All posts tagged J.R.R. Tolkien
Family Britain: A Thicker Cut, 1954-57 by David Kynaston (2009)
This is the second part of the second volume of David Kynaston's social history of post-war Britain. As usual, it is a dense collage of quotes from the diaries, letters, interviews, surveys and speeches of an enormous range of people from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to vox pops of shoppers in the street via civil servants, actors, coal miners, housewives, writers who were kids at the time recalling their early memories (John Fowles, David Hare, Alan Bennett, Hunter Davies) – all combining to give you a really deeply felt sense of what it was like to live through these years.
Chronological events part one
Thus, without any preliminary introduction the book opens straight into a cabinet meeting discussing the problem of coloured workers, held on Wednesday 3 February 1954: 'Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK?' Winston Churchill asked, a sentiment which is echoed half a dozen times as the race problem and the 'colour bar' are revisited throughout the book, reflecting the rising rate of immigration from the Commonwealth.
This very long book then touches on:
the housing problem, the debate about whether to build flats or houses, and whether to shunt people out to the periphery (as believed by 'dispersionists') or keep them in high rise inner cities ('urbanists')
whether to decriminalise homosexuality, specifically in light of the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood, which began in 15 March
Billy Graham's Greater London Crusade starting 1 March
the campaign to set up a commercial TV channel to rival the BBC's monopoly; the canny entrepreneurs lobbying for commercial TV choose Sir Kenneth Clarke as their ultra-respectable front man and he gives a speech supporting it; next time he enters his club, he is roundly booed
5 April Commons debate about the H-bomb, necessary if Britain is to remain 'a world power'
repeated crashes of the British-built Comet airliner result in it being grounded and overtaken by the American Boeing
newspapers report on fighting at youth clubs and dance halls involving teenagers with a new look, the Teddy Boys: 'The effect of the whole décor is thin, mean and sinister, and is obviously meant to be' (Cyril Dunn in his diary)
Doctor in the House starring Dirk Bogarde is the box office smash of 1954
6 May 1954 at Iffley Road track in Oxford, Roger Bannister breaks the four-minute mile
on 27 May, Hungary beat England 7-1 (West Germany go on to beat Hungary in the World Cup Final in July)
Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net. She is a committed communist
butter comes off the ration
June, Benny Hill shoots to TV stardom doing impersonations on Showcase
the myxomatosis epidemic among wild rabbits continued, eventually 99% of the population is wiped out
refrigerators are beginning to be a sign of status, notes sociologist Phyllis Willmott (p.399); restrictions on hire-purchase are removed for a wide range of consumer goods such as fridges, hoovers, radios, TVs, motorbikes and cars, setting in train the consumer society
August – Salad Days is a surprise hit in the theatre, starting a run which continues till 1960
Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring published, followed in November by the Two Towers
September – the Third Programme's live broadcast of Benjamin Britten's new opera, A Turn of the Screw
Kidbrook school opens, London's first purpose-built comprehensive
October – an exhibition of paintings by John Bratby leads critic David Sylvester to coin the term 'kitchen sink' school, which goes on to be widely applied to theatre and film
2 November – début of Hancock's Half Hour on BBC radio
by the end of the year there are nearly 4 million TV licences
January – BBC documentary Has Britain a Colour Bar? to which the answer was emphatically yes
February: road traffic has almost doubled since 1938 and so the government publishes a major road expansion plan including the building of two motorways, M1 and M6
government also announces plans to build 12 nuclear power stations, the most advanced scheme of nuclear power anywhere in the world
January – debut on TV of The Sooty Show and The Benny Hill Show
February – debut of Kitchen Magic, presented by Fanny Cradock, first of the celebrity chefs, coinciding with the era of rationing passing into memory i.e. the start of conspicuous consumption
March – national newspaper strike
5 April Winston Churchill (aged 80) steps down as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister
6 April replaced by Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford) who announces a snap general election for 26 May (the voting age was still 21, as it continued to be until 1969)
May General Election: Conservatives 321 seats, Labour 277, Liberals 6, the 17 communist candidates polled 33,000 votes between them. Turnout was down from 82 to 76% amid what Kynaston portrays as widespread apathy, the general interpretation being that the economy was booming, rationing was over, consumer goods were becoming widely available, who cares about politics? Hugh Gaitskell, and Kynaston, attribute it to Tory success with housewives.
May Day – Stirling Moss became the first British driver to win the Mille Miglia in Italy
May – The Dam Busters released, the outstanding British film of the year 'maybe of the decade'
Miners strike, train drivers strike, dockers' strike
13 July Ruth Ellis hanged for murder, last woman hanged (the last men hanged were executed in August 1964)
August – Kingsley Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, and publication of the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records
September – Henry Fairlie writes an article in the Spectator describing the 'Establishment' that runs Britain
22 September – commercial television (ITV) starts broadcasting in the London area
October was dominated by controversy among politicians, press and people on the long-running saga about whether young Princess Margaret Rose (25) should or should not marry divorced father-of-two Group-Captain Peter Townsend (30) with whom she was clearly in love. After dividing the nation, she decided not to.
About two-thirds of the way through the text it abruptly stops giving a month-by-month overview of political and popular events and turns into an extended consideration of various sociological issues, moving seamlessly through religious belief, attitudes to marriage, sex, homosexuality, unmarried mothers, abortion, prostitution, the role of women, women in the home, women in the workplace and so on.
As usual Kynaston draws evidence from a wide range of sources: from social historians, from the surprising number of surveys and sociological studies carried out at the time, from the diaries or letters of ordinary people and politicians or the autobiographies of writers, from questionnaires carried out by contemporary magazines, from government-sponsored reports, and so on.
Inevitably, in the longish sequence about the social expectations on women in the 1950s, the white, private-school-educated man Kynaston bends over backwards to emphasise his feminist credentials and bring out how lazy and selfish 1950s men were, and the pressure of social expectations on women. There's a lot less about the social expectations on men – to be financial provider, role model, father, and good companion in marriage.
In fact, although a huge amount of the content is informative and illuminating, not much is very surprising: the four books I've read so far tend to confirm everything you already suspected, but just with an awesome range of witnesses and voices adding texture and lived experience to the statistics and stereotypes, making the era really come to life.
Some of the sociological findings do raise a smile for confirming sociology's tendency to state the bleeding obvious. For example, on pages 576-77 Kynaston quotes several surveys which, after hundreds of interviews and hard work compiling the data, present the dazzling conclusion that, for lots of working women, the main motivation for going out to work was — to earn money! 73% of married women gave 'financial reasons' as their main motive for going to work. Not, maybe, earth-shattering news.
