That Eden was very much of the old guard, having been trained and educated under their systems, was overlooked. But surely the ancient conflicts had been dissolved in the post-war solution? For while the decade was Conservative in flesh, it remained Labour in soul. That a Labour epoch should result in a Conservative era was an irony that few statesmen, thinkers, housewives or labourers had the time or will to ponder. Once again, they had other concerns. The perennial needs were how to secure food, water and a roof. Beyond that, how to give them life and grace? The washing machine was a start.
36
Plays and players
Household appliances, or ‘white goods’ as they were termed, made slow and hesitant headway through British households. The glories of the ‘labour-saving device’ were not always apparent, but the washing machine undoubtedly aided the harassed housewife. It revolved and churned, slowly but assiduously, before the results were passed through a hand-operated or automatic mangle. It was the age of modern conveniences, or ‘mod cons’.
Some older traditions could still be found, although they often came in a modern guise. Families were encouraged to adopt a fashion known as ‘DIY’. The ancient art of pickling, too, was practised in households long after formal austerity had ended. It was to be expected: fridges were both expensive and cumbersome. Nor, in a climate that was scarcely subtropical, was the usefulness of these new appliances immediately clear. Still, they advanced on the swell of prosperity.
But there was a catch: these utensils were not always built with durability in mind. This was an unsettling development but perhaps an inevitable one, given that Britain had moved from being an exporting to a consuming society. A survey conducted in 1953 found housewives’ chief concern was that these new gadgets should last, but it was increasingly recognized that they did not. The market was skewed in favour of the supplier, and the interests of supplier and consumer were inherently at odds.
One of the more distinctive developments of the Fifties was the emergence first of the milk bar and then of the coffee bar. England had been a nation of tea-drinkers from time immemoriaclass="underline" tea, after all, had rescued England from the gin craze of the early eighteenth century and was the settling beverage of what has been called an instinctively phlegmatic nation. Coffee had been the drink of intellectuals, of the restless and the politicized, and had never gained wide popularity.
As is often the case, it was immigrants who changed this – Italian immigrants in this instance. The coffee bar, fuelled by the sprightly and galvanizing espresso machine, began to appear first in Soho, then all over London, and then throughout the land. At first glance, it bore little relation to the coffee houses of the eighteenth century, yet a family relationship can be discerned even in the variations: pipe smoke had been replaced by cigarette smoke, the stench of bodies by that of cooking grease, and the politics by music.
There were other signs of emerging affluence. In 1954 the meat ration ended, and wartime austerity fell away. Another shoot sprouted on 14 September in that very eventful year, when the first comprehensive in London, Kidbrooke School, opened its gates. Less than a decade after its inception, the grammar school system was already under assault. Children were selected, at the age of eleven, for grammar schools, secondary moderns or technical colleges. It is perhaps best understood as a mentality that saw privilege as something that must be earned. Paradoxically or not, we may see in it the impulse that led William of Wykeham, in the fourteenth century, to establish a college for boys disadvantaged by circumstance but avid for learning. It is noteworthy that neither Attlee nor his successors in the Fifties attempted to dismantle the public schools. Perhaps they had more nostalgia than some of their successors. By these lights, the grammar school meritocracy set up under Labour in the Forties was unimprovable. If universal education was to be imposed, then a basic fact had to be acknowledged: different pupils had different aptitudes. Let the academic become academics, and the handy become handymen. If you failed the eleven-plus you were simply meant for other tasks, often more socially useful.
The first objection lay in the title of the exam. Was it wise, just or even sensible to determine the future prospects of a child at eleven? The second objection, of course, was that rejected pupils could not help but feel that failure, and express it. Secondary moderns became bear pits for the unwary. The third was that the role of technical colleges was ill-defined, for all the benefits they brought to many, and as a result they were underfunded. They soon disappeared, and even now they represent an unmarked grave in the history of education.
It was a year of advances. On 2 February 1954, the government announced £212 million for road development, including the first motorways. In the same month, it announced that 347,000 new houses had been built in the previous year. They were sturdy and serviceable, if oddly designed; they tended to the triangular, particularly in the suburbs of London.
While England’s physical highways thickened and deepened, the country’s moral certainties seemed increasingly fragile and vulnerable. On 13 July, Ruth Ellis was executed for the murder of her lover, becoming the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The calm courage in her decision to admit her guilt impressed many. When the prosecuting counsel asked whether she had truly intended to kill her lover, she replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In true eighteenth-century fashion, she dressed herself immaculately for her trial, and even dyed her hair. A campaign for her reprieve was launched, but she wanted no part of it. Her executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, wrote later that hers was the one execution for which he felt not a jot of remorse. Her record was against her, certainly, but then so was that of many men.
Ellis’s execution pricked awake a sleeping giant: the justice of capital punishment itself. The cabinet was divided on the question. The Commons were to vote for abolition in 1956, but the Lords voted against. When Pierrepoint sought the position of official executioner, it had to be explained to him that no such office existed: it was not quite English. Rab Butler, home secretary in 1957, was not at first an abolitionist, but his agonies over the choice of life or death were palpable. ‘Each decision,’ he wrote, ‘meant shutting myself up for two days or more … By the end of my time at the Home Office I began to see that the system could not go on, and present day Secretaries of State are well relieved of the terrible power to decide between life and death.’
The Homicide Act of 1957 was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all the humane Butler. It was predicated on the notion that punishment should be exemplary rather than condign. The legal and moral incoherence of this approach would soon be apparent, and only a few years had to pass before government was obliged to choose between unravelling the tangled noose and cutting it.
It was a decade in which many supposedly inviolable traditions would be questioned. In 1957 a report on sex and sexuality was assembled. It is ironic, perhaps, that the Wolfenden Report echoed many of the concerns raised by the law it sought to overturn: the Labouchere Amendment. The issue, as before, involved prostitution. The ‘blackmailer’s charter’, as the 1885 amendment was known, was motivated in part by its author’s drive to extirpate underage prostitution. The Wolfenden Report sought to protect prostitutes from being exploited any more than they were already. Two years earlier, the Church of England had assembled a memorial on the question of sexuality, urging the government to ‘separate sin from statute’. It is hardly coincidental that the Church’s reputation for gentle compromise arose just as its political influence began to falter.