History of England 1-6

But such tempests rolled over distant seas; at home, all was calm. Eden, only weeks after Churchill’s resignation, felt ready to call an election. His confidence was vindicated. On 26 May 1955, the Conservatives again won the general election, with 345 seats to Labour’s 277. Among other considerations, the result represented something like a kiss blown to the new prime minister. The mandate was as much personal as political. Eden’s popularity sprang from his modest manner, his lack of overt jingoism and from the fact that he did not appear to be of the old guard. The age of ardent rhetoric and mighty personalities had passed, to be succeeded by that of ardent goodwill and good intentions. People were now ready for relaxed and unstated glamour.

That Eden was very much of the old guard, having been trained and educated under their systems, was overlooked. But surely the ancient conflicts had been dissolved in the post-war solution? For while the decade was Conservative in flesh, it remained Labour in soul. That a Labour epoch should result in a Conservative era was an irony that few statesmen, thinkers, housewives or labourers had the time or will to ponder. Once again, they had other concerns. The perennial needs were how to secure food, water and a roof. Beyond that, how to give them life and grace? The washing machine was a start.

36

Plays and players

Household appliances, or ‘white goods’ as they were termed, made slow and hesitant headway through British households. The glories of the ‘labour-saving device’ were not always apparent, but the washing machine undoubtedly aided the harassed housewife. It revolved and churned, slowly but assiduously, before the results were passed through a hand-operated or automatic mangle. It was the age of modern conveniences, or ‘mod cons’.

Some older traditions could still be found, although they often came in a modern guise. Families were encouraged to adopt a fashion known as ‘DIY’. The ancient art of pickling, too, was practised in households long after formal austerity had ended. It was to be expected: fridges were both expensive and cumbersome. Nor, in a climate that was scarcely subtropical, was the usefulness of these new appliances immediately clear. Still, they advanced on the swell of prosperity.

But there was a catch: these utensils were not always built with durability in mind. This was an unsettling development but perhaps an inevitable one, given that Britain had moved from being an exporting to a consuming society. A survey conducted in 1953 found housewives’ chief concern was that these new gadgets should last, but it was increasingly recognized that they did not. The market was skewed in favour of the supplier, and the interests of supplier and consumer were inherently at odds.

One of the more distinctive developments of the Fifties was the emergence first of the milk bar and then of the coffee bar. England had been a nation of tea-drinkers from time immemorial: tea, after all, had rescued England from the gin craze of the early eighteenth century and was the settling beverage of what has been called an instinctively phlegmatic nation. Coffee had been the drink of intellectuals, of the restless and the politicized, and had never gained wide popularity.

As is often the case, it was immigrants who changed this – Italian immigrants in this instance. The coffee bar, fuelled by the sprightly and galvanizing espresso machine, began to appear first in Soho, then all over London, and then throughout the land. At first glance, it bore little relation to the coffee houses of the eighteenth century, yet a family relationship can be discerned even in the variations: pipe smoke had been replaced by cigarette smoke, the stench of bodies by that of cooking grease, and the politics by music.