In the immediate wake of the Ruth Ellis case, a Gallup poll had found that only 50 per cent agreed with the death penalty, compared to 37 per cent wanting abolition and 13 per cent don’t knows. By November 1955 a major abolitionist campaign was under way, including a mass rally at Central Hall, Westminster, with speeches from Gilbert Harding, J. B. Priestley and Lord Pakenham (the future Lord Longford), though when Kingsley Amis attended a demonstration in Swansea, he was struck by how it comprised largely ‘the professions, the middle-class intelligentsia and the young’. Opinion, moreover, was shifting back, with Gallup in late November finding that the abolitionists were down to 25 per cent and then, in early February, to 21 per cent. Even so, a free vote in the Commons on 16 February produced an unexpected majority of 31 for experimental suspension of the death penalty, with most of the 37 Tories who swung the vote having only been elected the previous May. If this was indeed ‘the sign of a genuine liberalisation of public opinion’, as Richard Crossman hoped after the vote, no one had told Anthony Heap. ‘Emotionalism scored its greatest and most deplorable triumph over reason,’ he snorted next day, with the ‘37 Tory idiots’ making him especially indignant: ‘They ought to be shot.’ He need not have worried, because five months later the Lords, spearheaded by Lord Goddard (still Lord Chief Justice), repeated their 1948 action and rejected any form of abolition by 238 to 95.
A nationwide survey undertaken by Mass-Observation in December 1955 fleshes out the bald narrative. This broke down attitudes to the notion of a five-year trial suspension, finding among other things that 34 per cent approved (well over double the 1948 figure in a similar survey); that 48 per cent of men disapproved, compared to 42 per cent of women; that women had been ‘particularly influenced towards disapproval of capital punishment by the emotional influence of the case of Ruth Ellis’; that younger people were more inclined to favour a trial suspension; that members of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland were least likely; and that – perhaps surprisingly – differences in social class were ‘insignificant’. The vox pop had their usual pungent, M-O flavour:
Oh no, don’t please. They’d murder us all.
(LCC female nursery helper, Kentish Town, 46)
If they’ve done a murder they should be punished. They should be
tortured
. (
Engine driver’s wife, Crewe, 55
)
There was the case of Craig and Bentley. I think the wrong person got the string, and that’s what makes me feel the whole system wants changing. (
Parcel packer, Shoreditch, 25
)
You hear about these Teddy boys – we saw some at Blackpool, and one had a razor in his lapel. These teenagers need a firm hand. I know, I’ve got a daughter, she’s a good girl, but we have to pull the rope tight. The things she comes back from the Youth Club and tells me! (
Housewife, married to grocer’s assistant, Sheffield, 39
)
I think it was dreadful to hang Ruth Ellis. I was ill all the time the trial was on. I could not believe they could hang her, especially a woman. She loved him and did not mean to kill him, it was done on the spur of the moment. I would stop this horrible death penalty. (
Housewife, married to fitter, Greenock, 40
)
I think Ruth Ellis deserved to swing. Women can be as vicious as men. More so in some cases. (
Cinema odd-job man, Birmingham, 21
)
It seems a bit medieval to hang people. (
Male teacher, Romney Marsh, 23
)
Death penalty should be kept. I don’t think they should have done away with the cat. It might have helped to curb these Teddy boys. I think they’re too lenient in schools these days. I’m old-fashioned and I believe in the cane. (
Middle-class widow, Chesterfield, 65
)
There’d be a few wives slaughtered lying about. It would be cheaper than divorce. (
Male taxi proprietor, Hereford, 25
)
I just know that if it was someone belonging to me I’d help put the rope on myself. (
Male film coater, Brentwood, 55
)
I am a Catholic, but God forgive me I do believe in a life for a life. To think of the MPs voting for no hanging is absolutely disgraceful. (
Female lavatory attendant, Tottenham, 44
)
There were also a couple of nice linguistic manglings. ‘No, I think it had better stay as a detergent,’ stated a 47-year-old cashier’s wife, while the other was unattributed: ‘It’s hanging I don’t like. They should have elocution, as in America.’4
Race and class, meanwhile, continued to provoke deep fault lines.
