History of England 1-6

From the viewpoint of the returning soldier, it was often a question of having one’s expectations upended. ‘It had made my blood boil,’ recalled one, ‘while we were sweating in a jungle on a few shillings a day. Now I’m beginning to see how impossible it is to live on present-day civilian wages – let alone pre-war pay. The value of money is topsy-turvy.’ Another said, ‘I have to take the laundry, and calculate so that I have enough to wear before I can collect it again … I’m more harassed by small worries than I have been for five years.’ Such ‘small worries’, coalescing often into implacable panic, were the staple of the world in which the demob was forced to acclimatize.

But the population wanted social change; for what else had the war been fought? Were the impoverished days of the 1930s to return? The celebration of the royal wedding in November 1947 might have been considered a positive jubilee, but the reports sound muted. Ursula Wood, later married to Ralph Vaughan Williams, considered it ‘as quiet as a Sunday’. Orderly crowds gathered in restrained groups with the occasional bonfire to enlighten the proceedings. Some travellers waited to join the last 68 bus, illuminated with pale-blue lighting. Nor were civilians always impressed by the demob’s efforts in the workplace. He was supposed to be complacent and work-shy – a host of satirical terms were soon coined. ‘Stripes disease’, ‘pippitis’, ‘air crew’s chest’, ‘storeman’s clutch’, ‘ranker’s dodge’ and ‘scrimshanking’ were all expressions flung at the demob’s back, and sometimes at his face. A veteran, writing in the Picture Post, felt minded to offer a counterblast: ‘As one who has had five years’ holiday in foreign lands at public expense, I feel that it is high time I turned my hand to honest work and civilian life, while some overburdened civilians are given the chance of rest and recuperation in the Forces. Why should the delights of a camping holiday in sunny Burma or a cruise to Japan be denied these jaded people?’ It is clearly unwise to speak of demobs in general. Their narratives touch every point: from ease to starvation, from ‘cushy’ staff posts to incarceration under unrelenting hosts.

33

The cruel real world

This was a time for even more privation. Bread rationing was reintroduced in the summer of 1946, and the cloud of a new terror occluded the sun with the threat of atomic war. It may seem odd that people can prevail under such circumstances, but patience and resignation had become customary. After constant attacks in the press, the prime minister, Attlee, felt obliged to reassure the nation that ‘many of these restrictions fall heavily on the housewife. You can be assured that the Government will ease them as soon as it is possible to do so … On the question of bread rationing, your knowledge and good sense was an important factor in steadying and educating public opinion in the face of the press campaign last summer.’

The late 1940s inaugurated what may be termed the ‘housewives’ war’, which was in part a war against the political classes. That the burden of increasingly restrictive rationing fell heaviest upon housewives was a fact denied by none, but while Conservative women aimed their darts at the government, women loyal to Labour reserved their wrath for the opposition. It was an unglamorous affair, and there were no clear or certain victors beyond the pale of Westminster and Whitehall.

The measures were provoked by a dollar economy, and by huge food import cuts. There was a further reduction in the clothes ration, and the use of foreign currency for pleasure travel was suspended. Hugh Dalton was forced to resign after he inadvertently supplied a journalist with details of the 1947 budget. He was perhaps the first victim of what became known as the press ‘leak’. Stafford Cripps was now chancellor, and seemed quietly intent on spreading his own brand of punitively abstract philanthropy. But, like Churchill himself, he led by example. A proud Spartan, he demanded nothing of others that he was not prepared to do himself.

As the 1940s progressed and a new election came closer, political rhetoric rose both in heat and in shrillness. ‘We’re up against it’, ‘We work or want’, ‘A challenge to British grit’ – such appeals were characteristic of the Labour approach. They would have had a certain resonance only a few years before, but many were now beginning to wonder why wartime appeals were being made in a time of peace. As ever, the press was divided. Where the Labour-supporting papers emphasized that the cuts were inevitable, their Conservative counterparts scoffed at what they saw as excuses for simple mismanagement.