Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the twelve disciples, possibly the first and previously one of John the Baptist’s disciples (Mt. 10 v 1, Jn. 1 v 40). He and his brother were originally from Bethsaida in Galilee (Jn. 1 v 44), moving to live and work at the fishing port of Capernaum on the northern shore of Lake Galilee (Mk. 1 v 29). Pointed towards ‘the Lamb of God‘ by the Baptist (Jn. 1 vv 35-40), he, in turn, introduced his brother to Jesus, telling him that he had found the Messiah (Jn. 1 v 42). There are several references to his role in the ministry of Jesus, especially in terms of mediating within the group of apostles and facilitating Jesus’ contact with would-be disciples and enquirers (Jn. 6 v 8, 12 v 22, Mk. 13 v 3). He also witnessed the Ascension of Jesus (Acts 1 v 13).

Andrew means ‘manly’ in Greek and, as he was not just Simon Peter’s brother, but also his partner in the fishing business, it was a name that he no doubt lived up to. However, after meeting Jesus, he gave up the trade, at least as a full-time occupation, and, together with Simon, he joined Jesus’ itinerary ministry as a ‘fisher of men’. Before the cross became the symbol of Christianity in Roman times, the fish was the sign which Jesus’ disciples recognised on each other’s houses and later in the catacombs in Rome. After Jesus’ ascension he travelled in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea as far as the River Volga. He therefore became the patron saint of the Volga  boatmen and then of Russia. He was taken prisoner as a Christian and condemned to death by crucifixion. Legend has it that he considered himself unworthy to be put to death in the same manner as Jesus, and so elected to be crucified in the form of a ‘crux decussata’, or diagonal, hence his white diagonal cross on a blue background making up the flag of Scotland and, of course, the background of the Union Flag. The white stands for the purity of the saint and the blue for the sea which he loved.His remains were taken from Patros where he was buried (hence his association with Greece) to Constantinople. He was canonised by the Church long before being adopted by the Scots as their patron. His remains are now said to be on the spot over which St Andrew’s Cathedral was built and around which the university town grew up.

There are also many legends about the manner in which the relics of the saint came to rest in Scotland. One of the most attractive recounts how a group of monks set out from Constantinople to reach Scotland to spread the gospel and convert the Scots to Christianity, probably in the sixth century.  They asked for the relics of a holy man to take with them as a protection from all the dangers of the voyage. Given the length of the journey and the number and nature of the hazards, known and unknown, that they were likely to encounter, they needed a pretty hefty insurance policy, and so were given the bones of St Andrew. After months of travel, they arrived on the east coast of Scotland, buried the relics near where they landed and set up an altar within a small church which they built on the spot. On being converted to Christianity, the people then declared St Andrew as their patron and St Andrew’s became a place of pilgrimage.

Since then, Scottish people all over the world celebrate St Andrew’s Day, though Hogmanay, a two-day public holiday in Scotland, and Burns’ Night are more important events in Scotland itself and among expatriates. Stories are told in schools which illustrate the bravery and independence of the Scots. Many of these tales date back to the period when the Scots contested the claims of Edward I and Edward II to be the Kings of Scotland, following great historical characters such as William Wallace, Robert Bruce and the Black Douglas. Perhaps the best-known legend is that of Bruce in despair following the capture of his wife and execution of his brother. He was considering giving up his claims to the Scottish throne and going into exile, lying back on his straw bed looking up at the roof of his miserable hut. Then he saw a spider hanging by a long thread, trying to swing itself from one beam to another. He counted the creature’s six attempts to link up with the other beam before finally succeeding. Bruce remembered that he had fought and lost six battles, and vowed to fight on.

A distinguished follower of Bruce was the Good Lord James of Douglas who fought fiercely to recover the castles of Scotland that had fallen into the hands of the Norman English. The castle at Linlithgow was one of these, having the usual defences of huge gates to the only entrance and a portcullis behind them, a huge iron grate which could be let down rapidly, crushing all below it with its spikes. Not far from the castle lived a farmer called Binnock who supplied the castle garrison with hay. One night, he loaded a great wagon with hay, hiding eight fully armed soldiers beneath it, lying flat at the bottom of the cart. In the morning, he and his driver approached the castle and the portcullis was raised to allow the two men to enter. When the cart was directly under the portcullis, the driver took his hatchet and severed the horses’ harness. The horses, freed from their load, started forward, leaving the cart of hay under the portcullis. Binnock shouted ‘Call all, call all!’ as he pulled his sword from under his farm coat and slew the gatekeeper. The English soldiers were unable to lower the portcullis with the hay cart in the way. The soldiers hiding in the cart were joined by reinforcements lying in wait outside and the castle was taken.

The dreaded Black Douglas was so-called for his deftness at using the cover of darkness to retake the castles. He used the night of Shrove Tuesday, when most of the English troops were tucking into their pancakes, to take back Roxburgh. The wife of one of the English officers was sitting on the battlements singing a lullaby to the child on her lap. She saw black objects moving about in the darkness below and thought they were cattle. However, they were Douglas’ soldiers, able to scale the walls without detection. When she realised what was happening, the mother changed her song:

Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye,

Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye,

The Black Douglas shall not get ye.

From the darkness at her shoulder a voice said, Ye canna be sure o’ that! and was followed by a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned to see the Black Douglas himself. Although many English died that night, Black Douglas saw to it that no harm came to the woman or child. Sir Walter Scott tells this tale in Tales of a Grandfather, commenting ‘I dare say she sang no more songs about the Black Douglas’. A third legend tells a tale of a group of English soldiers approaching a castle held by the Scots. It was a black, moonless night, and this time the English were wearing black cloaks over their uniforms. However, one of them put his hand on a thistle and gave a cry of pain. This alerted the garrison and the castle was saved. After that, the thistle, an unlikely flower to choose as a national emblem, became just that. The other, sometimes preferred, emblematic purple flower is, of course, the heather.

There are historic ties between Hungary and Scotland predating Edward I,  the hammer of the Scots, and even the Norman conquest of England. These relate to Margaret of Wessex, who was born in exile Mecseknádás in southern Hungary. Margaret was the daughter of the English prince, Edward the Exile and granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, king of England. After the Danish conquest of England in 1016, Canute had the infant Edward exiled to the continent. He was taken first to the court of the Swedish king, Olof Skötkonung, and then to Kiev. As an adult, he travelled to Hungary, where in 1046 he supported Andrew I‘s successful bid for the throne. Margaret’s mother, Agatha, was related either by blood or marriage to István (Stephen I), the founding king of Hungary. and Margaret was born in Hungary around 1045. Her brother and sister were also born in Hungary around this time. Margaret grew up in a very religious environment in the Hungarian court. Andrew I of Hungary was known as “Andrew the Catholic” for his extreme aversion to pagans, and great loyalty to Rome, which was probably what induced Margaret to follow a pious life.

Still a child, she came to England with the rest of her family when her father, Edward, was recalled in 1057 as a possible successor to her great-uncle, the childless Edward the Confessor. Whether from natural or sinister causes, her father died immediately on landing, but Margaret continued to reside at the English court where her brother, Edgar Ætheling, was considered a possible successor to the English throne. When the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was selected as king, Edgar perhaps being considered still too young. After Harold’s defeat at the battle of Hastings later that year, Edgar was proclaimed King of England, but when the Normans advanced on London, the Witenagemot presented Edgar to William the Conqueror who took him to Normandy before returning him to England in 1068, when Edgar, Margaret, Cristina and their mother Agatha fled north to Northumbria.

According to tradition, the widowed Agatha decided to leave Northumbria with her children and return to the continent. However, a storm drove their ship north to Scotland, where they sought the protection of King Malcolm III. The spot where they are said to have landed is known today as St. Margaret’s Hope, near the village of North Queensferry. Margaret’s arrival in Scotland in 1068, after the failed revolt of the Northumbrian earls, has been heavily romanticized, though Symeon of Durham implied that her first meeting with Malcolm III may not have been until 1070, after William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north.

Malcolm was a widower with two sons, Donald and Duncan. According to the sources on which Shakespeare based his ‘Scottish Play’, Macbeth, the ‘evil tyrant’ who had his wife killed after Malcolm had escaped into exile in England, returning to overthrow Macbeth and claim the Scottish throne. He would have been attracted by the prospect of marrying one of the few remaining members of the Anglo-Saxon royal family. The marriage of Malcolm and Margaret took place some time before the end of 1070. Malcolm followed it with several invasions of Northumbria, in support of the claims of his brother-in-law Edgar, as well as to increase his own power. These, however, had little result beyond the devastation of the province.

Margaret’s biographer Turgot, Bishop of St. Andrews, credits her with having a civilizing influence on her husband Malcolm by reading him stories from the Bible. She instigated religious reform, striving to make the worship and practices of the Church in Scotland conform to those of Rome. This she did with the inspiration and guidance of Lanfranc, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. She also worked to bring the Scottish Church practice in line with that of the continental church of her childhood. Due to these achievements, she was considered an exemplar of the “just ruler”, and influenced her husband and children – especially her youngest son, later David I– also to be just and holy rulers. She attended to charitable works, serving orphans and the poor every day before she ate, and washing the feet of the poor in imitation of Christ. She rose at midnight every night to attend church services. She invited the Benedictine order to establish a monastery at Dunfermline in Fife in 1072, and established ferries at Queensferry and North Berwick to assist pilgrims journeying from south of the Forth Estuary to St. Andrews in Fife. A cave on the banks of the Tower Burn in Dunfermline was used by her as a place of devotion and prayer. St Margaret’s Cave, now covered beneath a municipal car park, is open to the public. Amongst her other deeds, Margaret also instigated the restoration of the monastery at Iona. She is also known to have been an intercessor for the release of fellow English exiles, forced into serfdom by the conquest.

In her private life, Margaret was as devout as she was in her public duties. She spent much of her time in prayer, devotional reading, and ecclesiastical embroidery. This appears to have had a considerable effect on the more uncouth Malcolm who could not read; he so admired her devotion that he had her books decorated in gold and silver. One of these, a pocket Gospel with lavish images of the Evangelists, is kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Malcolm seems to have been largely ignorant of the long-term effects of Margaret’s endeavours, not being especially religious himself. He was content for her to pursue her reforms as she wished, a testament to the strength and affection inherent in their marriage. Malcolm and their eldest son, Edward, were killed in a fight against the English at the Battle of Alnwick on 13 November 1093. Her son Edmund was left with the task of telling his mother of their deaths. Margaret was not yet fifty, but a life of constant austerity and fasting had taken their toll. Already ill, Margaret died on 16 November 1093, three days after the deaths of her husband and eldest son.

Below: Site of the shrine of St. Margaret,Dunfermline Abbey, Fife

Saint Margaret was canonised in 1250 by Pope Innocent IV in recognition of her personal holiness, fidelity to the Church, work for religious reform, and charity. On 19 June 1250, after her canonisation, her remains were moved to Dunfermline Abbey.

The Roman Catholic Church formerly marked the feast of Saint Margaret of Scotland on 10 June, because the feast of “Saint Gertrude, Virgin” was already celebrated on 16 November, but in Scotland, she was venerated on 16 November, the day of her death. In the revision of the Roman Catholic calendar of saints in 1969, 16 November became free and the Church transferred her feast day to 16 November. However, some traditionalist Catholics continue to celebrate her feast day on 10 June. She is also venerated as a saint in the Anglican Church.

Several churches are dedicated to Saint Margaret. One of the oldest is St Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle, which was founded by her son King David I. The chapel was long thought to have been the oratory of Margaret herself, but is now considered to be a 12th-century establishment. The oldest building in Edinburgh, it was restored in the 19th century, and refurbished in the 1990s.

Right: St Margaret’s Chapel, Edinburgh Castle

Others include the thirteenth century Church of St Margaret the Queen in Buxted, East Sussex, St Margaret of Scotland, Aberdeen and the Church of England church in Budapest. There are also memorial stones and shrines to her in and near Mecseknádásd in Baranya County (see below).

 

Sources:

Victor J Green (1978), Festivals and Saints Days: A Calendar of Festivals for the School and Home. Poole: Blandford Press

Wikipedia, Saint Margaret of Scotland.

Related articles

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• St Andrews Day (wanderersintimeandplace.wordpress.com)
• Salmond and Cameron deliver St Andrew’s Day messages (scotsman.com)
• St Andrew’s Day: The history, date, and traditions (scotsman.com)
• Great Scots! Happy St. Andrew’s Day (carlanthonyonline.com)
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Chapter Four: Those Two Impostors: Triumph and Disaster

In 1978 the House of Lords held a special debate on the state of the English language. Due to rapid social and economic transformation, thanks mainly to the technology of mass communication, fears for the future of British English had become one of the staples of newspaper columns and television chat shows. Now it was the turn of the peers of the realm to have their say. The record of the debate, The English language: Deterioration and Usage, makes very interesting reading. All but one of the speakers in it accepted, without question, that the language was deteriorating. They unrolled a catalogue of familiar complaints. One peer remarked,

It seems to me virtually impossible for a modern poet to write ’the choir of gay companions’. What has happened is that is that a word has been used for propaganda purposes which have destroyed its useful meaning in English.

 

Pronunciation was also considered to be slipping, and here the BBC came in for a substantial amount of criticism for failing in its clear duty to uphold the standards of English. There was praise for the Plain English Campaign, which had begun a series of successful battles against Civil Service gobbledygook, and complaints about the prevalence of jargon in official documents. There were also laments over the latest translations of the Bible and the recent revisions of the Book of Common Prayer. And, of course, more than one noble speaker blamed the Americans. Lord Somers, observed:

If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is!

 

In fact, the noble peers blamed just about every institution in society – the schools, the universities, and the mass media. Children were no longer educated in grammar or the classics. Newspaper, radio and television were familiarising the public with a language that depends on generalisations which are usually imprecise and often deliberately ambiguous… a language that makes unblushing use of jargon whenever that can assist evasion. They also displayed more than a touch of xenophobia, one of them arguing rather perversely that a major cause of deterioration in the use of the English language is very simply the enormous increase in the number of people who are using it. The most revealing comment of all was perhaps the one made by Lord Davies of Leek who remarked,

Am I right in assuming that in an age tortured by uncertainty with respect to religion, God, family, self, money and property, there is a worldwide collapse of not only the values of the past but of our language which, more and more, tends to be vague, indecisive, careless and often callous?

 

Certainly, as with sexual intercourse, the moral relativist revolution of the sixties and seventies had also encouraged a more permissive approach to social intercourse. Tongues were loosened and noses unblocked. However, Lord Davies’ remark was using language-change as a means of complaining about deeper changes in society. Against this, we might point out that speakers of Standard British Mercian English have often taken second place to other users, whether Scots, Irish or Welsh, the East Anglian Founding Fathers, Cockneys, Jews, Caribbeans or Indians. Influential changes and diversifications have usually occurred at the cultural centre of the language rather than at its fringes, in Britain itself. From this perspective, Standard British English remains as radical a tool as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just as in the ninth century, the fusion of Norse and Saxon languages was happening far from the main centres of trade and administration in the South of England, so in the late twentieth century the dominant forms, accents and voices in British English as it was used and taught were not those of the Establishment, speaking in the House of Lords, but those of Brixton, the East End and Coventry.

The Celtic countries and provinces also have their own brands of English, each of which can be subdivided into further localised varieties. For example, Welsh English, or Anglo-Welsh, has differing northern and southern varieties, also spoken in some of the border areas of England. The traditional Northumbrian Saxon dialect, sometimes referred to as the Scots’ language, and there is also Lallans, another lowland Scots dialect. Both have literary traditions. In Northern Ireland, Ulster Scots remains as the dialect of those who migrated from south-west Scotland. While some traditional features of these varieties fall out of use, other innovations, both regional and national, continue to be made to British English, so that the idea that there will one day be a uniform standard spoken English throughout the British Isles is unlikely to ever become a reality. In addition, there are still (officially) half a million Welsh-speakers, about one in five of the resident population of Wales. In Scotland, the Gaelic speech community is just over one per cent of the population, sparsely distributed through the western islands and highlands. In the Republic of Ireland, about forty per cent of the population have some level of Irish, but the number of habitual speakers is far lower. There are few monoglot speakers of either Irish or Welsh, but both languages are taught to school-leaving age to all students, thus ensuring continuing bilingualism. Both languages have strongly influenced the forms, vocabulary and pronunciation of Anglo-Welsh and Irish English, sometimes deliberately recorded by poets and writers.

 

Above: Factory workers strike over low pay

In the 1977-79 there was an explosion of resentment, largely by poorly paid public employees, against a minority Labour government incomes policy they felt was discriminatory. It began earlier in the year, but got far worse with a series of strikes going into winter, resulting in rubbish being left piled up in the streets throughout the country.This became known as the Winter of Discontent after Shakespeare’s opening soliloquy spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester in his history play, Richard III. The scenes provided convincing propaganda for the conservatives in the subsequent election in May. Using the slogan Labour isn’t working, which appeared on huge hoardings showing long dole queues, they came back to power with a clear majority in the General Election in 1979, led by Margaret Thatcher, who promised a return to the values which had made Victorian Britain great. However, what the British people got was more of a return to the hard-nosed Toryism of the interwar years as the Thatcher government set about the task of deliberately lengthening those dole queues. As wage-rises were believed to be the main source of inflation, heavy unemployment, it was often openly argued, would weaken trade union bargaining power, and was a price worth paying. At the same time, an economic squeeze was introduced, involving heavy tax increases and a reduction in public borrowing to deflate the economy, thus reducing both demand and employment. In the 1980s, two million manufacturing jobs disappeared, most of them by 1982.

Above: Rubbish is left piled up in London’s Leicester Square in February 1979

In Coventry, nearly sixty thousand jobs were lost in this period of recession. The Conservative policy of high interest rates tended to overvalue the pound, particularly in the USA, the major market for Coventry’s specialist cars, leading to a rapid decline in demand. Also, the Leyland management embarked on a new rationalisation plan. The company’s production was to be concentrated at its Cowley and Longbridge plants. Triumph production was transferred to Cowley, and Rover models were to be produced at the new Solihull plant. The Coventry engine plant at Courthouse Green was closed and Alvis, Climax and Jaguar were sold off to private buyers. In these first three years of the Thatcher government the number of Leyland employees in the city fell from twenty-seven thousand to eight thousand. One writer summarised the effects of Conservative policy on Coventry in these years as turning a process of gentle decline into quickening collapse. Overall the city’s top manufacturing firms shed thirty-one thousand workers between 1979 and 1982. Well-known pillars of Coventry’s economic base such as Herbert’s, Triumph Motors and Renold’s all disappeared. Unemployment had stood at just five per cent in 1979, the same level as in 1971. By 1982 it had risen to sixteen per cent.

 

None of this had been expected locally when the Thatcher government came to power. After all, Coventry had prospered reasonably well during the previous Tory administrations. The last real boom in the local economy had been stimulated by the policies of Ted Heath’s Chancellor, Anthony Barber. However, the brakes were applied rather than released by the new government. Monetarist policy was quick to bite into the local industry. Redundancy lists and closure notices in the local press became as depressingly regular as the obituary column. The biggest surprise was the lack of resistance from the local Labour movement, given Coventry’s still formidable trade union movement. There was an atmosphere of bewilderment and an element of resignation characterised the responses of many trades-union officials. It was as if the decades of anti-union editorials in the Coventry Evening Telegraph were finally being realised. There were signs of resistance at Longbridge, but the BL boss, Michael Edwardes, had introduced a tough new industrial relations programme which had seen the removal from the plant of Red Robbo, Britain’s strongest motor factory trade union leader. He had also closed the Speke factory on Merseyside, demonstrating that he could and would close plants in the face of trade union opposition. Coventry’s car workers and their union leaders had plenty of experience in local wage bargaining in boom times, but lacked strategies to resist factory closures in times of recession. Factory occupation, imitating its successful use on the continent, had been tried at the Meriden Triumph Motorcycle factory, but with disastrous results. The opposition from workers was undoubtedly diminished by redundancy payments which in many cases promised to cushion families for a year or two from the still unrealised effects of the recession.

 Above: Employment levels in Coventry

Young people were the real victims of these redundancies, as there were now no places for them to fill. The most depressing feature of Coventry’s unemployment was that the most severely affected were the teenagers leaving the city’s newly-completed network of Community Comprehensives. As the recession hit the city large numbers of them joined the job market only to find that expected opportunities in the numerous factories had evaporated. By June 1980, forty-six per cent of the city’s sixteen to eighteen year-olds were seeking employment and over half of the fourteen thousand who had left school the previous year were still unemployed. Much prized craft apprentices all but vanished and only ninety-five apprentices commenced training in 1981. The Local Education Authority was pioneering in its attempts to provide even basic employment and training for youngsters in cooperation with central government schemes and with major firms such as GEC and Courtaulds. It established a city-wide Careers Service, with full-time officers attached to individual schools, but working from a centralised service for employers and school leavers. In 1981-2, some 5,270 youths were found posts in training course, work experience and community projects, but with limited long-term effects. The early 1980s were barren years for Coventry youngsters, despite the emergence of their own pop group, The Specials, and their own theme song, Ghost Town, which also gave vent to what was becoming a national phenomenon. The lyric’s sombre comparison of boom time and bust was felt much more sharply in Coventry than elsewhere.

Coventry paid a very heavy price in the 1980s for its over-commitment to the car industry, suffering more than other comparable Midland towns such as Leicester and   Nottingham, both of which had broader-based economies. Its peculiar dependence on manufacturing and its historically weak tertiary sector meant that it was a poor location for the so-called sunrise industries. These were high-tech enterprises, based largely along the axial belt running from London to Slough, Reading and Swindon, so they had little initial impact on unemployment in Coventry and other Midland and Northern industrial centres. The growth in service industries was also, initially at least, mainly to the benefit of the traditional administrative centres, such as Birmingham, rather than to its West Midland neighbours. While little development work took place in local industry, but Nissan recruited hundreds of foremen from Coventry for its new plant in Sunderland, announced before the Thatcher government, and Talbot removed its Whitley research and development facility to Paris in 1983, along with its French-speaking Coventrians. Only at Leyland’s Canley site did research provide a service for plants outside the city. For the first time in a hundred years, Coventry had become a net exporter of labour. By the time of the 1981 Census, the city had already lost 7.5 per cent of its 1971 population. The main losses were among the young skilled and technical management sectors, people who any town or city can ill afford to lose. Summing up the city’s position at this time, Lancaster and Mason emphasised the dramatic transition in its fortunes from boomtown, a magnet for labour from the depressed areas, to a depressed district itself:

Coventry in the mid 1980s displays more of the confidence in the future that was so apparent in the immediate post-war years. The city, which for four decades was the natural habitat of the affluent industrial worker is finding it difficult to adjust to a situation where the local authority and university rank amongst the largest employers. Coventry’s self-image of progressiveness and modernity has all but vanished. The citizens now largely identify themselves and their environment as part of depressed Britain.  

 Above: A 1982 cartoon: Britain was at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The inhabitants of the islands, a dependent territory of the United Kingdom, wanted to remain under British rule, but Argentina invaded.

Thatcher was victorious, but it was a costly war for the British.

Below: The Royal Marines march towards Port Stanley during the Falklands War, June 1982

The government had promised in 1979 that a restructuring of the economy would be followed by increased investment and employment opportunities but three years later, in the spring of 1982 there was no sign of this promise being kept.   There had already been serious rioting by the disaffected of Brixton in 1981. After this, the Tories had looked destined for defeat in the 1983 General Election, but following the Falklands War, the Iron Lady, also variously characterised as Boadicea and Britannia, swept back to power on a tidal wave of revived jingoistic imperialism. Even in Labour heartlands, such as south Wales, the Tories made major gains. The government then took a more confrontational approach at home. As in the 1920s, resistance to brutal rationalisation through the closure or selling off of uneconomic enterprises, or by wage or job reductions, was met by determined opposition, never tougher than in the confrontation of 1984-85 with the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill. The National Coal Board, supported by the government, put forward a massive programme of pit closures. The bitter, year-long miners’ strike which followed was roundly defeated, amid scenes of mass picketing and some violence from both miners and the police. Ultimately the government proved too determined even for the miners, and had, in any case, built up the resources to resist their anticipated demands for it to back down.

 

Above: Miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill/ Striking Yorkshire miners

However, the strike and the colliery closures left a legacy of bitterness and division in British which was only too apparent at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s recent state funeral, and is the subject or background for many recent films, some of which have distorted or trivialised our recollection of the reality. Among the better representations of it is Billy Elliott. Under the thirty years rule, the government documents from 1984 have only just become available, so we can now look forward to the more rounded perspectives of historians on these events. Already, politicians have called for government apologies to be given to the miners and their families.

 

Above: In the Durham Coalfield, pits were often the only real source of employment in local communities,

so the economic and social impact of closures could be devastating.

The 1984-5 Strike was an attempt to force a reversal of the decline.

The pit closures went ahead and the severe contraction of the mining industry continued: it vanished altogether in Kent, while in Durham two-thirds of the pits were closed. The government had little interest in ensuring the survival of the industry, determined to break its militant and well-organised union. The social cost of the closures, especially in places in which mining was the single major employer, as in many of the pit villages of Durham and the valleys of south Wales, was devastating. The entire local economy was crippled. On Tyneside and Merseyside a more general deindustrialisation occurred. Whole sections of industry, including coal, steel and shipbuilding, simply vanished from their traditional areas. Of all the areas of the United Kingdom, however, it was Northern Ireland that suffered the highest levels of unemployment. This was largely because the continuing sectarian violence discouraged inward investment in the six counties of the Province.

Nationally, in February 1986 there were over 3.4 million unemployed, although statistics were manipulated for political reasons and the real figure is therefore a matter of speculation. The socially corrosive effects of the return of widespread mass unemployment, not seen since the early thirties, were felt throughout the country, manifesting themselves in the further bouts of inner-city rioting that broke out in 1985. This was more serious for the government than the rioting against the Means Test of half a century before, because it occurred in cities throughout the country, rather than in depressed mining areas. London was just as vulnerable as Liverpool, and a crucial contributory factor was the number of young men of Asian and Caribbean origin who saw no hope of ever entering employment: opportunities were minimal and they felt particularly discriminated against. The term underclass was increasingly used to describe those who felt themselves to be completely excluded from the benefits of prosperity.

