Reading in the 1950s E-Book

Stuart Hylton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In Reading in the 1950s Stuart Hylton gives a fascinating account of the town and its people during a decade of rapid and memorable change. The story begins in the drab atmosphere of the early postwar years, with their austerity, sense of shrinking empire and declining national prestige. It ends with the brash new world of the swinging sixties, which brought The Beatles, the miniskirt and the Mini car. From television and labour-saving appliances which revolutionised the home, to the motor car which began to dominate travel and to alter the character of the town, the author also records aspects of Reading that stayed much the same – the courage and humour of the townspeople in sometimes trying circumstances, the ingenuity and incompetence of the criminal classes, the absurdities of officialdom, and the sheer diversity of local life as it emerges from reports in the press. Capturing the spirit of the population during an era of bewildering development and change, this is a must-have for locals and anybody with an interest in the history of the town.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction and Acknowledgements

1. 1950: Out of Austerity

2. 1951: Festival Time

3. 1952: The King Dies

4. 1953: Coronation

5. 1954: Teddy Boys and Tragedy

6. 1955: Smog and ITV

7. 1956: Rock Around the Clock

8. 1957: Space, and Room to Live

9. 1958: Banning the Bomb, and the Smoke

10. 1959: Minis and Mikardo

Copyright

Introduction and Acknowledgements

After I wrote my first book about Reading – Reading Places, Reading People – I promised myself I would never do another one on the subject. But this will be my fourth book about Reading, and I would be far less confident in predicting that there might not one day be a fifth!

My previous book, Reading at War, looked at how the ordinary people of Reading fared through the extraordinary events of the war years. The 1950s were in some ways even more dramatic in the changes they wrought in ordinary people’s lives. The decade took us right from postwar austerity to the swinging sixties of the Beatles and the Mini. During those years we saw the introduction of many of the conveniences that we take for granted today. Television came into its own and the motor car – for better or worse – began to dominate our travel habits and many other aspects of our lives. It saw the heralding of a new Elizabethan era in Britain and the beginning of the space age worldwide.

All of these radical changes were reflected in the lives of the average citizen of Reading. At the same time, the town was wrestling with its own domestic problems – the housing shortage, the pressure on schools and public services from a growing population and the first signs of the town’s change from a mainly industrial economy to one based on services.

Once again, I have used the pages and pictures of the Berkshire Chronicle to tell the story. All human life is reflected in them – courage and infamy; vision (both the genuine article and the confident predictions that are way off-target); and what is to us the innocence of an age that perceives such things as the launderette and the multi-storey car park as miracles of modern technology. Last, but by no means least, there is the humour – conscious and unintended – of the era. We see both the ingenuity and the incompetence of the local criminal classes; the ability of officialdom and the thundering editorial column to get it completely wrong; and the values and attitudes that remind us that 1950s Reading was vastly different from the present-day community.

My thanks as ever go to Margaret Smith and her colleagues at the Local Studies Library at Berkshire’s Central Library in Reading, who hold the historic copies of the Chronicle. Thanks are also due to Karen Hull, Javier Pes and their colleagues in Reading Borough Council’s Museum Service, which is now custodian of the Reading Chronicle collection of photographs for this period. The Berkshire Newspaper Company, which publishes what is now the Reading Chronicle, kindly gave their permission to quote from the pages of its predecessor and supported the publication of this book in other ways.

Last, but by no means least, my thanks go to my long-suffering family who, having recently relived the war years at second hand, have now endured the whole of the fifties within twelve months, without too many visible signs of ageing!

ONE

1950: Out of Austerity

Reading was still struggling with the aftermath of war as the second half of the twentieth century dawned. The damage caused by bombing in the very heart of the town centre was yet to be repaired. Power cuts brought all-too-frequent reminders of the blackout and many goods were still on ration.

Reading people marked the arrival of the 1950s in all sorts of ways. The dance halls and churches were equally full. Railwaymen saw in the New Year by sounding their locomotive whistles. In the week between Christmas and New Year, one of their passengers, a drunken reveller on the London to Penzance train, chose to step out at Reading for a spot of fresh air to clear his head. Unfortunately for him, the train did not stop at Reading and he did not survive to see the 1950s. At the other end of the mortal coil, Mrs Annie Gains of Whitley saw in the new decade by giving birth to a son in the back seat of a taxi, en route to the Grove Maternity Home in Emmer Green.

