33
The cruel real world
This was a time for even more privation. Bread rationing was reintroduced in the summer of 1946, and the cloud of a new terror occluded the sun with the threat of atomic war. It may seem odd that people can prevail under such circumstances, but patience and resignation had become customary. After constant attacks in the press, the prime minister, Attlee, felt obliged to reassure the nation that ‘many of these restrictions fall heavily on the housewife. You can be assured that the Government will ease them as soon as it is possible to do so … On the question of bread rationing, your knowledge and good sense was an important factor in steadying and educating public opinion in the face of the press campaign last summer.’
The late 1940s inaugurated what may be termed the ‘housewives’ war’, which was in part a war against the political classes. That the burden of increasingly restrictive rationing fell heaviest upon housewives was a fact denied by none, but while Conservative women aimed their darts at the government, women loyal to Labour reserved their wrath for the opposition. It was an unglamorous affair, and there were no clear or certain victors beyond the pale of Westminster and Whitehall.
The measures were provoked by a dollar economy, and by huge food import cuts. There was a further reduction in the clothes ration, and the use of foreign currency for pleasure travel was suspended. Hugh Dalton was forced to resign after he inadvertently supplied a journalist with details of the 1947 budget. He was perhaps the first victim of what became known as the press ‘leak’. Stafford Cripps was now chancellor, and seemed quietly intent on spreading his own brand of punitively abstract philanthropy. But, like Churchill himself, he led by example. A proud Spartan, he demanded nothing of others that he was not prepared to do himself.
As the 1940s progressed and a new election came closer, political rhetoric rose both in heat and in shrillness. ‘We’re up against it’, ‘We work or want’, ‘A challenge to British grit’ – such appeals were characteristic of the Labour approach. They would have had a certain resonance only a few years before, but many were now beginning to wonder why wartime appeals were being made in a time of peace. As ever, the press was divided. Where the Labour-supporting papers emphasized that the cuts were inevitable, their Conservative counterparts scoffed at what they saw as excuses for simple mismanagement.
While it was generally agreed that wartime rationing had introduced a diet that was far healthier than before, by the late 1940s the case was not so clear. The suggestion that rationing had begun to badly affect the nation’s basic health was first raised in May 1947 by Dr Franklin Bicknell in his paper ‘Dying England’. Speaking for the government, Michael Foot proclaimed that on average children were ‘stronger … than any breed … we have ever bred in this country before’. It is true that not even the Conservatives went so far as to say that the nation was starving. On the other hand, the medical world was increasingly troubled by the effects of the low fat ration. The fatigue and irritability so characteristic of the age might have been provoked less by the existential agonies of a war-weary nation, and more by a lack of carbohydrates.
The opposition’s case was put most forcefully by Lord Woolton, former minister for food during the war. He is now remembered best for the Woolton Pie, composed of whatever was left in the larder, but at the time he was still revered as the quiet saviour of the nation’s health and heart. He had refused to allow the fat ration to dip below 8 oz ‘if we were to maintain the nation’s health and productive capacity’. Now it had fallen to 7 oz. ‘That is a dangerous position,’ he maintained.
Labour countered such concerns with an appeal to community spirit. What was needed was the attitude of ‘cooperative effort’, ‘courage’ and ‘common sense’ – in short, something like the spirit of the Blitz. But to many, that spirit had come to require not so much sturdiness and solidarity as an almost angelic forbearance. The word ‘propaganda’ was now used without embarrassment by all sides in the austerity debate – the cuts of 1947 worked both ways. Horns sounding in the cause of export production and solidarity were answered by trumpets for free enterprise and individual effort. The local elections of that year heard the first answering murmur to the trumpet. The ‘food and basic petrol election’, as it was termed by Morgan Philips, resulted in large local election gains for the Conservatives, but did not sway the nation as a whole.
By 1948 the rationing had eased somewhat, the shop lights were on and the electric lights flashed occasionally. But prices were rising. ‘Dreariness is everywhere,’ one school teacher lamented. ‘Streets are deserted, lighting is dim, people’s clothes are shabby and their troubles [laid] bare.’ ‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ one social worker complained. From the late 1940s onwards, a tilt towards consumerism may be discerned.
It is often maintained that there was little to choose between the competing parties’ aims, but that claim was made in hindsight – the differences were clear enough at the time. The Labour demand for a socialist democracy with full employment and a state that provided for its citizens ‘from cradle to grave’ sat uneasily with the Conservative promise of individual affluence and freedom from state interference. A tacit acquiescence in the post-war settlement grew to be the hallmark of all parties, but that was to come later.
Rationing had tightened under Stafford Cripps. The public’s initial reaction was understandably resentful, but the mood swiftly softened when it was discovered that ordinary households could cope with the new austerities, however uncomfortably. Some resentment remained, yet in spite of continued shortages, the English could at last share in a luxury that had been rationed for centuries: a sense of gratitude. The new government was no sooner in power than it began to make good its promises; foremost among them was that none in these islands should ever again fear illness or want. In 1942, the Liberal William Beveridge had drawn up a paper in which he identified ‘Five Giants’: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. By ‘ignorance’ Beveridge meant lack of education, by ‘squalor’ poor housing and by ‘idleness’ unemployment. These could, and should, be amended by the state. Thus, in 1946, the National Insurance Act was passed, ensuring benefits against unemployment and sickness and provision for mothers and widows. No one, in principle, needed to starve. The Industrial Injuries Act provided for those stricken at work, and the Butler Act offered free schooling for all. There remained only the matter of the nation’s health, and that would take longer to resolve. On 5 July 1948, three years after Britain went to the polls, the labourer, the clerk, the miner, the midwife and the seamstress, together with their children, could go to the doctor without fear of paying a penny. For Labour, it was the great new promise for the great new era. ‘It’s real Socialism,’ proclaimed Aneurin Bevan, adding, ‘and it’s real Christianity too, you know.’