The only sizeable addition to the immigrant population during the recession of the early eighties was among the Polish community. After the Polish government’s clampdown on the shipyard-led Solidarity movement in 1980, about two thousand refugees entered Britain. It was hard for researchers at the time to assess the extent to which these new arrivals influenced the already well-established Polish communities and organisations throughout Britain. The only reported figures, taken from a Language Census conducted by ILEA between 1981 and 1987, shows nearly six hundred Polish pupils in London schools. Assuming that these were pupils with Polish as their strong first language (L1), requiring English as an Added Language (EAL) tuition support, rather than established Polish bilingual children with English as a strong L1 or L2, we might therefore conclude that the majority of these new immigrants settled in London, probably using already-established kinship networks and institutions. No matter how much Polish was the language used at home, second-generation Polish children showed a strong preference to switch to English in conversations involving the expression of abstract concepts, even within the home context.

The Linguistic Minorities Project (LMP) Survey, conducted in Coventry and Bradford in 1985 showed that the Polish language skills of the adult respondents were, perhaps predictably, very high. However, the reported levels of fluency in Polish for members of respondents’ households as a whole, likely to include a high proportion of British-born children, was significantly lower. Ninety-one per cent of the respondents in Coventry reported that their children used only English between themselves, and third-generation children in Polish Saturday schools used Polish only with the teachers and assistants. The influx of younger first-generation Poles in the 1980s helped to create new relationships in which second and third generations could use Polish in more realistic ways. The Survey also showed that in Coventry and Bradford, whereas almost half of Polish workers were in a workplace where at least one fellow-worker was a Polish-speaker, more than sixty per cent of them used only English with their workmates. Nevertheless, the Poles maintain a network of friends with whom they could use their mother tongue. They also had a wide range of opportunities to use the language in the community:

The Pole can buy Polish food from Polish shops, eat in Polish restaurants, sleep in Polish hotels or digs, with a Polish landlady, entertain friends in Polish clubs, attend a Polish doctor (over five hundred are practising in Britain) or dentist (eighty Polish dental surgeries), have a Polish priest and be buried by a Polish undertaker.

In the 1980s, Polish was not taught in the mainstream schools, though there were some unsuccessful attempts made in this direction in Stepney in 1981. Some years later, ILEA approached the Polish Educational Society Abroad with a similar suggestion which also failed, partly because Poles insist that mother tongue teaching must include Polish cultural content. In 1982 a section of Polish Studies was added to the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London. For L1 or bilingual speakers of Polish, the degree lasted for three years and included language, literature and history as compulsory elements. Additional options included economics, politics, geography and planning. The Polish Section also organises conferences for Polish teachers and pupils. Otherwise, only Oxford and Cambridge hold lectures on Polish as a Slavic Language. These developments encouraged a note of optimism for the Polish community in Britain at a time when other immigrant groups were struggling to integrate, or felt alienated by the host country, particularly in the second and third generations. Together with the arrival of the Solidarity generation, there was a revival of awareness of linguistic and cultural roots in Britain in this decade. This helped the Poles to integrate into British society while resisting linguistic and cultural assimilation: becoming British did not necessarily involve losing their Polish identity.

By 1987, service industries were offering an alternative means of employment in Britain. Between 1983 and 1987 about one and a half million new jobs were created. Most of these were for women, many of whom were entering employment for the first time, and many of the jobs available were part-time and, of course, lower paid than the jobs lost in primary and secondary industries. By contrast, the total number of men in full-time employment fell still further. Many who had left mining or manufacturing for the service sector also earned far less. By the end of the century there were more people employed in Indian restaurants than in the coal and steel industries combined, but for much lower pay. The economic recovery that led to the growth of this new employment was based mainly on finance, banking and credit. Little was invested in home-grown manufacturing, but far more was invested overseas, with British foreign investments rising from 2.7 billion pounds in 1975 to 90 billion in 1985. At the same time, there was also a degree of re-industrialisation, especially in the Southeast, where new industries employing the most advanced technology were growing. In fact, many industries shed a large proportion of their workforce but, using new technology, maintained or improved their output. These new industries were certainly not confined to the M4 Corridor by the late eighties. By then, Nissan’s car plant in Sunderland had become the most productive in Europe, while Siemens established a microchip plant at Wallsend. However, such companies did not employ large numbers of local workers. Nissan recruited its foremen in Coventry, while Siemens invested more than a billion pounds, but only employed a workforce of about 1,800.

Regionally based industries suffered a dramatic decline during this period. Coal-mining, for example, was decimated in the decade following the 1984-85 miners’ strike, not least because of the shift of the electricity generating industry to other alternative energy sources, especially gas. During the period 1984-87 the coal industry shed a hundred and seventy thousand miners, and there was a further net loss of employment in the coalfields, with the exception of north Warwickshire and south Derbyshire, in the early 1990s. The economic effect upon local communities could be devastating, as the 1996 film Brassed Off accurately shows, with its memorable depiction of the social impact on the Yorkshire pit village of Grimethorpe of the 1992 closure programme.

The trouble with the economic strategy followed by the Thatcher governments was that South Wales, Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Tyneside and Clydesdale were precisely those regions that had risen to extraordinary prosperity as part of the British imperial enterprise. Now they were being written off as disposable assets, so what interest did the Scots in particular, but also the Welsh, have in remaining as part of that enterprise, albeit a new corporation in the making? The understandable euphoria over Thatcher and her party winning three successive general elections disguised the fact the last of these victories was gained at the price of perpetuating a deep rift in Britain’s social geography. Without the Falklands factor to help revive the Union flag, a triumphalist English conservatism was increasingly imposing its rule over the other nations of an increasingly disunited Kingdom.   Thatcher’s constituency was, overwhelmingly, the well-off middle and professional classes in the south of England, whilst the distressed northern zones of derelict factories, pits, ports and terraced streets were left to rot and rust. People living in these latter areas were expected to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, retrain for work in the up-and-coming industries of the future and if need be get on Tory Chairman, Norman Tebbitt’s bicycle and move to one of the areas of strong economic growth such as Cambridge, Milton Keynes or Slough, where those opportunities were clustered. However, little was provided by publicly funded retraining and, if this was available, there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it. The point of the computer revolution in industry was to save labour, not to expand it.

In the late 1980s, the north-south divide seemed as intractable as it had all century, with high unemployment continuing to be concentrated in the declining manufacturing areas of the North and West of the British Isles. That the north-south divide increasingly had a political dimension as well as an economic one was borne out by the 1987 General Election in the UK. Margaret Thatcher’s third majority was this time largely based in the votes of the South and East of England. North of a line running from the Severn estuary through Coventry and on to the Humber estuary, the long decline of Toryism, especially in Scotland, where it was reduced to only ten seats, was apparent to all observers. At the same time, the national two-party system seemed to be breaking down so that south of that line, the Liberal-SDP Alliance were the main challengers to the Conservatives in many constituencies.

Culturally, the Thatcher counter-revolution ran into something of a cul-de-sac, or rather the cobbled streets of Salford, typified in the long-running TV soap opera, Coronation Street. Millions in the old British industrial economy had a deeply ingrained loyalty to the place where they had grown up, gone to school, got married and had their kids; to the pub, their park, their football team. In that sense at least the Social Revolution of the fifties and sixties had recreated cities and towns that, for all their ups and downs, their poverty and pain, were real communities. Fewer people were willing to give up on Liverpool and Leeds, Nottingham and Derby than the pure laws of the employment market-place demanded. For many working-class British people, it was their home which determined their quality of life, not the width of their wage-packet.

Not everything that the Thatcher governments did was out of tune with social reality. The sale of council houses created an owner-occupier class which, as Simon Schama has written, corresponded to the long passion of the British to be kings and queens of their own little castles. Sales of remaining state-owned industries, such as the public utility companies, were less successful, since the concept of stakeholderdship was much less deeply rooted in British traditions, and the mixed fortunes of both these privatised companies and their stocks did nothing to help change customs. Most misguided of all was the decision to call a poll tax imposed on house and flat owners a community charge, and then to impose it first, as a trial run, in Scotland, where the Tories already had little support. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham that it would be a good way of creating a property-owning, tax-paying democracy, where people paid according to the size of their household. This was another mistaken assumption. Soon after, the iron lady was challenged for her leadership of the Party, and therefore the country, and was forced to step down from the contest. She was then replaced as PM by one of her loyal deputies, John Major, another middle-class anti-patrician, the son of a garden-gnome salesman, apparently committed to family values and a return to basics. Although winning the 1992 General Election, the Major government ended up being overwhelmed by an avalanche of sexual and financial scandals and blunders, as well as by the back-bench right-wing in the House of Commons who wanted Britain to withdraw from the European Union.

 

The old north-south divide in Britain seemed to be eroding during the recession of the early 1990s, which hit southeast England relatively hard, but it soon reasserted itself with a vengeance later in the decade as young people moved south in search of jobs and property prices rose. Even though the shift towards service industries was reducing regional economic diversity, the geographical distribution of regions eligible for European structural funds for economic improvement confirmed the continuing north-south divide. The administrative structure of Britain also underwent major changes by the end of the nineties. The relative indifference of the Conservative ascendancy to the plight of industrial Scotland and Wales had transformed the prospects of the nationalist parties in both countries. In the 1987 election, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, previously confined mainly to middle-class, rural and intellectual constituencies, now made huge inroads into Conservative areas and even into the Labour heartlands of industrial south Wales and Clydeside.

In a 1992 poll in Scotland, half of those asked said that they were in favour of independence within the European Union. In the General Election of the same year, however, with Mrs Thatcher and her poll tax having departed the political scene, there was a minor Tory recovery. Five years later this was wiped out by the Labour landslide of 1997, when all the Conservative seats in both Scotland and Wales were lost. Only one Scottish seat was regained by the Tories in 2001. The Tories became labelled as a centralising, purely English party. Nationalist political sentiment grew in Scotland and to a lesser extent in Wales. The devolution promised and instituted by Tony Blair’s new landslide Labour government did seem to take some of the momentum out of the nationalist fervour , but apparently at the price of stoking the fires of English nationalism among Westminster Tories, resentful at the Scots and Welsh having representatives in their own assemblies as well as in the UK Parliament. In 1999, twenty years after the first campaigns for devolution, a devolved Parliament was set up in Scotland, in Edinburgh, Wales got an Assembly in Cardiff, and Northern Ireland had a power-sharing Assembly again at Stormont near Belfast. In 2000, an elected regional assembly was established for Greater London, the area covered by the inner and outer boroughs in the capital, with a directly elected Mayor. This new authority replaced the Greater London Council which had been abolished by the Thatcher Government in 1986, and was given responsibility over local planning and transport.

 

The process of deindustrialisation continued into the nineties with the closure of the Swan Hunter shipyard on the Tyne in May 1993. It was the last working shipyard in the region, but failed to secure a warship contract. It was suffering the same long-term decline that reduced shipbuilding from an employer of two hundred thousand in 1914 to a mere twenty-six thousand by the end of the century. This devastated the local economy, especially as a bitter legal wrangle over redundancy payments left many former workers without any compensation at all for the loss of what they had believed was employment for life. As the map above shows, the closure’s effects of spread far further than Tyneside and the Northeast, which were certainly badly hit by the closure, with two hundred and forty suppliers losing their contracts. According to Keynesian economics, the results of rising unemployment are multiplied as the demand for goods and services declines. The closure of Swan Hunter certainly had a widespread impact on Suppliers as far afield as Southampton and Glasgow, as well as in the West Midlands and the Southeast. They lost valuable orders and therefore also had to make redundancies. Forty-five suppliers in Greater London also lost business. Therefore, from the closure of one single, large-scale engineering concern, unemployment resulted even in the most prosperous parts of the country. In the opposite economic direction, the growing North Sea oil industry helped to spread employment more widely throughout the Northeast and the Eastern side of Scotland, with its demands for drilling platforms and support ships, and this benefit was also felt nationally, both within Scotland and more widely, throughout the UK. However, this did little in the short-term to soften the blow of the Swan Hunter closure.

 

Overall, however, the 1990s were years of general and long-sustained economic expansion. The continued social impact of the decline in coal, steel and shipbuilding was to some extent mitigated by inward investment initiatives. Across most of the British Isles, there was also a continuing decline in the number of manufacturing jobs throughout the nineties. Although there was an overall recovery in the car industry, aided by the high pound in the export market, much of this was due to the new technology of robotics which made the industry far less labour-intensive and therefore more productive. The service sector, however, expanded, and general levels of unemployment, especially in Britain, fell dramatically in the 1990s. Financial services saw strong growth, particularly in places such as the London Docklands and Edinburgh. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the financial industry was the largest employer in northern manufacturing towns like Leeds, which grew rapidly, aided by its ability to offer a range of cultural facilities that helped to attract an array of UK company headquarters. Manchester, similarly, enjoyed a renaissance, particularly in music and football. Manchester United’s commercial success led it to become the world’s largest sports franchise.

 

Other areas of the country were helped by their ability to attract high technology industry. Silicon Glen in central Scotland was, by the end of the decade, the largest producer of computer equipment in Europe. Computing and software design was also one of the main engines of growth along the silicon highway of the M4 Corridor west of London. But areas of vigorous expansion were not necessarily dominated by new technologies. The economy of East Anglia, especially Cambridgeshire, had grown rapidly in the 1980s and continued to do so throughout the 1990s. While Cambridge itself, aided by the university-related science parks, fostered high-tech companies, especially in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, expansion in Peterborough, for instance, was largely in low-tech areas of business services and distribution.

 

Getting around Britain was, at least, getting easier. By 1980 there were nearly one and a half thousand miles of motorway in Britain. In the last twenty years of the century, the stretching of the congested motorway network to just over two thousand miles, mostly involving the linking of existing sections. Motorway building and airport development was delayed by lengthy public enquiries and well-organised public protest. Improving transport links was seen as an important means of stimulating regional development as well as combating local congestion. Major road developments in the 1990s included the completion of the M25 orbital motorway around London, the Skye bridge and the M40 link between London and Birmingham. However, despite this construction programme, congestion remained a problem: the M25 was labelled the largest car park on the planet, while average traffic speeds in central London fell to only ten miles per hour in 2001, a famous poster on the underground pointing out that this was the same speed as in 1901. Improvements to public transport networks tended to be concentrated in urban centres, such as the light rail networks in Manchester, Sheffield and Croydon. At the same time, the migration of some financial services and much of the Fleet Street national press to major new developments in London’s Docklands prompted the development of the Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee line extension, as well as some of the most expensive urban motorway in Europe. Undoubtedly, the most important transport development was the Channel Tunnel rail link from Folkestone to Calais, completed in 1994. By the beginning of the new millennium, millions of people had travelled by rail from London to Paris in only three hours.

 

The development of Ashford in Kent, following the opening of the Channel Tunnel rail link, provides a good example of the relationship between transport links and general economic development. The railway had come to Ashford in 1842 and a railway works was established in the town. This was eventually run down and closed between 1981 and 1993, but this did not undermine the local economy. Instead, Ashford benefited from the Channel Tunnel rail link, which made use of the old railway lines running through the town, and its population actually grew by ten per cent in the 1990s. The completion of the Tunnel combined with the M25 London orbital motorway, with its M20 spur, to give the town an international catchment area of some eighty-five million people within a single day’s journey. This, together with the opening of Ashford International railway station as a main terminal for the rail link to Europe, attracted a range of engineering, financial, distribution and manufacturing companies. Fourteen business parks were opened in and around the town, together with a science park owned by Trinity College, Cambridge, and a popular outlet retail park on the outskirts of the town. By the beginning of the new millennium, the Channel Tunnel had transformed the economy of Kent. Ashford is closer to Paris and Brussels than it is to Manchester and Sheffield, both in time and distance. By the beginning of this century, it was in a position to be part of a truly international economy.

 

Transport policy was only one of the ways in which the EU increasingly came to shape the geography of the British Isles in the 1990s. It was a key factor in the creation of the new administrative regions of Britain in 1999. At the same time, a number of British local authorities opened offices in Brussels for lobbying purposes. The enthusiasm the Scottish National Party discovered in the late 1980s for the supposed benefits that would result from independence in Europe may help to explain its subsequent revival. The European connection has proved less welcome in other quarters. Fishermen, particularly in Cornwall and on the East coast of England, have felt themselves the victims of the Common Fisheries Policy quota system. A strong sense of Euroscepticism developed in England in particular, fuelled by a mixture of concerns about sovereignty and economic policy. Nevertheless, links with Europe have been growing, whether via the Channel Tunnel, or the connections between the French and British electricity grids, or airline policy, as have the number of policy decisions shaped by the EU. This pace of change quickened as the result of the 1987 Single European Act, as it became clear that the UK was becoming increasingly integrated with the European continent.

 

By the late 1990s, another indispensible marker of British identity, the monarchy, began to look tired, under strain of being simultaneously a ceremonial and familial institution. Ever since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, which suddenly propelled the ten year-old Princess Elizabeth into the spotlight as the heir apparent, the membership of this institution was thought to require standards of personal behaviour well above the norm of late twentieth century expectations. Just as the monarchy had gained from its marriages, especially that resulting from the fairy tale romance of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, whose wedding at St Paul’s in 1981 had a world-wide audience of at least eight hundred million viewers, so it lost commensurately from the failure of those unions. The year 1992, referred to by the Queen as her annus horriblis, saw not just the separations of Charles and Diana (the Wales) as well as Andrew and Sarah (the Yorks), but also a major fire at Windsor Castle in November. When it was announced that the Crown would only pay for the replacement and repair of items in the royal private collection, and that repairs to the fabric would therefore come from the tax-paying public, a serious debate began about the state of the monarchy’s finances. In a poll, eight out of ten people asked thought the Queen should pay taxes on her private income, hitherto exempt. A year later, Buckingham Palace was opened to the public tours for the first time and the Crown did agree to pay taxes. In 1994 the royal yacht Britannia, the emblem of the queen’s global presence, was decommissioned.

 

Above: A sea of flowers laid in tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, outside Kensington Palace, London, August 1997

The most difficult moment came in August 1997, when Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris. Royal protocol dictates that the royal standard should be flown above Buckingham Palace when the Queen is in residence. The Union Flag is only flown above the royal palaces and other government and public buildings on certain special days, such as the Princess Royal’s birthday, 15 August. Since it was holiday time for the Royal family, they were away from London, so there were no flags flying. The Queen, as the only person who could authorise an exception to these age-old customs, received criticism for not flying the union flag at half-mast in order to fulfill the deep need of a grief-stricken public. They are only flown at half-mast on the announcement of the death of a monarch until after the funeral, and on the day of the funeral only for other members of the royal family. Although Her Majesty meant no disrespect to her estranged daughter-in-law, the Crown lives and dies by such symbolic moments. The immense outpouring of public emotion in the days and weeks that followed was very different from the more conventional but no less heartfelt mourning of the Queen and her immediate family. The crisis was rescued by a television speech she made which was both informal and sincere in its expression of personal sorrow, adding to the tidal wave that swept over the whole country, for England’s rose, or the People’s Princess of Wales.

 

The monarchy was fully restored to popularity by the Millennium festivities, at which the Queen watched dancers from the Notting Hill carnival under the ill-fated Dome, and especially by the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 2002, which continued the newly struck royal mood of greater informality. Brian May, the lead guitarist of the rock-band Queen began the pop concert at Buckingham Palace by playing his instrumental version of God Save the Queen from the roof-top overlooking the Mall. Modern Britannia seemed at last to be at ease with its identity within a multi-national, multi-ethnic, United Kingdom, in all its mongrel glory.

Above: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2001, aged 75. She has already (in 2014) reigned for another thirteen years,

and celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

Sources:

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.)(n.d.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: University of Warwick Cryfield Press.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain; The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000. London: BBC Worldwide.

Robert McCrum, William Cran & Robert MacNeil (1987), The Story of English. London: Penguin Books.

John Haywood & Simon Hall, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Safder Alladina, Viv Edwards & Elizabeth Muir (1991), Multilingualism in the British Isles. Harlow: Longman (Linguistics).

Chapter Three: A Multi-cultural Society?

 

By the end of the 1950s, although the populations of the nations and regions of the British Isles had become more permanently mixed than ever before, and added to by those refugees from central and eastern Europe who had now been exiled by the triumph of Soviet Communism in the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, as yet there had been very little New Commonwealth immigration to Britain. It was only in the sixties and seventies that the country began to be transformed into what came to be known as a multi-cultural society.

 

Following the wartime Emigracja – immigration to Britain, there was a further wave of Poles arriving in the UK between 1950 and 1971. According to the 1971 Census, this amounted to 13,470 persons, seventy-five per cent of whom were women. Some of these were relatives of previous refugees who had decided to stay, while others were traditional devout Catholics and anti-Communists. The Polish Educational Society Abroad was established in Britain with the main aim of giving financial support and assistance to Polish voluntary schools in order to maintain Polishness by educating the children of Polish parents and preparing them for their return to Poland. The beginning of the Polish schools in Britain goes back to the 1950s when Polish parents began to be seriously concerned about the maintenance of Polishness in their children. While the underlying motive was the return to the homeland, the need to establish schools was also driven by the concern that, with Poland under Communist rule, many families did not know when they would be able to return safely and permanently. While, at first, the schools were located in private houses, later they moved into the halls of Polish churches throughout the country. When the numbers grew and they could no longer be accommodated in the church halls, more space had to be hired in state schools. In 1977 it was estimated that there were eighty-eight Polish Saturday Schools with over seven thousand pupils. In addition, the Polish Scout and Guide Movement was formed in the 1950s, a nationalistic exile group centred in London with, by 1961, an organisational network in over twenty countries. In that year, there were one and a half thousand Polish boy scouts and a thousand guides in Britain, with a further four hundred Rovers and six hundred adult members of attached groups. The organisation reinforced the work of the Saturday Schools by offering invaluable opportunities for using and developing the Polish language in a variety of realistic communication settings.

Following the unsuccessful Hungarian Uprising and Soviet invasion of October – November 1956, people from all classes and groups who had suffered under the Communist repressions and who feared reprisals for having participated in the uprising, found their way to Britain. Many of them were en route to the USA, but of the two hundred thousand who fled Hungary, about twenty-six thousand were admitted to the UK for settlement. Three Hungarian Associations were formed in the 1950s, the British Hungarian Fellowship in London being one of them. In addition, three associations were formed between 1965 and 1971. Otherwise, the Hungarian expatriates seem not to have been so determined to maintain their separate cultural identity in their host country, becoming fully integrated in British society within a short period of settlement, though keeping up their familial ties with their home country. This may have much to do with the relative freedoms of travel and association allowed during the period of Goulash Communism, especially from the early 1970s, and partly to do with the relative difficulty of learning and using Hungarian outside the home environment, even when both parents were native-speakers. Only in London was this ever a real possibility.

 

During and immediately after the Second World War about forty thousand Ukrainians found refuge in the UK, none of them having left their home country of their own free will. The majority of those who settled permanently in the UK came from the rural areas of western Ukraine, and only about three per cent had completed secondary and tertiary schooling (to eighteen) before arriving in Britain. They were employed in low-paid jobs in agriculture, mining and textiles, in domestic service and as ancillary personnel in hospitals. After a time they moved to better-paid jobs, encouraged their children to do well at school, so that it is sometimes suggested that, as a result of strong family ties and parents’ ambitions for their children, the proportions of Ukrainian children who gained academic success at the various educational levels were greater than the national levels. The Ukrainians who settled in Britain were predominantly male, young and single. Only about ten per cent were women, so Ukrainian men had to look outside the community for marriage partners, mainly among other continental settled in Britain. Later, about two thousand displaced Ukrainian women came to Britain from refugee settlements in Poland and Yugoslavia following the decade between when Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union again, and Poland was forced to join the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

Of the first émigrés, who were predominantly male, about forty per cent didn’t marry, and a large percentage of the rest, maybe half, married non-Ukrainian women. The majority of them hoped at first that they would be able to return to the Ukraine. Most, however, learnt some English in their workplaces. Those who married Ukrainian partners use their native tongue when speaking with them and, in most cases, with their children. A minority considered that speaking Ukrainian at home would be detrimental to their children’s education, however, and so deliberately avoided using the language in the family. Second generation British Ukrainians used English in their workplaces and with friends, in places of entertainment, while using Ukrainian with parents and older members of the exile community, switching to English to talk to Ukrainians of their own generation. They were also encouraged to use Ukrainian in the Saturday schools, meetings and camps of youth organisations. During rehearsals of choirs or dance groups, popular among the second generation, they often used both languages to describe events or experiences connected with these. This was regarded within the community as a sign of language loss rather than of retention in the bilingual setting.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, due to the political situation in the USSR, and its international relations, contacts with the home country were limited and, despite the efforts made by the community to preserve the language, there were significantly fewer third generation speakers. The community life revolved around the churches, principally the Ukrainian Roman Catholic Church and the Autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, together with a variety of organisations catering for women, young people, ex-servicemen, students and professionals. It also built a number of properties in addition to churches, including cultural centres and school premises, commercial enterprises, summer camps and retirement homes. Family and personal contacts mainly took the form of correspondence, and well-chaperoned choirs and dance groups from the Ukraine sometimes toured the UK. In the Brezhnev years there was freer intercourse with Ukrainians living in Poland and Yugoslavia, with many more exchange visits taking place. In Ukraine itself, the language came under strong Russian influence, whereas the majority of first-generation British Ukrainians spoke a rural variety of Western Ukrainian at home. In 1966, there were nearly two and a half thousand pupils attending forty-three Ukrainian Saturday Schools throughout Britain, run by over two hundred teaching staff. The curriculum consisted of Ukrainian language, literature, history, geography, religion and folklore. Pupils had two or three hours of classes a week over eleven or twelve years, starting with nursery classes. A GCE Ordinary level examination in Ukrainian became available in 1954, and the language became available as a subsidiary subject at the University of London in 1970. Coventry LEA was the first to provide material support for community Saturday schools.