On 3 January 1956 – exactly two months after the Cabinet had decided, under threat of resignation from the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, not to back the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, in his wish to introduce legislation to control immigration from the New Commonwealth – the 12-year-old Mike Phillips arrived in London from British Guyana. Living with his parents in the De Beauvoir Town area between Islington and Dalston, at the top of a crowded three-storey Victorian house with a clothing factory in the basement, he slowly adjusted to school life with working-class London boys: bollock-grabbing before the teacher came in, spitting on the ceiling of the bicycle shed, frequent fights, and always the regular, repetitive use of ‘words like fuck, piss, shit, cunt, bastard and bloody’, which he had never heard before ‘used in such a casual and vacuous manner’. He was not especially victimised, as he and the other ‘foreign’ boys sat apart in a corner of the classroom and were also taught how to box, but outside, ‘I’d bump into a man or a woman in the street, or trip over someone’s bag, and if it wasn’t the first thing they said, it might be the last thing: the inevitable question, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”’ The writer Colin MacInnes, picking up on how London was starting to change rapidly with large-scale black immigration, assembled in March ‘A Short Guide for Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)’, whose Q&As included:
What
is
a Jumble?
– You are, and I, if we are white. The word’s a corruption of ‘John Bull’, and is used by West Africans of Englishmen in a spirit of tolerant disdain.
Do Africans not like us, then?
– Not very much, because our outstanding characteristics of reliability and calm don’t touch them, and we lack the spontaneity and sociability they prize.
Is there a colour bar in England?
– I’ve not yet met an African or West Indian who thinks there isn’t. The colour of the English bar, they say, is grey. Few of us love them, few of us hate them, but almost everybody wishes they weren’t here and shows it by that correct, aloof indifference of which only the English know the secret.
Is it possible for a white man, and a coloured, to be friends?
– One hastens to say ‘Yes’; but then, remembering the
distant
look that sometimes comes into the opaque brown eyes – that moment when they suddenly depart irrevocably within themselves far off towards a hidden, alien, secretive, quite untouchable horizon – one must ultimately, however reluctantly, answer, ‘No.’
The next month, London Transport started to recruit staff from Barbados (and subsequently Trinidad and Jamaica), lending the money for their sea fares and arranging accommodation on their arrival. It was soon axiomatic that the capital would grind to a halt without this imported labour, doing work that the white working class was unwilling to do.
North Oxford’s Cutteslowe Walls – erected in the 1930s, 7 feet tall, with a set of revolving iron spikes running the entire length – were not quite as notorious a symbol of continuing social divisions as the Gentlemen versus Players fixture at Lord’s, but in early 1956 a sociologist, Peter Collison, surveyed the pleasant, trim, almost entirely middle-class private estate on one side of the Walls and the almost entirely working-class council estate (the Cutteslowe Estate) on the other side. In answer to the question ‘Should the Walls Be Taken Down?’, 88 per cent on the council side said they should, in comparison with only 29 per cent on the private side, though 58 per cent there did concede that ‘a passage through them for pedestrians should be provided’ – not unreasonably, given that on the council side convenience of access to the bus stops on Banbury Road was overwhelmingly the main reason for wanting the Walls down. What motivated the private side? The key considerations, according to what residents told Collison, were (in descending order) traffic, social class and property value. He quoted some respondents:
The Walls should never have been there in the first place, but as they have been up for twenty years, and many people on the estate bought their houses on the assumption that there would never be any through traffic,
I
think that they should stay up.
If the Walls are taken down traffic will be diverted and cause child casualties.
After all we are private owners and pay a lot more money, especially with increased rates. And there is a lot of riff-raff on the other side.
At present children on the other side of the Wall fight those from this side. If the Walls were taken down the fighting would be much worse and as a mother I feel strongly about this.
An undertaking was given that the council estate houses should not be built near the private estate and when the Walls are taken down the value of the property will drop.
A lot of folk have bought their property here and I think it [ie removal of the Walls] might devalue it.
On the council side, quite apart from the significant daily inconvenience, there was clear, understandable resentment. ‘People over there are no better than we are,’ said one. And another: ‘People on the private estate would become less toffee-nosed if the walls were removed.’5 But for the moment, they stayed put.