This list gives you a sense of the scope and number of surveys Kynaston refers to, as well as indicating the subject matter they address:
Brian Abel-Smith and Richard Titmuss study of NHS services underpinned the 1956 Guillebaud Committee report on the NHS which recommended no major changes
BBC survey 1955-6 about Britain's decline (28% thought there'd been a decline in Britain's economic ranking, blaming the trade unions and strikes)
White and Coloured by Michael Banton (p.451) recorded how cities across the UK recruited west Indian bus drivers and conductors through the first half of the 1950s
1956 survey of racial attitudes in Birmingham (two thirds thought coloured people were intrinsically less intelligent than white people)
Family and Social Network by Elizabeth Bott (1957), including the Bott hypothesis that the connectedness or the density of a husband's and wife's separate social networks is positively associated with marital role segregation
Tom Brennan, author of a 1956 study of occupants of the Gorbals and attitudes to redevelopment
The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (1956) by Eustace Chesser (women look for physical strength in man more than looks; the higher up the social scale the more likely a woman was to experience sexual satisfaction; husband doesn't pet enough [foreplay]; 'overwhelmingly it was felt by wives that men wanted sex more frequently than women did', p.592)
Citizens of Tomorrow by a working party of educationalists and sociologists
Peter Collison – study of the Cutteslowe Wall in Oxford
Professor Kate Fisher, pioneering historian of sex e.g. , Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960 (2007)
February 1957 Gallup survey about church going
1954 BBC-commissioned Gallup survey into church attendance
anthropologist Frank Girling spent 18 months on a Scottish housing estate studying the unskilled workers and their families (women had a dominant position in the social life of the area and their homes)
Social Mobility in Britain by David Glass finding a generally low level of social mobility (p.410)
1951 survey of British life by Geoffrey Gorer
Ken Grainger did a study of Herbert's the machine tool firm in Coventry
Natalie Higgins, author of a study of marriage in mid-twentieth century England (women looked for a man who was clean, decent and hard working)
Margot Jefferys author of a study of married women working in the civil service
Pearl Jephcott investigated youth clubs in London and Nottingham
1956 survey by Joyce Joseph of 600 adolescent girls attending school in the Home Counties and the West Country
1949 Mass-Observation on household income
1951 Mass-Observation survey of 700 working class housewives
1955 Mass-Observation survey into capital punishment
1956 Mass-Observation study of the housewife's day
1957 Mass-Observation survey on women in work
John Barron May's study of a police division in inner-city Liverpool
John Barron May's 1956 study of Liverpool's Crown Street area
John Mogey's study of working class life in Oxford
1954 NHS survey of services for the elderly
Anthony Richmond author of The Colour Problem
Elizabeth Roberts, author of a 1990s oral history of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston – parents became closer to their children, than their own parents had been
Women of the Streets (1955) edited by C.H. Rolph
English Life and Leisure (1951) by Rowntree and Lavers
Lulie Shaw, author of a study of a working class suburb in the 1950s
John Smith in 1955 conducted field work at the Peak Freen biscuit factory in Bermondsey
Steven Tolliday's study of Coventry engineering workers
The Family Life of Old People (1957) by Peter Townsend
Margaret Williamson – interviews in the ironstone region of Cleveland: post-war fathers more involved and willing to play with their children than pre-war fathers
Family and Kinship in East London (1957) by Michael Young and Peter Willmott
More About the Sex Factor by Dr Helena Wright (1947)
The single finding I found most interesting was the notion that the extended kinship system Young and Willmott found in the East End (grandparents and siblings living nearby and able to babysit and do errands) disappeared as young couples moved out to housing estates on the edge of town, and to new towns. Being isolated and thrown back on their own resources coincided or led to a) families being smaller (two children) and b) a greater sharing of household work and parenting, more involvement by dads i.e. the loss of an extended family network was compensated by more 'modern' gender roles. Although it did also just lead to lots of lonely, isolated mums.
Chronological events part two
October 15 Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets enters the Billboard Top 20
November: Cabinet decided not to support the Home Secretary's plan for legislation to limit immigration from the Commonwealth
books of the year: The Cruel Sea, Reach for the Sky, HMS Ulysses
Christmas Day: Somerset Maugham published an attack on Kingsley Amis's characters, calling them 'scum'
December Clement Attlee stands down as leader of the Labour Party, replaced by Hugh Gaitskell (aged 49, educated at Winchester Public School and New College, Oxford)
January – a concert by young turks Harrison Birtwhistle and Peter Maxwell Davies
February – London Transport starts to recruit staff from Barbados, followed by Trinidad and Jamaica
high prices bring discontent, complaints about Eden's premiership, and worries about growing manufacturing competition from Germany and Japan
March – politicians and commentators react to news of Nikita Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin and his crimes – a number of intellectuals quit the communist party and were to form the nucleus of the New Left which flourished in the 1960s
April – release of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier amid an orgy of merchandising
April – Khrushchev and Soviet premier Bulganin visit Britain, attending a race meeting, tea with the Queen, lunch at the House of Commons, and questions at the Oxford Union
8 May – first night of Look Back In Anger by John Osborne divides the critics
19 May – Elvis Presley entered the British charts for the first time with Heartbreak Hotel
May – opening of the This is Tomorrow art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, including Richard Hamilton's iconic collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing, the earliest example of Pop Art
Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956) by Richard Hamilton
12 June – bulldozers start clearing hedgerows for the building of the M6, Britain's first motorway (opened in 1958, the M1 was opened in 1959)
winter, spring and summer dominated by strikes, strident speeches by trade union leaders and complaints from the media about their selfishness
October – Tommy Steele enters the top 20 with Rock with the Caveman becoming Britain's first rock'n'roll star
17 October Windscale nuclear power station became the first nuclear power plant to feed electricity into a national grid anywhere in the world
November – Post Office Premium Bonds launched
Wednesday 9 January – Sir Anthony Eden resigns as Tory leader and Prime Minister on grounds of ill health
Thursday 10 January – replaced by Harold Macmillan (Eton and Balliol College, Oxford)
Suez and Hungary
Traditional history of the 1950s focus on the Suez Crisis as a symptom of the end of Britain's role as a genuine global power. Characteristically Kynaston reserves it for almost an afterthought in the last fifteen or so pages of the book, and even then his account is interspersed with references to Elvis Presley, Fanny Cradock and petrol prices, and he doesn't concern himself with the military or geopolitical issues, but focuses on how the unfolding crisis was received by his usual cast of diarists – Nella Last, Anthony Heap and so on – as well as the diary entries of Prime Minister Eden's wife and the private thoughts of other politicians. Two things come over:
I hadn't realised that the Anglo-French invasion of Suez and the Soviet tanks rukbling in to suppress the Hungarian Uprising were so closely synchronised – the first shots fired by the Hungarian security forces on protesters were on 23 October, the next day Soviet tanks occupied Budapest. On 29 October Israeli jets attacked Egyptian positions and on 31 October the British and French began bombing Egyptian positions on 31 October. Part of what made liberals so angry about Suez was that it was an illegal unilateral action not sanctioned by the UN. At a stroke this removed the moral superiority or ability of the West to criticise the Soviets. If there had been no Suez the West would have been infinitely better placed to protest the Soviet invasion and sanction the USSR.
I knew that Suez divided the nation but Kynaston's strength, here as everywhere else in the book, is to use diaries, letters, speeches, memoirs to really bring home the virulent anger on both sides. As families and husbands and wives and generations bitterly fell out over the best course of action, it's impossible not to see the parallels with Brexit.
Of the Conservative Party's 600 candidates in the 1955 general election, 80% went to private school, and 80 had gone to Eton. Ten of Anthony Eden's 18-strong cabinet went to Eton, five of whom also went on to Christ Church, Oxford ('the House', as it is known). Small world, the ruling class.