In the postwar years, the Greek Cypriot community in Britain grew significantly and came from a variety of backgrounds. There had been a sizeable group in interwar and wartime Britain, but it was after the war that substantial numbers of Greek Cypriot men arrived, followed by their families as soon as they had found a permanent job and reasonable housing. The 1955-60 Independence struggle gave rise to further immigration to Britain, as did the civil struggles in 1963 and the invasion by Turkey in 1974, so that the estimated Greek Cypriot population in the UK reached two hundred thousand. This meant that one Cypriot in every six was living in Britain by the late seventies. While the largest part of this population was concentrated in London, there was also much smaller but still significant community in Birmingham. Greek Cypriots left their homes mainly for economic reasons. Most of them came to Britain to find work and improve their standard of living. The largest section came from the lower socio-economic groups. They set out with high aspirations, confident in their hard-working nature, and supported by the strong feeling of solidarity which bonded them to their compatriots. In the fifties and early sixties Greek Cypriots worked mainly in the service sector, in catering, in the clothing and shoe manufacturing industries, in hairdressing and in grocery retailing. In the villages in Cyprus, most of the women’s work was confined to the household and the fields, but in Britain a substantial number went to work in the clothing industry, either as machinists in small factories or as out-workers sewing clothes at home at piecework rates.

By the late sixties self-employment was becoming more common among Greek Cypriot men who had established a variety of small businesses – restaurants, estate agents, travel agencies, building firms, etc. – building gradually what Constandinides (1977) called an ethnic economy. These small businesses often provided goods and services primarily for other Cypriots, although by the second generation there was a tendency to move away from these traditional forms of employment. Their interests moved away from the world of kebab takeaways and Mediterranean grocery shops into the more successful and highly competitive world of property development, manufacturing industry, import-export, travel and tourism, printing and publishing. Mother tongue teaching activities were inevitably concentrated in the areas of greatest Greek settlement, the first classes, in Haringey, dating back to 1955, while classes in Coventry were established around 1963. Children spent between one and four hours per week at these community-run classes.

 

In Coventry, the small wartime Indian community had expanded to an estimated four thousand by 1954, occupying some of the more rundown housing stock to the north of the city. Like other immigrants to Coventry at this time – the Welsh, the Irish, Poles and Ukrainians, the Indians were keen to protect their own religious and cultural identity. In October 1952, Muslim members of the Indian community applied to the Planning and Redevelopment Committee for separate burial facilities and land for the building of a Mosque. Although relatively few in number, Coventry’s Indian community was already beginning to experience the racial prejudice that was already beginning to disfigure Britain nationally. It was also soon reported that local estate agents were operating a colour bar. It has already been noted how trades unions and management in the car factories agreed measures to keep them from working on the production lines, relegated to menial cleaning tasks. In October 1954 the editor of the Coventry Standard had reported that a branch of the AEU had approached Miss Burton M.P. on this subject. He commented:

The presence of so many coloured people in Coventry is becoming a menace. Hundreds of black people are pouring into the larger cities of Britain including Coventry and are lowering the standard of life. They live on public assistance and occupy common lodging houses to the detriment of suburban areas. … They frequently are the worse for liquor – many of them addicted to methylated spirits – and live in overcrowded conditions sometimes six to a room.

This article was not the juvenile outpourings of a bigoted cub reporter but the major editorial. Racism appears to have infected a wide spectrum of Coventry society by the mid-fifties as it had also begun to infect the country as a whole. Change was not comfortable for many to live with, and not always easy to understand, and it was easy to project the problems which it presented in everyday life into stereotypical images, as this extract from the transcript of a BBC archive disc shows:

It is getting too bad now. They’re too many in the country and they’re over-running it. If they come into this country, they should be made to live to the same standards as we live, and not too many in their house as they always have done, unless someone puts their foot down. They bring in diseases and all sorts of things that spread to different people, and your children have to grow up with them and it’s not right.

 

Above: The Windrush Generation: One of the first Jamaican immigrants seeking work and lodgings in Birmingham in 1955.

They in this extract were, of course, immigrants from the West Indies and Pakistan and/ or India who, from the mid-fifties on, came in substantial numbers into the booming cities and industries. Many West Indian immigrants encountered considerable racial prejudice when seeking accommodation. A teenage motor-cycle maniac who was still living with his parents and knew that every time he went out they were on edge, could casually remark about going down Notting Hill Gate… to punch a few niggers up. The scene soon shifted onto a bigger backcloth, and from Notting Hill to Nottingham, but the story was the same, and one which was to become more and more familiar over the coming decades – one of growing intolerance, if not cultural bigotry, in British society. In August 1958, as violence against coloured immigrants became a serious problem, The Times reported on the demands for immigration controls being made by Conservative MPs:

Seeing the Nottingham fight between coloured and white people on Saturday night a red light warning of further troubles to come, some Conservative M.P.s intend to renew their demand for control to be placed on immigration from the Commonwealth and the colonies when Parliament reassembles in October… A resolution is on the agenda for the Conservative Party Conference. It has been tabled by Mr Norman Pannell, Conservative M.P. for the Kirkdale division of Liverpool, who obtained the signatures of about thirty Conservative M.P.s for a motion (never debated) during the last session of Parliament. This expressed the growing disquiet over ’the continuing influx of indigent immigrants from the Commonwealth and colonies, thousands of whom have immediately sought National Assistance’. Mr Pannell said yesterday, ’… The Nottingham fighting is a manifestation of the evil results of the present policy and I feel that unless some restriction is imposed we shall create the colour-bar we all wish to avoid… The object of my representation is to get some control, not to bar all colonial and Commonwealth immigration, but to see that the immigrants shall not be a charge on public funds, and that they are deported when they are guilty of serious crimes.

 

Paradoxically, then, just as Britain was retreating from its formal imperial commitments, Commonwealth immigration into Britain, principally from the West Indies and South Asia, was becoming an increasingly important issue in domestic politics. During the 1950s, the number of West Indians entering Britain reached annual rates of thirty thousand. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent began to escalate from the 1960s onwards. The census of 1951 recorded seventy-four thousand New Commonwealth immigrants; ten years later the figure had increased to 336,000, climbing to 2.2 million in 1981. Immigration from the New Commonwealth was driven by a combination of push and pull factors. Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the construction of the Mangla Dam in Pakistan had displaced large numbers of people, many of whom had close links with Britain through the colonial connection.

In Britain, postwar reconstruction, declining birth rates and labour shortages resulted in the introduction of government schemes to encourage Commonwealth workers, especially from the West Indies, to seek employment in Britain. Jamaicans and Trinidadians were recruited directly by agents to fill vacancies in the British transport network and the newly created National Health Service. Private companies also recruited labour in India and Pakistan for factories and foundries in Britain. As more and more Caribbean and South Asian people settled in Britain, patterns of chain migration developed, in which pioneer migrants aided friends and relatives to settle. Despite the influx of immigrants after the war, however, internal migration within the British Isles continued to outpace overseas immigration.

 Above: West Indians in London in 1956. About 125,000 people from the Caribbean came to live in Britain

between 1948 and 1958, hoping to escape the poverty in their home islands.

The importance attached to the Commonwealth in the 1950s prevented the imposition of immigration controls on New Commonwealth citizens. However, by the 1960s, Britain’s retreat from the Commonwealth in favour of Europe and events such as the Notting Hill and Nottingham race riots in 1958 heralded a policy of restriction, which gradually whittled away at the right of New Commonwealth citizens to automatic British naturalisation. Although the 1962 Immigration Act was intended to reduce the inflow of blacks and Asians into Britain, it had the opposite effect: fearful of losing the right of free entry, as many immigrants came to Britain in the eighteen months before restrictions were introduced as had arrived over the previous five years.  

 

The census of 1961 showed the 1954 estimate of Asians living in Coventry to be an exaggeration. In fact, immigration from the new Commonwealth over the previous ten years had been a trickle rather than a stream, accounting for only 1.5 per cent of the population compared with 6.1 per cent from Ireland, including the North. The total number of immigrants from India and Pakistan was less than three thousand five hundred, and there were about another one thousand two hundred immigrants from the Caribbean as a whole. Between the census of 1961 and the mini-census of 1966, however, some major shifts in the pattern of migration into Coventry did take place. A substantial increase in immigration from Commonwealth countries, colonies and protectorates had taken place during the previous five years. The total number of those born in these territories stood at 11,340. The expansion needs to be kept in perspective, however. Nearly two-thirds of the local population were born in the West Midlands, and there were still nearly twice as many migrants from Ireland as from the Commonwealth and Colonies. Indeed, in 1966 only 3.5 per cent of Coventry’s population had been born outside Britain, compared with the national figure of five per cent. The Welsh stream had slowed down, increasing by only eight per cent in the previous fifteen years, and similar small increases were registered among migrants from Northern England. There were significant increases from Scotland, London and the South East, but only a very small increase from continental Europe.

The rate of migration into Coventry was undoubtedly slowing down by the mid-sixties. Between 1961 and 1971 the population rose by nearly six per cent compared with a rise of nineteen per cent between 1951 and 1961. The failure of Coventry’s manufacturing industry to maintain immediate post-war growth rates was providing fewer opportunities for migrant manual workers, while the completion of the city centre redevelopment programme and the large housing schemes reduced the number of itinerant building workers. Between 1951 and 1966 the local population increased by approximately four thousand every year, but in the following five years the net annual increase fell to about a thousand per annum. Moreover, the proportion of this increase attributable to migration had dramatically declined. Between 1951 and 1961, a Department of the Environment survey estimated that migration accounted for about forty-five per cent of population growth in the Coventry belt, whereas in the following five years it made up only eighteen per cent. In the following three years to 1969 the survey noted that the same belt had begun, marginally, to lose population through out-migration.

 

The 1968 Immigration Act was specifically targeted at restricting Kenyan Asians with British passports. The same year, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton and government minister, Enoch Powell made a speech in Birmingham, that contained a classical illusion that most people took to be a prophecy of violent racial war if black immigration continued:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ’the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.

 

The speech became known as The Rivers of Blood Speech, and formed the backdrop of the legislation. Although Powell was sacked from the Cabinet by the Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, more legislative action followed with the 1971 Immigration Act, which effectively restricted citizenship on racial grounds by enacting the Grandfather Clause, by which a Commonwealth citizen who could prove that one of his or her grandparents was born in the UK was entitled to immediate entry clearance. This operated to the disadvantage of Black and Asian applicants, while favouring citizens of the old Commonwealth, descendants of white settlers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Thus immigration control had moved away from primary immigration to restricting the entry of dependents, or secondary immigration.

 

The employment available to new immigrants in 1971 continued to be restricted to poorly paid, unskilled labour. In addition, since the mid-fifties, many West Indians faced prejudice in finding private rented accommodation and all new Commonwealth immigrants faced official discrimination in the residency requirements for council housing.

To overcome this prejudice, immigrants to Birmingham tended to congregate in poorer inner city areas or in the western suburbs along the boundary with Smethwick, Warley, West Bromwich (now Sandwell), and Dudley, where many of them also settled. As in Coventry, there was a small South Asian presence of about a hundred, in Birmingham before the war, and this had risen to about a thousand by the end of the war. These were mainly workers recruited by the Ministry of Labour to work in the munitions factories. Birmingham’s booming postwar economy attracted West Indian settlers from Jamaica, Barbados and St Kitts in the 1950s, followed by South Asians from Gujarat and the Punjab in India, and Bangladesh from the 1960s onwards.

 

By 1971, the South Asian and West Indian populations were equal in size and concentrated in the inner city wards and in north-west Birmingham, especially in Handsworth, Sandwell and Sparkbrook. Labour shortages had developed in Birmingham as a result of an overall movement towards more skilled and white-collar employment among the native population, which created vacancies in the poorly paid, less attractive, poorly paid , unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing, particularly in metal foundries and factories, and in the transport and health care sectors of the public services. These jobs were filled by newcomers from the new Commonwealth. In the 1970s, poor pay and working conditions forced some of these workers to resort to strike action. Hostility to Commonwealth immigrants was pronounced in some sections of the local white population. One manifestation of this was the establishment of the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, founded in the early 1960s by a group of Tory MPs.

In Coventry, despite these emerging signs of a stall in population growth by the end of the sixties, the authorities continued to view the city and its surrounds as a major area of demographic expansion. In October 1970 a Ministry of Housing representative predicted that the city’s population would rise by a third over the next twenty years. The economic boom under the Conservative Heath government and Anthony Barber’s Chancellorship, which greatly benefited the local motor industry, temporarily reversed the stall in population growth. By 1974, it was estimated that the local population was rising by two thousand per year, twice the rate of the late 1960s. By 1976, however, the youthfulness of the city’s population was being lost as the proportion of over sixty-five year-olds rose above the national average. By the mid-seventies Coventry was faced with a new challenge posed by changes in the age-structure of its population. The city was having to care for its increasing numbers of elderly citizens, a cost which soon became difficult to bear, given its declining economy. Coventry, with its large migrant element, began to lose population rapidly during this decline, from 335,238 to 310,216 between 1971 and 1981, a fall of 7.5 per cent. Nearly sixty thousand jobs were lost during the recession, and given the shallowness of the family structure of many Coventrians, this resulted in a sizeable proportion of its citizens being all too willing to seek their fortune elsewhere. For many others, given the widespread nature in the decline in manufacturing in the rest of the UK, there was simply nowhere to go.

 

As New Commonwealth immigrants began to become established in postwar Birmingham, community infrastructures, including places of worship, ethnic groceries, halal butchers and, most significantly, restaurants, began to develop. Birmingham in general became synonymous with the phenomenal rise of the ubiquitous curry house, and Sparkbrook in particular developed unrivalled Balti restaurants. These materially changed patterns of social life in the city among the native population. In addition to these obvious cultural contributions, the multilingual setting in which English exists today became more diverse in the sixties and seventies, especially due to immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. The largest of the community languages is Punjabi, with over half a million speakers, but there are also substantial communities of Gujarati speakers, as many as a third of a million, and up to a hundred thousand Bengali speakers.

 

Within the British West Indian community, Jamaican English, or the patois – as it is known – has had a special place as a token of identity. While there were complicated social pressures that frowned on Jamaican English in Jamaica, with parents complaining when their children talk local too much, in England it became almost obligatory to do so in London. One Jamaican schoolgirl who made the final passage to the Empire’s capital city with her parents in the seventies put it like this:

It’s rather weird ’cos when I was in Jamaica I wasn’t really allowed to speak it (Jamaican creole) in front of my parents. I found it difficult in Britain at first. When I went to school I wanted to be like the others in order not to stand out. So I tried speaking the patois as well… You get sort of a mixed reception. Some people say, ’You sound really nice, quite different.’ Other people say, ’You’re a foreigner, speak English. Don’t try to be like us, ’cos you’re not like us.’

 

Despite the mixed reception from her British West Indian friends, she persevered with the patois, and, as she put it after a year I lost my British accent, and was accepted. However, for many Caribbean visitors to Britain, the patois of Brixton and Notting Hill was a stylised form that was not, as they saw it, truly Jamaican, not least because British West Indians came from all parts of the Caribbean. Another West Indian schoolgirl, born in London and visiting Jamaica for the fist time, was teased for her patois. She was told that she didn’t sound right and that. The experience convinced her that…

… in London the Jamaicans have developed their own language in patois, sort of. ’Cos they make up their own words in London, in, like, Brixton. And then it just develops into patois as well.

Researchers found that there were already white children in predominantly black schools who had begun using the British West Indian patois in order to be accepted by the majority of their friends, who were black:

I was born in Brixton and I’ve been living here for seventeen years, and so I just picked it up from hanging around with my friends who are mainly Black people. And so I can relate to them by using it, because otherwise I’d feel an outcast… But when I’m with someone else who I don’t know I try to speak as fluent English as possible. It’s like I feel embarrassed about it (the patois), I feel like I’m degrading myself by using it.

 

The unconscious racism of such comments pointed to the predicament of the Black Britons. Not fully accepted, for all their rhetoric, by the established native population, they felt neither fully Caribbean nor fully British. This was the poignant outcome of what the British Black writer Caryl Phillips called The Final Passage. Phillips, who came to Britain as a baby in the late 1950s, was one of the first of his generation to grapple with the problem of finding a means of literary self-expression that was true to his experience:

The paradox of my situation is that where most immigrants have to learn a new language, Caribbean immigrants have to learn a new form of the same language. It induces linguistic schizophrenia – you have an identity crisis that mirrors the larger cultural confusion.

 

In his novel, The Final Passage, the narrative is in Standard English. But the speech of the characters is a rendering of nation language:

I don’t care what anyone tell you, going to England be good for it going to raise your mind. For a West Indian boy you just being there is an education, for you going see what England do for sheself… It’s a college for the West Indian.

 

The lesson of this college is, as Phillips puts it, that symptomatic of the colonial situation, the language has been divided as well. In the British Black community, and in the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, English – creole or standard – was the only available language.

 

The story of 1970s Britain, whether viewed from an economic, social or cultural perspective can be summed up by one word, albeit a long one – deindustrialisation. By 1977, if not before, its role as the world’s first and leading industrial nation was finally over, just as its time as an imperial power had effectively ended fifteen years earlier, as Dean Acheson had commented. It was another question as to whether the British people and politicians were prepared to accept these salient facts and move on. Employment in manufacturing reached a peak of nine million in 1966. It thereafter fell rapidly, reaching four million by 1994. Much of this loss was sustained in the older industries of Northwest England, but the bulk of it was spread across the newer industrial areas of the Midlands and Southeast (see map). As with the processes of industrialisation two centuries before, Britain led the way in what was to become a common experience of all the mature industrial nations. The so-called maturity thesis suggested that, as industry developed and became more technologically sophisticated, it required less labour. At the same time, rising living standards meant that more wealth was available, beyond what would normally be spent on basic necessities and consumer goods, giving rise to a growing demand for services such as travel, tourism and entertainment. By 1976, services had become the largest area of employment in all the regions of Britain.

Another problem faced by the manufacturing sector was the long-standing British taste for imported goods. Many observers noted that not only was the country failing to compete internationally, but British industry was also losing its cutting edge when competing with foreign imports in the domestic market. The problem of deindustrialisation therefore became entwined with the debate over Britain’s long decline as a trading nation, going back over a century. It was seen not only as an economic decline, but as a national failure, ownership of which in speeches and election propaganda, even in education, struck deep within the collective British cultural psyche.

There were three periods of severe recession, but here we are only concerned with the first of these, from 1973-75. British industry’s share of world trade fell dramatically during these years, and by 1975 it was only half what it had been in the 1950s, to just ten per cent. Nor could it maintain its hold on the domestic market. A particularly extreme example of this was the car industry: in 1965, with Austin minis selling like hot-cakes, only one car in twenty was imported, but by 1978 nearly half were. In addition, many of the staple industries of the nineteenth century, such as coal and shipbuilding, continued to decline as employers, surviving only, if at all, through nationalisation. In addition, many of the new industries of the 1930s, including the car industry, were seemingly in terminal decline by the 1970s, as we have seen in the case of Coventry. Therefore, deindustrialisation was no longer simply a problem of old Britain, it was also one for new England. It was also a problem for East Anglia, because although it was not so dependent on manufacturing, and services were growing, agriculture had also declined considerably (see map).

A great variety of explanations for the decline in British industrial competitiveness were put forward, and have continued to be debated since. None of these explanations has proved wholly satisfactory, however. One explanation suggests that there is a cultural obstacle, that the British have been conditioned to despise industry. This might be a relevant argument to apply for new England, with an industrial heritage going back only two or three generations, and to old England, the traditional rural areas, although even in these areas it would be something of a stereotype, but it would be difficult to apply to old Britain, with its generations of coal miners, shipbuilders, foundry and factory workers. During the depression years of the 1930s many of these workers, finding themselves unemployed, had, like the father of Norman Tebbitt (Margaret Thatcher’s Party Chairman in the late seventies) got on their bikes, or walked long distances, in their hundreds of thousands to find work in the new manufacturing areas. With no jobs to find anywhere in the seventies, these were pretty pointless words of advice. Pointless or not, Tebbitt’s speech was picked up by the popular Tory press and appeared in the banner On Your Bike headlines which have since become so emblematic of the Thatcher era. Unfortunately, the same press used them to put forward a related argument that the British were not sufficiently materialistic to work hard for the rewards associated with improved productivity. Complacency from generations of national success has also been blamed, as has the Welfare State’s cosseting of both the workforce and those out of work.

Alternatively, the government’s failure adequately to support research and development has been blamed, together with the exclusive cultural and educational backgrounds of Westminster politicians, government ministers and civil servants. This exclusivity, it is argued, left them ignorant of, and indifferent to, the needs of industry. Obstructionist trade unions were a favourite target of many, particularly after the coal dispute of 1971-72, which led to a series of power cuts throughout the country and a three-day working week. Management incompetence or short-termism, leading to an abdication of responsibility and the failure to restructure factories and industries, was seen as another cause and this, as seen in the case of Coventry, was an argument which had some local evidence to support it, although unions were sometimes equally short-sighted in some instances.

 

Britain’s falling competitiveness was making it difficult, throughout most of the seventies, for governments to maintain high employment by intervening in the economy. Since 1945 successive governments had followed the tenets of the economist J M Keynes, borrowing in order to create jobs if unemployment approached a figure deemed as unacceptable (in the 1970s this was about six hundred thousand). During the decade, this became increasingly difficult to do as Edward Heath’s government (1970-74) struggled to follow such policies in the face of a global recession associated with the tripling of oil prices in 1973, by OPEC (the international cartel of oil producers). This caused immediate recession and fuelled international inflation. Attacks on trade union power were becoming more popular owing to a growing perception that they had become too powerful and disruptive, holding the country to ransom. The Second Wilson Labour administration that followed faced a huge balance-of-payments crisis and the tumbling value of the pound and they soon found themselves under the control of the IMF (International Monetary Fund), which insisted on severe spending cuts. The contraction of manufacturing began to accelerate and inflation was also increasing alarmingly, reaching twenty-four per cent by 1975. It came to be seen as a more urgent problem than unemployment and there was a national and international move to the right and against high-taxing and high-spending governments. Demands were made that they should stop propping up lame duck industries with public money or by taking them, however temporarily, into public ownership.

 

Keynes’ argument had been that keeping workers in employment multiplied the effect through the economy as they spent part of their incomes on goods and services was shown to operate in the opposite direction through the effects of rising unemployment. However, the majority of people of working and voting age had no adult memory of their own of the 1930s, and radical politicians were able to exploit these demographics to their advantage to argue the case for monetarism with tight controls on public spending. In these circumstances, voters felt that spending public money on ailing industries was wasteful and inappropriate, especially as it raised their tax burden.

Printed Sources:

Barry Cunliffe, Asa Briggs, et.al. (eds.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

McCrum, Cran & MacNeil, (eds.) (1986), The Story of English. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Michael Clark & Peter Tweed (eds.) (1972), Portraits and Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

Safder Alladina & Viv Edwards (eds.) (1991), Multilingualism in the British Isles I: The Older Mother Tongues and Europe. Harlow: Longman.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (n.d.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press (University of Warwick).

Theo Baker (ed.) (1978) The Long March of Everyman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000. London: BBC Worldwide.

Richard Brown & Christopher Daniels (1982), Documents and Debates: Twentieth Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Derek Wilson (1997), A Short History of Suffolk. London: Batsford.

Chapter Two: A Social Revolution?

The main achievement of the first quarter century of Elizabeth II’s reign was to be found in the significant expansion of education across England and Wales, caused mainly by the post-war baby boom and the continuing rise in birth-rates throughout the fifties and sixties. This was largely the achievement of the Local Education Authorities, given their statutory responsibilities by the 1944 Butler Act. In Coventry, the Labour-controlled Authority used the selective system to establish most of its initial comprehensive schools and, of the schools that opened in the 1950s, only Binley Park began with a predominantly secondary modern intake. The first head of the Woodlands School told his audience of Rotarians in 1954, that the Comprehensive School is not revolutionary; all the things have been tried time and time again; we have only brought them together. In 1954, the Chairman of the Education Committee was reported as saying that Coventry had decided to build schools where a variety of courses could be provided rather than building a number of different schools. However, Coventry continued to provide secondary education in a variety of different schools alongside its comprehensives: secondary modern schools, two selective grammar schools for girls and a boarding school for boys. In addition, it continued to provide places for boys to attend the two Direct Grant Grammar (later independent) schools in the city.

At this point, it looked as if Labour would win the local elections in 1955 and be able to carry through this plan itself. However, the local elections of May 1955 were preceded by a month of high Cold War controversy. Objections had appeared in the local press as well as among Conservatives against Labour’s opposition to the civil defence plans of the Conservative Government. Councillor Hodgkinson had consistently argued the futility of implementing precautionary measures against a nuclear attack. His wartime experience of Coventry’s Blitz had convinced him that international fraternity was of far more value than local defence expenditure. However, prior to 1955 the issue had been somewhat marginal. The situation changed dramatically in 1955 when a party of delegates from Stalingrad were invited to Coventry by the City Council to repay a visit of the previous year to Russia by its members. The lavish hospitality provided for the guests, no doubt an attempt to match that received in Russia, was widely reported. An article in the Coventry Standard reported how,

Mellowed by an eight course dinner at which vodka and five different kinds of wine were served, the two hundred people who attended the banquet in St Mary’s Hall… to mark the end of the Stalingrad delegation, (listened as the leaders) spoke affectionately of each other’s countries.

The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had commanded the Soviet troops in Stalingrad during the war.

The visit, albeit during the thaw in the Cold War following Stalin’s death and the speech of Khrushchev (above) to the CPSU Congress, proved to be the moment the Conservatives had been waiting for. The Standard told it readers that the issue before them on polling day was simple, … the Kremlin versus Coventry. It’s Conservatism versus Communism. The Conservatives entered the local election with the slogan, Clear out the Reds. It was also pointed out that the local Labour Party’s view of Civil Defence and the H-bomb was the opposite of the national Party’s policy. The Standard reported that its own survey of the population revealed that Coventrians were equally divided on the Stalingrad issue, but the Conservatives were able to use it to claim that the local Labour Party was dominated by a few extremists who did not represent the views of ordinary Labour voters. Certainly, despite the special relationship with Stalingrad that had been developed through the popular wartime campaign for the opening of a second front, the Party leaders had seriously misjudged the mood of the local population. The city was highly prosperous and enjoying the fruits of Eden’s mixed economy. The Conservatives were enjoying rising fortunes nationally. Moreover, many local workers, particularly those in the aircraft industry, were dependent on the continuation of defence contracts for their livelihood. Five seats, both in the city centre and around the outskirts, including Lower Stoke and Walsgrave were lost by Labour. Most of these wards were relatively affluent areas dominated by skilled or semi-skilled factory workers. Although Sidney Stringer claimed that the campaign had been the most vile in all my years in politics and blamed the result on the local press, they really had only themselves to blame in taking their voters for granted and not guarding against a well-known enemy in the Tory press.

