History of England 1-6

Bevan himself resigned in 1951 over Hugh Gaitskell’s introduction of prescription charges for dental care and spectacles. The funds were needed for a project particularly loathsome to a man of Bevan’s sympathies, the Korean War. Attlee felt obliged to speak of Britain’s ‘very serious financial position’; the Americans withdrew their ‘Lend-Lease’ provision, which had provided supplies without Britain having to pay for them, resulting in a disproportionate excess of imports over exports. In eighteen months, a committee was set up on the ‘Socialisation of Industries’ to concentrate on the Bank of England, civil aviation, the coal industry and cable and wireless, but the fatal continuation of union opposition, mismanagement and general incompetence did not respond to optimism. The era that had offered so many sweeping commitments was finding it harder to sustain them. In the Labour manifesto of 1950, the party in government still felt able to recall its New Testament roots:

Socialism is not bread alone. Economic security and freedom from the enslaving material bonds of capitalism are not its final goals. They are means to the greater end – the evolution of a people more kindly, intelligent, free, cooperative, enterprising and rich in culture. They are means to the greater end of the full and free development of every individual person. We … have set out to create a community that relies for its driving power on the release of all the finer constructive powers in man.

Never again was any party able to speak in such utopian terms. Once again the country seemed to be stumbling towards crisis. If it could happen in war, it could happen in peace. The scheme of nationalization had been put in place but many questioned whether it was of any actual benefit. They might have agreed with Churchill, who said it was ‘proving itself every day to be a dangerous and costly fallacy’. Nothing was going as well as it appeared.

An almost hung parliament in 1950 led Attlee to call a second election. Perhaps he had grown complacent, or perhaps he desired vindication. In 1951, after only six years, the Conservatives were returned to office, promising an end to austerity and the beginning of wealth. But austerity, in one form or another, was to last until 1955.

34

An old world

On 6 February 1952, the king died, and, quite by accident, an Elizabethan age was established. Another herald was the establishment of the Conservative government in 1951. Domestic duties were no longer considered as inevitable as they had been, and the status of nursing and teaching rose proportionately. Women were no longer merely duchesses, mistresses, housewives or labourers, but teachers of mathematics and gymnastics. It had taken the carnage of the world wars to illuminate that. There were complaints, as at all times of social change. Surely it was not proper to train women as doctors in a world where cuts in services were continually threatened?

The coronation of the young queen was, if anything, more panoplied and pearled than that of her father. For those with ears to hear it, however, a new and sombre note had been struck. The new monarch of Great Britain was not the Empress of India; she was proclaimed simply as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. Her declared devotion to ‘our great Imperial family’ was celebrated, but she understood her new place.

The preceding year had been marked by the Festival of Britain. If it could not match the opulence of its Victorian model, then that was its glory. The times were quieter, pockets shallower and the people less inclined to triumphalism, but the bunting fluttered and the beer flowed. The Festival inaugurated, too, the establishment of the ‘South Bank’ as one of London’s cultural centres. There were jarring moments, of course. One of the exhibits was a collection of printed rayon cloths, and the king was invited to inspect them but had no notion of their purpose. When enlightened, he was heard to mutter: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wear those.’ Despite all outward gestures to popular sentiment, the royal family could not fully share the shared experience. Their role during the war years was revealed as an anomaly.