The education dilemma
Nearly seventy years after the debates about education which Kynaston quotes so extensively in his book, we:
still have an extensive network of private schools, whose alumni continue to dominate all aspects of public and economic life
are still agonising and hand-wringing about whether selection at age 11, the 11-plus, and grammar schools are a good or a bad thing
Examples of such agonising and debating:
Grammar schools do not help children achieve academic success, study claims
Rob Newman radio show about education
Intelligence: Born smart, born equal, born different
Why are the basic facts about education i.e. what works best for individuals and for society as a whole, still not definitely known? What have all those educationalists and university departments of education and educational psychologists and all the rest of them been doing for the past 65 years?
Consumer society
My impression of British history over the past 70 years is that people wanted more stuff.
Governments came and went, politicians agonised over the precise wording of manifestos and speeches, clever Oxbridge graduates devised wizard wheezes (the poll tax, universal credit) but Kynaston's approach to history makes it crystal clear that most people don't give a stuff about politics – again and again disillusioned politicians find themselves speaking to tiny audiences in the rain, or surveys show that half the people surveyed have never even heard the phrase 'welfare state', let alone have sophisticated ideas about how to fund it.
What comes over strongly – especially in the recurrent thread about housing, slum clearance, the creation of flats and so on – is that people want to be left alone to get on with their lives. Again and again we read that people want to live in houses because of the privacy and don't want to live in flats because of the lack of privacy.
And all through the book there is a massive disconnect between the university-educated politicians and theorists and writers and planners and activators and sociologists and anthropologists who agonise about definitions of 'community' and the 'working class' and the 'proletariat' — and the people living in Coventry or Birmingham or Glasgow (the most rundown city in Britain) who want: a clean home, hot water, a sink, a bathroom, an inside toilet.
And once they've got that, they want one of those TV sets that everyone is talking about, and one of the new line of fridges in which they can put the new range of frozen foods which were just being launched in the mid-1950s, led by Birds Eye fish fingers, they want instant coffee and tinned beer they can bring home to sup as they watch Fabian of the Yard or Variety Hour..
An indication of how things were changing was Elizabeth David's comment in the preface to the 1956 edition of A Book of Mediterranean Food that the food situation was 'startlingly different' to how it had been just two years before. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fridge freezers, convenience foods, formica table and work tops, affordable eating out (Berni Inns opened in 1954 with their trademark meal of rump steak, chips and peas, a roll and butter and pudding for just 7/6d). Local traders were closing down while Marks and Spencer opened stores throughout the country. Tesco opened its first true supermarket (entirely self-service) in Maldon in 1956.
And the age of DIY was dawning, with cheap and effective Dulux paint going on sale in 1953 while Black and Decker decided to enter the domestic market in 1954, selling drills and lathes and saws, and the first DIY magazine, Practical Householder, was launched in October 1955.
While Doris Lessing was writing articles in praise of Stalin and E.P. Thompson was agonising about whether to leave the communist party over Hungary – precisely the type of upper-middle-class university-educated people and highfalutin' issues that upper-middle-class university-educated historians usually focus on in their highfalutin' histories – the people, the 'masses' who they so fatuously claimed to be speaking for – were going shopping, collecting the new green shield stamps and buying a new Morris Minor on the never-never.
They knew who the future belonged to – and it wasn't Comrade Khrushchev.
Family Britain 1951 – 57 on Amazon
Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007) comprising:
A World to Build, 1945–48
Smoke in the Valley, 1948–51
Family Britain, 1951–57 (2009) comprising:
The Certainties of Place, 1951-5
A Thicker Cut, 1954-57
Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (2014) comprising:
Opening the Box, 1957–59
A Shake of the Dice, 1959–62
Reviews of fiction from the period
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)
That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis (1955)
Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming (1954)
Moonraker by Ian Fleming (1955)
Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming (1956)
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)
The Strange Land by Hammond Innes (1954)
The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes (1956)
HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean (1955)
Posted in Books, History
Tagged 1954, A Book of Mediterranean Food, A Turn of the Screw, Abortion, Alan Bennett, Anthony Eden, Anthony Heap, Anthony Richmond, BBC, Benjamin Britten, Benny Hill, Berni Inns, Bill Haley and the Comets, Billy Graham, Birds Eye, birth control, Black and Decker, Brian Abel-Smith, C.H. Rolph, Christianity, Citizens of Tomorrow, Clement Attlee, Comet airliner, communism, consumerism, Cutteslowe Wall, David Glass, David Hare, David Kynaston, David Sylvester, Davy Crockett, Dirk Bogarde, DIY, Doctor in the House, Dulux, Elizabeth Bott, Elizabeth David, Elizabeth Roberts, Elvis Presley, English Life and Leisure, Eustace Chesser, Family and Kinship in East London, Family and Social Network, Fanny Cradock, flats, Frank Girling, Gallup, gender, Geoffrey Gorer, Guillebaud Committee report, H-bomb, Hancock's Half Hour, Harold Macmillan, Harrison Birtwhistle, Heartbreak Hotel, Helena Wright, Henry Fairlie, HMS Ulysses, homosexuality, housing, Hugh Gaitskell, Hungarian Uprising, Hungary, Hunter Davies, immigration, Iris Murdoch, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Barron May, John Bratby, John Fowles, John Mogey, John Osborne, John Smith, Joyce Joseph, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different So Appealing, Kate Fisher, Ken Grainger, Kenneth Clarke, Kingsley Amis, kitchen sink, London Transport, Look Back In Anger, Lulie Shaw, Margaret Williamson, Margot Jefferys, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman, Marks and Spencer, Mass Observation, Michael Banton, Michael Young, More About the Sex Factor, motorways, Natalie Higgins, Nella Last, new town, NHS, Nikita Khrushchev, nuclear power, Oxford Union, Pearl Jephcott, Peter Collison, Peter Maxwell Davies, Peter Townsend, Peter Willmott, Phyllis Willmott, Pop Art, post-war Britain, Practical Householder, Princess Margaret, prostitution, race, Reach for the Sky, religion, Richard Hamilton, Richard Titmuss, Rock Around the Clock, rock'n'roll, Roger Bannister, Rowntree and Lavers, Ruth Ellis, sex, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960, sexuality, social history, Social Mobility in Britain, Somerset Maugham, Steven Tolliday, Stirling Moss, Suez Crisis, supermarket, surveys, Teddy Boys, Tesco, The Benny Hill Show, The Cruel Sea, The Dam Busters, the Establishment, The Family Life of Old People, the role of women, The Sexual, The Sooty Show, This is Tomorrow, Tom Brennan, Tommy Steele, unmarried mothers, Whitechapel Gallery, Windscale, Winston Churchill, women in the home, women in the workplace, Women of the Streets
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/family-britain-a-thicker-cut-1955-57-david-kynaston/
Austerity Britain: A World to Build 1945–48 by David Kynaston (2007)
David Kynaston (b.1951) has written about 16 history books on broadly three topics: cricket, the City of London, and Britain after the Second World War. His post-war histories (to date; the plan is to take them up to 1979) have been published as three volumes, each of which – rather confusingly – contains two 'books':
Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007) containing:
Family Britain, 1951–57 (2009) containing:
Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (2014) containing:
Should one review the portmanteau volume – Austerity Britain (692 pages long in its current Bloomsbury paperback edition) – or the two 'books' it contains? I've chosen the latter option, because each of the 'books' is so dense and packed with information that they require separate posts.