However, the Coventry Labour Party soon appeared to have learnt the lessons of their 1955 losses. Civic adventurism in bricks and mortar, either in the rebuilding of the centre, or the schools around the outskirts, were entirely acceptable, but taking a firm stance on foreign and defence matters was not what local government, even a municipal socialist one, was for. In future, although civic links were established, through the Blitz commemorations, with town and cities around the world, these were low-key in nature and, in the case of eastern Europe, were largely abandoned after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The message from Labour supporters in the local elections of May 1955 was underlined in the Parliamentary elections that took place the following month. Not only were Labour majorities reduced in Coventry but the eve of poll ritual march from the major factories to Pool Meadow in the city centre, to hear the addresses of the Labour MP’s, Crossman and Edelman, were poorly attended.

There was a cruel irony for Labour in the events of 1955 in that the main energy of the local Party since 1945 had been directed into the rebuilding of the central area of the City. By 1955 the precinct was just beginning to take shape and Coventry’s affluent workers had a shopping centre commensurate with their spending power. Yet the connections between the availability of consumer goods in bright new shops and the ideals of municipal socialism were difficult to make, even amongst the better informed members of the population. What mattered more was the availability of money to spend and Coventry’s capitalist owned industry was providing this in abundance. Perhaps more attention to housing, health, education and housing would have provided a more solid long-term political allegiance for Labour, particularly in the delivery of a top-class comprehensive secondary school system.

 

Above: Grammar School Boy, Harold Wilson, Labour leader and PM

However, the debate about grammar schools was not simply one which existed between the two main political parties, but also within the Labour Party, which had sought to expand grammar school education before the war as a means of social mobility, and a route out of poverty for many working-class children. Ellen Wilkinson, left-wing Education minister in the Attlee Government, had continued with this policy within a tripartite framework which would include multi-lateral schools. Even in the 1960s, it was not unusual for comprehensive schools to be compared with grammar schools by leading members of the Labour Party, including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, who referred to comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all, a strategy that was only partly designed to overcome the fears of the general public, especially parents, who resented the abolition of grammar schools. As products of grammar schools themselves, Labour’s local and national politicians well-understood the emotional attachment and sense of aspiration that many respectable working-class parents still had for these schools. However, hard choices about local priorities needed to be made, and these involved building schools which could serve children of all backgrounds and abilities, however they might choose to structure the curriculum.

A similar strategy was used by Alderman Callow, who chaired the Education Committee between 1958 and 1961, and who compared Coventry’s comprehensive schools with grammar schools when writing in the Coventry Evening Telegraph. He argued that comprehensive schools were both grammar schools and secondary modern schools. All eight of the City’s comprehensives provided the same courses in grammar schools but in addition offered all the courses available in secondary modern schools, having the additional advantage of the possibility of changing from one type of course to another within the same school as aptitudes developed. For Callow, therefore, the Coventry comprehensive was little more than one school that combined all the courses that were available in different schools under one roof. Six years later, Alderman Sidney Stringer, then Chairman of the Education Committee, stated that the Authority was bringing into existence many more schools that were equal to grammar schools, providing courses through which pupils could maximise their intellectual abilities.

 

The city still operated a selection examination at eleven plus, provided places at the Direct Grant schools for boys and maintained two grammar schools for girls, and allocated selective places within the comprehensives. The headmaster of Caludon Castle School commented in his speech day address in 1960 that a truly comprehensive shool hasn’t even been brought into existence… though Coventry has created comprehensive buildings it was still without a single comprehensive school because the schools’ incomplete intake prevented their becoming what their names, size and cost proclaimed them to be. In 1964 the head of Whitley Abbey School concluded that Coventry now needed to choose between returning to a grammar and secondary modern school system or go fully comprehensive. He thought that if the Authority continued to abolish secondary modern schools while retaining grammar schools it would result in a situation whereby the comprehensive schools would be little more than secondary moderns within a selective secondary system.   Therefore, in the early 1960s at least, grammar schools and selection were still at the heart of Coventry’s so-called comprehensive revolution.

In Britain as a whole, the paradox was also apparent. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 1950s, almost everything changed in British society, but only a little. No segment of society, no corner of the kingdom, no aspect of life remained untouched. So, part of the story of the fifties is the story of emergent patterns of change and a sense of discontinuity with the prewar past. However, there was also considerable continuity over the decade itself compared with the decades which were to follow. There was, as yet, no social revolution, unless we mean that the wheel of change came full cycle and returned to exactly where it had been at the beginning of the decade without taking society very far forward.

In October 1963 Harold Wilson, then Labour leader of the opposition, predicted that Britain would be forged in the white heat of the technological revolution. Certainly, living standards continued to rise, aided by the discovery in the North Sea of natural gas in 1965 and oil in 1969, and consumer goods became even more common. But there were also disquieting signs that Britain was approaching an as yet undefined crisis, cultural as well as financial. British economic growth rates did not match those of competitor states, and it was partly for this reason that Britain applied to join the European Economic Community, in 1961 and 1967, entry both times being vetoed by France. In addition, television programmes like Cathy Come Home made the public aware that poverty remained in the midst of Britain’s affluence. The Teddy Boys of the fifties were gradually replaced in the early sixties by Mods and Rockers, their social alienation being fuelled by the new vogue for high-rise flats in which they felt like caged animals. Britain was also becoming a more secular and iconoclastic, as well as a more materialistic society. Sexual intercourse began in 1963, wrote the Coventry-born poet Philip Larkin, perhaps with not a little exaggeration! The 1960s were certainly dramatic years in Britain: demographic trends, especially the increase in the proportion of teenagers in the population, coincided with economic affluence and ideological experimentation to reconfigure social mores to a revolutionary extent.

In 1964 a Labour government had again taken office, under Wilson, after thirteen years of Conservative rule. It promised economic and social modernisation. In an attempt to tackle the residual problem of poverty, public expenditure on social services was expanded considerably, resulting in some small degree of redistribution of income. It issued Circular 10/65 which requested that LEAs provide details of their plans for secondary education with a view to ending selection at the age of eleven in favour of introducing comprehensive schools. Coventry already had a working party in existence which was considering the pattern of secondary education across the city. It was the work of this group which resulted in a shift of emphasis within the LEA and brought about a change in mood on the Education Committee by September 1966. The proposal which emerged was to move towards a fully comprehensive system involving the abolition of the girls’ grammar schools and the disappearance of the remaining secondary moderns.

However, Labour’s ups and downs in the local elections had closely followed national trends since 1955 and in 1966 the Party’s rule in the City was again threatened, this time by the new austerity measures of the Labour Government under Harold Wilson in 1966. Economically, the real problems of the decade arose from the devaluation of the currency in November 1967, and the increase in industrial action. Employment in manufacturing nationally declined, until it accounted for less than a third of the workforce by 1973. Car production slumped and some Coventry firms declared redundancies, as their long boom appeared to be faltering. The incomes policy declared by the Wilson Government was hard to swallow for local engineering workers who had long enjoyed the benefits of free collective bargaining and wage differentials. Thus Coventry began to suffer for the first time since the early thirties with the twin problems of rising unemployment and stagnant wages. By way of contrast, employment in the service sector rose, so that by 1973, over half of all workers in the UK were employed in providing services.

 

Local idealism in Coventry had been toned down since 1955 and by the mid-sixties the Coventry Labour Party had become a party of civic administration. It had run out of new ideas and was failing to attract new, younger members. After a presentation to mark his twentieth year as an MP in December 1965, Richard Crossman wrote in his diary:

I have tended to get depressed about Coventry. … I am… aware of a decline in the Party and a decline in its quality on the council. Mostly it was old people who were there for the presentation; only a handful were young.

This generation gap was to present long-term problems for the local party as the lack of new blood in the sixties and seventies made the party staid and unadventurous. The local Conservatives, by contrast, were able to fight the 1967 local election as the party of opposition to central government as well as local government. They had developed policies on four key local issues. Top of this list was the protection of grammar schools, popular with working-class parents with high aspirations for their children. Secondly, and   predictably, they proposed to prune the rates. The third policy promised council tenants the right to buy their own homes, and the fourth was an especially attractive one on public transport. They proposed a major reduction in fares, which they claimed would produce an increase in passenger numbers and an improved service. They were ably led in the election by Gilbert Richards, and their offensive on national issues, coupled with a new brand of local Tory populism proved decisive.

Labour lost control of the council after thirty years of continuous rule. The average overall turnout across the city was 49 per cent, but in some key marginal wards, such as Wyken, over 60 per cent of the electorate voted. The Tories stayed in power for another three years. Apart from a small degree of financial retrenchment, however, there were few new policy initiatives. Labour’s secondary education proposals were put on hold when the Conservatives gained control of the council. Nevertheless, during their period in power, although the Tories kept their promise to retain the girls grammar schools and continued to purchase places at the direct grant grammar school for boys, the phasing out of the secondary moderns also continued, a further comprehensive was opened, and building programmes went ahead for further comprehensives. After the 1967 local elections, Labour was never again able to recapture the commanding majority it enjoyed in the immediate postwar period. Yet, on the whole, Coventry remained a distinctly Labour city, holding three of the four local Parliamentary seats.

 

Young people were most affected by the changes of the 1960s in Britain as a whole. Education gained new prominence in national government circles and student numbers soared. Higher education in Britain saw particularly rapid expansion over the whole quarter century. In 1938 there had been just twenty thousand students, but by 1962 this figure had increased by nearly a hundred thousand. However, the real increase in numbers came after this, as new plate-glass universities were formed and former colleges of advanced technology were given university status.

By 1972 there were forty-five universities, compared with just seventeen in 1945. By 1966, seven new universities had opened, including the University of East Anglia and the University of Warwick at Canley in Coventry. More importantly, students throughout the country were becoming increasingly radicalised as a growing hostility towards what they perceived as the political and social complacency of the older generation. They protested loudly against poor student accommodation, the unfairness of examination systems, restrictions on academic freedom, civil rights in Northern Ireland, dictatorial decision-making by academic hierarchies, support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Vietnam War. The latter of these issues placed immense strain on the special relationship between the US and British governments. Although protests were generally less violent than those in the US, due partly to more moderate policing in Britain, there were major protest all over the country in 1968 and some, like the one which took place in Grosvenor Square in London, involved police charges against hundreds of thousands of protesters.

                

Anti-establishment and anti-capitalist values spread much wider than the student population. The cultural revolution had a profound effect on sexual behaviour and on women’s rights. Sex before marriage became less taboo and there was a more general feeling of sexual freedom. The Women’s Liberation movement gained considerable ground, leading to the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The family also underwent important changes, many of which had begun in the 1950s with smaller family sizes, aided by changes in the laws on abortion, more widely available and effective contraception, including the pill from 1962, and increased domestic technology. In 1956 only seven per cent of household had had refrigerators; by 1971, this had increased to seventy per cent. By this time, sixty-four per cent of households also had a washing machine. In addition, the rapid and real growth in earnings of young manual workers, sustained over the past decade, had, by the early sixties, created a generation who had money to spend on leisure and luxury. The average British teenager was spending eight pounds a week on clothes, cosmetics, records and cigarettes. In London, their attitude was summed up by the fashion designer Mary Quant, whose shop, Bazaar, in King’s Road, provided clothes that allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.

 

If London was swinging, Liverpool was providing the beat. No band was more important than the Beatles, though there were others who helped to produce the distinctive sound which emerged from Merseyside. The fab four expressed both a vibrant, diverse youth culture and a keen commercial outlook, the latter largely due to their clever manager, Brian Epstein. They provided British teenagers with an identity that cut across the barriers of class, accent, nationality, region and religion. First known as The Quarrymen, they formed in July 1957 and by October 1962 they had hit the all-important top twenty singles’ chart with Love Me Do. In April 1963 From Me to You became their first number one hit single. Between 1957 and 1970 they performed live in eighty-four different venues in England, fifteen in Scotland, six in Wales and two in Ireland. In Dublin, teenagers sang She Loves You on the double-decker buses which had replaced the trams, children imitated them with tennis-raquets, using tree houses for stages in suburban Middle England, each pretending to be a different member of the group, and young mothers sang I Wanna Hold Your Hand as they crossed busy streets to the brand new precincts in Coventry when out shopping with their children.

Beatlemania swept the British Isles, and pretty soon they became a global phenomenon, playing all over Europe, as well as Australia, Japan and, of course, the USA. Meanwhile, a more working-class sub-culture emerged, particularly in London and the South-East, as rival gangs of Mods and Rockers followed hard rock bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones. In the summer of 1964, they rode their mopeds and motorbikes from the London suburbs down to Brighton, where they met up on the beach and staged fights with each other.

 

The BBC held a monopoly over the radio waves and, in a deal with the Musicians’ Union and record manufacturers, ensured that popular music was not given much air time. Anyone wanted to listen to the new artists and groups had to tune into Radio Luxemburg, but reception was often very poor. At Easter 1964, however, the first illegal pirate station, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship just off the Sussex coast. Within months, millions of young people were listening to the station and to others which sprang up, often, to begin with, from transistor radios hidden from prying parents under their bedclothes. Not only did these stations broadcast pop music, but they also warned that any attempt to silence them would constitute a direct attack on youth. Eventually, the BBC gave way and set up Radio One and, in 1967, the Marine Offences Act outlawed the pirate ships.

The event which marked the high point in popular culture for many in Britain, not just England, was the English national football team’s victory in the 1966. The tournament was held in England for the first time, and the team, built around Bobby Charlton, the key Manchester United midfielder who, along with Nobby Stiles, had survived the Munich air crash earlier in the decade, and Bobby Moore, the captain, from West Ham United, who also had two skilfull forwards in the team in Martin Peters and striker Geoff Hurst. Manager Alf Ramsay had been part of the team which had lost 6-3 to Hungary at Wembley thirteen years earlier, their first ever defeat to continental opposition at home, in the run up to the 1954 World Cup. On 3 August they faced the unlikely winners from that year, West Germany, now a much stronger team than the one that had squeaked past a magical but tiring Magyar team in that final. Although a colour cine film recording of the match was made and released later, people watched it live on TV in black and white. Only the hundred thousand at Wembley that day saw the red shirts of the England team raise the Jules Rimet trophy after the match. People’s memories of the details of the whole match vary somewhat, but most remember (in colour, of course) Geoff Hurst’s two extra-time goals and Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary because they have watched them replayed so many times. After the match, people dressed up in a bizarre, impromptu mixture of sixties fashion and patriotic bunting and came out to celebrate with family, friends and neighbours just as if it were the end of the war again, or at jubilee street party, copying Nobby’s knobbly-kneed skipping they had just seen on the box. After that, it was downhill all the way to Mexico in 1970 where England’s 3-2 defeat by Beckenbauer, Müller and company seemed to sum up the change in the fortunes and mood of the nation compared with those of a resurgent West Germany. At least, this time, we could watch the golden Brazilian team thrashing the Azurri in colour, usually at a middle-class friend’s house.

Despite the dramatic increase in wealth, coupled with the emergence of distinctive subcultures, technological advances and the dramatic shifts in popular culture, there was a general feeling of disillusionment with Labour’s policies nationally. In the 1970 General Election, the Conservative Party, under its new leader Edward Heath, was returned to power. When the Labour group regained the ascendancy in Coventry in 1970, they sought to press ahead with the plans for fully comprehensive secondary education they had made four years earlier. The Conservatives accepted the demand for comprehensive education but continued to argue that the rights of parents to have their children educated in a grammar school should be respected. Despite this dogged resistance, the Labour proposal was approved by the Council and subsequently by the government, ending the purchase of direct grant places, reorganising the girls’ grammar schools as comprehensives, and ending the eleven plus.

Edward Heath

In addition, the comprehensive schools would be reorganised as community colleges, each serving a defined neighbourhood. The first of these were opened in the academic year 1972-73, one near the city centre (Sidney Stringer) and the other on an estate on the outskirts of the city (Ernesford Grange). These schools were to have a dual function, operating as community centres which would open for up to fifty weeks of the year, six days a week, and for twelve to sixteen hours each day, with the provision of additional buildings, equipment and recreational facilities. However, this development was not fully completed until 1979, when the ninth of these colleges, Alderman Callow, was finally completed to its planned size. These purpose-built colleges took several years to complete due to the need to build by instalments at that time. However, the comprehensive schools within them were all opened by September 1975. The community element provided facilities covering a range of activities and organisations with playgroups, pensioners, parents and children coming together on one site. The concept of the community college was originally developed from Henry Morris’ idea of the village college, but applied to the urban and suburban context in Coventry. Robert Aitken, the Director of Education responsible for its application in the city, also argued that the community dimension would help to overcome the clash between home and school which existed on many working-class housing estates in the sixties and early seventies, developing pupils’ self-respect and utilising the skills of parents and teachers in tandem.

The principles and practices of the Sidney Stringer School and Community College were the best-documented of all the Coventry schools, both by a succession of headteachers and by its general teaching staff and through evaluation in the wider community. The school population was fifty per cent of Asian background, forty per cent European and ten per cent Caribbean. It opened in August 1972 with an intake of nineteen hundred pupils, a hundred and forty teaching and community staff and seventy non-teaching staff. Among the distinctive features of the school were its mode of government, its House system and its curriculum. Arfon Jones, its second head, claimed that two of the key aims of the school were to raise the consciousness of the people in the area and to develop a mode of democratic control. In these terms, the LEA decided to delegate authority and accountability to local people through the governing body, combining its statutory responsibilities with the strengths of a Community Association. Under this system, the Association elected a Council, some of whose members represented it on the Governing Body, which then involved pupils, parents, staff, local residents and LEA representatives in equal numbers. Besides determining the policy of the school and college, the governors had responsibility for the plant, finance and community development. Although there were some gaps between the scheme and the practical realities of managing the facilities, it did represent a bold attempt to make the school government more broadly and genuinely representative of an albeit loosely defined local community.

 

Contrary to popular mythology about Coventry, comprehensive education was only fully established in the 1970s; first in the voluntary controlled sector, when the Catholic schools became fully comprehensive in 1970 and subsequently in 1975 when no further selective places were available for girls and the Authority no longer purchased places outside the maintained sector for boys. The development of comprehensive education was therefore as slow in Coventry as it was in many other LEAs, including Birmingham. Coventry was still operating secondary school selection well into the 1970s, concerned to offer grammar school courses in many of its schools. By that time, the school-leaving age was raised from fifteen to sixteen in 1973. By 1975 the number of comprehensives in Coventry had increased to twenty-one, five of them Church controlled, with an additional LEA boarding school. In total, the number of enrolled pupils stood at 28,538, compared with 20,385 in 1960.

From the early 1950s to the mid 1970s was a long period of economic expansion and demographic growth which helped to fuel educational development in England in general and Coventry in particular. Over these decades the city’s Director’s of Education, the LEA and the schools themselves pioneered different forms of comprehensive schooling and education, so much so that, in the educational imagination, Coventry became synonymous with educational innovation. Yet the evidence suggests that while Coventry was among the first authorities to build schools with the purpose of comprehensive secondary education in view, this was, for the most part, the result of practical imperatives following the war. In common with many other authorities, it then struggled with the process of developing the principles of comprehensive education. Whether, by 1977, a truly comprehensive system of education had been achieved was open to question, at a time when primary school rolls had begun to fall and practical priorities had to be confronted once more. With the benefit of hindsight, through subsequent decades of economic and industrial decline, it still is open to question.

Chapter One (cont.): Never Had it so Good?

 

In the Home Counties of Southeast England, Macmillan’s Bedford speech in 1957 may have rung true, but it soon began to have a hollow ring to it, as job insecurity by the mid-sixties was replaced by the return of serious structural unemployment by the mid-seventies. Real wages grew, on average, by fifty per cent between 1951 and 1964. In Coventry, this was partly due to the strength of shop floor bargaining in the motor industry. Until the early 1960s Coventry stood in a different league of union organisation to the biggest motor manufacturers – Morris, Austin, Ford and Vauxhall. The district conditions of Coventry clearly provided a favourable environment for union development, especially the pressing demand for labour, the drive for high output and the relatively slack cost constraints on products before the 1960s. At Ford, Vauxhall and Morris’, the managements determinedly set themselves to restrict the role of unions with considerable success: the case of Herbert’s shows that such dogged resistance was probably not out of the question in Coventry either. However, at Standard management opted positively to promote certain aspects of union organisation in pursuit of wider business goals, while Rootes and Jaguar both found it convenient to abdicate large areas of traditional managerial control and allow the piecework system to act as a rough proxy for works management. In Luton, Cowley and Dagenham, wartime union development was very patchy and the unions faced a long, hard uphill slog in the postwar years before they could achieve critical mass.

 

Above: The Standard Strike of 1956 as seen by the Coventry Evening Telegraph of 30 April.

Wages were undoubtedly higher in Coventry motor firms than they were elsewhere during the 1950s and 60s. Yet the caricature of the greedy Coventry car worker out for all he could get, who worked half as hard as his counterpart in Cowley and yet was more prone to strike, is at best misleading. It may have become useful to the local and national press and politicians, particularly as a way of explaining the decline of engineering in the late seventies, but it does not match the evidence of what was actually happening on the shop-floors in the period of relative prosperity which preceded it. High wages certainly made motor firms magnets of attraction for semi-skilled workers, but against a background of general shortages of engineering labour there was still intensive competition to get these jobs. They were certainly not accessible to allcomers. There were already very definite bars to the entry of women and Indian workers. Those who got into these firms then climbed a ladder of jobs, moving from firm to firm and playing the paid-up union card to secure higher-paid work. On the other hand there were periodic intakes of green labour cutting across this. For example, in 1971 there was a large-scale intake at Ryton which coincided with a slump in the nearby Hinckley hosiery trade. The result was an influx of woollybacks and knickerstitchers into the plant, though there appears to have been little difficulty in their absorption into the industrial relations traditions of the plant. Previous to this, even in the mid-sixties and even in a firm like Jaguar, half the labour force had less than five years service. The fact that there was a loss of managerial control on the shop-floor, does not mean that the converse was true.

The shop steward system under piecework was fraught with inequity, lack of security, constant haggling and divisiveness. The results of sectional, fragmented bargaining were only partly satisfactory for stewards who recognised the bargaining advantages of piecework but were also critical of the system as dog-eat-dog and in the sometimes vicious way it both drove and divided the workforce. One result of the prolonged piecework system was the chaotic and widespread use of differentials with neither a managerial nor a trade union rationality behind them. The unions were able to disrupt the differentials imposed by the management, but could not impose their own. This meant that workers at the same skill grade had widely differing earnings within the same plant as well as the same job receiving different ratings within different plants. While differentials in the American automobile industry had become highly compressed by the 1960s, they remained very wide in the British motor industry. Moreover there was no incentive or natural tendency within the piecework system to change this, and shop stewards were often bargaining to maintain differentials even among semi-skilled workers. Perhaps because the system had become so complex and confused, workers on individual piecework were ready to tolerate surprisingly wide differentials between similar jobs. In fact, stewards had more influence over the internal plant hierarchy of wages than over the absolute levels of earnings of the workforce as a whole. Neither were the stewards very effective in mitigating job insecurity and instability of earnings, except perhaps at the Standard works.

So, exactly how effective was shop floor bargaining in raising earnings and what impact did it have on the economic performance of the firms concerned? Stewards were generally unable to develop broader strategic goals. Much of their bargaining advantage in the shops derived from astute manipulation of custom and practice, but this should not be confused with unilateral regulation of conditions in the workshops. There is a general correspondence between high wages and high levels of shop-floor bargaining, but there is an unresolved question of cause and effect. Standard was the best organised firm in Coventry when it offered the highest wages during its expansion in the late forties and early fifties, but it was still the best organised when its wages fell back towards the district average under the impact of economic decline. Nor did the onset of powerful shop floor bargaining in the motor inustry nationally result in carworkers outstripping the wages of workers in other manufacturing industries.

Workers in Ford, Morris, Austin and Vauxhall were poorly organised until the late 1950s, whereas in Coventry the trades unions had consolidated their position a decade earlier. However, the extension of union organisation to Cowley, Dagenham and Luton plants did not lead to a divergence of earnings in the motor industry compared with other trades. However, whereas earnings in motors were twenty-one per cent higher than the national industrial average in the period 1949-59, rising to only twenty-four per cent between 1959 and 1963, falling back to sixteen per cent from 1964 to 1968, and recovering only slightly to nineteen per cent in 1968-73. Given that motor industry productivity was above average and that union density was growing in the period 1949-63, more quickly than in the manufacturing sector as a whole, this could be an indicator that shop floor bargaining did not have a significant comparative effect on wages. Even in the mid-sixties, the rise in average hourly earnings in motors (19.2%) was below that for engineering as a whole (20%), and marginally below that for chemicals (19.7%). The case that shop-floor bargaining was a major determinant of motor industry wage levels is a weak one.

