Family Britain, 1951-1957 (49 page)

The celebrations carried on past my bedtime, but I stayed at the window in the twilight, with my chin resting on my hands. People started to sing and dance. My father, who was more than a little drunk, spied me at the window. ‘Gi’us a song, Marie, hen’, he called out.

I started singing ‘In a Golden Coach’, a song that had been written for the Coronation [and a current Dickie Valentine hit].

‘That,’ added Lulu, ‘was my first public appearance.’
¹⁴

How was it all done? An M-O investigator drew five broad conclusions on the basis of reports in the
Willesden Chronicle
of 94 children’s street parties in that largely rundown, working-class district:

1. The approximate average amount collected for each street party seems to be in the region of £90. Money raised by means of weekly house-to-house collections, raffles, etc. Collections well organised and no shortage of voluntary helpers.

2. Parties generally catering for approximately 100 children.

3. Parties well organised. No expense spared. Bunting, flags and lavish street decorations, a huge swanky tea provided with all the works: sandwiches, jellies, blancmanges, ice-cream; presents; nearly always Coronation cup, saucer and plate, some money (generally a 2/6d or 5/- piece freshly minted), packages of fruit, sweets, etc. Lavish entertainment: Punch and Judy Show, Conjurer or local talent competitions with prizes in abundance.

4. Many reports conclude with thanking local tradesmen for generously providing cakes, toys, etc, etc, for the kiddies.

5. Many small streets pooled their efforts to make a really successful street party . . . much goodwill and co-operation behind efforts judging from reports and pictures.

The reality may not have been quite so cohesively harmonious. Maurice

Broady, a young sociologist, uncovered the organisation behind the parties in the working-class Mersey ward of Birkenhead. He found that individual streets or even sections of streets kept themselves very much to themselves – ‘We don’t interfere with the other parts of the street,’ remarked one informant, ‘we don’t inquire into other people’s business’; that volunteers to do the organising (usually middle-aged women with children still at school) were often slow coming forward – ‘It was a lot of worry,’ said one afterwards, ‘wondering if you were doing right, and with nobody coming to help you, you feel you’re always in the wrong’; that it was particularly delicate choosing which child would be the street’s Coronation Queen – ‘It’s a question of pleasing one and vexing another’; and that the organisers who had collected the money often avoided patronising the Co-op in case they should be suspected of trying to get the dividend on the street’s large order added to their own accounts – ‘You can’t be too careful with other people’s money . . . You’ve got to do it properly. If you’re working among your neighbours, you want everything just so, so there’s nothing [ie no complaints or insinuations] afterwards.’ Still, whatever the potential pitfalls, parties
were
held, and the great majority of children for whose benefit they were (‘the kiddies ought to have something to make up for what they missed during the war’) undoubtedly enjoyed them.
¹⁵

Generally, these were not comfortable days for the British left, or indeed the progressive intelligentsia as a whole. ‘I am in trouble for a reply at last weekend’s brains trust at Lowestoft,’ privately noted the rising Labour politician Barbara Castle on the Tuesday evening:

I said I didn’t see what all the fuss was about as the Queen had been exercising her powers perfectly satisfactorily for the last 18 months. I said I hoped this would be the last Coronation of its kind we should see, it was so unrepresentative of ordinary people . . . I think there is no doubt this is a minority view, even among the working class . . . As I write this the Queen’s correct & piping girlish voice is enunciating the formulae of dedication; Winston has just introduced her on the radio, exploiting the romantic mood of the moment to its fruitiest uttermost.

Frances Partridge, embodiment of Bloomsbury values, felt much the same. ‘The Coronation has come roaring towards us like a lorry heard approaching up a steep incline, and now, thank God, has roared away again,’ she reflected two days later. ‘I suppose it has meant fun for a great many people, though I allowed myself to be momentarily overcome by dislike for the mumbo-jumbo of the service, with its “holy oil” and the rest, as well as the noisy way the English always pat themselves on the back and say how well the monarchy “works”.’ Satire was of course a possible outlet, and a precocious ten-year-old at boarding school developed a comic mini-cabaret. ‘I would tell this running story about the Coronation and it was about the Duke of Edinburgh being taken short,’ recalled Michael Palin in 2008 about arguably the first Python moment.

