provides a wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were.
But there are chapters in which the pieces seem still scattered or brought
together in the wrong place. And the fashionable technique of describing the
past in eyewitness report imposes a debilitating limitation on the
historian. Readers can decide for themselves what contemporary sources felt
about the time in which they lived. But the author’s opinions are drowned by
the vox populi. Historians have a duty to express opinions as well as
to record facts.
Some sections of Austerity Britain come near to being stream of
consciousness. A chapter entitled “Ain’t She Lovely” – a comment made by the
crowd during a visit by Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) to Rochdale
– begins with an account of the outrage caused by Ernest William Barnes, the
Bishop of Birmingham, when he “rejected evidence of the Virgin Birth, the
Miracles and the Resurrection”.
The bridging passage between heroine and heretic is provided by the Archbishop
of Canterbury, who both reproved Barnes and officiated at the wedding of
Princess Elizabeth and the future Duke of Edinburgh.
Irritation at the contrived connection is assuaged by the exhumation of
related details. Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the groom’s uncle, was so
concerned about opposition to the future queen marrying “a foreign prince”
that he asked the editors of the Dailyand Sunday Expressif
hostility would be reduced by a swift naturalisation. “Prince Philip of
Greece . . . duly became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten R.N.”
Not everyone was assuaged. The Camden Town branch of the Amalgamated Society
of Wood-workers demanded “a quiet wedding in keeping with the times”. That
quotation illustrates the weakness of history based on “the short and simple
annals of the poor”. The individual opinions quoted may not reflect the
feelings of people at large. Perhaps the whole nation shared the
wood-workers’ preference for reticence. Or perhaps it did not.
Illuminating anecdotes enliven what might otherwise be a pedestrian narrative.
But they are snap-shots, not part of a panorama.
The title that Kynaston, whose previous works include his acclaimed
four-volume history The City of London, has chosen is wholly
appropriate for his story of the six years of postwar Labour Government led
by Clement Attlee. All the economic vicissitudes that characterised those
years are faithfully recorded.
Chief among them was devaluation which, as always, came too late and with a
reluctance that made it look like crisis management rather than a strategic
policy decision. Nothing new there.
But the story is brought to life with additions that, in a sense, are no more
than footnotes. When the Government took the belated decision to adjust the
exchange rate, Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, had to be convinced that
the new parity would not price white sliced bread out of the working man’s
budget. Brown bread, he explained, made him belch.
More importantly, according to opinion polls, when Hugh Gaitskell insisted on
charging for prescriptions, thereby providing the pretext on which Aneurin
Bevan resigned from the Cabinet,
51 per cent of the country thought that the charges were justified.
Austerity Britainpays less attention to opinion polls than to Mass
Observation and a survey conducted by Ferdinand Zweig, a Polish economist
who interviewed working men in London pubs, clubs and cafés. But neither
generalisations nor the mixture of recollections and contemporary opinions
produces an account of the era that catches its true flavour.
Kynaston illustrates some people’s reaction to great events but he does not
adequately convey the feelings of the time. My memories of the postwar years
– I took the 11-plus examination in 1945 – were stirred not by the
statistics but by glimpses of how life really was in those remarkable years.
Some of those memories reflect great moments in national history – the party
in the Coop Society’s old cobblers’ shop to celebrate Indian Independence
and the “great snow” (I was reading Lorna Doone at the
time) which paralysed the economy in 1947.
Some of the names are equally evocative. I sat behind Wilfred Pickles (host of
the radio quiz show Have a Go) at the Headingley Test match in 1948
and my view of Denis Compton’s “life-affirming batting” was obscured by a
stream of autograph hunters. But, even if we put aside such categorical
errors as the assertion that postwar miners suffered from a “deep sense of
social inferiority” it must be said that Austerity Britain
misses the essential point.
The years after the war were a good time to be young. The new education the
war had bequeathed, and the full employment the postwar Government had
achieved, made us believe that the world was opening up before us. It was a
time of hope.
Discussing my own book A Yorkshire Boyhood on the radio, Michael
Parkinson, a slightly younger survivor of the place and period, said that it
was also a time of innocence, when the young were allowed to move slowly
towards adult attitudes, obligations and responsibilities. He was right.
Innocence and hope are essential ingredients of the good society. I suspect
that the austerity of which David Kynaston makes so much contributed to
their dominant position in postwar Britain.
AUSTERITY BRITAIN 1945-51 by David Kynaston Bloomsbury, £25;
692pp, Times offer £23 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 or at timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Hard times
- Rationing continued after 1945. Bread and potato rationing were introduced
in 1946 and 1947. Bacon, butter and meat rations were cut. In 1947 one
housewife noted: "We should be a lot better considering we won the war."
- Fuel was in short supply, particularly in the bitter winter of 1946-47.
There were coal shortages in London, the Midlands and the North West.
- Industry in these areas was suspended and electricity cut off daily for
three hours from 9am and two hours from 2pm. As Kingsley Amis, then a
student, put it: "Christ, it's bleeding cold."
- That winter, unemployment rose from 400,000 to 1.75 million. Britain was
dependent on a £1.1 billion US loan. To combat absenteeism, sport was banned
during the week.
- People were urged to draw on the strength shown in wartime. A 1946 Times
leader read: "Material resources... so unquestioningly thrown into the
common stock when loftier values were at stake, have now to be made good by
arduous labour and austerity of life... Great Britain has to live in the
coming years... by the labour of her people's hands; for the inherited
wealth that once gave her privilege has been sacrificed."
- In 1945 the BBC resumed TV broadcasting with a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was
its last broadcast in 1939.
- By 1948, only 4.3 per cent of the population had a television, and
programmes could be received only within 50 miles of Alexandra Palace.
- Household servants were less readily available and affordable washing
machines, wringers, vacuum cleaners and fridges some way off. Only 25 per
cent of married women worked.
- By the end of the 1940s there were two million cars on British roads.
Horse-drawn carts were still regularly used, especially in the North.