Certainly, at least on the surface of early sixties’ society, many British people were at last able to experience the affluence that they felt was their due. By 1963, three out of every four households had a vacuum cleaner, one in three had a fridge, and one in five a washing machine. BBC TV had begun in 1936, though it had been suspended during the war. Now it went from strength to strength. In 1955, commercial television began, and by 1959 new transmitters allowed over ninety per cent of the population to receive pictures, by which time three-quarters of the population had a television set, increasing to four-fifths by 1963. In 1962, J. B. Priestley took a critical look at the state of the new medium:

Television here suffers from a false importance… Outside light entertainment, where rewarding reputations can be made, it is nothing as important as programme controllers and producers imagine it to be. One enquiry had already proved that its political influence has been enormously exaggerated. It can make reputations very quickly, but they are not solid reputations, they are easy-come-easy go… The sheer quantity of attention that television receives is of course formidable, but the quality of that attention is dubious. If it were sharper and more demanding, half the stuff – particularly all those empty interviews – would never be tolerated. Most of us – enjoying a smoke after dinner, are content to stare at programmes we would never leave the house and go fifty yards to see. We watch and listen in an idle dream, passing the time digestion takes. No urgency is communicated. We could smile or yawn at scenes of torture or murder. Very little appearing on that tiny screen in the living-room seems quite real, even less of it excitingly significant. There may be something we all watch till our eyes ache – I for one drop all work when Test Matches are being televised – but out of programmes designed to pass everybody’s time painlessly we cannot expect much that will be either urgent or delightful. Really good television, I believe, will begin when we have to pay for something, on the night, to see it. We shall give it a different kind of attention, and demand value for money.

 

Some of Priestey’s criticisms began to be addressed by programmers and programme-makers when, in 1964, BBC2 started, providing more high-brow programmes, and in 1969 colour sets were introduced. Watching television soon became the most popular leisure activity in the country, while cinema audiences declined from twenty-seven million in 1950 to under four million in 1970. For those who preferred more physically healthy activities, ten national parks had been designated between 1951 and 1957, protected fom industrial and commercial development.

 

Despite these outward signs of affluence, there were also warning signs of serious weaknesses in the economy as a whole, but especially in manufacturing industries. These were largely ignored by both Conservative and Labour governments until it was too late. By the mid-sixties there were growing government pressures for engineering employers to put their houses in order and to develop more orderly systems of collective bargaining. The Labour Government which was returned in 1964, led by Harold Wilson, was particularly concerned over the inflationary risks of payment by results. However, even the Coventry District Engineering Employers Association (CDEEA) recognised in 1968 that there were advantages in the piecework systems as they allowed management to have a flexible wage system which could readily and unobtrusively be manipulated in order to improve wage levels to attract or retain labour. They also recognised, however, that it was difficult to manipulate them in a controlled fashion. This was mainly due to the fluctuating increases in output and productivity which persisted in the motor industry, partly due to fluctuating and shifting demands, particularly in Coventry’s luxury car markets.

Certainly, the unions’ near obsessive focus on sectional earnings prevented progress on wider issues such as status, overtime pay, holidays, sick pay, pensions and fringe benefits, in other words on longer-term security for the unionised workforce. In addition, the Coventry Tool Room Agreement of 1941, which was introduced to control poaching by employers of essential skilled workers under wartime conditions, or playing the market by the workers themselves, was still operating throughout the factories, holding down the wages of skilled workers by comparison with the semi-skilled pieceworkers. Toolmakers were simply paid the average wage in each factory, but did not have the same opportunity for additional payments. However, both unions and management found the Toolroom rate useful in having a publicly agreed average wage as a pace-setter and bargaining tool for pieceworkers, averting attention away from peak earnings. When the CDEEA considered terminating the agreement in 1965, the argument that it was a stabilising element and a symptom rather than a cause of wage drift led to its retention by the employers, until it was finally scrapped in 1972, when British Leyland threatened to withdraw from the Federation otherwise. It was then, belatedly accepted that its continuation would hamper the wider restructuring of payment systems in the District and there was strong pressure from the Department of Employment and Productivity to get rid of it as an anti-inflationary measure.

The widespread working of weak piecework systems in Coventry was illogical, inelegant and erratic, leading to what the Employers’ Association itself called a wider derogation of managerial control. For over twenty-five years, management paid almost no attention to the need to control the labour process, to the integration of production engineering and workshop organisation, to the flow and scheduling of production in the workshops and to front-line supervision. The role of the foreman had shrunk in status, not least because he was often paid less than the men he supervised. Management had come to believe that it was not worth wasting resources on training shop-floor supervisors. Ford, who had always operated their day-work system had one supervisor for every twenty workers, while at Rootes it was 1:50 and in the mid-sixties the Coventry average was 1:45. However, by the late sixties employers had come to realise that the haphazard operation of loosely controlled incentives were a poor substitute for a properly managed workplace. However, since they had abdicated their roles for so long, they did not realise the range of managerial tasks that they would have to face in replacing piecework. Changing the workplace culture from one of working by incentive to one of coercive practice based on established and maintained norms required specialist personnel, knowledge and training techniques to be put in place. They lacked these at the outset, and it took another decade for them to acquire them, by which time the Coventry motor and engineering industries had already been decimated in terms of employment and seemed to be on a downward spiral of almost terminal decline.

 

Predictably, in the short-term, the Coventry car companies found themselves unable to get continued sustained effort without incentives. Stewards ceased to attempt to correct production problems as they occurred, or to chase up materials in short supply, and inferior work was allowed to go down the lines since this no longer had any impact on earnings. However, instead of the focus of bargaining being exclusively on pay, it did shift towards effort, conditions and security of earnings. Extra labour was now welcomed on the sections because it eased labour without reducing earnings. Nevertheless, it was only after several years that management began to adapt to the new tasks of maintaining the flow of materials and the continuity and quality of production. Employers also began to integrate their new payments systems with the restructuring of shop-floor organisation and managerial systems and to follow through on quality control.

The elimination of piecework curbed wide variations in wages, but also opened up new patterns of comparability bargaining. For instance, workers at Chrysler’s Linwood plant became to demand the same wage levels as existed at the Ryton plant near Coventry. At the same time, pay differentials became an intense focus of conflict and disputes, especially among craft unions representing skilled workers like the toolmakers, who now re-emerged on the bargaining scene following the abolition of the CTA. In the early seventies these groups were involved in a string of strikes that were disproportionately costly to the numbers involved as they sought to re-establish themselves in the wage tables and achieve status and bargaining rights. The operation of the Labour Government’s wage restraint policy also made it difficult to resolve conflicts, settle disputes and develop more rational pay structures. Nonetheless, the dominance of semi-skilled and unskilled production workers was eroded, partly by the redistributive effects of government incomes policies and equal pay legislation which brought significant catching up by low-paid workers in society as a whole. At the same time, after 1975, vigorous workplace bargaining by skilled workers finally successfully re-established skill differentials and took them to the top of the wages tree.

Even in the recession-hit Coventry car industry of the mid-to-late 1970s, most employers preferred to enhance the authority of senior shop-stewards and convenors in continuingly close bargaining relationships with management, dealing with more hierarchical and centralised shop-steward organisations rather than seeking to abolish them. As a result the scope of bargaining widened, albeit at the cost of more direct shop-floor democracy. This, together with the general atmosphere of economic and political crisis, has helped to channel and control sectional militancy. However, throughout the period from 1952 to 1972, sectional bargaining was always more cooperative and less confrontational than was often portrayed in the media, both at the time and in the period of crises which followed. However, such bargaining techniques were primarily opportunistic, weak on co-ordination and longer-term strategy, and paid little attention to many broader aspects of workers’ lives. It also depended, in most cases, on a weakness of management which could not persist if the industry was to survive in the competitive export market of the last quarter of the century.

 

Two parties shared between them the government of Britain in the thirty years that followed the second world war. Both had as a prime aim the restoration and expansion of the British economy by restoring and expanding industry and exports. Perhaps we should discount the period of the post-war Labour governments of 1945-51, given the handicaps it faced both in terms of wartime debts and continuing foreign and imperial obligations. Nevertheless, by 1977 both parties had had multiple opportunities in national government to create the conditions for growth in Britain. Both failed, and by the end of the seventies the downward spiral of the British economy was accelerating out of control. The country seemed to be in terminal economic and social decline. In the debate about the conduct of public affairs throughout these years, the focus was on what the government of the day was doing, and on whether what it was doing was right or wrong for the economy. This shows how government policy and action had become central to the management and direction of the economy, even though many industrialists deplored or sought to evade this development.

P. Calvocoressi, writing at the end of this period and just before the accession of Margaret Thatcher, and taking a long view of the British economy to 1975, saw the failure of successive governments as the result of their unwillingness to dismantle the mixed economy of private and public sectors:

Every government acted within the established system. None tried radically to change it. This system was and remained a capitalist system. Labour governments made significant changes in emphasis with the system by acts of nationalisation which diminished the area of private capitalism and extended the public sector, but there had long been these two sectors and both were and remained capitalist in structure and operation. The mixed economy… was mixed in different proportions… All governments accepted an obligation to contribute positively to the prosperity of both sectors… governments provided money or facilitated credit, and with this money private and nationalised businesses would invest, modernise and grow. At the same time… governments of both colours also saw it as part of their job to intervene in economic affairs to keep wages in check, whether by bargaining with the unions or by subsidising the cost of living by law… Government intervention of this nature was inflationary… A modern democratic capitalist economy is based on inflation, and in these years the wherewithal for recovery and expansion was provided to a significant degree by government…

 

Failures in economic policy led to criticism not only of the policies of successive governments, but also of the role of Government in the economy. Whilst there had been arguments within governments over the right means to stimulate the mixed capitalist economy, no-one had sought to deny that this was governments ought to be doing. Still less had they questioned the existence of the mixed economy. However, the failure of this economy to expand led to serious questions about its viability. In the sixties, before Bogdanor and Skidelsky wrote The Age of Affluence in 1970, it was usual to look back at the fifties as an age of prosperity and achievement. This was certainly the verdict of the electorate in 1959 who returned a Conservative Government to power for a third term in succession, with a handsome majority. However, by the seventies it was being reflected on by the above historians as:

… an age of illusion, of missed opportunities, with Macmillan as the magician whose wonderful act kept us too long distanced from reality… what has altered the verdict on the 1950s has been the experience of the troubles of the 1960s, which stem in part at least from the neglect of the earlier decade. Already by 1964 the appeal of the slogan ’Thirteen Wasted Years’ was strong enough to give Labour a tiny minority; in the years following it has been confirmed almost as the conventional wisdom… perhaps the period of Conservative rule will be looked upon as the period of quiet before the storm, rather like the Edwardian age which in many ways it resembles. In that case its tranquility will come to be valued more highly than its omissions.

 

In his book The Affluent Society (1958), J K Galbraith had intended to sketch an outline of a developed society which had in large part solved the problem of production and could therefore concentrate its energies on other things, including the more even and fairer distribution of the wealth it created. The class struggle in such a society would be obselete and so also the ideologies which propped it up. Politics would no longer be about general choices but about incremental changes. Uncritical transference of Galbraith’s thesis into the British context helped obscure the fact that Britain had not, in fact, solved its production problems. While the optimism of the early 1950s was understandable, the production boom at that time was largely built on random, temporary circumstances. From 1955, the British was bedevilled by a series of sterling crises which gradually forced the politicians to pay attention to difficult structural problems they wished to avoid. From the early seventies onwards it became possible to see that the years 1952-64 were neither a period of continuous and uninterrupted expansion as the Conservatives pretended, nor the Thirteen Wasted Years of Labour propaganda.

As the Kennedy’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, commented in 1962, Britain had lost its empire and now needed to find its role. Macmillan was slow to see that that role was not to be found in its special relationship with the United States, which, without the Empire, was bound to become more and more unequal, if there was ever any real equity in it, but in relation to the changes occuring within Europe. In economics, as in foreign policy, consensus reigned supreme, signifying the common political ground over the mixed economy and the Welfare State. It humanised and civilised the adversarial political system in Britain and ensured its emancipation from the ghosts of the past; unfortunately, as Bogdanor and Skidelsky pointed out, it also imposed a moratorium on the raising of new and vital issues, because it was based on traditional assumptions about Britain’s political and economic role in the world. The need to make real political, maco-economic choices was submerged under a generalised commitment to the objective of economic growth, without an effective strategy with which to bring this about. The Conservatives became convinced that…

… capitalism could provide affluence for the working class while at the same time preserving the gains of the well-to-do… Consensus was the natural product of a lessening class antagonism, which in turn reflected a seeming trend towards embourgeoisement… Indeed, one of the striking characteristics of the 1950s was the absence of any major intellectual challenge to the dominant political assumptions…

 

Certainly, there was no-one of George Orwell’s stature to provide such a challenge, following his death in 1950. Writing in the year after Calvocoressi, on the cusp of the Thatcher era, Sked and Cook agreed that, on the surface, the thirteen years of Tory rule appear to have been successful ones. Great Britain still behaved as a world power internationally, while at home people experienced the affluent society and were told that they had never had it so good. They felt that they had earned the right to take things easy for a while and to take full advantage of Mr Macmillan’s hire-purchase society. In reality, as far as fiscal and economic policy was concerned, the Tories did little with their long period in power. Cushioned by the turn in the terms and balance of trade, largely the achievement of, if anyone, Stafford Cripps in the previous Labour government, they abolished rationing, reduced taxes and manipulated budgets, but they gave little impression of knowing how the economy really worked. Scant attention was paid to sluggish growth or to the long-term challenge posed by the resurgent economies of West Germany and Japan. Industrial relations were treated with an us and them managerial attitude and any thought given to the inflationary problems created by prosperity was little and late. Most of the time their energy was devoted, as in the Suez Crisis of 1956, to maintaining Britain as a world power whatever the cost to the economy. Sked and Cook concluded that:

Tory economic complacency ensured that the necessary economic growth would never be generated. Not enough money was channelled into key industries; stop-go policies undermined the confidence of industry to invest in the long-term; too much money was allowed to be exported abroad; and too much money was spent on defence… With the economic crises of the early 1960s… it began to be apparent that Tory affluence would soon come to and end…

 

It may have been the case that in 1957 a large slice of British society had indeed never had it so good. But this was hardly due to Conservative fiscal and economic policy, and may even be said to have happened in spite of it. Certainly, those policies, together with its continuing expenditure on defence and foreign policy in the face of economic and political realities, combined to ensure that, after 1963-4, the British people would never have it so good again.

Introduction: A New Elizabethan Age?

The closer the social historian gets to his own times, the harder it is for him to be sure he has hold of what is essential about his period: the more difficult it is to separate the rich tapestry of social life which appears on the surface of the woven fabric from its underlying patterns. This is the problem of perspective which the historian has to try to overcome in his craft.The period from 1952 to 1977 was one of rapid social change, and one in which the pace and direction of social change itself became a matter of concern in social discourse. The discussion was about whether the surface evidence of change really added up to a social revolution for ordinary people. That argument is still unresolved: more than sixty years later we are still living out its contradictory legacy. Many witnesses to the period are still alive, and each with their own differing memories, impressions and interpretations of the period.

 

One of the most striking features of the period is the growth and importance of the mass media of communication. Television on a mass scale decisively intervened in English Social life, supplementing and then overtaking the already complex networks of communication – radio, newspapers, mass publishing – which are part and parcel of the advanced industrial civilization. These new media also serve to document the social life of the period for the historian. Commentaries, personal testimonies and documentary material which for perviously the historian would have to call from printed sources, dusty archives or directly from eye-witnesses, are now to be found, more comprehensively, in primary form, in radio and television archives, many of which are now available online via the internet, together with more accessible written sources. In the oral and film sources are preserved the living voices and speech patterns of ordinary people, talking about their experiences of, and responses to, the conditions of their lives. They also give us a sense of how the new means of communication fundamentally reshaped our sense of what our collective social experience is like. However, extracts from archive material are not always more useful as printed sources, nor are they more reliable. They tend to be briefer, as well as having been edited for specific purposes. They have been inserted into a programme format, dictated by the special interest of a producer. The witnesses do not have the opportunity to think their way around a topic in the way in which the diarist or letter-writer of a previous period did. There is also an over-abundance of material related to official public events. Yet it is in these voices that we can best grasp the impact of historical forces on the lives of ordinary men and women.

The Windsor Family Tree following the death of George V

 

People began to speak of a new Elizabethan age following the death of George VI and the accession of his daughter in 1952, leading to the great national event of the coronation in the summer of 1953. Many bought their first television sets in order to watch the event live, while the Establishment took up their usual positions at Westminster Abbey. Sir Henry Chips Channon occupied almost the same seat as the one he had at the previous Coronation. He wrote the following account in his diary:

…Finally came the magic of the Queen’s arrival: she was calm and confident and even charming, and looked touching and quite perfect, while Prince Philip was like a medieval knight – the Service, Anointing, Crowning, Communion were endless, yet the scene was so splendid, so breath-taking in the solemn splendour that it passed in a flash. The homage was impressive… The Great Officers of State swished their robes with dignity… Privy Councillors in their uniforms, men in levee dress, the little Queen at one moment simply dressed in a sort of shift, and then later resplendent: the pretty pages; the supreme movements… the nodding, chatting, gossiping Duchesses; the swan-like movements when they simultaneously placed their coronets on their heads… it was all finer, and better organised than the last time, although the Archbishop’s voice was not as sonorous as that of the wicked old Lang.. What a day for England, and the traditional forces of the world. Shall we ever see the like again? I have been present at two Coronations and now shall never see another. Will my Paul be an old man at that of King Charles III?

 

Two other events caught the popular imagination of Britain in 1953/54. They were both firsts for the British Empire. The news of the first successful Ascent of Everest by the New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, came through on the day of the Coronation. The following spring, the country was thrilled again by Roger Bannister’s stunning running of the first four-minute mile at the Iffley Road Athletics Stadium in Oxford, on 6 May 1954. Dr. Bannister’s own account of the race, written two years later, reads as follows:

There was complete silence on the ground… a false start… The gun fired a second time… Brasher went into the lead and I slipped in effortlessly behind him, feeling tremendously full of running. My legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, as if propelled by some unknown force. We seemed to be going slowly! Impatiently, I shouted ’Faster!’ But Brasher kept his head and did not change the pace. I went on worrying until I heard the first lap time, 57.5 secs …he had made success possible… I barely noticed the half-mile, passed in 1 min. 58 secs, nor when, round the next bend, Chataway went into the lead. At three-quarters of a mile the effort was still barely perceptible; the time was 3 min. 0.7 sec., and by now the crowd were roaring. Somehow I had to run that last lap in 59 seconds. Chataway led round the next bend and then I pounced past him at the beginning of the back straight, three hundred yards from the finish. I had a moment of mixed joy and anguish, when my mind took over. It… drew my body compellingly forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim… The only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality – extinction perhaps.

 

I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride… The noise in my ears was that of the faithful Oxford crowd. Their hope and encouragement gave me greater strength. I had now turned the last bend and there was only fifty yards more… The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace, after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed… I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him. My effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me. It was only then that the pain overtook me… I was too close to have failed… The stopwatches held the answer. The announcement came – ’result of one mile… 3 minutes…’ the rest lost in the roar of excitement…

 

The stop-watches were stopped at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. As Bannister, Brasher, and Chataway took their lap of honour, they knew that they would share a permanent place in sporting history. They were the first athletes to record a mile in under four minutes. Since then the record has been broken several times, but under much better conditions underfoot and in the air. In those conditions, Bannister could not have achieved the time without his fellow-athletes. There was no huge stadium clock to glance up at, only the lap times shouted by the officials from the trackside. It was therefore crucial to get the pace-setting exactly right. In any event, no matter how many seconds are shaved off the four minutes by men, and perhaps women, in the future, Bannister’s run will always remain, as his the title of his 1955 memoir states, The First Four Minutes. And, of course, the cameras were present to record the event on film.

 

Chapter One: Never had it so Good?

Following their victory over Labour in the 1951 General Election, it took the Conservatives longer to remove rationing than they had hoped. The new Tory government continued the consensus policies of the Labour governments and built on their achievements. There was continuing substantial economic growth, with industrial production rising by a third in the decade after 1951. By sacrificing a certain degree of quality, the government was able to build three hundred thousand new houses a year. They also had new towns built, though market forces were allowed to override the regional policy of the previous government, with its emphasis on special development areas. Most of the country’s electrical power was produced by coal-fired stations, but the atomic bomb had been successfully tested in 1952, leading to the setting up of a reactor at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) to produce the necessary plutonium. Despite a major fire there in 1957, producing widespread contamination, a series of Magnox power stations was built throughout the country. A lonely stretch of coast near Leiston in Suffolk became the site of Britain’s second nuclear power station, built in the early 1960s. In 1966 power began surging out from the grey, cuboid plant into the national grid. By the mid-seventies Sizewell’s five hundred and eighty thousand kilowatts were going a long way towards meeting the electricity needs of eastern England.

Sizewell Nuclear Power Station (2014)

The period from 1952 to 1977 bridges the two worlds of wartime Britain and Britain in Europe, Britain under inflation. The mid to late fifties was the period of affluence. Slowly at first, and then with gathering speed, Britain entered a period of rapid change and growing prosperity, when a great deal of money flowed into the purchase of the newly available consumer goods. Prosperity is underpinned by the continuing revolution in Welfare and by full employment. The rebuilding and reconstruction of the urban and suburban environment, made necessary by the large-scale bombing and the massive social neglect of the interwar period, was in full sway. New kinds of industry, based largely on the revolution in electronic, came into being alongside the old, without displacing them. There was a shift in the patterns of skills, and of work, and in the composition of the labour force, with more workers involved in clerical, highly skilled or service occupations. At the same time, more workers were pushed down into the unskilled ranks of mass production. They became more mobile again, pulled to where the jobs were. The pattern of regional decline in the older industrial areas and of rapid, unorganised growth in the new areas began to re-emerge. In some areas and industries, the long-term pattern of continuity from one generation to the next persisted, while in other, newer areas, this continuity was broken. New housing schemes, including estates and high-rise blocks of flats, plus the new town experiments, undermined the traditional urban working-class environments, robbing them of their intrinsic collective identities. The extended kinship network of the traditional prewar working-class neighbourhoods and communities was replaced by the nuclear family life on the new estates. Rehousing, property speculation, the rise of the consumer society, market forces, urban planning and legislation, all play their role in a further regeneration of working-class culture. In 1972, Phil Cohen, a University of Birmingham sociologist, described these processes in a Working Paper:

The first effect of the high density, high-rise schemes was to destroy the function of the street, the local pub, the corner shop… Instead there was only the privatised space of the family unit, stacked one on top of another, in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space which surrounded it, and which lacked any of the informal social controls generated by the neighbourhood. The streets which serviced the new estates became thoroughfares, their users ’pedestrians’, and by analogy so many bits of human traffic… The people who had to live in them weren’t fooled. As one put it – they might have hot running water and central heating, but to him they were still prisons in the sky… The isolated family unit could no longer call on the resources of wider kinship networks, or the neighbourhood, and the family itself became the sole focus of solidarity… The working class family was… not only isolated from the outside but undermined from within. There is no better example of what we are talking about than the so-called ’household mother’. The street or turning was no longer available as a safe play space, under neighbourly supervision. Mum, or Auntie, was no longer just round the corner to look after the kids for the odd morning. Instead, the task of keeping an eye on the kids fell exclusively to the young wife, and the only safe play space was the ’safety of the home’.

 

However, away from the high-rise blocks, the stubborn continuities of working-class life and culture survived. Nevertheless, the theme of community became a matter of widespread and fundamental concern in the period. The question emerged as to whether, as the conditions and patterns of social life for working people changed, and as what surplus money there was about began to pour into the new consumer goods on offer, people might not only be uprooted from a life they knew, and had made themselves, to another made partly for them by others. This might also involve a shift from the working-class values of solidarity, neighbourliness and collectivism, to those of individualism, competition and privatisation. The BBC archive material from the period record how television played a role in this transition to more middle class attitudes:

Nowadays, there’s a tremendous change, an amazing change, in fact, in just a few years. People have got television. They stay at home to watch it – husbands and wives. If they do come in at the weekend they’re playing bingo. They’ve now got a big queue for the one-armed bandit as well. They do have a lot more money, but what they’re losing is togetherness.

 

The real spread of television happened only in the early years of the fifties. Commercial TV opened in 1955. By monopolising the channels of public discussion, television also centralised the power to make its images of social life stick. It communicated, at rapid speed, highly selective, if not distorted, images of one community or section of society to another. It also helped to form an overall image of where the whole of society was headed. It gave an almost tangible visibility to the quite limited rise in consumption and in spending money, signifying the world in terms of the goodies produced in the new consumer industries and seeking markets among the working class. It created the spectacular world of commodities. It is difficult to assess how far this advertising imagery of consumption entered the lives of ordinary men and women. It seems, in retrospect, to have been wildly exaggerated. The telly in the corner made a difference – but it did not suddenly dismantle the culture of working people. Alan Sillitoe, in his The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), gave this assessment of its impact:

Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, and a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots., while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered… To begin with, the adverts on the telly had shown us how much more there was in the world to buy than we’d ever dreamed of when we’d looked into the shop windows but hadn’t seen all there was to see because we didn’t have the money to buy it with anyway. And the telly made all these things twenty times better than we’d ever thought they were. Even adverts at the cinema were cool and tame, because now we were seeing them in private at home. We used to cock our noses up at things in the shop that didn’t move, but suddenly we saw their real value because they jumped and glittered around the screen and had some pasty-faced tart going head over heels to get her nail-polished grabbers on them or her lipstick lips over them, not like the crumbly adverts you saw on posters or in newspapers as dead as doornails; these were flickering around loose, half-opened packets and tins, making you think that all you had to do was finish opening them before they were yours, like seeing an unlocked safe through a shop window with the man gone away for a cup of tea without thinking to guard his lolly… mam used to call us the Telly boys…

 

If the British working class was entering a sort of affluence, it was also, at the same time, trying to comprehend what affluence was about. It was easy and tempting to mistake the highly visible indices of change for the real movement below the surface. It was a temptation that many at the time fell into, and one that many historians have done since. The myths of affluence became inextricably interwoven with the contradictory experience of affluence. No wonder that one commentator, writing about Britain in the late fifties, called it Britain – Unknown Country. In one section of the population, change did register in a peculiarly strong and visible way: among the young. The 1950s saw the rise to prominence, for the first time, of a distinct and identifiable culture of the young – something different from the culture of the private public schools that George Orwell had known, or the high spirits of Oxbridge students. For ordinary young people, the war – which they had experienced as young children, really did divide history into before and after; and they belonged to after.

