Read Family Britain, 1951-1957 for Free Online Page B

standard was quite high,’ the M-O team found. ‘Greta, who was accorded a tepid reception, exhibited an unexpected versatility and sang “Nevertheless”. The most popular turn was given by a boy of fifteen, who did farm-yard imitations.’ And, they added in a reference to the radio programme on the BBC in the 1940s, moving to Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s,
Opportunity Knocks
, ‘his performance was better than that of most of Hughie Green’s discoveries’.11
    Everywhere, this sixth summer after Labour’s landslide victory, the welfare state was in daily, ubiquitous action. ‘There were medicine bottles of orange juice and jars of Virol to pick up from the baby clinic for my sister,’ Carolyn Steedman recalled about moving in June as a four-year-old from Hammersmith to Streatham Hill. Or take the experience of a nine-year-old living with her mother and stepfather in a converted railway carriage at Wraysbury in Berkshire. ‘The school health inspector said that I was too skinny, and that I was suffering from malnutrition,’ Christine Keeler remembered. ‘He arranged for me to be sent to a holiday home in Littlehampton to be fattened up for a month. When I arrived there were sixteen boys staying, but no girls. We were all skinny as rakes. We bathed and played ping-pong and one of the older boys taught me how to play chess.’ ‘It was,’ she added, ‘the first time I felt myself aware of a boy.’
    For most adults, it was still quite hard just getting by. ‘What is the main problem facing you and your family at the present time?’ asked Gallup in July. Fifty-six per cent replied that it was the cost of living. Nevertheless, as the very worst of the immediate post-war austerity became a memory, things were continuing to ease somewhat – but only somewhat – in the shops. ‘We went for the meat,’ noted Nella Last in mid-August. ‘I got best frying steak for 1½ rations, & stewing steak for 1½ books, and was lucky enough to get a kidney too.’ Later that month, Judy Haines in Chingford was similarly grateful: ‘Meat ration much increased [to 1s 10d worth, the highest for ten years] and I have steak as well as a joint this week.’ Soon afterwards, on Saturday, 1 September, there was an important symbolic event, with the opening in bombed-out Plymouth of the new Dingle’s, the old one having been destroyed in an air raid. It was the first big department store to have been completed in the country since 1939, and some 40,000 eager shoppers visited on the first day. ‘Nylons were the main object of the early arrivals,’ reported the
Western Morning News
as a queue quickly formed at the hosiery counter ‘and at one time snaked through several departments on the ground floor’. In the crowded food hall, ‘the grocery counters were besieged’. Tellingly, ‘women who had secured the goods they required then stopped to admire a refrigerated window full of meat’.
    That same day, in the Dorset parish of Loders and Dottery, there took place the annual gymkhana, held in the park of Loders Court. ‘The Gymkhana was good for our souls,’ the Rev. Oliver Willmott wrote in due course in his Parish Notes:
    In previous years the weather had always smiled on us, and we sometimes wondered how we would face up to it if the weather frowned. Now we know. Rain fell mercilessly most of the morning and afternoon, but the competitors turned up, some of them from a distance, and ‘the show must go on’ became the order of the day. The entries reached the surprising number of 87, and this encourages the supposition that fine weather would have made the day eminently successful. The cosiest spot on that boggy field was Mrs Harry Legg’s tea emporium under the cedar tree. There the sweetest smiles of herself and her bevy of lady helpers atoned for the rain. The eyes of many customers turned to her warm stove, but it could not be come at for the ice-cream man, who seemed glued to it . . .12

     
    ‘We listened to Mr