Although the nation was still living in the shadow of the war, signs of a new way of life were beginning to emerge. Helicopters, the newspapers announced, were going to be the transport of the future and they demanded to know what the town was doing to prepare for this. Rooftop landing pads were urgently needed. Car ownership was spreading, though new cars were still often difficult to obtain. In the second-hand market, £99 would buy a 1933 Morris Minor two-seater saloon, while a brand new Humber Pullman limousine (the stretched limo of its day) cost £1,350 plus purchase tax (or roughly twice the cost of a two-bedroom cottage in Caversham).

Perhaps even more significantly, a new form of home entertainment was starting to come into its own. The advertisements spoke very highly of it:

Whatever the family choice of entertainment, you will find it in TELEVISION. It has brought a new meaning into home life and thousands who used to seek their entertainment outside, now find their television set a source of untold pleasures at home. Why not learn more about it?

Home trials were available, before you decided to make the sizeable investment of £54 or more in a set of your own. A major irritation was cars without suppressors, which affected reception. As the television-viewing public grew in number, there was hope that the fitting of suppressors to cars would be made compulsory.

Television arrives to take over our lives.

All the glamour of washday!

For those who could not afford a television, there was something else to watch – a self-service launderette.

It is the first in Berkshire and follows a pattern which has made launderettes top favourites for household washing in America and with British housewives in many towns. Standing in the garden of an eighteenth-century cottage, Reading’s most original laundry is light, airy and decorated throughout in blue and white.… Customers bring all their family wash, from blankets to handkerchiefs, receive a cupful of special soap powder and are allotted to a machine. Mrs M. Jones, the trained attendant, shows newcomers how to pack the soiled clothes into the electric washing machine. The glass door is closed; a small dial is set and the customer sits back to watch operations.… even men can manage their own washing under this system, which has clear advantages in hygiene – each person’s laundry is washed separately under their own supervision.

For most people, the radio and the cinema remained the main sources of entertainment. Radio stars were household names and a variety bill made up of ‘Stars of Radio’ appeared at the Palace Theatre in the spring of 1950. It was headed by a ventriloquist, Peter Brough (and his better-known dummy, Archie Andrews). In case anyone else finds it odd that a ventriloquist should make his name on the radio, the bill also included a troupe of dancers and a duo mysteriously described as ‘Thrills on wheels’, neither of which sound like an obvious act for that medium. It seems only the radio juggler was missing.

At the cinema, the Central and Granby cinemas experimented with midnight matinées, and many people queued in the rain to see Little Women or the Alfred Hitchcock film Under Capricorn. The bus company laid on special late-night buses for the filmgoers. They bought a combined cinema and bus ticket on the way in and, while they watched the film, the bus company worked out how many buses would be needed afterwards and called them up. The British film, The Blue Lamp, which gave birth to the character of Dixon of Dock Green, was attracting a great deal of interest in 1950. A special showing was organised at the Odeon for the Chief Constable and many of his staff. Chief Constable Lawrence said afterwards, ‘It is an extremely important film, from the official police point-of-view.’

The first postwar Labour Government was coming towards its end and the hostility between Reading’s Labour MP, Ian Mikardo, and the local press was growing more fierce by the week. This editorial from January 1950 is typical:

The Socialist party knows that, in the coming General Election, whatever the hoardings may flaunt, they are on trial, and have to face a barrage of unpleasant facts which, over the past five years, have proved how much easier it is to promise than to perform. In 1945 they were suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to translate into reality the blueprints of the dreamers and the pseudo-philosophers who, for half a century, had asked only to be allowed to put their theories to the test. And what a dismal failure this translation has been! Instead of devoting their energies to restoring the war-wracked nation to at least some of its former prosperity, the Government at once plunged into the task of implementing their ideals in the face of every economic warning from more sober and expert guides; proceeded to placate by class legislation those who had put them into power; and to pass over the real government of the country into other hands.

Mikardo, for his part, took the paper to task for sending their fashion, rather than their political, correspondent to one of his speeches, since he spent all his time reporting what Mikardo was wearing and nothing about what he had said – and even managed to get the details of his attire wrong! Maybe it was this that led the paper to involve its ultimate weapon – the Women’s Page – in the election. They sent their reporter to spend an afternoon canvassing with the wife of one of the candidates (the Conservative, naturally).