 

This break in the heroic narrative of Britain gave a strong generational marking to the relationships between adults and youth. If incomes had gone up a little for many working people, they had improved at a faster rate for young adults; and since their families had a little more economic security than between the wars, a higher proportion of what they earned was left over for spending on themselves and their own recreations and pursuits. Affluent Britain was not a society which allowed spare cash to accumulate in anyone’s pockets for long. The surplus in the pockets of young working-class boys and girls was quickly funneled into the new industries servicing working-class leisure, and out of this emerged distinctive youth styles which so marked the fifties that youth itself became the metaphor for social change. Violence also began to increase in British society, not only in terms of crime, but also in riots by teenage Teddy Boys in the late 1950s. Bringing together youth, new dance music, extravagant dress and a reputation for insolence and violence that shocked a nation still largely wedded to prewar and wartime vales, they were the first modern youth culture. A teenager interviewed by the BBC described their dress in great detail:

Short jackets, two little vents at the back, three buttons, single-breasted, maybe blazer stripes, wearing blazer, Italian rounded collar shirts, usually navy blue, white or red, trousers with no turn ups, usually 16 inch, 17 inch bottoms, pointed toe shoes, you know. That’s about all. Oh, and they wear big overcoats, with pointed collars or macs, white macs, you know. It’s all derived from the French and Italians.

T.R. Fyvel, in The Insecure Offenders (1961), wrote that there was a sexual twist in the make-up of Teddy Boys which could be ascribed to their excessive interest in their own and each other’s clothes and hair-styles, such as the habit of the early Teddy boys having their hair permanently waved. The stock answer of Teddy boy dandies to inquiring journalists about this was: If the girls do it and make themselves look nice, why shouldn’t we? An Irish informant was sure that this revealed a basic effeminacy and nothing else. He felt that the main motive for their dress was jealousy of the girls for being the centre of attention. Listening to these Teds as they stood around talking to each other in the dance-halls, all he could hear about was clothes and style:

They could talk literally for hours about styles and cut and prices, the way you usually only hear women talk. But even if they weren’t all effeminate,… the main thing with these Teds was that they had to outshine the way the girls dressed… The Teddy boy was always the person who had to stand out.

Two processes were at work here. The new youth styles, expressing themselves in terms of consumption patterns, also indicated subtle shifts in attitude and outlook: but no-one changed their life-situation, life chances or social position by becoming a Teddy Boy or a Mod. The other process, the route out of the working class into the professional ranks through education – the Eleven Plus, the Grammar School, the University – may have offered a more permanent route of social mobility, but far fewer could ever take it; and the social and personal costs for first generation Scholarship Boys and Girls were punishing – the loss of roots, of a sense of connection to their own communities, even to their own families. In Michael Young and Peter Wimott’s famous 1957 report on Family and Kinship in East London, one of the informants was the first girl at an East End elementary school to pass the scholarship examination for grammar school. Coming home on the day the results came out, she tried to tell her mother as casually as she could that she had passed, but soon broke down. Soon afterwards a messenger arrived from the headmistress to summon her mother to the school to receive her congratulations and those of her staff. Her school was given a half-day holiday in celebration. However, the rejoicing of the teachers was not generally shared within her working-class community. It was a breach of custom for little women to go to secondary schools to prepare for paper work in offices, and, if they did, they were made to feel their peculiarity. They lost their classmates as friends and they were isolated in their street; there was probably no-one else going to the grammar school. They became sort of reserved and regarded as someone apart. The uniform, supposed to be a mark of superior status, became the target of inverted snobbery. The gym tunic, panama hat, gloves and long black woollen stockings which had to be worn all year round until they reached the upper form, made the scholarship girls figures of ridicule among their peers who all attended an ordinary school. She commented:

I was more or less ostracised by the other girls in the street… They would shout out something about being stuck up or a ’swank-pot’. It was not just that they made fun of us, we just didn’t have much in common. They had different ideas…

 

Their non-conformity was very apparent when they reached fourteen, the minimum leaving age. All the other girls in the street left elementary school and went to work at a proper manual job. She remembered passing two girls who had just started work on the way to the bus stop. They wouldn’t speak to her any more and she felt they were probably thinking, the lazy little so and so. Adults were no more sympathetic, though less vocal, than their children: This was a working-class community, and those who tried to become something else were not behaving as they should.

Out of this first generation of working-class boys to complete their education, the late 1950s also saw the Angry Young Man syndrome emerge. The literary and dramatic prototype for this was Jimmy Porter, in John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956). In the play, Jimmy had observed:

It’s pretty dreary living in the American Age – unless you are an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans… I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang comes, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave-New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.

While many insisted that the new permissive society was essentially civilised and liberating, prophets of doom believed that Britain had progressed from austerity to affluence and, finally, to decadence. Complaints were made about materialistic values, striptease clubs, drink, gambling and the alarming increase in juvenile delinquency, prostitution and illegitimacy. The Profumo and Vassall affairs, although talking place in echelons of society which were high above the man in the street, and a generation removed from the Scholarship Boys, were nevertheless held up as examples of a decline in sexual morality. The Profumo episode, erupting into the House of Commons in March 1963, was a fitting post-script to the era of affluence. It was, as Wayland Young wrote at the time, scandal and crisis together. It exercised some of the purgative and disruptive functions of a revolution. Certainly, concern was also registered about the waning influence of established religion, or even nonconformist religion.

Typical of the critical comments on youth culture were those of BBC Radio’s Any Questions team, when asked to comment on the events surrounding Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. Mary Stocks remarked that young people were merely exhibiting a sort of unexpended animal spirits, while Lord Boothby expressed the view that he’d rather they went off to Cairo and started Teddy-boying around there. Jeremy Thorpe said that Jazz to me comes from the jungle and this is jungle music taken to its logical conclusion… musical Mau-Mau. But was the Britain of this period a decadent society in any meaningful sense? Young people were certainly more sceptical about traditional values, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they cared about cultural values. After all, there was also a more serious side to the cultural revolution of the late fifties and early sixties. Nevertheless, the angry young men and women who found a cause in joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) also came under verbal attack. When the 1958 Aldermaston march began, and the first ragged ranks swung into view on the first day, one observer commented:

This must be a bunch of bloody psychotics, trying to extrovert their own psychic difficulties, you know, to neither end nor purpose. It’s like a bunch of tiny dogs yapping at the back door to the big house – it will accomplish sweet nothing.

 

They did find some support from among the prewar generation, especially from those who remembered being young when the Peace Pledge Union was formed with high, if somewhat impracticable ideals, in the mid-thirties. Radio commentator and writer René Cutforth lent his cryptic support to the new generation of peace campaigners by suggesting that they might just be the only people left alive. Certainly, the shadow of what Jimmy Porter called the big bang lengthened across the whole face of affluent Britain throughout the whole decade, and into the sixties, when the anti-Vietnam war movement developed alongside CND. However, CND received a set-back when the next Labour leader, Harold Wilson, originally a Bevanite advocate of unilateral disarmament, made a pragmatic switch to a determined opponent of it. Regardless of the eventual outcomes of these movements, the extra-parliamentary politics which they introduced changed the nature of post-war politics over the next decade, crystallising the popular mood of protest and dissent against the enforced calm of prosperous Britain. 

 Below: Aneurin Bevan, Labour’s Health and Local Government Minister

Above: Winston Churchill won the 1951 General Election was returned to office as PM of a Conservative peace-time government for the first time

In the view of many hindsighted historians, the period of Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964 was of one of illusion, of an Indian summer, an Edwardian era which preceding a period of crisis and conflict. The Conservatives had come to power in the 1951 General Election largely because the electorate had become disillusioned with Labour. Prolonged Austerity was remembered more clearly than the benefits of the Welfare State. Churchill had been returned to power promising a bonfire of controls. The removal of the symbols of austerity, especially rationing, the housing programme masterminded by Harold Macmillan and the boom of the early fifties all presaged well for the Conservatives. They were aided in this by the internecine struggles within the Labour Party between Gaitskill and Bevan over the succession to Attlee, beginning Thirteen Wasted Years for it. When Gaitskill became leader, he made it clear that he was opposed to further nationalisation, putting a hold on any return to the socialist idealism of 1945-8.

Austerity with its characteristic lack of consumer products was replaced by affluence with the plethora of those same products which came to characterise the country as a consumer society. But Conservative policy also led to inflation based on the continuous demand that this generated, and government failed to intervene to deal adequately with the growing problems in the economy. In 1955, when, as a result of a Government-assisted boom in industrial development, demand began to run ahead of capacity and the economy became overstrained, R. A. Butler deliberately pushed up the cost of living by raising purchase tax on a wide range of goods, and at the same time a number of measures were taken to discourage capital investment. The policy eventually succeeded in slowing down the pace of wage increases, which was one of the factors behind the 1955 inflation. But it took nearly three years to do so, at the cost of a virtually complete industrial standstill and a number of financial crises and major industrial disputes.

One particularly unfortunate aspect of this period was the Government’s attempts to restrict investment in the public sector, an attempt which was largely unsuccessful because of the long-term nature of most of the projects involved, which made it quite impossible to turn them on and off like a tap to meet the short-term fluctuations in the economy. One economist, writing in 1961, commented that it was too early to assess the long-term damage to the British economy from this period of enforced standstill, but that it certainly left us with a lot of leeway to catch up. He also pointed out that it was not until the recession of 1958 that this policy was reversed by the Treasury. Some historians have argued that the consensus politics of the post-war era, followed by both major political parties, meant that new perspectives for examining old economic problems could not be forthcoming. The illusion of continued affluence, as well as the idea of maintaining a world role, were the results of this. But others have argued that while politics may have remained the same, society did not. New beliefs, values, and attitudes began to show themselves. In this way the idea of consensus eventually came into question and the illusion of affluence was also made transparent. However, for the time being, these social changes continued to work in favour of the Tory ascendancy, as people believed that, under their rule, every day, in every way, things were getting better and better. In a speech made in Bedford on 20 July 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan caught, encapsulated and articulated this optimistic mood:

Indeed, let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial areas, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed ever in the history of this country.

When he went to that country in 1959, it was behind the slogan You’ve had it good. Have it better. Vote Conservative! When the Economist took stock of the situation for the Tories in May of that year, what it glimpsed, much to its pleasure, was The Unproletarian Society:

The old-fashioned Conservative is one who looks out at the comforts made achievable by rising incomes and the hire-purchase revolution and who feels vaguely that the workers are unfairly luckier than he was as a boy – that they are getting above their station. The modern Conservative should be one who looks up at the television aerials sprouting above the working-class homes of England, who looks down at the housewives tight slacks on the back of the motor-cycle and family side-car on the summer road to Brighton, and who sees a great poetry in them. For this is what the de-proletarianisation of British Society means; and the changes in social and industrial attitudes of mind it could bring with it are immense.

It was not only Conservatives who took this view. In 1956 Anthony Crosland, in his influential book, The Future of Socialism, recognised much the same trend towards the threshold of the new era of abundance:

 

…even these poorer workers are themselves peering over the threshold; they have accepted the new standards as the social norm, and are already thinking of the day when they too will acquire these goods. All this must have a profound effect on the psychology of the working class.

When the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, faced the 1959 Conference at Blackpool after the third successive defeat of the traditional party of the working class at the polls, the second under his leadership, he certainly believed that these psychological changes were indeed part of a deep and permanent secular trend:

In short, the changing character of labour, full employment, new housing, the new way of life based on the telly, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazines – all have had their effect on our political strength.

 

Perhaps Gaitskill really did believe that the strong cultural under-currents in British society were pulling the Labour boat out to sea, and that there was little he could do about it, or perhaps he was just a captain looking for the first available port amid a storm of criticism from a potentially mutinous crew. In retrospect, given the deliberate slowing down of the boom of the mid-fifties, the general economic condition of Britain the following year and the forecasts being made for its development, it is difficult to understand how Macmillan could have justified his talk of affluence had Gaitskill sought to expose the illusion. Yet, it seemed, consensus politics even extended to the pretence that the affluent boom could not have been higher. However, the bubble burst soon after the election. When the myths of deproletarianisation and the new era of abundance were exploded with it, the reality was that it was still, fundamentally, the same Britain which had existed a decade before when Orwell was still writing. All that had happened was an era of Newspeak. The proles and the poor were not only still within British society, but the latter were increasing in numbers again: poverty was out there, simply waiting to be rediscovered, as soon became apparent once again. The economic miracle turned out to be no more than a conjuring trick that had everybody fooled for most of the time. The Tories had not only failed to solve the problem of production, but they had also managed to side step what was supposed to be an era of redistribution of wealth.

By the end of the fifties, the American dawn of the Macmillenium had failed to break over Britain. Affluent Britain, successor to Austerity Britain, had proved to be no more than a mood change, not a sea change, as politicians had pretended. The country had risen to a sharp curve of feeling, only to stutter to a halt. There had been signs enough to read. They were, by now, many young, secular new nonconformists who were challenging Macmillan’s establishment mantra, repeated in his January 1961 interview with the Daily Mail, that… We’ve got it good. Let’s keep it good. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that. But had there ever been any substance to Macmillan’s claim, even in places like Bedford? To examine whether there is any local, social and micro-economic evidence for it, I will take up his suggestion by first heading up-country to the industrial areas of the Midlands, before turning east to visit the farms of Suffolk.

 

Certainly, by 1950 Coventry had made so rapid recovery from wartime damage and so smooth a transition to peacetime production of motor cars, that in that year The Financial Times reported that at least half a dozen government ministries were now trying to limit such expansion. The city’s economy was poised for yet another expansionary spurt, which manifested itself in rapid population growth, continuing to add an average of three and a half thousand every year. As in the period of mass immigration from 1926-41, this was essentially a young population, many of whom had come from Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the North of England (now including the North-East), to join relatives and friends already settled in Coventry. The predominant group among the newer migrants were prime aged males in 1951, so that by 1961 there were 21,600 males aged twenty-five to thirty-four in Coventry, representing an increase of fifty per cent, compared with the average figure for England and Wales of only three per cent. However, even this increase was not enough to satisfy the thirst for labour and this in itself helps to explain much of the increase in the occupied population of Coventry between 1951 and 1971.

 

During the early 1950s most British quality cars bore the Coventry seal of Armstrong Siddeley, Alvis, Daimler, Jaguar and Rootes (the latter through its control of Humber). Their combined output was comparatively small, totalling no more than twenty-five thousand vehicles a year, no more than a quarter of the city’s total output. Of this share, Rootes produced over half. By 1960 Armstrong-Siddeley had left the market and Daimler was taken over by Jaguar, which was itself taken over by BMC in 1966. Jaguar’s production tripled over the 1950s and through the purchase of Daimler the company not only gained additional car-producing capacity, but was also enabled to diversify into the profitable bus division. Among the mass-producers, Rootes and Standard remained relatively small compared with Ford and Austin Morris, suffering because of their inability to make the economies of scale which were necessary to compete effectively in this market. Again, in 1959, the Times predicted that such small firms and plant would be unable were bound to suffer more in the event of a serious recession in the motor industry. Both Rootes and Standard were well aware of this problem, spending much of the fifties negotiating with each other, as well as with other firms, for mergers or takeovers. Having itself taken over Singer in 1956, Rootes was then gradually taken over itself by Chrysler in the next decade, while Standard merged with Leyland.

Until the mid-fifties, Coventry’s industrial over-specialisation went relatively unnoticed, except by a few economists writing in The Times and The Financial Times. The motor industry continued to expand and the city continued to act as a magnet to labour from other parts of the UK. In search of secure work and high wages in the city’s burgeoning industries. It was only when the aircraft industry began to contract that a growing awareness began to develop of the narrowness of the industrial base with its increasing over-reliance on the fortunes of the motor industry. This in turn was compounded by the fact that within the British motor industry as a whole Coventry was steadily becoming of less importance as a source of output and coupled with relatively low profits and investment levels, the economy’s stock was slowly ossifying and becoming increasingly inflexible. In the late fifties, the economy still appeared, on the surface, to be as prosperous as Macmillan’s remark suggested. It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to regard it as complacent. The incentives to embark on a vast restructuring of industry, whether national or local, were simply not there, especially since the policy of successive governments was to divert industry away from the new industry areas of the interwar period in favour of Britain’s depressed areas, or development areas, as they had been redesignated in the immediate postwar period.

Yet other car towns, notably Birmingham, Cowley, Dagenham and Luton were subjected to similar pressures but retained the bulk of their manufacturing capacity by the end of the seventies. The problem peculiar to Coventry was not only that the local economy became overdependent on the motor industry but that virtually all the automotive firms were, by the 1960s, ill-suited because of their size to survive the increasing competitiveness of the international market. It is no accident that most of what remained of the British motor industry was centred in towns which were dominated by one single large manufacturing plant. A major reason for Coventry’s long boom was the multiplicity of firms in the motor industry, but in the seventies this became the major cause of its decline. The only viable motor car establishment to survive this deep recession was Jaguar.

 

From the industrial Midlands, I next pay a visit to old Macmillan’s farms, or rather to one of the more agricultural areas of England. By the mid-fifties, the people of East Anglia were not yet having it as good as many parts of the Home Counties that Macmillan probably had in mind when he made his famous remark. Then, from the opening of the first stretches of motorway in the winter of 1958/9, including the M1, there was a major improvement in the road network. By 1967 motorways totalled 525 miles in length, at a cost of considerable damage to the environment. Bridges were built over the Forth and Severn between 1964 and 1966. The development of new industries and the growth of the east coast ports necessitated a considerable programme of trunk road improvement. This continued into the mid-seventies at a time when economic stringency was forcing the curtailment of other road building schemes. East Anglia’s new roads were being given priority treatment for the first time. Most of the A12, the London-Ipswich road, was made into dual carriageway. The A45, the artery linking Ipswich and Felixstowe with the Midlands and the major motorways, had been considerably improved. Stowmarket, Bury St Edmunds and Newmarket had been bypassed. By the end of the decade, the A11/M11 London-Norwich road was completed, bringing to an end the isolation of northern and central Suffolk.

The railways were also made more efficient with the closure of almost six thousand miles of track and two thousand stations after the Beeching report of 1963. Thereafter, they concentrated on fast intercity services and bulk-freight transportation. The docks also began to be modernised, with ports like Tilbury and Felixstowe hastening the decline of London, which could not handle containerised freight. In 1955 the Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company had had on its hands a dilapidated dock that needed dredging, and warehouses, quays and sea walls all showing signs of storm damage. The total labour force was nine men. By the mid-seventies the dock area covered hundreds of acres, many reclaimed, made up of spacious wharves, warehouses and storage areas equipped with the latest cargo handling machinery. The transformation began in 1956 as the direct result of foresight and careful planning. The Company launched a three million pound project to create a new deep water berth geared to the latest bulk transportation technique – containerisation. It calculated that changing trading patterns and Felixstowe’s proximity to Rotterdam and Antwerp provided exciting prospects for an efficient, well-equipped port. Having accomplished that, it set aside another eight million for an oil jetty and bulk liquid storage facilities. In addition, a passenger terminal was opened in 1975. The dock soon acquired a reputation for fast, efficient handling of all types of cargo, and consignments could easily reach the major industrial centres by faster road and rail networks.

 

There were many reasons for this unprecedented growth. which brought Suffolk a prosperity unknown since the expansion of the cloth trade from the mid-fourteenth century. As back then, Suffolk’s depression gave a boost to new development. Most of the county was within eighty miles of London and served by improving road and rail connections. Ports like Felixstowe were no further from the capital than those of Kent and they were a great deal closer to the industrial Midlands and the North. Some of Suffolk’s most beautiful countryside was no further from the metropolis than the stockbroker belt of the Home Counties, and yet land and property prices in Suffolk were less than half of what they were there. People were becoming more mobile and light industries were less tied to traditional centres. Companies escaping from high overheads found that they could find both the facilities and labour they needed in Ipswich, Bury, Sudbury and Haverhill. Executives also discovered that they could live in areas of great natural beauty and yet be within commuting distance of their City desks. Moreover, the shift in international trade focused attention once more on the east coast ports. As the Empire was being disbanded and Britain was drawn increasingly towards trade with the European Common Market, producers were looking for the shortest routes to the continent. More and more lorries took to the roads through Suffolk.

The Road to 1945 and Beyond (4/4)

 

As the debts mounted for maintaining Britain’s global status and its benevolence at home, so did the doubts about the ideological basis on which the new Jerusalem could be built. Even those who had been the most ardent supporters of the collectivist approach, like Stafford Cripps, became, after 1949, equally determined supporters of the mixed economy. Attlee set the date of the general election as 23 February 1950, and the Labour Party fought the election on the manifesto Let us win through together, an endorsement of Cripps’ economic policy.

Despite polling a record 13.3 million votes, the Labour majority was cut to six. Nevertheless, the social reforms enacted by Labour were clearly popular with the British people, since it not only succeeded in winning more votes, but also won more seats in the 1950 election than it had done in 1945, on an even higher turn-out.

 (Above: The end of sweet rationing in 1949)

Although it polled nearly fourteen million votes, slightly more than the Conservatives, Labour lost the October 1951 election. Historians have argued that this was, in part, because its achievements in the postwar years had been accompanied by continued, and sometimes intensified, austerity for the British people. Wartime rationing of some essential foods continued into the new year following the government’s re-election. However, there were clear signs, for instance in the Festival of Britain celebrations of that summer, that the drabness of the period was coming to an end. Interestingly, one woman, a wartime child, recalled in 1963, that a great deal was determined by differing expectations within the population. Not everyone’s experience of the prewar years was of prolonged economic depression, of course, but it should be remembered that those born after 1930 did not yet have a vote:

For those who remembered the years between the wars the gradual climb back to prosperity was a long, dispiriting haul, echoing with prewar memories of better days. For the wartime children it was different. Those years were not a return but a revelation. They were lit by surprises; between 1945 and 1951 we saw not only the first pineapples and bananas of our lives, but the first washing machine, the first fountain, the first television sets.

The world opening before us was not a pale imitation of the one we had lost but a dip of extraordinary things we had never seen before. If later, we seemed to snarl with baffled rage at the disillusionment and apathy of our elders, perhaps this was why. They treated it all as a dreary mess; they forget that for us it could have been a brave new world.

 

As this wartime child suggested, many older, ordinary people had become tired and disillusioned by Labour’s Big Brother style. We work or we want, proclaimed the irritating government posters. Many had worked hard, and industrial production increased by a third between 1946 and 1951, but people wanted more consumer goods in the shops, even, as a tantalising 1946 advert suggested, some lovely lingerie, and ’Lux’ to look after these pretty things. They remembered how pure, safe Lux preserved the beauty of these delicate fabrics… and how easily it rinsed out. For the time being, they had to wash their treasured things with the soap or flakes available. Of course, there were ways and means of getting some of these goods on the black market:

 

The spivs were tense, dubious, insecure. Yet the essence of spivvery was deeply English, a small, boyish lust for life, and eagerness to play practical jokes on the clumsy, long-winded motions of a bureaucracy.

 

One woman, quoted in a radio broadcast, said she was happier when she lay listening to bombs and daring herself to tremble; when she got romantic letters from abroad; when she cried over Dunkirk; when people showed their best side and we still believed we were fighting to gain something. However, for many (now) teenage evacuees, like Daphne Gulliver, returning home after five years, was a much longed-for occasion and they were keen to settle back into their families and communities, to finish school and salvage whatever they could of their childhood and teenage years. Daphne left school at sixteen in 1947 and then went to work as a short-hand typist at the Rolls Royce engine factory at nearby Ansty, using her bicycle to get up the farm lane on the other side of the river Sowe and up the hill each day. She remembered how much she treasured her cycle which one of her relatives put together with true Coventrian craftsmanship:

Tommy Hatfield had a sort of workshop and you could go up there and say you wanted a bike, and he’d measure you up for size and look through all these frames, and find one the right size. Then he’d dip it in acid, then he’d dip it in a stone enamelling vat. I suppose they were always black. He’d tell you which day he’d finish it, and then you’d come home riding your bike, pleased as punch. Lovely thing a bike.

Daphne was also happy to be able to take part in chapel life again. There were marvelous harvest festivals after the war and everything was decorated. Then the produce would be sold off to raise money and there would be a concert to follow. The choirmaster was quite strict and if anyone wasn’t behaving themselves, he would throw a hymn book in their direction to bring them to attention. After the war, the chapel was taken under the wing of Queens Road and the Rev Gordon Wylie, succeeding Rev Ingli James, brought the thirty-four year-old Rev Arthur J Chandler (left), my father, to Walsgrave from Wednesbury, Staffordshire, in 1948. In addition to overseeing Ansty and Shilton chapels, he helped to build up the Walsgrave congregation again. As Daphne’s mother, Vera, was a deacon at the chapel, he was a regular visitor to their house and around the time of Daphne’s twenty-first birthday in 1952, they got engaged. Her Aunt Jessie’s husband, Tommy Gardner, worked for forty-five years at the Austin Motor Carriage works in Holbrooks. Although they had no children of their own, Jessie and Tommy fostered two children from the Barnado’s Home Tommy had grown up in before the First World War. Jessie lived on in Coventry to be a hundred and two. Aged ninety-one, in 1992, she concluded her memoirs with these remarks about the heritage of her family:

So, they (the Gullivers and Tidmarshes) were good people and that’s where it’s coming out in these generations, because we came from good stock; honest, God-fearing workers. We all seem to be doing very well these days, after all these years. So, I can’t say much for the good old times that they talk about. I’m all for these times.   Some things are better, some things are worse, I will admit. But, on the whole, we are looked after much better in our old age now.

George Orwell died in January 1950, in a London hospital. His last published piece was a review of Churchill’s memoir, Their Finest Hour which had been published the previous year. He wrote that Churchill’s memoirs read more like those of a human being than those of a public figure. There was, Orwell felt, a certain largeness and geniality about the wartime PM, soon to become a peacetime leader too, which made him cherished by ordinary people, and the stories circulating about him testified to that affection. The same year that Churchill published Their Finest Hour, Orwell published what many consider to be his finest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is usually remembered as a nightmare vision of the doublespeak future, in which the tyranny of Big Brother presides over an English state where War is Peace and Lies are Truth. However, it needs to be read as an English novel, and its title simply as a reversal of the numbers four and eight, rather than as an extended essay, warning of future abuses of power.