Not that readers of the
Manchester Guardian
reacted kindly when the paper on Wednesday the 3rd published a cartoon by David Low called ‘Morning After’, picturing a dazed, bloated family after watching the Coronation on television. Of the well over 500 letters sent during the ensuing controversy, almost three-quarters were hostile:

To say the least it is a joke in bad taste and I feel certain that the ‘gentlemen’ behind the Iron Curtain are rubbing their hands with glee. Therefore I suggest Mr Low leave your paper and apply there for a job!
(M.B. Sketchley, Heaton Moor, West Stockport)

The cartoon in today’s issue besmirches the reputation of the Manchester Guardian for ever.
(George W. Smith, Blackpool)

I found Low’s cartoon ‘Morning After’ almost incredibly tasteless and offensive. I am astonished that you should have seen fit to publish it.
(Rodney M. Galey, Woodford, E18)

I shall cut this cartoon out before I take my ‘M.G.’ home tonight as I should be ashamed to produce it to my wife & two small daughters.

To those many of your readers who were uplifted and inspired on Coronation Day to an extent perhaps never before reached in life, this vulgar buffoonery in our treasured paper is just devastating and unforgiveable.
(Frank Hopkinson, Shipley, Yorks)

Reaction was much the same to the
New Statesman
’s carping, condescending coverage of the event. ‘I listened to the whole service on T.V. with a very mixed company, including a road man, cook, gardener, etc,’ wrote a reader, Mrs C. Anson from a village near Blandford in Dorset, ‘& I heard no criticism nor were they restless during your “boring” Communion Service. Every house & cottage was decorated & the Queen’s speech listened to in silence at the social in the evening. I feel your republic is not very near.’

This profound social conservatism was not lost on Michael Young. ‘The heart has its reasons which the mind does not suspect,’ began his take on ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, a typically engaging piece co-written with the American sociologist Edward Shils. They argued that the occasion had been ‘an act of national communion’, the Service itself ‘a series of ritual affirmations of the moral values necessary to a well-governed and good society’, and that throughout the country ‘one family was knit together with another in one great national family through identification with the monarchy’. It was not, in other words, just escapism, the desire to break briefly free from the prevailing drabness, that had animated people, but something more profound – ultimately, they asserted, the expression of a post-1945 ‘moral consensus’ behind ‘the combination of constitutional monarchy and political democracy’. Altogether it was an analysis unlikely to win many academic friends – one LSE sociologist, Norman Birnbaum, complained scathingly that ‘it is a considerable disservice to sociology to present our discipline as a useful handmaiden of the current effort to make a conservative ideology once more orthodox and unquestioned’ – but even so, for all the obvious charge of a certain over-cosiness, its intensely helpful starting-point was that the Coronation had been a remarkable episode revealing much about the values and assumptions of British society. And one footnote, backing up their point about how ‘parents and wives and children are thought of more highly because they receive some of the backwash of emotion from their Royal counterparts’, had a very Youngian touch: ‘One of the authors, during an interview in a London slum district, asked a mother the age of her small son. “Just the same age as Prince Charles,” she replied, looking at him with a smile of pride and love.’
¹⁶

Four days after the Coronation was a particularly sporting Saturday. At Epsom the just-knighted Gordon Richards, for many years Britain’s greatest jockey, at last managed to win the Derby. ‘Beaten – By Dear Old Gordon’, declared one headline, after the Queen’s horse came second. ‘The Queen smiled. “Congratulations,” she said. “I am delighted.” ’ There was less graciousness in the Coronation football final at Glynceiriog, where after a week’s competition (also involving Glynceiriog ‘B’, Llanrhaiadr, Pioneer Corps and Chirk) the local ‘A’ team met Treflach from Shropshire. Halfway through the second half, with the home side leading 3–2, the referee sent off Treflach’s goalkeeper for striking a Glynceiriog forward and also awarded a penalty. Already cross because earlier in the week four of the opposition had played against them in Glynceiriog’s ‘B’ team, and amid chaotic scenes with spectators on the pitch, the Treflach team walked off and refused to come back. Mr H. Roberts, secretary of the competition, called it a ‘shameful’ finish to an otherwise good, celebratory week. Still, it was all relative to Bertie Buse’s calamity that day. The Somerset all-rounder had chosen the fixture against Lancashire at Bath (his home town) for his benefit match, crucial nest egg for any long-serving professional cricketer approaching retirement. A newly laid pitch meant that the contest, instead of lasting the usual three days, was all over before six on the Saturday – a financial disaster. Buse, the faithful pro, sped things along by taking six wickets himself.

