Free Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston

of consumption.28
    Ultimately, of course, men and women alike had for more than six years since the war been feeling the squeeze. ‘The electorate was generally fed up with its wartime regime,’ reflected Peter Parker in later life on his Bedford experience, ‘and Labour was seen to be the party of boring rationing and planning regulations. Their continued existence infuriated a people who had fought nobly, had come through the siege of the immediate post-war reconstruction, and as I heard regularly on the doorsteps, were now buggered if they knew who had won the war.’ In the face of such grumbling, it was in vain that Parker and his colleagues claimed that the Tory pledge to ‘set the people free from controls’ – a pledge that involved ending bulk-buying of foodstuffs by the government, abolishing price controls, reducing subsidies and scrapping the wartime utility scheme – would lead to an explosion in the cost of living. No doubt there was widespread scepticism as to whether a change of government would really lead to a more bountiful, less restrictive future, but enough voters were willing to take the chance.
    For much of the middle class, the outcome was a sweet moment. ‘What do you think the Labour party stands for?’ Gallup had asked during the campaign:
    More money for less work.
(Headmaster’s wife)
    Giving the working classes power they are not fitted to use.
    (Commercial traveller)
    They say social security but I think class warfare.
(Solicitor’s wife)
    Pampering the working man.
(Dentist)
    Class hatred, revenge, and grab.
(Engineering technician)
    To keep down the people with money.
(Butcher’s wife)
    Fair shares for all – if they are working people.
(Managing director)
    During the weeks afterwards there lingered in many middle-class breasts a visceral satisfaction that Britain had at last expelled its socialist rulers. On Guy Fawkes Night at one prep school in Shropshire, the headmaster Paul Denman Fee-Smith (nicknamed ‘Boss’) solemnly threw effigies of Mr and Mrs Attlee on to the bonfire – a spectacle, especially Mrs Attlee’s blazing pumpkin hat, that (according to his biographer) ‘deeply distressed’ the 11-year-old Bruce Chatwin. ‘Mummy, how could he do-o-o this?’ he would later say in tears to his mother. But at the time, not wanting to rock the boat, he wrote home circumspectly: ‘I enjoyed the fireworks last night. They made a very good display indeed.’29

    3
    You Can’t Know Our Relief
    In 1951 the Prescotts – father Bert (a Liverpudlian railwayman), mother Phyllis, 13-year-old John and three other children – took their summer holiday at Brighton. There they qualified as finalists for a competition to find the ‘Typical British Family’, with all the finalists having to return to Brighton for the judging on the first Saturday in November. With a mouth-watering prize of £1,000 at stake, the Prescotts naturally did not hesitate to travel down from their home near Chester. That morning the Corporation gave the nine families a guided tour of Brighton and the Downs, in the course of which Bert spoke freely. ‘I won a £206 Tote double at Ascot this year,’ he told a local reporter. ‘I backed Fleeting Moment in the Cambridgeshire and won £14 having seen it win at Brighton – and now we’re hoping to pull this off.’ Within hours the interview had appeared in the
Evening Argus
– certainly by the time the judges (mainly local councillors but also including the two impeccably middle-class radio stars Anona Winn and Jack Train) got down to business that afternoon at the Dome in front of an audience of about a thousand people. All nine families were interrogated. ‘They were quizzed on such thorny family subjects as washing-up, shopping, making the morning tea, and for the younger members there were questions of school, home life and did Dad use the slipper?’ another local paper subsequently related. ‘Most of the girls said they wanted to be nurses; nearly