As the elections approached, the paper campaigned furiously for a change of MP. For this election, Reading had been split into two seats and Mikardo was standing for Reading South. In their pen portraits of the rival candidates, the paper made not the slightest pretence at impartiality. Of Mikardo, they said, ‘No other candidate arouses more feeling among friend or foe’ and, referring to his previous career in the private sector, suggested that ‘It is typical of Mikardo that, while he condemns capitalism and free enterprise, he is quite prepared to make a good living helping capitalism and free enterprise.’ By contrast, his Conservative opponent, David Rissik, was portrayed in near-saintly terms. He was a war hero who ‘didn’t just fight in the jungle; he knew what he was fighting for’.

The campaign drew a variety of well-known speakers to the town. Herbert Morrison put the Labour case at a public meeting, while Quentin Hogg came to Reading for the Conservatives and threatened to slap a writ on a man who was heckling him! The Liberals were also campaigning, though one gets the impression that their hearts were not really in it. They were being criticised in the press for splitting the anti-Labour vote and their electoral slogan ‘For a liberal government vote Liberal’ did not immediately seize the public imagination for some reason. Their candidate for Reading North, Michael Derrick, addressed what was not surprisingly described as ‘a small audience’ at Kendrick School on the uplifting theme of ‘If we fail, we shall try again’. Small wonder, perhaps, that they only got just over 3,000 votes in each of the Reading constituencies.

The country returned the Labour government for a second term, but with the slimmest of majorities, and Reading elected two Labour MPs, Mikardo and Kim Mackay (‘a disastrous choice’ the paper called it). Characteristically, Mikardo could not resist a piece of sarcasm at the Chronicle’s expense in the light of his victory:

I am thankful for the service they have rendered to the Labour cause during the election campaign. People are not dumb and they are not taken in by such vituperation and, far from supporting the cause they are urged to, they oppose it. There were hundreds of ‘floating voters’ who voted for us on the basis of what the senile old gentleman who writes the leaders for the Berkshire Chronicle said. I do sincerely want to thank him for putting some doubtful voters into our camp which we should not otherwise have had.

When, later that year, Mikardo was rushed to hospital with a gall bladder problem, the editorial columns were strangely silent in their wishes for a speedy recovery.

One of the commonest criticisms of the government was that it was imposing its ideology on aspects of life where it was not needed. There were editorial calls for housing to be removed from the realm of party politics (that is, Labour party politics) so that free enterprise could rapidly reduce waiting lists, and the prospective Conservative candidate for Reading South made the following attack at a local by-election meeting:

National policies have been forced into local government. That has been the work of the Socialists. In our view, local government must be 100% local, and one of our first objectives when we are returned will be to see that our local councils get back the powers that have been stripped from them.

Local councils in the 1990s are still waiting for a government of any persuasion that will do this.

Housing remained a major problem for many people in Reading. In July 1950 the 1,000th postwar house was handed over to its new tenants at Halls Road in Tilehurst. Mr and Mrs Slater, the happy occupants, had been waiting five years for it and there were still more than 4,000 families like them on the town’s waiting lists. Many solutions (other than private enterprise) were offered to the housing problem. Some saw industrialised building methods as the answer and 128 concrete houses were built in Whitley at a cost of £158,544 5s 8d. These, the public were told, kept the costs down without spoiling the beauty of the surrounding area (in this case, Whitley Wood Road). Wokingham Rural District Council believed terraced houses were one possible answer. As one of the councillors noted, during a fact-finding mission to look at this form of building:

They can be things of beauty and frightfully economical as well. In the past, we have made the mistake of putting people into houses they cannot afford. We do not want any more of this nonsense of two lavatories, one upstairs and one downstairs. I hope this council is going to turn its back on semi-detached houses with rents of 30s a week.

The courts continued to offer up their selection of life’s rich tapestry. A man was arrested under a 600-year-old piece of legislation for masquerading as a woman at the Rex cinema ‘in a manner likely to cause a breach of the peace’ (presumably as opposed to masquerading as a woman in any other way). No details were given to an eager public, except that he was bound over to keep the peace in the sum of £100. In another case, an 81-year-old man who had spent a total of fifty-six years in prison had another four added to his total, for a case of housebreaking.