Culturally, the post-Coronation weeks had their bruising moments.
Genevieve
, starring the ever-dependable Kenneth More and trumpet-miming Kay Kendall, may have been the immediately acclaimed film hit of the summer – ‘achieves that rarest of qualities in an English film – spontaneity,’ conceded the often hard-to-please William Whitebait in the
New Statesman
– but the
Evening Standard
’s young, iconoclastic theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, was finding his position increasingly untenable as readers continued to complain long and hard about his savage attacks on such untouchables as Anna Neagle and Donald Wolfit. Eventually by August he was gone, to be replaced by Milton Shulman, not exactly a soft touch either. But the real cause célèbre was Benjamin Britten’s opera
Gloriana
, performed in honour of the Queen at the Royal Opera House two days after the Derby. It did not go well. The performance, noted Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘was received with fairly muted enthusiasm by the majority of critics and with frank bewilderment by the distinguished audience’, which included the Queen herself; the intelligence soon reaching Noël Coward was that it was ‘apparently a bugger’, being ‘dull, without melody as usual with Mr B., and not happily chosen’. After the gala performance, at the official party, there were audible sneers about ‘Boriana’ and ‘Yawniana’, and the librettist, William Plomer, was perhaps relieved to leave London in July and, to the astonishment of his friends, move to the deep anonymity of Rustington, a Sussex dormitory town near Littlehampton. ‘Well, here we are – we have been a week today in this extremely bijou bungalette,’ he duly informed Britten, and soon afterwards he wrote some verses in praise of his new surroundings that included the cherishable lines ‘The commonplace needs no defence,/Dullness is in the critic’s eyes,/Without a licence life evolves/From some dim phase its own surprise.’
¹⁷

Fear of the commonplace – certainly of the commercial – was now gripping much of the British cultural elite. BBC television’s Coronation triumph was thrown into sharp relief by reports from the US that coverage there on commercial channels had included, right in the middle of the ceremony, advertisements featuring the undignified chimp

‘J. Fred Muggs’, and as early as 4 June a letter from four ex-Governors of the BBC (Lady Violet Bonham Carter and Lords Brand, Halifax and Waverley) appeared in
The Times
warning that ‘commercialisation – now imminently threatened – is fraught with dangers to those spiritual and intellectual values which the BBC has nobly striven to maintain’, calling on the government to ‘yield no further to the intense pressure to which they have been subjected by a comparatively small number of interested parties’, and announcing their intention to form a National Television Council to campaign for the BBC’s continuing monopoly. The driving force of the NTC was the Labour MP and BBC documentary-maker Christopher Mayhew, who soon produced a stirring pamphlet titled
Dear Viewer
. . . arguing that if indeed TV was ‘going to be a dominant force in our national life’, then it was crucial to ‘make sure it has ideals and integrity or it will ruin us’. Among those meeting at Lady Violet’s home later in June to get the NTC rolling were such unimpeachable figures as William Beveridge, E. M. Forster, Harold Nicolson and Bertrand Russell. Soon there was support too from the unusual alliance of the Workers’ Educational Association and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative government now faltered in its support for ending the monopoly. ‘Nearly all the best people in the country are opposed to commercial television,’ Churchill himself (an old friend of Lady Violet) remarked at Cabinet on the 17th, and soon afterwards Macmillan privately reflected that the antis made ‘a formidable combination’, adding that ‘the real cause of the feeling’ was ‘a desire to remain different from the Americans’.