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

Clapham, but Ron never found an answer to the speedier leading of Bill Sliney, King’s Cross, and was well outpointed.’ Charlie was 25, Reg and Ron were 18, and (in the words of one of Ron’s obituarists) ‘the twins’ street reputations were the result of successful unlicensed bouts with various local rivals’. Three weeks later there was also violence in the air in Glasgow, at the annual New Year’s Day ‘Old Firm’ match between Celtic and Rangers. Far from unprecedented in the fixture, and invariably fuelled by sectarian chanting and flag-waving, the trouble started this time when the visiting Rangers went 4–1 ahead some 20 minutes from time. ‘It was stated by the police,’ reported the
Glasgow Herald
, ‘that a bottle was thrown from high up on the terracing, and landed in the middle of the crowd, who scattered. There was more trouble and a man was arrested. Bottles were thrown at the policemen, who took the man away.’ The trouble then spread as several hundred in the covered enclosure scrambled on to the track surrounding the pitch, some even getting on to the pitch itself, before mounted policemen managed to clear them. Eleven people were arrested, with two of them jailed. ‘Something must be done,’ declared the
Herald
with feeling rather than originality. ‘This hooliganism on the sports field cannot be allowed to go on. The sport of football must be cleaned up.’ In fact hooliganism at football matches was still pretty rare – in England in 1951, only 21 incidents of spectator misconduct and disorderliness were reported to the FA – but, contrary to subsequent mythology about a ‘golden age’, it was not non-existent.3
    Away from the terraces, this first post-war winter under a Tory government remained for most people a daily struggle. There were reductions in imports of unrationed foods; rationing itself remained firmly in force for the time being; and Churchill even had to announce a cut in the weekly meat ration. It was presumably around this time that, confused by figures and weights, he asked his Minister of Food to show him an individual’s rations. ‘Not a bad meal, not a bad meal,’ said Churchill when the exhibit was produced. ‘But these,’ responded the Minister, ‘are not rations for a meal or for a day. They are for a week.’ Inevitably housewives were as much as ever at the sharp end, including of price rises. Nella Last in Barrow, noting ‘rail fares up 2/- in the £’ and ‘coal 3d or 6d more a cwt’, reflected just after Christmas that ‘it seems startling to have to face such “jumps”, after the feeling that a change of Govt would make for early betterment’; and in Chingford on New Year’s Eve, Judy Haines was told by the ‘girl in Dyson’s’ that ‘I have lost my last week’s fats, cheese and bacon rations for four as I didn’t get them before they stock-took’, which got Haines properly ‘worked up’ before she ‘took it up with Manager, who gave no trouble!’ Equally inevitably, continuing shortages meant a continuing role for the spiv – a role commemorated in February by the rhyme chanted by an 11-year-old girl living in Hackney:
     
    We are three spivs of Trafalgar Square
    Flogging nylons tuppence a pair,
    All fully fashioned, all off the ration
    Sold in Trafalgar Square.
     
    ‘Victoria tells me her brother, aged ten, made it up,’ her teacher informed Peter and Iona Opie. ‘Victoria and her friends skip to the rhyme very fast with a “bump” on the last word.’4
    For non-skipping pedestrians, these were fraught times. ‘Lots of pedestrian crossings have been swept away in Notting Hill Gate,’ complained Vere Hodgson in the same entry that acclaimed the Churchillian restoration. ‘I am foaming with rage.’ Four days later, on 31 October, new regulations came into effect about the use and markings of pedestrian crossings, against a background of government having asked local authorities to do away with uncontrolled crossings,