Family Britain, 1951-1957 (93 page)

In sum, the extended family was ‘a source of aid and comfort’ – a source, Young emphasised, that it was time that the framers of social and housing policy belatedly recognised.

Inevitably, and not wholly ignored by Young in his talk, there was potentially a darker side. Selfish, exploitative motives for helping kin, a sense of obligation breeding a festering resentment, the all-powerful grandmother as an oppressive, even malignant figure – all these, along with more positive elements, come out in Elizabeth Roberts’s oral history. Moreover, whether for good or ill, the inexorable trend was
away
from the large extended family. Women were having fewer children, and Gorer’s detailed evidence revealed that by the early 1950s the break-up of the extended family was already well advanced in the south of England, hastened by dispersal and the motor car, if not yet in the Midlands or the north. In short, the small, nuclear family represented the future – a future predicated on two core relationships: husbands and wives; parents and children.42

Realism as well as romance determined most choices of spouse. ‘In half an hour, it was over,’ wrote
Picture Post
’s Brian Dowling in a 1952 account of an East End white wedding. ‘The children, till then under everyone’s feet, had been awed into cherub-behaviour. There had been no tears, nor any great jubilation. The register was signed. The wedding was a fact.’ Natalie Higgins, in her groundbreaking study of working-class marriage in mid-twentieth-century England (based on interviews in the 1990s with people from Birmingham and Hull who had got married in the 1930s and 1950s), argues that ‘the qualities women looked for most in potential husbands were commitment to work and to their role as provider’, adding that ‘respondents often described the men that were to become their husbands with the words “clean,” “decent” and “hard-working” and they valued men that were not “pushy” in sexual terms’. Tellingly, Higgins is struck by ‘how many women enjoyed dancing above all else before they married, and yet eventually chose as a lifetime partner a man who could not or would not dance, and this included women who met their future husbands at dances’. Her overall thesis is broadly consistent with Eustace Chesser’s 1954 survey, showing that for single women it was physical strength rather than good looks that was important in the choice of a future husband, preferably allied to a similar sense of humour. Harder to be sure about are the spousal criteria for men, although Higgins’s view is that during the courting process they more consciously fell in love, a love that often included a strong element of sexual attraction. Nevertheless, when Gorer in 1950/51 asked men to nominate the most important qualities a wife should have, relatively few (even among the single men) mentioned beauty or good looks; instead the winning criterion was the thoroughly unromantic ‘good housekeeper’. In short, marriage was a contract, a well-understood lifetime arrangement based on mutual interest.

At the heart of that mutual interest was usually a very traditional division of labour: the husband as breadwinner, the wife as homemaker, even if she was in part-time paid work. ‘While he is at work she should complete her day’s work – washing, ironing, cleaning or whatever it may be – and she must have ready for him a good meal,’ explained Norman Dennis et al about the ‘very consciously accepted’ compact in the Yorkshire mining town of Featherstone. As a fairly standard display of anger if that compact was broken, they cited the husband who ‘when presented with “fish and chips” from the nearby shop on returning from work, threw them into the fire’, telling her that it was her job to cook a proper meal, not (in his words) ‘a kid’s supper on the street corner’.

For husbands generally in the 1950s, their side of the deal involved a particular strain, in the context of full employment and plenty of overtime work being readily available for both skilled and unskilled men. ‘Some of the men conveyed in their interviews,’ notes Higgins, ‘almost a compulsion to work to the point of exhaustion, in the process often neglecting their wives and growing families.’ She quotes the poignant recollections of ‘Joe Dixon’, a textile worker in Hull who had married in 1951:

Didn’t ’ave much sex, you know, because I worked and worked, I grafted an’ grafted, I did all the overtime, an’ I warn’t at ’ome much even when I got, when we got the ’ouse, I worked an’ worked an’ I din’t see much of me two sons, ’cos I was allers at work, ’cos I even got a night job, and you’d be amazed the hours I did, ’cos I thought ‘well, I’ve got to make a life fer them, an’ this is it, if it kills me I, I will work’.