For Orwell, as for many others in the world, the themes of the novel were evident in current and recent experiences. In fact, the fundamental conflict in the book is between history (as collective memory) and tyranny. When O’Brien, the arch-deceiver who has persuaded Winston Smith that he is running a resistance group, suggests sealing his recruitment with a toast to the future, Winston lifts his glass and drinks instead To the past. O’Brien agreed, The past is more important. By encouraging forgetfulness, the Party became free to impose on its subjects its own version of whatever past it chose. But, somehow, memory was not quite obliterated from Winston’s consciousness, so that he had a sense that things had not always been as they were in the present. Gradually, the past starts to come back to him through a series of encounters with objects and people. Finally, he denounces the revolution and the Party for destroying all archives: History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. He also dreams of a Golden Country, in which nature, love, liberty and history are all interlaced. This is Orwell’s vision of a True England. Searching for a True Coventry, the sociologist, Leo Kuper, made an astute observation on the gap between workers’ perceptions of Coventry in the late 1940s, and the realities of working class life there:

It is as if there were many worlds; a world of objective reality, Coventry and its people and neighbourhoods, and the worlds of interpretation of this objective reality, the images projected from many and contrasted points of view.

 

Kuper showed how many of those who considered themselves real Coventrians viewed the image of post-war cosmopolitan Coventry in wholly negative terms which led to racial stereotypes being applied to those who were seen as being the major contributors to this image. A leading Coventry official referred to the Rhondda Valley section of Coventry, where he said that there was continual trouble among the Welsh, second only to the centre of the city. He also portrayed the Irish as having to fight every Friday night, after receiving their wages, in order to complete the evening’s revelries; Indians as creating troubles with young girls and living like pigs; Negroes, like the Irish and Scots, as having little respect for the police and the Poles as being unable to understand why they were not beaten up for committing misdemeanors. He went on to suggest that the only real solution to these problems was to segregate these different national groupings until they had come to appreciate our way of living. Kuper commented, with not a little understatement, that there was more in these comments than cool observation of ethnic differences.

In any case, even in 1951, the description of Coventry as a cosmopolitan city, heterogeneous throughout, was as misleading as it had been in 1931. The Census showed that the overwhelming majority of immigrants to the city were of British origin, with just under ten thousand from Ireland. This was a new migrant stream in the postwar period. In the 1931 Census there were only just over two thousand Irish in Coventry, but this number may have expanded rapidly during the building boom of the later 1930s. At the close of the second world war the streets surrounding St Osburg’s and St Mary’s Roman Catholic churches had a distinctive Irish atmosphere. These two inner-city areas were well supplied with lodging houses and multi-tenanted buildings, and the two churches provided useful ports of call for itinerant building workers or those after a start in local factories. Although casual building workers formed an important part of the Coventry Irish community, many more workers began to settle permanently.

The Polish community in Coventry, as in Britain as a whole, came about as the result of three waves of immigration corresponding to the period up to 1940; the decade 1940-50, known as the Emigracja and then the period after 1950. It has been estimated that during the wartime Emigracja some 165,000 Poles arrived in Britain, though numbers decreased by about thirty thousand after 1950 through onward migration to other countries or voluntary repatriation to Poland. The Polish exile community was made up of members of the Polish Armed Forces who escaped to the west through Hungary following the Nazi-Soviet invasion and partition of their country in September 1939 which led to the surrender of the forces in Poland, together with political prisoners from concentration camps in Germany and Russia. Many of the latter, perhaps several hundred, were people with professional qualifications which could be used in Britain, especially doctors and dentists. In addition, there were about two thousand skilled engineers. Later, a rather larger group of unskilled workers, including some disabled and elderly relatives, entered the postwar British economy. Many ambitious immigrants with lesser qualifications set up small businesses, becoming householders and small-scale landlords. The location of Polish forces during the war largely determined the places to which Polish immigrants gravitated. Most of those in the Midlands were airmen, based in Nottingham or Leicester. London, as the home of the Polish government-in-exile became the largest Polish resettlement area, accommodating a quarter of the total immigrants. Birmingham and Manchester were the recipients of the next largest groups of four to five thousand each, but Coventry accommodated as many as three thousand.

Of course, these first generation Polish wartime exiles had every intention of returning to their homeland, and therefore made every effort to maintain their language and to cultivate their Polish heritage. The wartime Emigracja determined the later shape and character of the life of the Polish community in Britain. It was an exile community which arrived with a network of various military, civilian and religious institutions, as well as welfare associations such as the Polish Red Cross, the Polish Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), servicemen’s clubs and a Polish press. There were over two hundred periodicals published in Britain between 1939 and 1949. Factors such as patriotism, class and the negative attitudes towards Polish immigrants ensured a high level of community participation in these institutions and strengthening ethnic identity and vitality. These conditions gave shape to the social, religious, economic life of the community, allowing it to meet a variety of needs among new Polish immigrants. The Polish YMCA was founded in 1949 as a dynamic organisation responsible for the promotion of Polish history and cultural heritage not only within the Polish and British communities but all over the world through exhibitions of Polish art, folklore, song, dance and music.

Paradoxically, just as Britain was retreating from its formal imperial commitments, Commonwealth immigration into Britain, principally from the West Indies and South Asia, was becoming an increasingly salient issue in British domestic politics. The census of 1951 recorded just seventy-four thousand New Commonwealth immigrants; ten years later, this number had more than quadrupled. The 1948 Nationality Act reaffirmed the right of British citizenship and free entry to the United Kingdom to all Commonwealth citizens and colonial subjects, without restrictions. But as growing numbers of Caribbean and South Asian people began to take up this right to abode, the British authorities became increasingly alarmed. The most significant group of Commonwealth workers in Coventry were those of Indian origin who took up the right to settle in Britain under the 1948 Act, though a small number but significant number of them had been employed in the textile industries in the thirties. By the early fifties they were estimated to have expanded to about four thousand, though the 1951 Census only showed less than two thousand Commonwealth immigrants in total. They took over some of the more rundown housing stock in the Foleshill Road area near the textile factories. However, even as early as the summer of 1951 there was evidence of colour prejudice when the Indian workers tried to get semi-skilled jobs in engineering and metal-working factories. At the Sterling Metals works, the management, under union pressure, stated at the Works Conference that it was the main desire to recruit white labour. It also agreed to keep black and white gangs segregated and to give white labourers guarantees against the upgrading of Indian workers.

Certainly, by 1951 Coventry was predominantly a city of newcomers. It has been estimated that in that year only thirty to thirty-five per cent of the city’s population of a quarter of a million were born in the City, though when those born in outlying and incorporated areas of Warwickshire are taken into account, this proportion must have been somewhat higher. Of the thousands who came to the city many soon left, having failed to find accommodation or work. One study claimed that in 1949, while eighteen thousand newcomers entered Coventry, but that nearly the same number left. Surveys suggested that Coventrians were far from welcoming to newcomers generally, so that friendship and social networks followed regional and ethnic lines. Clubs, pubs and churches often catered for specific migrant groups, and there was a lack of interest in establishing neighbourhood friendships. However, there is little evidence to suggest any hostility or negative stereotyping between immigrant groups, perhaps because of Coventry’s general status as a city of immigrants. The London area continued to send just under ten per cent of the total immigrants, but by the late 1940s there were more from Northumberland and Durham. As recently as 1940, insurance book analysis highlighted a dearth of migrants from coalfields other than Wales. Perhaps the general increase in mobility of labour during wartime encouraged Geordies to move, together with the high wages available in Coventry.

Paul Addison, in his well-known book, The Road to 1945, attributed the Labour victory to the growth of middle opinion among English intellectuals and to the impact of the war upon popular consciousness. He paid scant attention the pressures from below to the new industrial areas of the Midlands and South East of England, including the contributions to the growth of trade unionism, the Labour Party and working class culture made by immigrants to these areas before and during the Second World War. Besides the role played by migrating militants in the unionisation of the Pressed Steel works in Cowley and later at Morris Motors, there were a number of significant individual immigrants involved in the development of the Labour movement in Oxford, Coventry and Birmingham. For example, Evan Roberts, a former Welsh miner and railwayman, became the first Labour Councillor for the East Ward of Oxford in 1945 and eventually became the first Lord Mayor of Oxford in 1962.

William Parfitt, a former miner from Tylorstown in the Rhondda, came to Coventry to work for Daimler, after which he became Industrial Relations Officer for the West Midlands Region of the National Coal Board. He was elected to Coventry City Council in 1945 and in 1965-6 became Lord Mayor of Coventry. William Tegfryn Bowen worked as a miner in the Rhondda between 1916 and 1926, moving to Birmingham in 1927, where he studied at Fircroft College, the workers’ college in Selly Oak, before working for the Austin Motor Company in 1928. In 1929 he became a trade union official and led a strike against the introduction of the Bedaux system in defiance of more senior officials. He then endured long periods of unemployment before becoming a City Councillor in 1941, an Alderman in 1945 and between 1945 and 1949 was Chairman of both the Council Labour Group and Chairman of the Health Committee. This latter position led to his becoming a member of the Executive Council of the NHS and a member of the Regional Hospital Board. On becoming Lord Mayor of Birmingham in 1952, Bowen was asked to account for the Labour hold on a City which, under the Chamberlains, had been considered a Tory stronghold. In his answer he referred to a large influx of workers from other areas, with a different political outlook.

 

Harry Richards was from Tonypandy in the Rhondda. Between 1939, aged seventeen, and 1945 he was an apprentice draughtsmen at Armstrong Siddeley Motors and a design draughtsman at Morris Motors. He then became a schoolteacher and was elected to the City Council in 1954. He also became Chairman of the Coventry Welsh Rugby Club, and became Lord Mayor of the City in 1979. Roberts, Parfitt, Bowen and Richards shared the motivation for their involvement with other immigrants from the depressed areas like Elsie Jones, who born and reared in a mining area… realised the need for reforms very early in life. It is also apparent that the political attitudes of many of those living in Coventry’s new housing estates were largely derived from their memories of the depression years elsewhere in Britain.

 

The result of the 1945 general election in Coventry had been the confirmation of the Labour Party’s local supremacy since taking control of the Council in 1937. Between them, Richard Crossman and Maurice Edelman took just over sixty per cent of the votes cast. Crossman’s majority in Coventry East, which included Walsgrave, was nearly twenty thousand. When the Labour government’s housing policy came under attack in 1947, Aneurin Bevan chose to defend it in Coventry. He issued a challenge to Anthony Eden to debate the issue and was given a great reception from the people of Coventry, in particular from members of the Welsh Community, many of whom knew him in their native valleys. The growth of municipal socialism in Coventry, from 1937 to 1947, can clearly be seen, like Bevan’s own political progress, as a practical and ideological expression of an impetus to reform which arose out of the determination of Labour leaders to attain better living and working conditions than those which they had been forced to endure for much of the inter-war period.

After 1945, the housing crisis presented an even greater challenge for Coventry’s municipal socialists than it did for Aneurin Bevan, who was Minister of both Health and Housing. The shortage of housing was not simply a short-term crisis for the Labour Government, but remained a huge national problem for the whole decade and a half after the war. In Coventry, for obvious reasons, it was particularly severe. By 1948 there were fifteen thousand families on the waiting list, widespread squatting in old military buildings and an illegal campsite facing the Council House, yet politicians and planners failed to act swiftly, preferring to concentrate on the city centre development. It was not until a decade later that the worst of the housing crisis was over. In the late 1940s, the large, so-called neigbourhood units of Canley, Tile Hill, Bell Green and Willenhall were designed to accommodate between fifteen to twenty thousand residents in decent dwellings within a planned environment. Several social surveys were conducted by the planners and the University of Birmingham on behalf of the council. What the authorities wanted to find out was what the attitude of the residents of this type of estate was, and the potential services they required. They concluded that the residents had only a thin attachment to their particular neighbourhood. The survey revealed that neighbourhood friendship networks were generally narrow, usually confined to immediate and very near neighbours.

Coventrians in these areas thought of the Welsh, Scots and Geordie women in their city as being unemancipated by comparison with themselves. They were more content than Coventry women to accept traditional roles as housewives, nurses and maidservants. Both oral and documentary sources suggest that very few Welsh women entered insurable employment in Coventry before the war, compared with both native women and immigrant women from Lancashire. However, there is little evidence to suggest that immigrant women were more fertile, as was suggested, or that they had more children. In Coventry, there was, however, a marked tendency for them to select their own countrywomen as friends, rather than their immediate neighbours. This clannishness was perhaps understandable if they were from the more strongly Welsh-speaking western valleys, and were not working, but it cannot have helped them to integrate, and in some cases reinforced the stereotypes of them held by Coventrian women. The Welsh immigrants in general were also accused of being all out for themselves… rootless… thrusting, trying to get on committees and councils in order to run the town, thereby showing a lack of respect for the true Coventrians.

Of course, this stereotyping reveals a classic pattern of a dominant majority irked by a foreign minority in its midst, except it was not always based on prejudice, but sometimes on real experiences. Seymour Gulliver (pictured on the right with his wife, Vera, in the 1970s), who had himself born outside Coventry, in 1900, albeit in Warwickshire, moving into Walsgrave with his family in 1909, recalled an occasion on which he fell out with the Welsh miner he had helped to settle into Walsgrave and Binley Colliery. This neighbour, Chairman of the Lodge at Binley, was delayed getting to an emergency strike meeting, so Seymour had started the meeting without him. He was annoyed when he arrived at the meeting to find that his place had been usurped, and became even more irate when the men voted for Seymour to continue in the chair. The two men had words after the meeting. Seymour commented that this incident had taught him that the Welsh miners always wanted to be in charge.

On the subject of who was a real Coventry kid, in his survey of Tile Hill, a district of Coventry, conducted in the late forties, Leo Kuper found that only thirty-two per cent of the community were Coventry born, while twenty-five per cent were from the North of England, sixteen per cent from other parts of the Midlands, ten per cent from Wales, and about five or six per cent each from Scotland, Ireland and the South of England. In Coventry, by the late 1940s, it was impossible to tell who the real Coventrians were.

In terms of facilities, especially shopping, the Coventrians of the late forties were unanimous in their desire for a large, well equipped central retail area with suburban outlets confined to the provision of everyday essentials. The findings of these surveys tended to reinforce the major thrust of the reconstruction plan and convinced the civic officers and councillors that they were providing what the people wanted. The residents on the new estates could also look forward to the provision of the ten form entry comprehensive schools, large health centres and new parades of small shops. Even so, the prosperity of the mid-fifties and sixties was still unimaginable, even in high-wage Coventry, in the late forties. In addition, neighbourliness was difficult to achieve on these new estates. It wasn’t just the Welsh who found it difficult to mix, but also the migrants from the North of England, Scotland and Ireland, who often found Coventrians cold and unfriendly.

Earlier immigrants continued to provide a warmer welcome through churches and chapels. One of the leading Welsh personalities at Queen’s Road Baptist Church in the centre of Coventry was Jehu Shepherd, who became organist and choirmaster during the ministry of Ingli James in the 1940s. The Welsh newcomers that Shepherd had formed into a Glee Party in the thirties, found themselves at home among the convinced and articulate group of Christian Socialists which James’ preaching helped to produce in this period. James was from Barry, where his father had been pastor of Bethel Baptist Church before the First World War. In 1917 he was ordained and became Minister at Stoneygate, Leicester, followed by powerful ministries at Cannon Street, Accrington and, from 1923, at Pantgwydr in Swansea. During these ministries, according to a Baptist Union memoir, he saw that the working classes in this country were drifting from the churches and he set himself resolutely to stop the drift. He began his ministry at Queen’s Road in 1931. Besides supporting the initiatives which the immigrants had taken to establish an image of respectability in their new environment, such as the Glee Singers, James also affirmed, from the pulpit, the culture from which they came, continually referring to the miners and unemployment in his sermons. However, his unashamed championing of working class causes and politics, including his appearance on Labour Party platforms (along with Rev Ivor Reece, of West Orchard Congregational Church), brought him into conflict with some of the established professional Coventrians on his diaconate. Jehu Shepherd’s wife, Mary Shepherd, originally from Ystalafera, near Neath, remembered him well:

 

He was a strong Labour man and he upset quite a few people because he just said what he felt – he was true to himself, he would not say one thing and mean another, or say something just to please people. Ingli was not bombastic and what he said was true. I always remember once when he talked about the miners, he said, ’I had a load of coal and paid for it the other day – did I say paid for it? – no money would pay for what they did!’ I can see him now in that pulpit.

 

In 1942 he preached a sermon entitled, How Green Was My Valley, coinciding with the distribution of the Hollywood film of Richard Llewellyn’s book in Britain. Daphne Gulliver remembered the Rev. James preaching at Walsgrave Chapel after the war. She described him as a Welsh ranter, a very famous socialist, and extremely funny. Walsgrave had the kind of pulpit in which you could walk up and down and he used to shake all his black hair into his eyes. James articulated his impetus to reform in his book, published in 1950, Communism and the Christian Faith. In it he acknowledged his indebtedness to the Queens Road congregation for the way they had given him a new vision of what a Christian community in a busy industrial city might be and do. He then went on to describe the means by which he came to his vision of Christian socialism:

The depression of 1929-33 left a profound mark on my mind. All around me I saw the bitter struggle of the unemployed… I also realised that the world contained an abundance of the necessities of life which the system denied to the people. However, these ideas were all vague, and I played no active part in the struggle of the unemployed. At the end of 1934, I read my first copy of ’the Daily Worker’. What I read filled the gaps in my political development…

 

Probably the most powerful weapon ever put into the hands of the British Marxists was the prolonged period of widespread unemployment between the wars. Those who wonder why ten thousand electors voted Communist in the Rhondda Valley in 1945 should reflect on the plight of the valley during that period, when streets of empty shops testified to its bitter poverty, when every male member of many a church was unemployed, when thousands of eager youngsters were compelled to seek employment far from home. The memory of what happened to Merthyr, to Jarrow, to many a small town in Lancashire during these years is still the most powerful weapon the Marxist propagandist can use. Conversely, the most convincing argument against Marxism would be a demonstration that we can build a relatively just society in which every citizen is assured of useful employment and a decent livelihood, without infringing on the rights of the other and without resorting to violence… we must show how it might be done.

 

In this passage, Ingli James distilled the essence of the experience of a significant section of the British working class between the wars. The migrating millions who found their own way to Coventry, as opposed to being sent there by the Ministry of Labour, showed, by their contributions to the economic, political, social, cultural and religious life of the new industry towns, both in the prewar and postwar periods, that they were not prepared to be treated as mere pawns of an economic and political system which had displaced them.

Coventry’s 1951 Development Plan was the culmination of a scheme designed by a new class of professionals, implemented by newcomers for the benefit of a population with shallow roots in the city. The shopocracy had been routed in 1937 and the vice of old Coventry continued to be associated with narrow-minded backwardness. The defeat of this old elite was compounded by the support of the Evening Telegraph for the reconstruction plan. The isolation of the Chamber of Commerce, the main opponents of the plan, was increased by the tendency of many of Coventry’s firms, both in retail and manufacturing, to come under the control of outside owners. There was almost an element of irrelevant antiquarianism in the announcement in 1951 that the new Lord Mayor, Harry Weston, was the first Coventrian to hold the office for eight years, at a time when eighty-four per cent of the ruling Labour group on the Council between in the decade after 1945 were born outside Coventry. In November 1945 thirty Labour councillors were returned to face an opposition of eighteen Progressives, an amalgam of Conservatives and Liberals. Despite continuing austerity, Labour maintained its two-to-one majority in 1947 and 1949. The Evening Telegraph, in its editorial on the 1949 poll, concluded that newcomers to Coventry were strengthening the Left. Labour had an apparently unbreachable majority and the Conservative candidates who stood for election in 1951, the year of Conservative victory in the general election, were an assortment of small businessmen, managers and retired publicans. They were the champions of small shopkeepers threatened by municipal socialism.

The newcomers to Coventry prepared to play along with the prejudices and stereotypical images which confronted them. Instead, and in response, they set about fostering a positive self-image in their new environments, and in the process they enabled and enhanced the recovery of working class politics and culture in the Midland cities of England. The memory of the depression years had become a powerful motive force on the road to 1945 and well beyond it. Those who had lost almost everything had also lost their fear; they had everything to regain, and were determined to be there at their own remaking, as part of an integrated and relatively united, British working class. In the 1945 government film A City Re-born, a soldier and his fiancée are shown viewing Donald Gibson’s model of the new Coventry. They cannot contain their optimism and enthusiasm about the city where they are going to live, looking forward to their own little home… with a nice little garage… and a nice little nursery, while the film commentary enunciated the official mythology about the City:

Coventry is going to be a place to live where people can believe how pleasant human life can be… It must not be every man for himself, but every man for the good and happiness of all people living… Every man must believe in the good and happiness that is to be shared… to be shared, equally.

By 1951, Everyman had come to Coventry. The city had become not simply the identifiable symbol of the Tue England, but also of the New Jerusalem of the British working class which had relocated and recreated itself there.

Printed Sources:

Theo Barker (ed.) (1978), The Long March of Everyman, 1750-1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Richard Brown & Christopher Daniels (1982), Documents and Debates: Twentieth Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.

Barry Cunliffe (et. al., eds.), (2001),The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (n.d.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. University of Warwick: Cryfield Press.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain, III: 1776-2000; The Fate of Empire. London: BBC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Road to 1945 and Beyond (2/3)

Most observers expected the Conservatives to win the General Election in the summer of 1945. However, both before and during the war there had been a strong movement to the Labour Party which could be detected in both by-elections and opinion polls. Yet The Times found nothing remarkable in the Conservatives losing both Chelmsford and Motherwell in April 1945. Churchill, like many other observers, confused heartfelt public votes of gratitude for the way he had led the British people over the past five years of war with votes in the ballot box for how they wanted to be led over the next five years of peace. Some workers were prepared to carry their gratitude into the polling stations. When the Labour Party agent called on my grandparents to make the usual arrangements to turn their front room into the campaign office, he was amazed to see a poster of Churchill in the bay window, with the words Let us go Forward Together on it. Vera told him that he would have to find somewhere else to run the campaign from, as she felt she had to support Mr Churchill. This was the only occasion she did not actively support the Labour Party from the 1929 election, when she gained the vote, right through to 1979. Pugnaciously over-confident, Churchill ran the national campaign of abrasive vilification against the welfare state plans of the Labour Party. Their execution of these plans would, he said in a broadcast on 4 June, inevitably involve…

…some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud… it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil… My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist Policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom… a free Parliament, is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire.

 

His attempt to demonise socialism as being somehow outside the mainstream of British history was an extraordinary reversion to the polemics of the mid-twenties, despite all the collaboration of wartime coalition and the acceptance by the reform group of Conservative MPs of the principles and many of the proposed practices of the Beveridge Report. In a quietly sardonic reply, Clement Attlee, still a relatively unknown figure to many of the electorate, told them that he realised what the aim of Churchill’s twisting of Labour policy had been. He wanted the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives.

He had feared that those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further now thanked him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly.

Churchill was confident enough of the outcome of the election to go to a summit meeting at Potsdam with Stalin and Truman on 15 July. Stalin told him that his sources indicated a Tory majority of eighty. But the big-hitters in the Labour Party had removed their gloves, and went for the Tories. Sidney Silverman gave voice to a now popular demand to be rid of the threat of a return to the pre-war conditions which the Tories had presided over:

The victory of free men and women over Nazism and Fascism is a challenge to us all … shall we face again poverty and unemployment? … we have brought freedom to so many people. Let us now liberate ourselves.

At the Labour Party Conference held just before the General Election, Aneurin Bevan (right) whipped up the emotional counter-current by stating that, our aim was the political extinction of the Tory Party. That was almost what happened as the results came in on 26 July, confounding and dumbfounding most observers. In a turn-out of seventy-three per cent, Labour won 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 213, giving them an absolute majority of 154. For the first time in its history, the Labour Party received almost forty per cent of the votes of the total electorate and almost half of all the votes cast. At no election in the interwar period was the poll so heavy.

In every area of the country, not just the traditional strongholds, they swept to victory and the size of the national swing towards them was twelve per cent. With the MacDonald Factor now a distant memory, the reunited party gained 226 seats where in 1935 a Labour candidate had been defeated. These seats included parts of England normally considered beyond the reach of Labour, e.g. the Home Counties, the Eastern Counties, the East Midlands and the South West. Perhaps the most significant results came in the industrial Midlands, where the Unionist constituencies dominated by the Chamberlain dynasty for more than half a century, were wiped out.

Perhaps this was due, at least in part, to the facts published by the Birmingham Social Survey Committee at the beginning of the war, which showed that on some housing estates on the city’s outskirts, fourteen per cent of families had insufficient income to buy the minimum diet recommended by the British Medical Association, and this at a time when both employment and earnings were higher than ever before in Birmingham’s long industrial history. More than one-third of the children living on the Kingstanding estate were living below the national poverty line.

As G. D. H. Cole, Chairman of the Fabian Society pointed out, in 1945, in his preface to Mark Abrams’ book on The Condition of the British People, 1911-45, pointed out that even regional statistics tended to obscure the continuance of absolute poverty and slumdom in every big city, of serious malnutrition, especially in the larger families, and of sharp inequalities of educational and social opportunity.

For millions, Labour’s landslide seemed like the millennium they had dreamed would replace the threats of mass unemployment, poverty and war. It also reflected the economic advances and progress that many had made, which gave them an enhanced sense of self-confidence, which has since been demonstrated as almost a prerequisite of subsequent Labour electoral victories. The general mood of optimism rather than that of desperation experienced before the war was what persuaded many non-traditional voters to back Labour. Never before had a government been elected with such enthusiasm and with such a mandate for radical social change. Bonfires were again lit in the streets, old men openly wept with joy, for the long night was over. Clement Attlee had awaited the election results at Transport House and calmly accepted the victory.

The photograph (right) shows him with Arthur Deakin, second on the left, front row, acting General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. In the House of Commons the party stood and sang The Red Flag to the disbelief and demoralised bewilderment of the Conservative opposition who had shared Churchill’s belief that a socialist Britain could not be Britain. Hugh Dalton recalled the atmosphere among his Labour Colleagues:

There was a new society to be built; and we had the power to build it. There was exhilaration and confidence. We felt exalted, dedicated, walking on air, walking with destiny.