The motoring offences at one quarter sessions were of more than usual interest, as the defendant in a case of driving without due care and attention was a 20-year-old racing motorist named Stirling Moss. It was alleged that he took a corner at excess speed, with his tyres squealing. At his appeal, his defence counsel described the £10 fine, the endorsement of his licence and a month’s suspension as ‘a slur on a racing motorist’, but the appeal was unsuccessful. (We will never know whether the arresting officer was the first to ask the immortal question ‘And who do you think you are, then, Stirling Moss?’)

One of the oddest cases of the year involved a motorist charged with two counts of dangerous driving. Despite narrowly missing a man in an invalid chair, hitting a car and a motor-cycle and turning his car on its side, his plea that he was suffering from the effects of sunstroke at the time was enough to get him acquitted.

One important question settled by the courts was the value of a wife. A man from Ringwood Road made a claim for £50 against the co-respondent in his divorce case for the loss of his wife. The learned judge’s summing up included the following remarks:

It is all too common for a co-respondent who has broken up a man’s home to evade the consequences of his wrongdoing by what some people might call a mean trick, saying ‘The woman I took away from you was not worth very much anyway, and you are not entitled to anything for having lost her.’

The judge took the view that £50 damages was very reasonable, and threw in the custody of their child for good measure.

Two men engaged in a potentially hazardous form of theft, appearing before the courts for stealing a quantity of lead from the Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell. Anyone seeking to copy their crime in future would have less travelling to do, as it was announced early in 1950 that Reading was to get its own Atomic Energy Establishment, on the former wartime bomber airfield at Aldermaston. The government took pains to ensure the public that ‘precautions will be taken to ensure that no harmful effect to the neighbourhood will arise from the works to be carried out at this new establishment’. Then as now, the authorities were not forthcoming when asked to be more specific about security.

Opinion was sharply divided between those who wanted to keep the picturesque village as it was and those who saw jobs and business opportunities. Plans were subsequently announced to build 500 homes to house the workers at the Establishment, in Newbury and Basingstoke, as well as in Aldermaston itself. The authorities in Reading were afraid that all this building would draw essential labour away from the house- and school-building programmes in Reading itself – both The Hill and Geoffrey Field Schools were getting seriously behind schedule. The council set up a group to monitor the effects of construction work at Aldermaston. Their fears proved to be well-founded. By 1951 the lure of free transport to Harwell and Aldermaston and payment for the time spent travelling proved too much for many people working in Reading, and the council had over a hundred vacancies for building tradesmen.

The Chronicle seemed to align itself with the modernisers:

One only has to think of the power grids that cross the land, the perfection of the internal combustion engine, of radio and radar, and the miracle of speed in the air, to realise that no part of the countryside is now remote or free from incursion and no rural settlement able to concern itself only with its traditional activities.

The bureaucracy that had burgeoned in the war years showed few signs of abating. There were complaints that the housing programme was being held back by the need to get government approval for every tender. A Mr Talfourd-Cook had more direct experience of government bureaucracy in action. Having taken his suits to the cleaners, when he returned to collect them, he found that government-appointed bailiffs had taken over the shop as a result of the owner’s tax arrears. They refused to hand over his suits, even in return for payment of the cleaning bills, and he subsequently had to buy his own clothes back at a sale of goods, at a cost of £13 15s. Mr Talfourd-Cook took the matter up directly with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and eventually received a refund and a letter of apology from Stafford Cripps.

Nationalisation had been one of the big issues for the election and the papers carried extensive advertising, singing the praises of a private-sector steel industry. The paper itself (an opponent of nationalisation) missed no opportunity to attack state-run enterprises. Even a report that the Gas Board offices in Friar Street were having electric light installed led them to attack state control for doing away with competition. If the editor was trying to be ironic, the joke was not obvious even all these years later.

Even with the election won, Ian Mikardo showed that he had lost none of his powers to fuel controversy. In an article in Tribune, he suggested that people who lived in areas like Amity Road and voted Conservative were snobs, who felt they really belonged in Caversham Heights. This caused a huge outcry among working-class Conservative voters in Reading (aided not a little by the local press). Mikardo’s response was to go down to Amity Road with a loudspeaker van and address the locals. Numbers of them took him (rather firmly, no doubt) into their homes, to prove that they were not the slum-dwellers that he had described in his article.