Higgins plausibly speculates that an influence on the more driven 1950s male interviewees – compared to her more fatalistic 1930s male cohort – may have been ‘a new and positive feeling that the images of family homes portrayed at the cinema, on television and in advertisements was not anywhere near as unattainable as they had been for their parents’ generation’.43

It was most wives, though, who truly knew what long hours meant. In the spring of 1951, a Mass-Observation survey involved 700 working-class housewives in Islington, Wandsworth, Camberwell, West Ham and Hendon for a week keeping daily diaries, which cumulatively revealed that their average weekday was one of at least fifteen hours, with at least half of those housewives spending between three and four hours daily in and around the kitchen. A typical day is exhausting simply to read:

Got up; washed

Started to cook lunch

Cooked and ate breakfast

Cleaned hall while lunch cooked

Dressed baby

Lunch

Cleared breakfast

Washed up lunch

Tidied and swept nursery

Ironing

Made children’s beds

Brought in washing

Put baby out in pram

Tidied self and baby

Got dressed herself

Fetched boy from school

Made own bed; tidied bedroom

Tea

Tidied bathroom, cleaned basin,

Wrote letter

   polished floor

Went to post

Cleaned out grate; tidied living room

Cleared tea

Tidied kitchen; washed up breakfast

Bathed children and put them to bed

Laundry; hung out washing

Washed up tea

Took out rubbish; brought in coal

Cooked supper

Went out to shop

Supper

More laundry

Sat and knitted

Read evening paper

Went to bed

‘Much of her day,’ observed M-O about the housewife generally, ‘may be spent in total isolation from adults.’

Three years later, Dr Irene Green, Medical Officer of Health for St Faith’s and Aylsham Rural District Council in Norfolk, contrasted in her annual report the shorter hours of the worker, holidays with pay and regular half-days, which had all ‘reduced the strain on large sections of the population’, with the conditions in which many housewives and mothers still worked. ‘The burden of the housewife with young children has been little affected by these changes,’ she went on, ‘and her hours of service to the family are still as long as ever they were. Everyone needs a day or even a few hours off occasionally and I am shocked to find some mothers never enjoy this luxury and no one seems to think they should.’ There had apparently been little change by the spring of 1956 when, exactly five years after its first survey, M-O again investigated ‘The Housewife’s Day’ and again found it was at least 15 hours long. Nevertheless, it did emerge that working-class housewives were now ‘spending rather less time on domestic jobs’, especially preparation of meals and housework, ‘and more on both part-time work and leisure’, including watching TV, than had been the case in 1951. Partly this was down to labour-saving devices, above all automatic washing machines, but their spread was still patchy and most homes were not yet temples of white electrical goods. ‘The job with the 100-hour week’ was how
Picture Post
in March 1956 profiled Anne Driver, a mother of four living in Hunstanton, married to a council worker, and busy through the day and into the night ‘cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, window-cleaning, house decorating, washing, ironing, first-aid, nursing, carrying coal, humping laundry, sewing, mending, patching, darning, cleaning sinks and drains, helping neighbours, caring for pets, and polishing’.44

Did these homemakers resent their assigned role? There simply does not exist for these years the weight of contemporary evidence to enable a definitive answer, but the probability is that by and large they did not, or at the least, if they did resent it, then they were broadly resigned to it. ‘Restricted to the home as they are,’ Dennis et al explicitly stated in their Featherstone study, ‘wives do not actively resent it. When pressed they will acknowledge jealousy of their husband’s freedom, but many of them say that they find satisfaction in the care of their children.’ Oral testimony suggests a degree of positive enthusiasm. ‘I was mistress in my kitchen and that is how I liked it,’ recalled Pamela Woodland, who as a young teacher in Rotherham had married in 1953. ‘I did everything. I knew where everything was. My kitchen was like a very, very efficient workshop . . . It was my ambition to run the house to the best of my ability.’ Similarly, interviewing a range of women about their post-war experiences, the historian Claire Langhamer has found that they ‘rarely fail to express pleasure in at least some aspects of their domestic work’. She quotes the working-class ‘Jean’, who married in 1955: ‘I just enjoyed having it nice and putting your nice tea set out and that sort of thing, you know. It was all part of the pleasure . . . This home-making thing to me was nice, you know.’ Attitudes are never static, and the very fact of an increasing appetite among married women for part-time work was a harbinger of change on the way, but at this specific time – the early to mid-1950s – not only were traditional gender roles still largely set in stone, but the zeitgeist as a whole overwhelmingly enhanced and fortified the self-worth of the homemaker, a self-worth already fortified by the ingenuity and resourcefulness needed to survive the austerity era.