Mark Abrams concluded that the first generation of products of the Secondary and Technical schools had responded to Attlee’s call for courage, imagination and social conscience. He added, perhaps somewhat nervously, that, at least for the time being they had ignored those whose appeal was to envy, self-seeking and retreat from social responsibility. The next five years would show them if, in the Labour Party, they had found a way out from the old unsatisfying life of political apathy, perplexity and cynicism. The confidence and the determination of Labour to act to assure them of this after their electoral success was summed up by the phrase, We are the masters now!, (…and for some time to come!) used by the Attorney-General, Harvey Shawcross, during a debate in 1946. In the event, they had a little over six years, in which much was achieved despite the continuing austerity and uneasy peace which followed the war.

The Labour government was quick to honour its pledge to nationalise the mines, the terms of the Coal Industry Nationalisation Bill being published on 21 December 1945. Eventually, after passage through Commons and the formation of the National Coal Board, the vesting date was finally set for 1 January 1947. Whatever the misgivings of many trades unionists on the final structure for the administration of the industry, the miners, after generations of exploitation and fierce struggle, acclaimed with enthusiasm the Act that passed the ownership of the mines to the people. The pictorial illustrations and slogans which adorned the lodge banners throughout the mining communities left no doubt as to the importance the miners gave to nationalisation.

It was a euphoria born of decades of oppression; for the old miners, this was the realisation of a dream, while for the young, their hope for the future. The photograph of George Short (left), born in 1872, who started work underground at the age of twelve, perfectly illustrates the mood of 1947. In his face is a life of work and hardship, while at his side the banner of the NCB symbolises hope realised at the end of a working life, a dignified conclusion and the beginning of a better future for the miners as a whole, at least for a few decades to come.

 Apart from the more predictable consequences of six years of war, the government also had to contend with the particularly harsh winter of January and February 1947, memories of which remained acute for years, even decades, afterwards. Temperatures had been at their lowest for over a century, while unemployment had briefly risen to prewar levels of two and a half million, and the floods that came with the thaw wrought destruction on the nation’s agriculture. Nevertheless, the recovery was back on course by the end of that year and in 1948, bread, potatoes and preserves were taken off ration, followed the next year by clothes, boots and shoes.

 

However, milk, tea, sugar meat, bacon, butter, fats, and soap all remained on ration (right), and the fresh meat allocation was a minuscule eight pennyworth a week. Austerity was a word reiterated remorselessly by the Tory press and bombsites and derelict buildings remained as ugly reminders that post-war reconstruction was still at its beginning. However, if life was indeed austere, it was better for the majority than it had been in the years before the war.

In Suffolk, however, most of the basic realties of life continued; young men continued to be conscripted for two years’ voluntary two years’ National Service, rationing remained in place and so did the Americans, with whom many Suffolkers had a love-hate relationship. They were amused at the way the Yanks rushed round the quaint villages taking photos and making brass rubbings in the churches, but were not so amused when they danced with local girls or told the local people how they had won the war for them. Gradually, the airfields were abandoned, Nissen huts were sold off to farmers, and the Defence Ministry personnel went back to London, leaving the country houses they had commandeered to decay. Old problems returned to plague the county once again – unemployment and rural depopulation, low land and property values, and urban sprawl. Council estates were built to replace war damage and cater for the growing town populations. However, the overall population of the county, which had been decreasing for over a century, fell to 475,000 by 1951.

Railway traffic declined and several Suffolk branch lines closed well before the Beeching Axe fell. Reinvesting in exhausted railways was not a priority after the war. Railway nationalisation was soon followed by rail closures, so that by the early fifties nearly two thousand kilometres (1,200 miles) of railway had been closed to passenger traffic. Industrial change brought the loss of staple coal and textile traffic. Britain’s compact industrial geography also diminished any long-haul advantages that railways had over modern road transport. Comparatively low-cost bus services damaged the railways further. Road transport recovered slowly from vehicle and fuel shortages after the war. Road haulage was assisted by the lifting of the twenty-five mile limit on road freight consignments. Yet, even though private car ownership and use expanded to three million, between 1939 and 1952 there was practically no major road improvement or new road construction anywhere in Britain. Without a developed inland transport network, Suffolk was one of the areas that could not share in the slow national return to prosperity from the early fifties.

The Labour government was at pains to make its collectivist economic programme look patriotically legitimate. Taking twenty per cent of the economy into public ownership was called nationalisation. In addition to the mines, the steelworks, the railways, the nascent road haulage industry, and the airlines were all taken into public ownership. Public utilities, such as gas, electricity and the cable and wireless companies were all nationalised, as indeed was another great British institution, the Bank of England. The new public enterprises were also given patriotic corporate identities: British Steel, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, British Railways. Being British was recast as being a member of a community of shared ownership, obligations and benefits: co-op Britain. It would also be a Britain in which the most socially damaged areas of Wales, Scotland and industrial England would have the same rights as those of southern England. This time, to revisit Orwell’s metaphor, the right family members would be in control, and there would be no poor relations.

The reforms carried through by the Labour governments were not irreversible, but the fact that the Conservative administrations of Churchill and Macmillan chose not to reverse them shows how much of a post-war political consensus had been established by 1951. The creation of the National Health Service by Aneurin Bevan in 1948, despite considerable political and medical profession opposition, and his commitment to building publicly owned, rented housing. This was a massive programme of reform, unprecedented in scope and scale, even compared with the reforms of the Liberal governments of 1906-11, which were not, in any case, a programme, offered to the electorate in a manifesto. On housing, health and social insurance, Labour kept the promises it made in Let Us Face the Future, and went into the 1950 General Election pointing out in its manifesto, Let Us Win Through Together that it had placed on the Statute Book four Great Acts of Parliament – the National Insurance, Industrial Injuries, National Assistance and National Health Services Acts.

Over a million new houses were built, a comprehensive social insurance scheme was begun and the National Health Service was inaugurated. Surveys suggested that, by 1951, poverty had been all but eliminated. The postwar years also saw full employment, and the government established special development areas, in which half the new buildings of the late 1940s were sited, in an attempt to avoid a return to the depressed areas of the prewar decade. A dozen new towns were built, the first of an eventual twenty-seven, designed to draw population from over-crowded cities like London, and to create balanced urban communities.

The degree of success which historians, with the benefit of hindsight, ascribe to these reforms, depends on their view of The Welfare State. Writing in 1979, the year that Margaret Thatcher came to power promising to roll back the (Welfare) State, Bédarida pointed out that while the Labour government had started with boundless ambition, envisaging a total transformation of society, they were only able to achieve a fraction of their programme, the setting up of the Welfare State. Bédarida defines this as a new social set-up that guaranteed a minimum of security and benefit to all, but also points to the broader meanings that the concept acquired in both historical and contemporary perspectives:

The expression soon acquired official status, appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary as early as 1955 as a polity so organised that every member of the community is assured of his due maintenance with the most advantageous conditions possible for all… But Bédarida felt that this was a narrow and rather technical definition… amounting to little more than an enlargement of social services. The phrase needed to be viewed, in his opinion, in a wider context to give it its fuller meaning. In this sense it stood as the symbol of the structure of post-war Britain – a society with a mixed economy and full employment, where individualism is tempered by state intervention, where the right to work and a basic standard of living are guaranteed, and the working-class movement, now accepted and recognised, finds its rightful place in the nation… He went on:

In seeking to determine the significance of the Welfare State one must bear three points in mind. Firstly, to use the word ’revolution’ is to devalue its meaning… In the second place, the arrival of the Welfare State was situated in the mainstream of the history of democratic freedom, linking the pioneers of the London Corresponding Society with the militants of the Independent Labour Party… the Nonconformist Conscience with Christian Socialism… Finally, if the Welfare State was the grandchild of Beveridge and Keynes, it was no less the child of the Fabians, since it concentrated on legislative, administrative and centralising methods to the detriment of ’workers’ control’. But in thus stamping on any frail aspiration towards a libertarian organisation of society, Labour laid itself open to a charge that would weigh heavily on it in the future, namely that of wanting to impose a bureaucratic form of socialism.    

Attlee’s administrations were not revolutionary by nature, but rather evolutionary in approach, ensuring a proper balance between making necessary radical changes while at the same time keeping the continuity of British institutions and traditions, especially those connected with the constitutional monarchy. There was little debate between the parties at the time as to whether a Welfare State was needed, though there were differences about how soon it could be afforded, and about the means by which it would be achieved. In its 1945 Manifesto, the Labour Party had accepted that such great national programmes of education, health and social services were likely to be costly, and that only an efficient and prosperous nation could afford them in full measure, but, they argued, there was no good reason why Britain should not afford such programmes. Though the manifesto had not referred to Beveridge by name, it acknowledged that while the Party had played a leading part in the long campaign for… social provision against rainy days, this was not, exclusively, their proposition.

In its 1950 Manifesto, it also pointed out that the first major national programme, that of Education, had already been enacted in 1944, by the Wartime Coalition, with the Conservative Minister, R A Butler guiding the legislation through Parliament. The 1944 Act gave LEAs a framework within which to make their postwar plans. Each LEA was therefore required to produce a Development Plan to indicate their intentions to the Ministry. The first Development Plan for Coventry, prepared in June 1946, revealed that Coventry had a school age population of thirty thousand. The Authority traced its problems back to the 1920s and 1930s when a rapid growth in population resulted in insufficient school accommodation. The war-time destruction and devastation of school buildings had exaggerated the accommodation difficulties still further. If it was to comply with the requirements of the Act, it indicated that it not only had to rebuild and repair war damaged schools, but it also had to complete the Hadow reorganisation of its schools which was started before the war. Only when this had been completed could it commence new developments in secondary education.

 

Despite the Ministry’s inclination towards a tripartite division of secondary schooling, shared by the new Labour administration, Coventry proposed multilateral schools. The 1946 Development Plan contained a proposal for ten multilateral schools with eight-form entry, giving a total of twelve and a half thousand places, with three Voluntary Modern schools (two Catholic, one Church of England), two single-sex boarding schools and two independent boys’ grammar schools making up the remaining three thousand places needed. However, the Ministry felt that the Plan had underestimated the size of the city’s school population and future needs for schools. Secondly, they considered the proposed multilateral schools were not sufficiently large, and that they should be increased to ten form entry. This was partly because the main consideration was how many pupils were required in these schools to produce a viable post-sixteen, or sixth form. The Authority submitted a revised plan in which it met some of the Ministry’s objections. However, the question of school size remained unsettled, and the LEA also shifted in its terminology and definition of the schools towards the comprehensive ideal, at least as an ultimate goal. The main practical difference between the two models was that a multilateral school was envisaged as offering a diversity of curricula, whereas a comprehensive school was one in which all pupils would follow a common curriculum to sixteen. In Coventry, the two terms were used interchangeably, because providing multilateral types of schooling on the same site meant that Coventry’s secondary schools would also provide elements of the tripartite system. By the early part of 1949 the LEA had decided in favour of comprehensive schools. This idea was applauded by the local press in March when a reporter stated:

Coventry is to be one of the first authorities to build a new school of the ’Comprehensive’ type. The idea is one favoured by the Ministry of Education. It has been brought forward because of the pressure on school accommodation now and to come. In Coventry the shortage is chronic, and any scheme that will provide more and better classrooms is welcomed.

A 1948 survey made by the Ministry of Education into the physical conditions of the city’s schools estimated that, overall, twenty per cent of their classrooms were in poor huts, hired accommodation and other makeshift premises. In addition, more than a quarter of all secondary school classes contained more than forty pupils, a situation that HMI (His Majesty’s Inspectors) regarded as a most unsatisfactory position for both the children and the teachers. In 1950, their report on one city secondary school commented its dilapidated wooden huts, both containing two classrooms, one an annexe hired by the LEA a quarter of a mile away, a poor, ill-lit building without playing space, the use of which could only be justified by the present critical emergency. One headmaster who was a member of the city’s special advisory group commented forty years later that, even if there had been no Education Act in 1944, Coventry would have needed to develop new schools as much of what remained of the prewar provision after the bombing was inadequate. Coventry’s move towards comprehensive schools can therefore be attributed to several factors relating to postwar accommodation, overcrowding, the poor quality of existing buildings and the ever-growing demand for places from the increasing population. The Authority could justifiably claim that, unlike other LEAs, the special circumstances facing it gave it few options but to adopt and develop a comprehensive school system. By the time Churchill’s Conservative Government came to power in 1951, the die was already cast, and it the Authority’s case was irresistible.

Coventry is named in numerous books on the development of the education system in England and Wales as a pioneer in the comprehensive movement, a champion of the cause of revolutionising the English school system. However, to understand the reality and significance of the later development of comprehensive education in Coventry, it is important to ask how, in its conception, it was defined locally. Until the early 1950s comprehensive education was only a vague idea in the English and Welsh school system. There were no buildings to visit, nor were any schools which could be seen in operation. There was little agreement in contemporary writing about what constituted a comprehensive school. The key element in the concept in Coventry was that it could start with first principles, with a range of local planners, including administrators, architects, councillors, educationists and teachers able to work together to translate a set of abstract ideas into educational practice, for the benefit of all the city’s children. Just as, at the national level, Bevan was concerned to develop the NHS as an example of socialist Britain working in practice, so the postwar Coventry school system, although also having some ideological origins, was, essentially, a practical expression of a municipal socialism already well-established in the City corporation.

Alongside the redevelopment of Coventry’s secondary school system, the first part of the City Architect’s plan for the bomb-damaged central area came to fruition in 1948, with the completion of Broadgate House. However, Donald Gibson’s city plan was not published until 1951. Brave new Coventry, with its precinct shopping centre (right), ring road and new Cathedral became an early symbol of Britain’s postwar rejuvenation.

From the 1951 Festival of Britain showground  (left) to the Pathe newsreel, Coventry was presented as a snapshot of life in post-austerity Britain. Gibson’s first problem was that, unlike in other bomb-damaged centres such as Exeter, there were few substantial buildings of character for the architect to respect. What remained after the bombing was a hotchpotch of medieval wood frame edifices and tatty Victorian in filling.

There were no graceful corner structures to build around, nor were there many major buildings in the heart of the central area, such as Exeter’s magnificent market hall, which warranted preservation.

Secondly, in terms of its population, Coventry was probably like nowhere else in mid-twentieth century Britain. Nearly half of the local citizens had come from elsewhere in Britain, most of these from quite remote industrial areas, and a high proportion of the remainder were the children of migrants. The sense of local identity and character among the population was weaker than in many other Midland cities, such as nearby Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham. The planning authorities had somehow to create a sense of civic loyalty among these newly arrived Coventrians, so they were pleasantly surprised when the plan for wholesale redevelopment of the city centre met with considerable enthusiasm, with droves of citizens, old and new, visiting the model exhibition. The transport department ran a special bus tour of the city centre with a planning official on board pointing out the main areas of redevelopment to the passengers. Perhaps this reaction was to be expected during the dark days of post-war austerity in a large working class city that had recently suffered so much. In particular, the idea of a new centre with bountiful retail outlets gave all Coventrians something to look forward to.

No-one would doubt that the achievements of the Labour governments were considerable. They undertook the massive dual task of social reconstruction and social transformation with vigour, and attempted to establish a new social order. Yet their success in this area must be viewed against their economic failures and inept foreign policy. The creation of the Welfare State did not, by itself, bring about a transformation of society. It was symbolic of that aim, but was also, in many ways, a substitute for it. Besides, most of the Labour ministers also remained loyal supporters of what Orwell had called The Lion and the Unicorn back in 1941, committed, in true Methodist fashion, to doing things decently and in order, even though they were more semi-detached from the Establishment than those in the National and Coalition governments.

The main problems they faced were the huge war debts, larger than any other nation in history, and was precariously dependent on American aid, and these two factors ultimately crippled the new government. In addition, whether they liked the fact or not, Britain was still committed to crippling defence costs around the world, rising to ten per cent of gross domestic product, far higher than that of any other European state. The idealistic assumption was made, mistakenly, that public ownership of key industries, with its replacement of the incentive for private profit replaced by cooperative enterprise, would somehow lead to greater productivity. There were periods in 1948 and 1950 when export surges made these projections look more realistic, but these were not sustained. They were the result of the same kind of pattern of post-war demand that Britain had experienced in the immediate aftermath of world war one. Eventually, the British economy would have to contend with the long-term reality of shrinking demand for its exports. As G. D. H. Cole had realistically pointed out in 1945, it was undeniable that Britain had lagged behind many other countries in developing its productivity and had thus failed adequately to increase the size of the cake which the Labour government had now to share out with less monstrous unfairness than before. He had also warned:

 It will become much more important to ensure that industry adjusts itself to providing types of employment to match the composition of the labour force, and that the State takes a hand in ensuring that the available labour is used with due regard to social priorities of production under the conditions of full employment.

As the case of Coventry shows, this restructuring failed to happen over the following six years of Labour rule, at least as far as the corporate or private motor manufacturing and light engineering industries were concerned. In addition, US loans came with firm conditions that Britain continue to play a major role in the Atlantic Alliance in resisting the growing communist threats, especially in those regions where it had maintained imperial dominance before the war, including the Middle East. In 1949, having tried to assert Britain’s independence from the USA, Bevin found himself negotiating Marshall Aid for Britain, and paying a high price for it in loss of that same independence. Not only were American B-29 bombers stationed in East Anglia from 1948, with nuclear capacity from 1950, but from 1951 Britain followed the USA into the Korean War. Then the government had to accept increased expenditure on the armed forces, cutting welfare spending, which resulted in Aneurin Bevan’s resignation and also triggered a balance of payments crisis and a second general election is as many years. It was a temporary deficit, but by the time balance had been restored, in 1953, Labour was out of office.

The Labour government kept its promise to see through the transition to Indian Independence in August 1947, and the Commonwealth became a multi-racial institution, eventually replacing the Empire. Nevertheless, in the short-term, welfare-state Britain was still committed to replacing an old empire with a new one. Ernest Bevin, now Foreign Secretary, turned out to be almost as much of an imperialist as Churchill. He had begun his working life as a Somerset farm labourer’s boy, but perhaps it was his battles with the communists in the Labour movement in the 1930s which had turned him into such an ardent defender of Empire by the beginning of the Cold War era.

Besides, new markets were being found for the British engineering products which had supplied the expanding home market before the war, including Morris Minors from Cowley and Rolls-Royce engines from Coventry, in return for a steady supply of petroleum to drive the same engines back home. The photograph of car workers on the assembly line in Cowley in 1946 shows that a boom in production was already well underway by 1950.

In 1945 fewer than seventeen thousand cars were manufactured in Britain, but by 1950 the figure had reached a record level of well over half a million, many being sold to Middle Eastern countries, thus improving the country’s balance of trade figures.

In Coventry, the most crucial divergence between the Standard Motor Company, supremely successful in delivering war contracts, came at the end of the War. Most of the other companies sought to roll back wartime union gains and to re-establish prewar wages and conditions as far as possible, though in practice with little success. John Black’s strategy was in complete contrast to this approach. He foresaw both an acute shortage of labour and an insatiable market for cars and opted to continue his high wage/ high output pattern into peacetime as a springboard to lift Standard into the league of mass producers. His initiative was strongly supported by Jack Jones, but brought him into conflict with the Coventry District Engineering Employers’ Association, leading to the Company’s expulsion from the Engineering Employers’ Federation nationally. Black believed that his policy was one which all the other Coventry firms would be forced to follow, but in practice he was proved wrong. Standard was not able to achieve a quantitative leap in its share of the market, and other firms found that they did not have to follow his lead in order to recruit the labour that they required. Over the next decade wage levels at Standard slowly fell back towards the more normal high wages of other Coventry motor manufacturers.

Nevertheless, the 1945/48 Agreement which initiated this system was a quite remarkable one, even for a time of full employment. It cut hours to forty-two and a half per week, compared with the average of forty-four for Federated firms, though it was not until 1948 that a comprehensive agreement covering the organisation of production and payment was concluded. It provided for the reduction of the number of gangs from over a hundred to fifteen at the main plant at Canley, with one giant gang at the Banner Lane engine works. The previous sixty-eight job grades were cut down to just eight, bonus was to be paid on gang output and prices were to be negotiated with each gang. There was an average twenty per cent wage increase and a guaranteed minimum wage of five pounds per week for all adult male workers. In addition, all labour would be recruit through the union, thus ensuring de facto a closed shop. Not only did this agreement concede high wages, but it also institutionalised large gangs as powerful bargaining units. It was also the less skilled workers, disproportionately represented in the TGWU who benefited most.

As far as John Black was concerned, the object was to devise an incentive system with a close correlation of effort, output and rewards, put it in place and then leave it to run itself. However, the price paid in terms of loss of traditional managerial control was high. The shop stewards enjoyed a great deal of job control: stopwatches were banned and all final prices had to be agreed with them as well as the gangs. The union controlled both the hiring of labour and the amount of overtime to be worked. After 1946 there was a very real sense that, while the company was riding the crest of a wave, it was the shop stewards who were running the company. In 1950 Black tried to get back control over hiring and to cut back on high-priced gangs, but was forced to back down through shop-floor action. In addition, there were divisive pressures within the incentive system, leading to rivalries both within and between gangs. In the early years of the Standard system, Black’s unique managerial strategy had linked up with the nascent union organisation and each had strengthened the other. The dominance of the TGWU and the unusually strong links between its District Secretary, Jack Jones, and the shop stewards, helped to achieve coherence on the union side. However, for all the progress that the system achieved within the works, it was geared to an expansion into the front rank of mass producers in Britain that never materialised.

At the Rootes assembly works at Ryton, on the outskirts of the city, and their engine plant at Stoke, a significant shop floor organisation had come about during the war but, unlike at Standard, it only flourished after a bitter attempt by management to roll back union gains between 1944 and 1946. The company attempted to tighten works discipline and push piecework prices down to prewar levels using redundancies and victimisations of leading shop stewards. After a long struggle culminating in a major strike in 1946, union organisation held the line. The strike victory owed something to the intervention of the Ministry of Labour who suspended half the redundancy notices, but more to the widespread district support from other factories and union branches who realised its strategic importance. Management backed down, but they did not immediately reconcile themselves to the union presence. In 1947 the Rootes brothers decided on a frontal assault on what they regarded as the Communist troublemakers of the unions, and sacked sixty Trim shop workers including the leading stewards in the plant. To their surprise, the NUVB Executive made the resulting strike official, and a lengthy dispute was only ended with a compromise settlement when they agreed to allow half the sackings to stand as long as the other half, including the non-Communist steward, were reinstated. Thereafter the management at Rootes adopted a more conciliatory style. By 1950 Rootes’ Coventry factories were 99 per cent unionised.

Before the Second World War, Jaguar too had been a bitterly anti-union firm. The founder and owner, Sir William Lyons, finally formally recognised the unions in 1946, but the hostility lingered on. Between 1946 and 1951 the firm continued to dislodge the unions but failed mainly because of the strategic strength of skilled NUVB workers in the Body and Trim shops. Jaguar were still making prewar quality models by prewar methods in a prewar factory and they were heavily dependent on scarce craft skills in these departments. In the late 1940s recurrent short-time and lay-offs, mainly due to component shortages and restricted steel allocations, were the main causes of conflict. Despite these periodic clashes, including an eight-week strike over the sacking of two leading stewards in 1951, during which the NUVB held firm, the management at Jaguar accepted the permanence of the unions.

Workplace relations at Alfred Herbert, the leading machine tool firm in Coventry, present a sharp contrast to the three motor firms. Herbert’s before the war was a classic anti-union, paternalistic shop. Many of these elements were also to be found in the motor firms in those years, yet the Herbert system came through the war and postwar boom more or less intact. Unionism developed considerably during the war, but it did so largely on the basis of a female membership that was almost entirely excluded from the factory once the war ended. Even during the war, union organisation lacked self-confidence and tended to rely on arbitration rather than exerting direct pressure in the shops. After the war unions were tolerated but they had almost no bargaining power and were only consulted on a few limited issues such as pensions.

In the postwar boom, Coventry engineering workers pushed shop-floor bargaining further than any other comparable group of workers. Energetic sectional bargaining and direct workplace democracy won significant gains, though shop floor bargaining was always more cooperative and less confrontational than has often been argued. As local factories struggled to switch from arms to motor production it became essential for employers to involve the unions in shop floor management. Unions were granted recognition, high wage settlements and an element of control over recruitment. Many local firms prospered in the immediate postwar period with virtually no structure of junior management. The short-term benefits of this system of shop floor bargaining are demonstrated by Coventry’s increasing share of the UK motor market in the years 1945-50, in particular at Standard, where despite John Black’s disappointment at not breaking into the top rank of the industry. that share rose by forty per cent.

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Nick Baines's Blog

This is the text of an article I published in the Yorkshire Post yesterday.

Every English teenager should be required to go with me to Berlin and take a 100 metre walk from the Brandenburg Gate up Unter den Linden. Within that short stretch we would walk the human history of great culture and dreadful tragedy, the heights of wisdom and the depths of corruption, the terror of captivity and the euphoria of liberation.

Of course, no one has offered to take me up on this proposal, but Berlin offers something unique in the world. And there could be no better – more poignant or instructive – day to do my walk than 9 November – a date that haunts Germans for different reasons. This year Remembrance Day falls on this day.

To remember means, literally, to re-member – that is, to put the memories back together in some order…

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The Princess who would not be Queen

Reblogged to go with forthcoming blogposts on The British People in the New Eliyabethan Era.

Andrew James

On April 21^st, 1926, King George V’s first grandchild was born and was christened

‘Elizabeth Alexandra Mary’ at Buckingham Palace in May.

Her parents were then the Duke and Duchess of York, and, after her uncle, the Prince of Wales, and her father, Elizabeth was third in line to the throne. She had blue eyes and weighed a little under average. All through the christening she cried loudly, but at six months she was a good-tempered child, always smiling.

People said she took after her father in appearance, but was more like her mother in personality. Two years later, on 21^st August 1930, her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, was born in Scotland, at Glamis Castle. She also had blue eyes, but had darker hair than Elizabeth, and weighed more at birth. The two princesses…

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