History of England 1-6

There were other signs of emerging affluence. In 1954 the meat ration ended, and wartime austerity fell away. Another shoot sprouted on 14 September in that very eventful year, when the first comprehensive in London, Kidbrooke School, opened its gates. Less than a decade after its inception, the grammar school system was already under assault. Children were selected, at the age of eleven, for grammar schools, secondary moderns or technical colleges. It is perhaps best understood as a mentality that saw privilege as something that must be earned. Paradoxically or not, we may see in it the impulse that led William of Wykeham, in the fourteenth century, to establish a college for boys disadvantaged by circumstance but avid for learning. It is noteworthy that neither Attlee nor his successors in the Fifties attempted to dismantle the public schools. Perhaps they had more nostalgia than some of their successors. By these lights, the grammar school meritocracy set up under Labour in the Forties was unimprovable. If universal education was to be imposed, then a basic fact had to be acknowledged: different pupils had different aptitudes. Let the academic become academics, and the handy become handymen. If you failed the eleven-plus you were simply meant for other tasks, often more socially useful.

The first objection lay in the title of the exam. Was it wise, just or even sensible to determine the future prospects of a child at eleven? The second objection, of course, was that rejected pupils could not help but feel that failure, and express it. Secondary moderns became bear pits for the unwary. The third was that the role of technical colleges was ill-defined, for all the benefits they brought to many, and as a result they were underfunded. They soon disappeared, and even now they represent an unmarked grave in the history of education.

It was a year of advances. On 2 February 1954, the government announced £212 million for road development, including the first motorways. In the same month, it announced that 347,000 new houses had been built in the previous year. They were sturdy and serviceable, if oddly designed; they tended to the triangular, particularly in the suburbs of London.

While England’s physical highways thickened and deepened, the country’s moral certainties seemed increasingly fragile and vulnerable. On 13 July, Ruth Ellis was executed for the murder of her lover, becoming the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The calm courage in her decision to admit her guilt impressed many. When the prosecuting counsel asked whether she had truly intended to kill her lover, she replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In true eighteenth-century fashion, she dressed herself immaculately for her trial, and even dyed her hair. A campaign for her reprieve was launched, but she wanted no part of it. Her executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, wrote later that hers was the one execution for which he felt not a jot of remorse. Her record was against her, certainly, but then so was that of many men.

Ellis’s execution pricked awake a sleeping giant: the justice of capital punishment itself. The cabinet was divided on the question. The Commons were to vote for abolition in 1956, but the Lords voted against. When Pierrepoint sought the position of official executioner, it had to be explained to him that no such office existed: it was not quite English. Rab Butler, home secretary in 1957, was not at first an abolitionist, but his agonies over the choice of life or death were palpable. ‘Each decision,’ he wrote, ‘meant shutting myself up for two days or more … By the end of my time at the Home Office I began to see that the system could not go on, and present day Secretaries of State are well relieved of the terrible power to decide between life and death.’

The Homicide Act of 1957 was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all the humane Butler. It was predicated on the notion that punishment should be exemplary rather than condign. The legal and moral incoherence of this approach would soon be apparent, and only a few years had to pass before government was obliged to choose between unravelling the tangled noose and cutting it.