Of course there must have been many moments of discontent, and lives of outright unhappiness, but they surface surprisingly rarely, even in the diaries. Nella Last, however, allowed herself one such moment in June 1954. ‘I
did
so hope to get him to see Danny Kaye [in
Knock on Wood
], but had to be content when he agreed to go on the Coast Rd,’ she recorded after a Friday outing with her husband. ‘I proposed tea at a very good little café, it would only have been 3/6 or 3/9 for the two, but he pointed out, “very little more, & it would be the price of a cwt of coal, & anyway, nothing could be nicer than our own bread, butter, jam & cake.” I thought peevishly “except making them always” . . .’45

A rigid division of labour inevitably meant a high probability of husband and wife living most of the time in separate spheres. ‘The comedian who defined “home” as “the place where you fill the pools in on a Wednesday night” was something of a sociologist,’ noted Dennis et al in relation to Featherstone’s miners. ‘With the exception of a small minority, the husbands for preference come home for a meal after finishing work and as soon as they can feel clean and rested they look for the company of their mates, i.e. their friends of the same sex.’ So too in working-class Liverpool, where according to Mays ‘male solidarity is a conspicuous feature of social life’ and ‘men and women tend to segregate the social activities’. Significantly, when Gorer asked the married readers of the
People
to rank factors making for a happy marriage, ‘comradeship’ and ‘shared interests’ came well down, at sixth and eighth respectively, while in terms of factors making for an unhappy marriage, ‘each going own way’ was a lowly twelfth. The ideal, in other words, of a so-called ‘companionate marriage’, with an emphasis on teamwork, partnership and shared interests, was clearly not universally practised – and indeed, on the basis of her interviews in Preston, Lancaster and Barrow, Elizabeth Roberts bleakly concluded that it had been ‘difficult to find many companionate marriages in this study up to 1970’.

Much turned on male attitudes to housework, and here the contemporary sources largely endorse Roberts’s assertion that ‘women continued to be chiefly responsible’, with ‘little evidence of a corresponding increase in the amount of work their menfolk did around the house’ to match the increasing amount of paid work that their wives did outside the home. In Gorer’s survey, ‘selfishness’ was easily the main fault that wives found in their husbands, though there were also dishonourable mentions for ‘taking wife for granted’, ‘lazy, sleepy, won’t help in house’ and ‘untidiness’. Soon afterwards, in a survey of married women working in the higher grades of the Civil Service, Margot Jefferys found that ‘1 in every 4 husbands either did not help at all or did so only inconsistently, and only 1 in 5 put in as much as half the hours spent by their wives on domestic tasks’; in 1954, Dr Green in Norfolk noted how ‘many husbands seem particularly selfish’ in the sense of ‘never offering to be child-minders to allow their wives a little relief from this duty’; while in a letter to
Woman’s Own
the following year on the question of whether a man could run a house as efficiently as a woman, Mrs M. Titterington of Enfield waxed sarcastic: ‘Men manage the home on their own? Oh Yes! manage to dodge most real work. Methodical? Certainly. Their method is to get someone else to cope with the situation.’ Or, as Richard Hoggart observed in Hunslet, ‘. . . many wives come home from work just as tired as their husbands and “set to” to do all the housework without help from them’.46