Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online

Attlee’s political party broadcast,’ noted Marian Raynham in Surbiton on 19 September. ‘It turned out to be an announcement of an Election on Oct 25th. Dear, I hope this crew doesn’t get in again. That would be awful. I can’t vote Tory, but I would prefer the Tories in.’ For several months Attlee had been coming under sustained pressure from King George – to the effect that if there was going to be an election, it had better be sooner rather than later, so that it was out of the way before he began a lengthy Commonwealth tour in early 1952. Attlee, who felt an intense personal allegiance to the King, had eventually given in, informing the monarch on 5 September of the election timetable. By the time of the election announcement a fortnight later, however, there was a new, unforeseen twist. ‘The King seems very ill,’ Raynham added in her entry. ‘Has nine doctors.’ Four days later he was under the knife, as another diarist, Gladys Hague (in her mid-fifties, living with her sister in Keighley), recorded: ‘King George VI has had a serious lung operation so everyone is anxious.’ But by now it was too late to reverse the decision, and an election on 25 October it was going to be.
    ‘It certainly seems very strange that the P.M. shd have launched the Election at this moment,’ reflected Harold Macmillan the day after the three-hour operation for the removal of a lung. ‘What will happen if the King dies?’ The larger question was whether Attlee needed to call an election at all. It is true that his parliamentary majority of only six had become increasingly frayed at the edges over the summer, with the Tories using every device to keep the Commons sitting for unconscionable hours – so much so that half a century later Roy Jenkins recalled 1951 as ‘the most burdensome summer of all my thirty-four years in the House’.13 Even so, the Labour government probably could have carried on into 1952, waiting for the adverse economic effects of the Korean War to lessen; but Attlee was weary, his ministers were weary, and to someone like Attlee the appeal of a clear-cut resolution to a difficult, unsatisfactory situation would have been considerable.
    The Prime Minister himself exuded reassurance and steady-as-she-goes during the three weeks of the campaign. ‘He is sincere, straightforward, clear, concise, sometimes witty, and on rare occasions angry in a dignified kind of way,’ observed one reporter, Ian Mackay, in the course of following him around the country (as usual driven by his wife Vi). ‘His great strength is his sincerity and simplicity.’ In policy terms, though, there was on the part of both Attlee and his party a palpable sense of exhaustion, with little being offered for the future that was either new or exciting – and certainly no specific promise of any further extension of public ownership, with instead only a vague reference in the manifesto to how ‘we shall take over concerns which fail the nation’. Instead, there was a twofold emphasis: domestically, on the welfare and employment gains since the war, invariably compared to the ‘hungry’ 1930s; and internationally, partly in the context of difficult current situations in the Middle East, on depicting the Tories, above all Churchill, as warmongers. The latter theme was especially highlighted by the strongly Labour-supporting
Daily Mirror
, whose insistent question, ‘Whose Finger on the Trigger?’, passed into electoral folklore.
    ‘You have to make up your minds,’ William Warbey, Labour’s candidate in Luton, told his listeners as he toured the Farley Hill Estate just over a fortnight before polling day. ‘Which sort of government is more likely to safeguard peace, maintain full employment and preserve fair shares for the ordinary working man and woman of this country? Would you trust a Tory Government to keep this country out of war? I wouldn’t.’ And later that afternoon, addressing a crowd of women, he added: ‘We