What makes the books so delightful and addictive is that they are an oral history. Rather than the stats and graphs of an economic history, or the acts and votes of a political history, or the treaties and negotiations of a diplomatic history, Kynaston's account quotes at length from diaries, letters, journals and accounts kept by the widest range of people alive during the period, as they react to events large and small, national, international and parochial.
Fairly regularly he stops to consider this or that 'issue' – rationing, nationalisation, town planning – in what you might call the traditional historical way, describing key publications or speeches in that area. But then he swiftly returns to the more gossipy main stream of his approach, to quote housewives, workers, local officials.
The result is to be led through the key events and debates of the period, but to see it overwhelmingly in human terms, in the words of the people who shed and led debate but also the reactions of the ordinary man and woman in the street.
Some of the voices
Neil Kinnock, future leader of the Labour Party, aged 3 when the war ends in 1945
Patrick Stewart, 5, moved along by a policeman for singing outside a polling booth in 1945
Bill Wyman, bassist with the Rolling Stones, starts grammar school, 8
Glenda Jackson, aged 9 when the war ends, starts grammar school in 1947
Alan Bennett, 11, spent VE Day in Guildford
Kenneth Tynan, drama critic to be, now Birmingham schoolboy, 18
Humphrey Lyttleton, 24
ultra-royalist James Lees-Milne, diarist, architectural historian, worked for the National Trust, 36
Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon literary magazine, 41
Noel Coward, playwright, aged 45
J.B. Priestley, novelist and radio broadcaster, 50
J.R.R. Tolkien, 53, commenting on the insanity of the atom bomb
Harold Nicholson, British diplomat, author, diarist and politician, 58
Violet Bonham Carter, Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, politician and diarist, 58
There are hundreds more but this gives a flavour. Kinnock is quoted as remembering the prefab house his parents moved into. Bill Wyman remembers how going to grammar school in 1947 cut him off from his working class roots, though the boys at his new school teased him for being poor. Lees-Milne is very posh and quoted liberally throughout with his generally negative reactions to the Labour government.
Connolly, as a magazine editor and essayist, wrote reams of material, but Kynaston quotes him, fascinatingly, commenting on the way the great wall of left-wing / communist solidarity among artists, writers, poets and so on during the 1930s simply evaporated after the war and had quite disappeared by 1947. The problem was that they finally had a 'socialist' government and there wasn't a man or woman in 'the movement' who wasn't bitterly disappointed at the reality (p.235). The same sentiment is expressed by George Orwell, who in his long essay, The Lion and the Unicorn (1942), wrote confidently about the general public's swing to the Left and the notion of central planning but, by 1946, had become disillusioned (pp.45, 173).
All this was exacerbated by the Berlin Airlift, the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the general start of the Cold War. I hadn't realised that this led to actual legislation banning car carrying communists from public office, with the ruin of many a career.
There are also extensive quotes from key players in politics, from the diaries or letters or speeches of men like Clement Attlee (Labour Prime Minister), Hugh Gaitskell (Minister of Fuel and Power), Aneurin Bevan (Minister of Health overseeing the creation of the National Health Service), Ernest Bevin (Foreign Secretary who oversaw the independence of India, Israel etc), Herbert Morrison (Deputy Prime Minister), Stafford Cripps (Chancellor of the Exchequer).
Slowly you get a feel for their personalities, achievements and disagreements. Around them swim all kinds of minor figures, private secretaries, and MPs, and policy makers such as Michael Young, who wrote Labour's 1945 manifesto (Let Us Face The Future), coined the term meritocracy and went on to play a key role in setting up the Consumer Association and the Open University.
The Obscure
Kynaston takes his lead from Mass Observation, set up in 1937 by three Cambridge graduates, anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Mass Observation aimed to:
record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires (known as directives). They also paid investigators to anonymously record people's conversation and behaviour at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events. (Wikipedia)
Kynaston relies heavily on material from the M-O archive now held at the University of Sussex. This takes many forms. M-O carried out tailored surveys on specific issues throwing up statistical results of the numbers in favour or against particular policies. Their contributors often reported on conversations overheard on the street, on the buses or tube, at the theatre etc. And other contributors kept detailed diaries. The most famous of these was Nella Last (1889-1968), who wrote over two million words about everything she died, heard and observed, from 1939 to 1966, making her one of the single largest contributors to M-O.
But Kynaston quotes from a large number of other diarists and recorders, including:
Michael Burns, grew up in Tolworth
Lawrence Daly, coalminer
Alice 'Judy' Haines, a young married mother of two living in Chingford
Anthony Heap, a middle-aged local government officer from St Pancras
Mary King, retired teacher
Gladys Langford, deserted by her husband, living alone in the Woodstock Hotel
Ernest Loftus, headmaster of Barking Abbey School
Edith Palmer, ex-pat's daughter, late-20s, arriving in England from Kenya
Mrs Michael Pleydell-Bouverie who spent three years on behalf of the Daily Mail speaking to 'the Women of Britain' about homes and housing
Kenneth Preston, a middle-aged English teacher at Keighley Grammar School
Marian Raynham, a housewife from Surbiton
Henry St John, son of a sweetshop owner, living in Bristol
Sir Raymond Streat, head of the Cotton Board
Rose Uttin, housewife from Wembley
Mrs Madge Waller
Post-war issues
So what do these people comment on and discuss? A huge array of issues and problems which faced Britain right from the moment war ended (Victory in Europe 8 May 1945, Victory in Japan and the final end of the war, 15 August). As stated, Kynaston is not a conventional historian of diplomacy or economics. Issues appear insofar as they impinged on the minds of his huge cast of Britons. None of them are pursued in detail and, after 300 pages, I realised that he rarely comes to a conclusion about any of them. Instead we are presented with a variety of opinions, from top politicians and expert down to housewives and coalminers – and then he moves on.
The General Election 5 July 1945
The Labour government's attempts to:
nationalise industry
set up a National Health Service (launched, after much struggles with the doctors, on 5 July 1948)
The housing crisis
Education (everyone accepted the 11-plus, the division between grammar and technical schools, and nobody touched the public schools which were [and are], according to Kynaston, 'the single most important source of political, social and economic privilege', p.153)
Surrender of Germany, suicide of Hitler
Atom bombs dropped on Japan
Berlin Blockade and airlift
June 1947 Marshall Plan
February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia
But most of the people Kynaston quotes have little or no interest in international affairs. After initial relief that the war is over, and then shock at the revelation of the atom bomb, most people sink back into their customary indifference to international affairs (and to politics generally).
Britain might as well not have an empire at all. The independence of Israel and India/Pakistan are not mentioned. Decades ago I read the comment by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, that the tragedy of the British was that all their history took place abroad – by which he meant in the empire.
One of the biggest aspects of the book is the way the British Empire is almost completely absent from it. The people Kynaston quotes are struggling to make ends meet, to find somewhere to live, find a job, and then find food to eat. He quotes a survey of 2,000 adults made in 1948 which revealed that only 49% could name a single British colony. The majority of those surveyed could not name a single British colony.
And so, since so few people knew or cared about the empire, Kynaston devotes much space to popular radio programmes (Woman's Hour, first broadcast on 7 October 1946 on the BBC's Light Programme, the popular comedy It's That Man Again), to the very slow spread of television (only 50,000 sets in 1945). There is more about the Grand National than there is about Gandhi, more about Stanley Matthews (the footballer) than Stalin.
In this book nobody travels abroad (nobody can afford it) but plenty of people have a summer holiday at Margate or Morecambe or at Billy Butlin's new holiday camps (first one at Skegness in 1936).
Kynaston gives us the results of the key test matches and FA Cup Finals for 1945, 46, and 47, as well as the Epsom Derby, and reports from greyhound races and boxing matches – while all kinds of high-minded middle-class commentators lament that the average working man seems more interested in a pint, a packet of fags and the sports results than he does about the Iron Curtain.
The intellectuals and the masses
This reflects what, for me, is the main impression of the book, which is the enormous divide between the relatively small educated liberal intelligentsia – the policy makers and politicians and thinkers and writers and architects and planners – and the vast majority of the population, still very working class, often illiterate or, as Kynaston puts it:
the profound cultural mismatch between progressive activators and the millions acted upon (p.267)
Kynaston shows how all of the 1945 Labour government's policies were not just controversial but opposed by large number of people, even the working people the Labour Party claimed to represent. For example, efforts to pass laws guaranteeing the trade unions representatives on boards of the new nationalised industries (a policy followed in Germany) were rejected by the unions. Why? Because they preferred to negotiate wages from a position of freedom and strength (p.229) It was a mindset which, arguably, crippled British industry for generations.
Similarly, it is fascinating to read how many ordinary people (not just the usual suspects, Tory MPs and toff writers), really hard core working class people, were suspicious of, or actively against, the welfare state, the new system of national insurance and the National Health Service.
The gaping chasm between well-meaning left-leaning university-educated intellectuals and 'the masses' is probably best demonstrated in the area of housing. Vast amounts of Britain's housing stock was destroyed by German bombing. But a fair percentage of what survived was desperately rundown slums, particularly in the industrial cities – London's East End, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and so on contained acres of slums, houses with no running water, gas or electricity, millions of people living with no indoor toilet.
The chasm comes about when the planners and architects put their heads together to solve the problem. There was debate and argument at all levels, but roughly speaking, people wanted houses with a little garden of their own, and the planners wanted to put them in blocks of flats. People wanted their bombed out city centres to be restored to how they were before the war. Urban planners and go-ahead young architects wanted, on the contrary, to demolish what old buildings were left, and create sweeping new town centres, dominated by pedestrian precincts and car parks, surrounded by ring roads. As he writes of the brave new plan devised to demolish and rebuild central Plymouth:
There was little or no local consultation, with all objections overruled. (p.36)
The opening of the book is devoted to arguments about how to rebuild Britain and, through the thicket of specific details about new schemes for Plymouth or Hull, one gets a really clear feel for the divide between those who know best what the people want, and the people themselves – not least, of course, because Kynaston's whole book is devoted to the people's voices. He quotes one of the founders of Mass Observation, Tom Harrison:
worried most by the way that planners and others associated with the matter talked as if they were winning over the general public when they were only winning over each other. He had never met any group of people who 'scratched each other's backs' more than planners did. (p.47)
In Bristol the local retail association organised a poll which showed that only 400 were in favour of the new Broadmead shopping centre, while 13,000 opposed it. The planners ignored this and all other opposition, and went ahead and built it.
This Great Divide, this sense of a mass population profoundly alienated from their lords and masters, grows as the book progresses from the May 1945 General Election through to its end point, 5 July 1948, the day the National Health Service was inaugurated. Intellectuals at the time were agonisingly aware of it. Various papers and reports guesstimated that 'the thinking minority' ranged from 20% down to a mere 5% of the population (p.55). How could they break out of their bubble to really engage with the great unwashed (an expression coined around 1830 by the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton)?
Maybe the single biggest surprise is the couple of pages devoted to the four months spent by American actor, Ronald Reagan at Elstree Studios making a war movie called The Hasty Heart (pp.314-315). Reagan was appalled by the filthy London smogs and rundown hotels, and – although he went out of his way to praise the director and all the other technicians he worked with – it was a grim first-hand sight of socialism in action which, in his view, amounted to stoppages dictated by the militant trade unions, six-hour queues at hospitals, gaunt impoverished passersby and mile after mile of slate-roofed council houses in the rain.
So far so anecdotal: but Kynaston goes on to say that Reagan himself, writing twenty years later in the 1970s, pointed to this trip to Britain – to seeing the 'natural' economic order of free markets replaced by rationing and state interference at every level, and the resulting lack of all basic facilities in a culture dominated by the petty tyrannies of trade union shop stewards and local government officials – as a defining moment in his journey to the Right.
So that, considering Reagan's centrality to world politics during the 1980s and the role he played in the collapse of the Soviet Union, of communism, and even of full-blooded socialism as a viable political programme, there's a case for saying that these few months in rainy Hertfordshire changed the history of the world.
General impoverishment
Kynaston devotes pages to political debates about Marshall Aid, about the end of Lend-Lease, about the currency crisis and devaluation of sterling, and so on.
But by far the biggest and most enduring subject of the book is RATIONING, the rationing of food and clothing, which not only continued after the war, but got worse, a lot worse. From the poshest in the land down to a variety of housewives, Kynaston's quotes convey the sheer numbing crushing effect of days and months and year after year of shortages of meat, bacon, milk, sugar, butter, even of bread.
Demobbed soldiers, or visitors from abroad (including the American playwright Tennessee Williams), or British children arriving in Britain back from the colonies (Cliff Richard arriving from India in 1948, aged 8) all noticed how pale and underfed the population looked. For years after the war the gas supply was weak and the electricity was turned off at certain times of day. Witnesses like Harold Nicholson testify that even in the best London clubs, the food came in minuscule portions and was barely edible.
And then in February 1948 the population was afflicted by the coldest winter of the 20th century. Young Roy Hattersley remembers sledging down the middle of usually busy streets (p.199) but thousands of the elderly and the infirm died. And millions had to dig a path from their back doors to their outside toilets.
There are thousands of wonderful anecdotes, gems and insights throughout the book – but the predominating image is of impoverishment and endurance.
The queue for rationed food – symbol of post-war Britain
P.S. Obscure novelists
A lot of the people Kynaston quotes are, inevitably, writers, a self-selecting cohort since he is himself a writer dealing with written records which 'writers' dominate.
Your ears prick up at the famous ones (Graham Greene, Noel Coward, Doris Lessing) but he also introduces us to a cocktail party of less well-known writers from the period, a list which has the effect o making you realise how selective 'literary history' is, picking out the half dozen 'serious' writers from each era or decade, and letting plenty of other authors drop into obscurity.
It is one of the many many pleasures of the book to come across forgotten authors he mentions, and google them and toy with tracking down and reading their (mostly forgotten) works:
Ruby Mildred Ayres b.1881 – one of the most popular and prolific romantic novelists of the twentieth century
Ethel M. Dell b.1881 – author of over 30 popular romance novels
Naomi Jacob b.1884 – author and actress
Ivy Compton-Burnett b.1884 – novelist
Angela Thirkell b.1890 – author of a series of 19 novels set in Home Counties 'Barsetshire'
James Lansdale Hodson b.1891 – journalist and novelist
Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 – novelist and poet
Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 – Irish novelist and short story writer
Mollie Panter-Downes b.1906 – novelist and writer of Letters from England for the New Yorker magazine
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow b.1912 – novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic
Denton Welch b.1915 – writer and painter
Sid Chaplin b.1916 coal miner who wrote novels about mining communities in the North-East
Joan Wyndham b.1921 – rose to literary prominence late in life through the diaries she had kept about her romantic adventures during the Second World War
Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 on Amazon
Posted in History
Tagged 11-plus, 1945–48, 1945–51, 2007, A World to Build, Alan Bennett, Aneurin Bevan, Angela Thirkell, Anthony Heap, atom bomb, Austerity, Austerity Britain, BBC, Berlin Airlift, Berlin Blockade, Bill Wyman, Birmingham, Butlin's, C.L.R. James, Charles Madge, Clement Attlee, Cliff Richard, Cold War, communism, Consumer Association, Cyril Connolly, Czechoslovakia, David Kynaston, Denton Welch, diaries, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, Elstree Studios, Ernest Bevin, Ernest Loftus, Ethel M. Dell, FA Cup Final, George Orwell, Gladys Langford, Glasgow, Glenda Jackson, Graham Greene, grammar school, Harold Nicholson, Henry St John, Herbert Morrison, history, Hitler, Horizon, Hugh Gaitskell, Humphrey Jennings, Humphrey Lyttleton, India, It's That Man Again, Ivy Compton-Burnett, J.B. Priestley, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Lansdale Hodson, James Lees-Milne, Joan Wyndham, journals, Judy Haines, Kenneth Preston, Kenneth Tynan, Labour Party, letters, Light Programme, London, Manchester, Marian Raynham, Marshall Plan, meritocracy, Michael Young, Mollie Panter-Downes, Naomi Jacob, National Health Service, Neil Kinnock, Nella Last, Noel Coward, Open University, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Patrick Stewart, Plymouth, politics, post-war, Rolling Stones, Ronald Reagan, Rose Uttin, Roy Hattersley, Ruby Mildred Ayres, Second World War, Sid Chaplin, Sir Raymond Streat, slums, social history, Stafford Cripps, Stalin, Stanley Matthews, Sylvia Townsend Warner, television, Tennessee Williams, The Lion and the Unicorn, Tom Harrisson, trade unions, Victory in Europe, Victory in Japan, Violet Bonham Carter, Woman's Hour
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/25/austerity-britain-a-world-to-build-1945-48-david-kynaston/
Out of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis (1938)
His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and medieval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers – rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world.
The set-up
Ransom (we never learn his first name) is a harmless Cambridge professor of philology on a walking tour of the Midlands during the university holidays. It's getting dark and when he asks an old lady at a little cottage for the nearest accommodation, she suggests a nearby house, home of another 'professor'.
It's now night-time and Ransom, when there's no reply to his calls, cheekily pushes through the hedge and wanders round the back of the building where he a) comes across a surprising array of outhouses and chimneys, at least one showing the wild flames of a forge, and with some huge object looming over the buildings, and b) discovers two men struggling with a young lad.
Quickly the two chaps introduce themselves as Weston (a physics professor) and Devine (a businessman) who, to his annoyance, Ransom realises he knew at school, and disliked for his slimeyness. The pair explain that the boy is backward, and they only employ him out of charity and he was just fighting against a chore they'd asked him to do.
Now they let the boy go, to return to the old lady in the cottage, and take Ransom into the house and pour him a nice whiskey. But the whiskey is drugged. Ransom falls asleep. When he wakes, before he can even stir he hears the two men discussing their plans to 'sacrifice' him to someone or something. Alarmed, Ransom tries to make a bolt for it, but has barely got to the kitchen door before they're on him and one of them coshes him.
He regains consciousness in a spaceship. Lewis is a good describer and paints a vivid picture of coming to consciousness in a weirdly shaped metal box, hot on one wall (facing the sun), cool on the other – and being almost weightless. He blunders out of the small metal room into a sort of communal space where he finds Weston and Devine. Ransom's mind reels as they explain to him that they are going back to Mars in a spaceship.
Back? Yes, they've been once already and Devine darkly hints that a) there's a lot in it for him, wealth or riches or fame etc, and b) that the things – the creatures – they met requested they bring another human back, with implications that this person would be a gift or, as Ransom fears, a 'sacrifice'. My God, he's been kidnapped and flown to another planet against his will!
The description of the journey is full of the thoughtful kinds of details of the H.G. Wells type (the continual pattering of small meteorites on the shell of the ship, the way the ship is shaped like a big sphere) – all of which we now know to be completely impractical and unrealistic.
As unrealistic as the way the 'ship' mysteriously 'lands' quite peacefully on the surface of Mars and, when they open the circular hatch (much like a manhole cover) it turns out the air of Mars is perfectly breathable (just like the atmosphere of H.G. wells's Moon was perfectly breathable). All of this is almost too silly to be 'science' fantasy, is more like a medieval romance, where the sleeper awakes in a strange land full of new creatures.
Same here. They have landed near a 'lake' of phosphorescent blue water. Tall willowy things seem to approach from the other shore and gesture towards Weston and Devine. With a shock, Ransom realises these are the creatures his kidnappers spoke about and they are gesturing to him. He is going to be handed over and then sacrificed!
At that moment a water-based creature slip through the 'water' and appears to snap at Weston and Devine, who step back in a hurry, slip over and… Ransom takes the opportunity to turn and run, run, run, without looking back, across the spit of sand, up the sides of a hill or whatever it is, never looking back, into a 'forest' of tall swaying trunks, amid alien flora, driven by panic fear.
Meeting the Malacandrans
Forced by thirst to eventually risk drinking from a pool of Martian 'water', Ransom is terrified when a sleek black animal a bit like an otter arises from it. The creature barks and he is astonished to realise it is making logical, sequential sounds. It is talking. Ransom approaches, it backs away, it gestures, he backs away. Then driven by curiosity, they move closer to each other.
Now we realise why Lewis made Ransom a philologist – it gives a plausibility (well, a sort of plausibility) – to his ability to grasp key words, to separate nouns from verbs, and to quickly begin to talk to this creature.
(The idea that any of this could happen is the wildest fantasy – Mars's gravity not very different from ours, sunshine and breathable air, drinkable water, creatures with a sort of recognisable form and who can talk. It is Middle Earth, it is Narnia, it is not our solar system.)
To cut a long story short, this creature turns out to be a hross named Hyoi. Ransom is taken to their village where he learns the plural of hross is hrossa (not very difficult, really).
The peaceful hrossa like making poetry, their young frolic around Ransom's feet, and he goes on a village hunt for one of the few violent creatures on the planet, a hnakra, which live in the 'rivers'. Ransom is given pride of place in the 'canoe' which the hrossa paddle out to find the hnakra, armed with hrossa 'spears' and feeling a tremendous sense of comradeship with his fellow 'bloods' – at which point I realised that, despite looking like otters, everything else about the hrossa is reminiscent of native Americans: they live close to the soil, in teepee-like houses, have campfires, their young running free. It is a vision of innocence.
Ransom learns that there are two other 'intelligent' species on the planet which, by now, he has learned the natives call 'Malacandra' – short creatures who love building things and are known as pfifltriggi, and tall, willowy creatures known as sorns or séroni, to give them their grammatically correct plural.
There is something wonderfully innocent about the notion of a Cambridge philologist, magically transported to Mars, then spending his time fussing and fretting about plurals and tenses. And even about placing accents over the correct vowel sounds. Sweet.
Anyway, all three of these species long ago agreed to share one common language and live in peace together, each of their skills complementing the other species – in this, as in so much else, making Ransom reflect sadly on the violence and rapacity of our human species.
Once you get past the hot lakes and phosphorescent water, past the way the waterways have carved deep dead-straight canyons across the red surface of the planet (Lewis's explanation of Mars's canals) past the way the vegetation, the hills and the creatures are all tall and willowy due to Mars's weaker gravity – past, in other words, the Amazing Tales and Astounding Stories level of the setting – then the story reveals its very traditional roots, going back at least as far as Gulliver's Travels, if not to Pilgrim's Progress and beyond, in the sense that it is a highly moralised story.
The fundamental purpose of the narrative is to teach and instruct. And what is being taught is a very traditional antidote to human arrogance and ignorance. Initially Ransom judges the Malacandrans by all-too-human standards, expecting them to be rapacious, violent, competitive – and is continually being brought up short and reproved for his cynicism.
With everything he learns about Malacandra he is reminded that there is something 'crook', as the Aussies say, about mankind, something bent and broken.
Special insight comes in (maybe predictably) a conversation about sex – the hrossa breed only once in their lifetimes, which Ranson can't understand since our own species, of course, has a great deal of trouble restraining itself from all kinds of wanton promiscuity.
At last it dawned upon him that it was not they, but his own species, that were the puzzle. That the hrossa should have such instincts was mildly surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the hrossa so closely resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were so deplorably different? What was the history of Man?
The ultimate message of the book is that all the universe is a dance of beauty created by a loving God but that earth alone has brought upon itself ruin and silence. By man's Original Sin.
Back to the plot: Ransom is informed that there is a fourth 'species', the almost invisible eldil (plural eldila), spirits which shimmer through the world as prisms of light, as breaths of air and which, he also learns, live in space, at least what humans call 'space'. Because now he learns that what humans take to be the big black void of 'space' is in fact thronged with life and life-giving energy. He learns to think of it not as black and negative empty 'space', but as rich and full 'deep Heaven'.
On the hunting trip an eldil appears to the hrossa (Ransom can barely see it) and tells them to take the man (hman) to Oyarsa. Oyarsa, they explain, is the eldil who is ruler of the planet. The hrossa says they will, just as soon as they finish the hunt. They successfully capture the hnakra but, once the canoes have been pulled up on shore, Hyoi, Ransom's friend and guide, is shot by a rifle, Devine and Weston's rifle fired from way up in the hills – and expires in Ransom's arms.
This really brings home to Ransom just how 'crook' and 'bent' his species really is. To the hrossa it conveys a different message: that they should have obeyed the eldil straightaway. They tell Ransom how to get to the valley of Oyarsa, which requires crossing a kind of range of Martian Alps. Ransom sets off alone.
Up and up he climbs, becoming breathless, cold and observing the sky getting blacker. Eventually he realises he is climbing out of Mars's atmosphere altogether, up to the level of the surface of the planet. He realises that all the lush life he's been living among exists down in the 'canals' which are cut across Mars's surface. Up on the 'surface', there is no atmosphere at all.
Before he asphyxiates he arrives at a cave where lives an ancient and wise sorn. It is one of the same creatures who had terrified him all those weeks ago, when he had first arrived, on the shore of the 'lake'. Now he realises this species are the lofty 'philosophers' of Malacandra. They know about astronomy and about the planet's history in a way which doesn't interest the happy, hunting, singing hrossa.
The sorn (named Augray) gives Ransom a flower to press to his face, which exudes oxygen (handy), places him up on its shoulder, and then sets off across the mountains towards the valley of Oyarsa, all the way telling Ransom more about the history and life of Malacandra.
This journey on the shoulder of a wise and noble old alien creature reminds me very much of the hobbits' encounters with the Ents in Lord of The Rings by Lewis's lifelong friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Augray and Ransom descend into the beautiful valley of Meldilorn, the home of Oyarsa. Here he first sees pfifltriggi who build houses, make works of art and carve stones.
Oyarsa and the meaning of the solar system
Ransom is then led through a throng of Malacandrans, up a 'tree'-lined avenue towards a circle of pillars like a temple, where he finally meets Oyarsa who proceeds, of course, to explain everything to him. For this is a format as old as writing – the quest, the journey, the odyssey to meet the Old Man of the Hills or guru or Master or god.
Oyarsa explains that:
each of the planets of the solar system has a tutelary spirit or oyarsa (plural Oyéresu)
on the four inner planets, which contain life, the local Oyarsa is responsible for that life
but the ruler of Earth (known as Thulcandra or the 'silent planet' hence – we now realise – the title of the book), has turned evil (become 'bent') and after some kind of great battle has been restricted to Thulcandra
Quite naturally, as in any allegory or romance or fantasy of this type, Ransom (and by extension the reader) is made to feel small and humble and ashamed of humanity and its greed and wars and so on. A bit like a schoolboy getting a telling off from the headmaster.
During this Great Explanation, there is a fuss back at the edge of the crowd and Ransom turns to see Devine and Weston being manhandled into Oyarsa's presence by a group of hrossa, along with the corpses of Hyoi and two other hrossa who they have shot. God, is he ashamed to be human.
But it gets worse. Weston and Devine cannot in fact 'see' Oyarsa, having not developed the sensitivity to perceive eldila. They think the voice they can hear is being 'thrown' by a ventriloquist and decide a particularly sleepy old hross at the edge of the crowd must be throwing his voice. They talk to this old creature in patronising baby language, and offer him beads and cheap trinkets – exactly like the stereotypical white man encountering a new 'tribe'.
Ransom could sink through the floor in embarrassment and mortification. Are these stupid, blundering, clumsy, patronising idiots his fellow 'men'?
Oyarsa thinks Weston and Devine are behaving so irrationally they must be ill and orders them to be taken away and have their heads dunked in cold water to sober them up. They, with human cynicism, fear they are being dragged off to be executed and call on Ransom for help.
Then Oyarsa orders a pfifltriggi to use some kind of small crystal device, at the touch of which the bodies of the three dead hrossa disappear in a flash of light. That is their funeral ceremony.
Weston is brought back, head dripping with cold water, into the presence of Oyarsa where he makes a long speech justifying themselves. This is couched in a mix of imperial and capitalist rhetoric, and rises to a great vision Weston has, of Mankind colonising the other planets of the solar system and then Reaching Out To The Stars.
Ransom is called on to translate this lecture which he (and Lewis) not only regard as clumsy, crude, greedy, egocentric and completely contrary to the spirit of the peaceful ordered heavens – which we have by now learned so much about. But, on a telling linguistic level, Ransom finds that he cannot in fact translate portions of the speech, because a lot of the pompous abstract phraseology of imperialism and capitalism has no counterpart in the hrossa's admirably practical and poetic language.
Oyarsa listens to what Ransom translates and concedes that Weston is acting out of an (admittedly misplaced) sense of duty to his species, and so decides not to evaporate him and Devine on the spot, but to allow them to proceed back to earth. Ransom must decide whether to stay or go back with them.
Reluctantly, Ransom realises he must go. Oyarsa orders the spaceship to be supplied with ninety days of oxygen, food and water, and warns that soon after that time it will be evaporated. Weston doesn't understand, but Ransom by now realises that the entire solar system teems with life, with eldila, who can easily follow the ship's progress and obey Oyarsa's command, no matter where they go.