Anthony Eden this winter probably felt he had more working-class than middle-class supporters. Just before Christmas, as Harold Macmillan replaced the economically discredited Rab Butler at the Treasury, Mollie Panter-Downes reckoned that ‘this looks like a moment of some gravity for the Conservative Party’ and identified ‘continuing high prices’ as a principal cause of its popularity being ‘at a low ebb’. Then on 3 January came the hammer blow of the
Daily Telegraph
– solid, reassuring organ of the middling classes, the paper they could trust – turning savagely on Eden and demanding, in what became a famous phrase, ‘the smack of firm government’. Soon the middle-class chorus of complaint was becoming incessant. ‘Wanted: An English Poujade?’ was the stirring headline given by
Picture Post
in late January to a letter from Miss M. Edwards of Holywell, Cheshire, detailing the latest price and purchase-tax rises; ‘. . . am very worried at the way prices are soaring’, lamented Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park on 1 February; and later that month, a more occasional diarist, Rose Uttin in Wembley, wrote her first entry since 1949 in order to grumble that ‘food is so dear it might as well be rationed’, not helped of course by ‘3 weeks of awful weather below freezing every day’.
The same month, a package of anti-inflationary emergency measures (including higher interest rates, tightened hire purchase and reduced subsidies on bread and milk) predictably brought no early increase in the government’s popularity, while on the 27th a strong editorial in
The Times
on the plight of the middle class – over-taxed and struggling, especially if on fixed incomes, against the ravages of inflation – prompted a flurry of unburdening letters. Typical was John Lewis of Cradley Rectory, near Malvern, claiming forlornly that ‘we creep through each quarter only with extreme care’ and calling for ‘credit facilities for educational purposes’ in order to avoid middle-class children being ‘squeezed out of the public schools by financial considerations’. Eden himself had already been castigated by Malcolm Muggeridge in the
New Statesman
as ‘Boring for England’, but it was politically much more damaging when the
Spectator
in early April ran a full-length attack on ‘The Lost Leader’, whose ‘irremediable faults appear to be an exceptional lack of vision or originality and an excess of vanity’. Later in April came the formation of The Middle Class Alliance, with Henry Price, Tory MP for Lewisham, as founder-chairman. Claiming more than 25,000 members already, and setting out a litany of grievances about the high cost of living and increased taxation, Price told
The Times
that it was ‘not a purely selfish, sectional movement’, but instead wanted ‘to preserve the middle classes for the service of the nation’.6 The suburbanites were at last getting restless – having been largely taken for granted ever since Lord Salisbury’s tactically brilliant creation of so-called ‘Villa Toryism’ in the late nineteenth century.
The new leader of the Labour Party was indisputably middle-class, though of the upper variety. Attlee’s retirement had long been expected, and when he stepped down in December 1955 there was a three-way choice for Labour MPs, with the 49-year-old Hugh Gaitskell in the event trouncing Aneurin Bevan and Herbert Morrison, in effect a generational step-change. ‘It would have been better had they chosen Nye Bevan,’ complained Harold Nicolson, but a more typical reaction was Henry Fairlie’s in the
Spectator
, assessing Gaitskell as ‘emotionally and intellectually equipped for the highest political office’. One of his most loyal followers was Roy Jenkins, who in the 1970s, recalling Gaitskell, accepted that ‘he was stubborn, rash and could, in a paradoxical way, become too emotionally committed to an over-rational position which, once he had thought it through, he believed must be the final answer’. Jenkins also conceded that Gaitskell was ‘only a moderately good judge of people’, before going on:
Yet when these faults are put in the scales and weighed against his qualities they shrivel away. He had purpose and direction, courage and humanity. He was a man for raising the sights of politics. He clashed on great issues. He avoided the petty bitterness of personal jealousy. He could raise banners which men and women were proud to follow and he never perverted his leadership ability. He was informed by sense and humour and by a desire to change the world, not for his own satisfaction but in order that people might more enjoy living in it. He was rarely obsessed, either by politics or himself. He was that very rare phenomenon – a great politician who was also an unusually agreeable man.