The steel industry fought a rearguard action against the government’s nationalisation plans.

Also active in 1950 was God. The Vicar of Christ Church, the Revd E.H. Knell, announced plans for an evangelistic campaign on the Whitley Estate. He described it in military terms as ‘an attack’ and added ‘it is a formidable task but one that has to be faced’. A more apocalyptic view was taken by the Revd Oswald C. Goold, who announced that his work at St Mary’s, Castle Street, was coming to an end:

I believe that, to the intelligent Christian, the dreadful times in which we are living point to the fact that the great Head of the Church is coming soon, and that you and I are living in the last days of this dispensation. My one concern is that, when I lay down my charge and meet Him, I shall have His ‘Well done’.

Encouraging signs that rationing was gradually being phased out began to appear during the course of 1950. Points values on various goods were reduced. This led to a tremendous rush for sweet things that forced some retailers to introduce their own impromptu forms of rationing. Petrol came off rationing just before the Whitsun bank holiday and beer was returning to its prewar strength. As if this were not joy enough, families were even allowed one point-free packet of that wartime ‘favourite’, powdered egg. New forms of convenience food were also starting to make their appearance.

Reading wives learn about the miracle of frozen food.

At this time Birds Eye ‘frosted’ green beans and Batchelor’s chicken noodle soup in a packet were both available and the advertsisements for them came complete with instructions for cooking these exotic new products. Eighty old people in Reading got an early chance to try the delights of frozen food. The Reading Philanthropic Institution delivered frozen Christmas dinners to them on Christmas Eve, complete with instructions for heating them up the next day.

However, soap was still rationed until September. In July, a newsprint shortage resulted in the local paper being reduced to its wartime size for a time, much to their editorial dismay, and the launch of a paper salvage campaign had strong wartime overtones. The Ladies’ Page of the wartime newspaper had become the Women’s Page and, among the diet of fashion and home-centred items, there was the start of a recognition that women might have careers:

The American Department of Labour recently conducted a survey in the department stores, banks, insurance offices and industrial plants of four major American cities to find out why women seldom held the top jobs. Lack of confidence in the women themselves, ‘company policy’ and the attitude that high level management posts should be held by men are some of the reasons given in the survey, which revealed that women who had achieved good positions in the spheres mentioned were not predominantly university educated. In many cases, long experience appeared to count for more.

The survey showed that over half of bank employees in the sample were women, compared with 40 per cent in 1939, yet none of the bank presidents were women. The Women’s Page asked:

What have Reading business women to say about the positions they now hold, compared with the chances of promotion ten years ago? Do any of them feel that their sex prevents them from reaching top positions?

The answer from the correspondence columns of the following editions was a deafening silence.

The royal family still retained a prominent place in the affections of the public, as this editorial, written on the occasion of the birth of Princess Anne, shows:

Despite the troubles that beset it, Britain is a fortunate land in which loyalty to the Monarchy and affection for the King and Queen and their family are so happily conjoined. Since their wedding three years ago, the Princess and her husband have found their way into the hearts of the people by their unassuming charm and regard for their high duties.

Also dear to the hearts of local people was Reading Football Club, even though the team finished tenth in the Third Division – its lowest postwar position. The club made a loss of £957 17s 7d on the 1949/50 season, no doubt aided by the lavish £6,000 it spent in the transfer market in the course of the year. The review of the season bemoaned their low gates – though 25,000 supporters turned up to see the team knocked out of the FA Cup in the third round by Doncaster, and even a pre-season practice game drew a crowd of nearly 8,000. In those days, the club ran four teams and had a total of 32 professional players on its books.

As postwar traffic grew, there were moves to introduce better traffic management. However, the term meant something very different in 1950. There were calls for the pedestrian crossings on the Friar Street/West Street junction to be removed, because they impeded the free flow of traffic, and plans for easing the traffic problems of Broad Street included not pedestrianisation but railings to keep the walking public back out of the way of the motorist.

The news that Berkshire was to get its own ‘satellite town’ at Bracknell got the editorial column thinking about the amenities it would need: