Free Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston Page A

all the boys disliked school.’
    That evening, as part of a variety show that included Tony Hancock on the bill as well as Winn and Train, the judges gave their verdict. Unanimously they chose the Newcombs, comprising Chief Inspector Frederick Newcomb, his wife and their 12-year-old son Raymond, living in Hemel Hempstead. The tenor of their replies can be gauged from the
Argus
report on what ‘Brighton considers the typical British family’:
    They must enjoy the simple pleasures. (Mrs Newcomb likes best a quiet evening at home with her husband ‘relaxing and making a mess with his pipe and the family watching television’ or walking in the country with their dog Rover.)
    A husband who doesn’t drink, except for a sherry at Christmas, and who doesn’t grumble.
    A wife who, although told by her employer that she was a career girl who would never enjoy married life, makes a success of it, and who loves making such dainties as lemon meringue pie and fruit flan for a most appreciative husband.
    A husband who doesn’t mind doing the washing-up on his Sundays off . . .
    Phyllis Prescott, years later still bitter about the sheer atypicality of the Newcombs (not least their claim that they never had rows), remembered Hancock as one of the judges.1 That seems unlikely from the accounts in the press, but even if he had been, the family that so openly and cheerfully enjoyed a punt was probably never going to win. Only a week after the election, it was another sign that the middle class was back in the box-seat.
    Another railwayman’s son was also destined for disappointment, in his case permanently so. This was the writer Jack Common, whose most ambitious novel,
Kiddar’s Luck
, was published in November to considerable critical acclaim. ‘This is a rich, tolerant, considered and indeed really brilliant picture of working-class life and a profoundly human one,’ declared V. S. Pritchett in the
New Statesman
about Common’s largely autobiographical account of a working-class childhood in Newcastle during the early part of the century. ‘This book makes most of the novels of working-class life look faked and overstrained.’ The
Daily Express
even speculated that ‘it may collect the jackpot, as Walter Greenwood did 20 years ago with
Love on the Dole
’. It did not happen. ‘Having been,’ to quote the historian Robert Colls, ‘too late (and perhaps unwilling) for the Proletcult of the 1930s,’ Common now found himself ‘too early (and perhaps too old) for the Angry Young Man marketing of the 1950s.’ Still, one authentic working-class voice from the region was by this time starting to be heard – albeit not south of the Trent. This was the stand-up comedian Bobby Thompson, ‘The Little Waster’, who since October had been featured about one week in three on the variety programme
Wot Cheor Geordie!
This went out on Tuesday evenings at seven on the North of England Home Service, recruited all its acts from the Newcastle area and was invariably recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience in local theatres or miners’ welfare halls. By the time the current series ended in April 1952, Thompson was top of the bill, with
Radio Times
calling him ‘a Durham lad who has made quite a hit’. He was in fact 40 and, after years performing mainly in pubs and working men’s clubs for little or no money, had just given up his full-time job as a labourer at the Royal Ordinance Factory in Birtley, County Durham.2
    It was also on a Tuesday evening this winter, 11 December, that the Royal Albert Hall featured, at the bottom of the bill, three six-round contests (one welterweight and two lightweight) of a peculiarly family nature. ‘Lew Lazar, Aldgate, displayed a varied selection of punches before knocking out Charlie Kray, Bethnal Green, in the third round,’ reported
Boxing News
. ‘The Kray twins from Bethnal Green had mixed fortunes. Reg turned in the most memorable performance of the pair to outpoint Bobby Manito,