Read Online Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston - Free Book Online
Authors: David Kynaston
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The decision immediately attracted considerable national attention, and in a visit about a year later the King himself made approbatory noises and ‘expressed the opinion that in all schemes of re-planning towns and cities which had been badly bombed, the future amenities for the citizens were of supreme importance’. During the rest of the war, despite concerns from Whitehall about cost and precedent, the City Council held firm to Gibson’s plan. ‘A cauldron in which experiments were taking place’ was how the Bishop of Coventry proudly saw his city early in 1945. Speaking to the local Rotary, he added, ‘England was watching to see if the city was going to do its job and allow a full life to the people.’ 16 Given Coventry’s unique pre-war place in the national psyche as the hub of the thriving British motor industry, the cutting edge of the second Industrial Revolution, this was perhaps not an absurd claim to make.
But would the new, rebuilt, reconstructed Britain enjoy – as Gibson in his plans clearly hoped it would – a new, more democratic, more socially concerned, more politically conscious culture? ‘When Work is Over’ was J. B. Priestley’s contribution to Picture Post ’s 1941 ‘Plan’ for Britain and, apart from ‘real holidays for all’, his main vision of leisure in the post-war age seemed to involve more facilities to study the arts and the setting up of civic centres of music, drama, film and talk. Increased leisure as such, he emphasised, was not necessarily a boon: ‘We do not want greyhound racing and dirt track performances to be given at all hours of the day and night, pin table establishments doing a roaring trade from dawn to midnight, and idiotic films being shown down every street.’ Priestley himself kept his distance from the Labour Party, but during the war there was a comfortable, almost automatic assumption on the part of Labour politicians and activists that the conflict was producing a more egalitarian society and thus a more serious-minded, socialist people. Herbert Morrison, for example, was apparently convinced by the spring of 1944 that there now existed a ‘genuine social idealism’, reflecting the ‘altered moral sense of the community’, and that accordingly the British people were ‘moving into an altogether different form of society, working in an altogether different atmosphere of ideas’ – a revolution of outlook, shifting from the values of private enterprise to the values of socialism, that meant that the people would never again ‘be content with limited and material aims’. 17
These were not assumptions shared by Evan Durbin, the Labour Party’s most interesting thinker of the 1940s and arguably of the twentieth century. Durbin – born in 1906, the son of a Baptist minister – was an attractively paradoxical figure. He once remarked that his three greatest pleasures were ‘food, sleep and sex’ but accused D. H. Lawrence of ‘shallow abstractions’ in relation to ‘freedom in sexual relations’; politically, he defined himself as a ‘militant Moderate’; and, as a trained economist who had lectured through the 1930s at the LSE, he combined a strong belief in economic planning with the conviction that the price mechanism was indispensable if the liberty of consumers in a modern democracy was to be ensured. During the 1930s, Durbin became close to the young psychiatrist John Bowlby, and the influence of Bowlby ran through much of his major work, The Politics of Democratic Socialism , published in 1940. As for economics itself, Durbin made a brave gesture towards the ‘sound money’ school – its citadel the City of London – that had wrecked Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 Labour government, by declaring that ‘it is not wise in the long run to expect to live upon golden eggs and slowly to strangle the goose that lays them’.
Towards the end of his book, an arrestingly bleak passage shows how far removed Durbin
The decision immediately attracted considerable national attention, and in a visit about a year later the King himself made approbatory noises and ‘expressed the opinion that in all schemes of re-planning towns and cities which had been badly bombed, the future amenities for the citizens were of supreme importance’. During the rest of the war, despite concerns from Whitehall about cost and precedent, the City Council held firm to Gibson’s plan. ‘A cauldron in which experiments were taking place’ was how the Bishop of Coventry proudly saw his city early in 1945. Speaking to the local Rotary, he added, ‘England was watching to see if the city was going to do its job and allow a full life to the people.’ 16 Given Coventry’s unique pre-war place in the national psyche as the hub of the thriving British motor industry, the cutting edge of the second Industrial Revolution, this was perhaps not an absurd claim to make.
But would the new, rebuilt, reconstructed Britain enjoy – as Gibson in his plans clearly hoped it would – a new, more democratic, more socially concerned, more politically conscious culture? ‘When Work is Over’ was J. B. Priestley’s contribution to Picture Post ’s 1941 ‘Plan’ for Britain and, apart from ‘real holidays for all’, his main vision of leisure in the post-war age seemed to involve more facilities to study the arts and the setting up of civic centres of music, drama, film and talk. Increased leisure as such, he emphasised, was not necessarily a boon: ‘We do not want greyhound racing and dirt track performances to be given at all hours of the day and night, pin table establishments doing a roaring trade from dawn to midnight, and idiotic films being shown down every street.’ Priestley himself kept his distance from the Labour Party, but during the war there was a comfortable, almost automatic assumption on the part of Labour politicians and activists that the conflict was producing a more egalitarian society and thus a more serious-minded, socialist people. Herbert Morrison, for example, was apparently convinced by the spring of 1944 that there now existed a ‘genuine social idealism’, reflecting the ‘altered moral sense of the community’, and that accordingly the British people were ‘moving into an altogether different form of society, working in an altogether different atmosphere of ideas’ – a revolution of outlook, shifting from the values of private enterprise to the values of socialism, that meant that the people would never again ‘be content with limited and material aims’. 17
These were not assumptions shared by Evan Durbin, the Labour Party’s most interesting thinker of the 1940s and arguably of the twentieth century. Durbin – born in 1906, the son of a Baptist minister – was an attractively paradoxical figure. He once remarked that his three greatest pleasures were ‘food, sleep and sex’ but accused D. H. Lawrence of ‘shallow abstractions’ in relation to ‘freedom in sexual relations’; politically, he defined himself as a ‘militant Moderate’; and, as a trained economist who had lectured through the 1930s at the LSE, he combined a strong belief in economic planning with the conviction that the price mechanism was indispensable if the liberty of consumers in a modern democracy was to be ensured. During the 1930s, Durbin became close to the young psychiatrist John Bowlby, and the influence of Bowlby ran through much of his major work, The Politics of Democratic Socialism , published in 1940. As for economics itself, Durbin made a brave gesture towards the ‘sound money’ school – its citadel the City of London – that had wrecked Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 Labour government, by declaring that ‘it is not wise in the long run to expect to live upon golden eggs and slowly to strangle the goose that lays them’.
Towards the end of his book, an arrestingly bleak passage shows how far removed Durbin
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