Elizabethans
Churchill, the old lion, was seventy-seven and little more than a year away from a major stroke. But he wasn’t toothless. The story of his last administration is often told as a sad, withdrawing ebb – the hiss and rattle of impatient and jealous colleagues trying to nudge him into retirement; a few last great sea-gurgles, and clatterings of stones, as he warned of the dangerous new atomic age and tried to forge a better relationship with America, still committed as well to federal Europe; and then the slither of his great shadow into darkness.
This is a highly partial picture, however. As with the King’s war, Churchill’s old age has been unfairly remembered, thanks to the memoirs of the impatient younger men all around him. He might have been old, with his attention periodically wandering, but he had vast powers of recuperation and was intently interested in the modern world. This one-time cavalry officer under Queen Victoria, First World War Admiralty leader, staunch imperialist and global statesman of the 1940s, was able to see the beginning of the new reign with a perspective unlike anyone else’s. The English, he came to believe, would again be Elizabethans – the Scots, of course, for the first time. As with Tudor England, the archipelago would be a magic island full of noises, crammed with invention and ambition, looking outwards to the world.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Churchill’s romanticism about Britain in 1952 is easy to mock. But despite the economic and physical hammering she had taken during the war, Britain was a potently interesting place. She boasted composers of the stature of William Walton and Vaughan Williams for her Coronation music. In the American-born poet T. S. Eliot and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, she had two recent winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Churchill himself would soon be a third). She had explorers and adventurers; cutting-edge scientists and inventors, responsible for everything from the hovercraft to the jet engine. British artists such as Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Churchill’s bugbear, Graham Sutherland, gave Britain the kind of serious role in art that she had rarely enjoyed in the previous century. In short, if the new Elizabeth’s Britain wasn’t quite the ‘nest of singing birds’ that Shakespearean England had been, it was a vigorous and striking cacophony of ideas, images and expressive ambitions.
Yet all around her were wild seas and fresh horrors. The Cold War was beginning. The scale and monstrosity of Stalin’s dictatorship was only starting to become clear. The mushroom clouds of the nuclear age overshadowed all conventional diplomacy. From the hideous communal violence of India to uprisings in the Far East, the British Empire was coming bloodily apart. Five days after welcoming her to London, Churchill noted in the House of Commons that the new Queen was beginning her reign halfway through ‘the terrible twentieth century’. He went on: ‘Half of it is over and we have survived its fearful convulsions. We stand erect both as an island people and as the centre of a world-wide Commonwealth and Empire, after so much else in other lands has been shattered or fallen to the ground …’ But what was coming next? That was the real question.
Churchill believed that the beginning of the Elizabethan era marked a moment when the British, still impoverished after the war, could look ahead with fresh ambition, and he wondered what would befall them. There would, he thought, be more material wealth. The first signs of a new consumer economy were already clear in the United States. New inventions, from atomic energy – thought then to imply almost free electricity – to jet airliners and the first computers, promised to reshape daily life. If there were terrors, there was also great promise.
Churchill told the Commons that Elizabeth ‘comes to the throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age’. He spent most of his waking hours worrying about the threat to peace, from divided Korea to divided Germany. But if the world’s leaders could get themselves through this dangerous period and achieve a global armistice, Churchill suggested, ‘an immense and undreamed-of prosperity with culture and leisure ever more widely spread can come … to the masses of the people in every land’. And, of course, he was largely right.
There is so much about the Britain of the 2020s which would utterly baffle the first of the new Elizabethans, looking at us from 1952. We have become a people who have forsaken factories; whose skies are now clear of choking smoke; who are as variegated in the colour of their skins as the world’s population itself; whose mosques are crowded and whose churches are emptying; a people with only meagre armed forces to protect them; who spend much of their time staring at small glass screens on which images of all human culture can be seen; who are giving up the use of physical money; and whose children often browse pornography of an explicit nature that simply didn’t exist in the 1950s. Churchill’s ‘immense and undreamed-of prosperity’ has birthed an unexpected new Britain. But it has been made, not merely by anonymous historical forces, but by specific, identifiable individuals, leading the way and working together.
The British had two really big, overarching projects during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The first was to build the world’s most successful – the most fair, the most equal and the most generous – welfare state. This was more the project of the left than of the right, though many Conservatives threw themselves into it with gusto and determination. The range of early supporters stretched from Winston Churchill to the likes of Jack Ashley. By the 1970s, however, this project was in crisis.
A collapse of industrial discipline which would have surprised Labour politicians of the immediate post-war period led to higher taxes and a sense of weary malaise, provoking a backlash among working-class voters as well as among the middle classes. There was a crisis of values, a widespread questioning of democratic socialism. In the decades since, although worship of the National Health Service has become a national religion, celebrated with fervour during the coronavirus crisis of 2020, that wider dream which gave it birth has been in retreat. Meanwhile, there has been a second great project.
This was to impress British influence on the new world, as a ‘great power’, even as the traditional Empire was wound up. This might be done through the Commonwealth or, some came to believe, through British membership of the European Union. This project too has failed. Despite thinking of themselves as one of the great change-making peoples in world history, the modern British proved unable to hold territory, win guerrilla wars or maintain moral authority far beyond their borders. Instead, those borders became porous, so that for many people they barely seemed to exist at all.
This, too, provoked a crisis of values: immigration and emigration changed the texture of the country and made it impossible for the modern British to believe there was a truly special ‘British race’, as their grandparents had imagined. Britain suffered a loss of national self-belief – and, with it, the single-mindedness, the brutality and the Machiavellian ruthlessness that would have been needed to impose British will on a more prosperous and fast-changing world. To make an empire requires a nation of imperialists. By the 1970s, certainly, the British were that no longer. Why not? One answer is that we simply became better educated about the rest of the world, and about the darker aspects of our own history. Nor did we have the muscle to impose ourselves – the huge Navy, the tanks and the fleets of bombers and missiles backed up by a potent world currency.
Modern Elizabethans, while displaying great ingenuity, and a certain amount of buccaneering commercial spirit, failed to produce the outstandingly energetic and highly productive economy that would have been needed to make Britain either a modern superpower or a lavishly funded and wealthy welfare society – the two big, ambitious projects.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the British made major advances in everything from aeronautics to the structure of DNA, computers, innovative substances such as graphene and much else besides. Although it is a pretty bizarre measurement, Britain easily beats any other European country in the number of Nobel prizes awarded to her citizens – and won far more during the 1950s and 1960s than before or since. What we apparently couldn’t do, or do well enough, was to make things cheaply enough and well enough and consistently enough to earn ourselves the living we thought we deserved.
It’s true that in financial services, insurance and other less tangible areas London (for the moment) still punches above her weight. But we have been cursed by that dullest of curses, low productivity. This is, of course, relative. Despite the Blitz, Britain had escaped the wholesale battering and expropriation of the war years: poorer and less developed rival economies, including some in Europe, were bound to catch up in the end, giving the appearance of British decline. In the 1950s Britain had the most manufacturing-centred economy of any country in the world except for Germany.
British governments poured money into research and development, as did private British companies. The historian David Edgerton says:
The economic benchmark in the 1950s and 1960s in terms of income per head was the USA. It was roughly twice as productive per capita. In terms of rates of growth, the standard was not set by the USA but by France, Germany, Italy and Japan. They grew faster than the UK, but from a lower base of income per head. The fundamental process was that of convergence – with the poorer of these economies growing faster than the richer ones. Slow growth was for a country like the United Kingdom a sign not of weakness, but of wealth.
After a high-water mark of manufacturing in the 1970s, things began to decline, although by the 1980s the natural gift of North Sea oil and gas, and increasing agricultural efficiency, meant that Britain no longer needed to worry as much about manufactured imports as she had done. There are many stories of individual corporate failures, bad government investment decisions, goofy bosses and suicidally destructive shop stewards; but there has been more flagellation about economic failure than actual economic failure. The trouble is, we are a relatively small nation, with an inflated sense of ourselves, so we expect more in terms of wealth and a global prestige than is, perhaps, reasonable.
Here is the truth that grand old Winston Churchill, for all his perspective and wisdom could not confront: we are an ordinary country. We are a beautiful, diverse, law-abiding, hard-working and ingenious country, but we are an ordinary one – not New Jerusalem nor Greater Britain. Yet it seems we have never quite been able to believe it. That, really, was what eventually did for Tory dreams and Labour schemes. As somebody who loves Britain, the author does not find this depressing. Once we cast aside the illusions and forget the absurd ambitions, there is much in our recent history to celebrate, enjoy and learn from.
5
ON OUR UPPERS
So, in February 1952, what were the British arguing about among themselves when their new Queen touched down from Africa at London Airport – that modest new civil-engineering project plonked across some useful market gardens, now known as Heathrow? One sidelight on national talking points can be found by simply reading all the copies of The Times newspaper for that winter. It’s a partial picture, naturally. There are few photographs, and no gossip, in what was a remorselessly factual upmarket news service; the voices of working-class people are almost completely absent, while for its staff all that really mattered was foreign affairs, politics and business.
And yet this dry paper is nonetheless juicily fascinating and unexpected. For one thing, just seven years after the end of the Second World War, Britain had not yet confronted the reality that her Empire was slipping away: The Times divided all its news pages into two categories – home news, on the one hand, and imperial and foreign on the other. Reading through both, the British still seem very much at war. A bloody conflict in Korea, the first hot war between the democracies and communism, staggers on. British tanks and troops are fighting ‘terrorists’ in Egypt, Africa and the Far East. Later in the year, in October, Britain will become the third country in the world to test its own thermonuclear weapon.
War, war, war. As he folded his copy of the paper each morning, Churchill himself was obsessed about the danger of invasion by the Soviet Union. We think of Dad’s Army as a phenomenon of the 1940s, but by 1952 some 30,000 men had been registered into the Home Guard as a protection against (Russian) ‘raids, descents and sabotage’. Churchill’s speeches described a new, still-unfamiliar world order, based on division between Soviet aggression and capitalist defence. Correctly, he believed that it would last for most of the century.
In the most famous of these speeches, at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, he laid out in uncompromising terms the basics of what would become the Cold War. On the one side, there was the Soviet Union, led by his old friend Joseph Stalin. The Soviets did not actively want war but did want ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’. On the other side there was a new alliance between the people of the English-speaking Commonwealth and those of the United States. And of course an Iron Curtain now lay across Europe, ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. For a man who saw himself as a peacemaker, deeply worried about the coming nuclear age, this was a hard and aggressive speech. So much so that many of the leading American newspapers at the time recoiled from it in horror. The Times did not.
But how wise was Churchill, the dominant voice of 1950s Britain? Marilynne Robinson, the American Christian novelist and writer, gives the alternative view:
Has anyone really read the Iron Curtain speech lately and pondered how much of the worst policies for dealing with the Soviet Union in the post-war period are set out in it? And this is in 1946, when Russia had not yet had time to reckon its truly staggering losses? … After the Iron Curtain speech, angry crowds surrounded Churchill’s hotel in New York. Stalin was not alone in considering the speech a declaration of war – in 1946, for heaven’s sake, before the ashes of the last war were cool. In the speech Churchill proposed the British Empire as the de facto encirclement of the Soviet Union, urging Americans to sustain what Britain could not, for the advantage it would give us in a coming atomic conflict. From the side of wounded Russia, encirclement may have looked very much like an iron curtain. While Churchill did not foresee all the worst consequences of the Cold War, he did help to make them inevitable.
What this account of Churchill omits is how recently Britain had come close to invasion, and the effect of that on British thinking. However outlandish it seems today, in the early 1950s the possibility of a Russian invasion of the UK weighed deeply on policymakers in London. And the impact filtered, subtly, through British society. Churchill was talking to his ministers about organizing what would have been effectively a new British Army, 250,000 strong, into 500 ‘mobile columns’ to answer an airborne attack by Soviet forces.
A high proportion of young British men spent eighteen months (or, after the declaration of the Korean War in 1950, two years) doing National Service in the Army, in the RAF or, more rarely, in the Navy. All men aged between seventeen and twenty-one were liable for call-up, though there were reserved occupations, such as coal mining, agricultural labouring and service in the merchant navy. In the average fortnight, 6,000 young men would be called up, given haircuts and put into uniform. A total of 2.3 million British men experienced National Service during the 1950s, and although its abolition was announced in 1957, it carried on until 1960 and the very last conscripted men were not returned to civilian life until 1963.
The cohort of young men who might otherwise have been at their most rebellious were subjected to tough military discipline in wooden or prefab barracks. They were taught to obey orders, to look after their clothes and personal hygiene and to tolerate considerable boredom. Those who weren’t going through this process were being disciplined in tough agricultural work or down coal mines. We have already seen the importance of manufacturing and religion in shaping social attitudes, but a drilled and more obedient country was first forged by National Service. It wasn’t just the plan of Churchill’s Conservatives. When people talk today about the great reforming Labour government of 1945, they tend to miss out the 1948 Act responsible for this last great blast of British militarism.
Enough, for the moment, of the men. One great issue for millions of British women was the impact of unregulated childbirth on family budgets. After the disruption of the war, when many marriages had been ruined and millions of children had grown up fatherless, there followed a time when rebuilding traditional families seemed a personal, and national, necessity.
The most dramatic years of the so-called ‘baby boom’ occurred immediately after the war, but there was an annual increase in births throughout the 1950s – an average of 839,000 a year, and then another increase during the 1960s, when the annual average rose again to 962,000. This happened even though British families had more opportunity to limit the number of babies. The birth rate had fallen markedly during the first half of the century, from twenty-eight live births per thousand to sixteen. Government statisticians believed that the major part of the fall was taking place in working-class families. The cause? Newly available contraception.
More mouths meant hungrier families. But if married women could keep the wolf from the door by using condoms and contraceptive caps, there were many others who couldn’t. The war had brought a dramatic increase in single mothers. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (which continues in a different form today under the name Gingerbread) was dealing with ninety or so new cases a month in 1939: by the beginning of 1946 that had risen to 400, a total of more than 16,000 during the war years.
As a history of post-war single-parenthood explains:
In 1945, 25 per cent of all … cases concerned US servicemen. If these men denied paternity or had left the country, there was little hope … When the children were ‘coloured’ there was a particular problem, especially in the large areas of Britain unaccustomed to people of different skin colour. In 1945, the League of Coloured People reported to the [government] that it knew of 554 ‘illegitimate’ children born to ‘coloured’ US servicemen …
Among those worried about this was Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, who wrote to the National Council via a lady in waiting. She did not blame the soldiers particularly: ‘they are friendly, generous and have a great deal of money to spend; and there is no reason to believe that they are particularly ill behaved, though I fear there is very little doubt but that many English girls – often about 15 years of age – do run after these men (and their money!) most persistently …’
But, Queen Mary went on, rather contradicting her image as a starchy figure, ‘This is not chiefly a question of morals … American men refuse to allow Negroes to associate with white girls, and they are ready (unpunished by their own authorities) to “beat up”, first, the offending blacks, and subsequently the white girls who encouraged them.’ Alarmed by the prospect of lynchings in Britain, Queen Mary suggested there should be no media coverage of the issue, and that English girls should be warned of the disastrous consequences that could follow if they became pregnant by black Americans.
But whether the fathers were black or white, many children grew up in the immediate aftermath of the war slowly realizing that they were not living with their biological parents. The rock musician Eric Clapton was born to a sixteen-year-old woman who had had an affair with a married Canadian serviceman. He went home. She too moved to Canada after the war, though with another man. This left Eric with his grandparents, whom he long assumed were his parents. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, a house full of secrets: ‘But, bit by bit … I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on and to understand that the secrets were usually to do with me. One day I heard one of my aunties ask, “Have you heard from his mum?” and the truth dawned on me that when [Uncle] Adrian jokingly called me a “little bastard” he was telling the truth.’
Illegitimate war children were common at the beginning of the Queen’s reign; and illegitimate children continued to appear in large numbers throughout it. The ‘moral 1950s’ wasn’t the fabrication of nostalgic historians or journalists. There was a desperation to get back to a kinder, more traditional, stable world, and for many British people that meant a return to an imagined Christian community. But it didn’t restrain the sexual urge. And it didn’t stop millions of women looking around and wondering whether there was a life of more fun, and less drudgery, to be had. That meant contraception, but it wasn’t easy to get hold of. This was still the age of the backstreet abortionist, who had wearily seen it all, knocking on the back door with her bag full of knitting needles and vinegar. For many, giving birth and then passing on the inconvenient child was a safer, kinder and less terrifying option.
Many children born outside marriage lived perfectly happily with other members of their extended families, learning much later in life that ‘Mother’ was in fact a granny or aunt, and that brothers and sisters were, in biological fact, cousins. But large numbers of children were adopted, often informally or outside the law, through adverts in newspapers or even arrangements made in pubs or shopping queues. Pauline Prescott, then a hairdresser in Chester, who later married the future Deputy Prime Minister, had her first child in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers, St Bridget’s House of Mercy. The baby boy was later adopted by a family living many miles away in Wolverhampton.
The Prescotts only made contact with him again when he was in his forties, after a long and honourable military career. The story is worth mentioning not because it is unusual, but because informal and formal adoptions were so very common, an inevitable result of a strictly pro-marriage culture. One more example: the mother of the novelist Ian McEwan had her first baby during the war, while her husband was serving overseas, and placed an ad in her local paper: ‘Wanted, home for baby boy aged one month: complete surrender’. She handed the baby over to a couple at Reading Station. The boy, David Sharp, had a happy childhood and grew up to work as a bricklayer. He lived a few miles away from the famous novelist, without either knowing about the other’s existence for half a century. It is an extraordinary story, but not as rare as we might think.
A careful study of the papers of the National Council by the historians Pat Thane and Tanya Evans challenges the notion that the mothers and children from ‘illegitimate’ marriages were generally harshly treated in the tougher ethical climate of the 1950s. It is true that there were moral panics in Parliament about the number of children being adopted by people other than their relatives – about a fifth of illegitimate children – and about the number of couples changing a surname by deed poll to hide the fact that they were not married. But the somewhat chaotic system of informal adoptions was reined in after the 1949 Adoption Act, which required all adoptions to be sanctioned by law, and everyone wanting to adopt a child to be properly assessed.