In fact the journey turns out to be pretty perilous because the earth is not in alignment with Mars and so the ship has to pass much closer to the sun than on the outward journey, becoming dangerously over-heated.
Then they discover that the moon in its orbit is between the ship and the earth. But the earthmen navigate all these perils and, after losing consciousness, Ransom eventually wakens to the most wonderful sound in the world – the sound of rain falling on the outside of the ship.
Realising the others have already left it, Ransom clambers up to the manhole cover, falls out and stumbles across fields. There is a flash behind him and he realises the spaceship has been vaporised as Oyarsa pledged. The lane becomes a road into a village and then – joy of joys – he beholds an English pub, stumbles inside, elbows his way through the crowd to the bar and orders… a pint of good old English beer!
To my great surprise the postscript reveals that the author of this whole narrative is a man named 'Lewis', a friend of Ransom's who the latter has told his story to, and who has agreed to write it up and publish it as a fiction.
To give this a plausible feel the postscript quotes a letter from Ransom to 'Lewis' pointing out various inaccuracies or places where Lewis has simplified the story.
It also tells that Ransom suspects Weston is going to do more mischief and has come to realise it is his mission to stop him. the struggle may take place on earth which is why Ransom has been keen to get the book published, since it will familiarise readers with key ideas which might help in the coming battle.
Maleldil, god of all
hnau – generic for creature
Thulcandra – earth, Perelandra – Venus, Malacandra – Mars
Oyarsa, a spirit set to rule each of the inner planets
sorn, seroni
hman their name for humans
handramit the sunken canyons with breathable air where the hrossa live
Surprised by joy
Lewis was raised an Anglican but didn't bother much about religion as an undergraduate, until he underwent a profound Christian conversion experience in 1931.
Over the next twenty years he turned himself into one of the most popular and successful writers of Christian apologetics – i.e. books and essays arguing in favour of Christianity – in the English-speaking world. These works included classics such as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and Miracles.
Throughout these works Lewis makes the same central key points:
that the world is the product of a loving, caring God who instituted a sane and rational Moral Law for us to follow
that something in the world is wrong or crooked, something to do with man's disobedience to this higher Moral Law and his ignorant pursuit of his own selfish, egotistical aims
and that one man greater than all men sacrificed himself in order to redeem us, in body and imagination, from imprisonment in our own petty selves – to show us a higher realm of values – and to reunite us with the creator
and he set out to convey them through all the means at his disposal.
Thus Lewis not only wrote straightforward books of Christian argumentation but also came up with some wonderfully inventive formats or fictional frames. One example is the famous Screwtape Letters (1942), supposedly written from a wily old devil to a young apprentice, listing all the ways to entrap and ensnare humans, which sheds light on the psychology of evil or selfishness or badness.
Also famous – mega-famous since they began to be made into Hollywood movies in the early 2000s – are the Chronicles of Narnia series of seven children's books, published in quick succession between 1950 and 1956.
So Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938, could be said to stand at the start, not only of the specific science fiction trilogy, but also of Lewis's realisation that he could convey his Christian message in a range of fictional ways.
This background goes to explain the reader's feeling throughout the book that it is describing not just an adventurous sequence of thrilling incidents, but is promoting a very strong point of view.
From the moment Ransom meets Hyoi onwards, the book becomes steadily more laden with hints and suggestions that life can be beautiful but something about humanity spoils it.
This is perhaps the distinctive thing about Lewis's Christianity. It is drenched in happiness. It is not a baleful Victorian Christianity morbidly banning all pleasure of body or mind. On the contrary, Lewis sees human beings created by God to be happy – but they have fallen into narrow, egotistical ways of thinking which act against their own best interests.
As soon as Ransom is outside earth's tainted atmosphere, he feels happy and, at various moments throughout the story, the recurrent feeling is of immense happiness.
He was on the very frontier of that heaven he had known in the space-ship, and rays that the air-enveloped words cannot taste were once more at work upon his body. He felt the old lift of the heart, the soaring solemnity, the sense, at once sober and ecstatic, of life and power offered in unasked and unmeasured abundance. If there had been air enough in his lungs he would have laughed aloud.
Lewis is a surprisingly sensuous writer. He gives unashamedly sensuous descriptions of things. Not sexual. Sensual.
Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, 'sweet influence' pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.
Wells, anti-Wells, beyond Wells
When it needs to be, Out of the Silent Planet is a science fantasy adventure story in the absolutely traditional mode of the day. Lewis credits H.G. Wells as an influence in his short preface and Wells is referenced throughout the book, since he was by far the most dominant imaginative influence on the genre.
For example, the very shape of the space 'ship' they travel in, a metal sphere, is borrowed from Wells's First Men In The Moon. And when the hrossa quiz Ransom about earth, Ransom is very careful not to tell them about the constant warfare and lethal weaponry which characterise mankind, because:
He remembered how H. G. Wells's Cavor had met his end on the Moon… (Chapter 11)
(In Wells's novel, Cavor tells the moon's inhabitants, the Selenites, all about mankind's cruel and destructive wars, with the result that theSelenites curtail his broadcasts back to earth and – it is heavily implied – curtail him, in order not to have the vile Homo sapiens come invading their planet.)
But the actual Mars that Ransom discovers is as remote as possible from Wells's visions of cities and steel. It is a rural, albeit alien, idyll.
The old dreams which he had brought from earth of some more than American complexity of offices or some engineers' paradise of vast machines had indeed been long laid aside. But he had not looked for anything quite so classic, so virginal, as this bright grove.
It's only looking back that I realise that the Wellsian paraphernalia of the opening chapters is invoked in order to draw the science fiction fan into a narrative which then goes on to shed, plate by plate, its Wellsian shell and turn into something completely different – science fiction theology – a fully Christianised view of what life on other planets might be like, and a theological interpretation of how they got that way, which takes full cognizance of the Christian story on earth – the Fall and Christ's incarnation and redeeming crucifixion – but which, imaginatively, goes way beyond that frame to imagine the forces of good and evil battling right across the solar system.
It is the beauty – of the planet, and of its inhabitants, and then of the eldila and then of Oyarsa – the transcendent sense of beauty and happiness and joy and bliss which the book radiates, which makes it so memorable and which gives Lewis's Christian belief its distinctively optimistic and inspirational character.
Out of the Silent Planet online
Out of the Silent Planet Wikipedia article
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the 'little people'
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth's atmosphere and brings about 'the Great Change', inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as 'the Mule'
1953 Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the 'Overlords' who arrive from space to supervise mankind's transition to the next stage in its evolution
1957 The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle – a vast cloud of gas heads into the solar system, blocking out heat and light from the sun with cataclysmic consequences on earth, until a small band of astronomers discovers the cloud contains intelligence and can be communicated with
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1963 Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle French journalist Ulysse Mérou accompanies Professor Antelle on a two-year space flight to the star Betelgeuse, where they land on an earth-like plane to discover that humans and apes have evolved here, but the apes are the intelligent, technology-controlling species while the humans are mute beasts
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and 'retire' escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by 'inertials'. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War has become an authoritarian state. The story concerns popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world in which he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the 'ordinaries' and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman The story of William Mandella who is recruited into special forces fighting the Taurans, a hostile species who attack Earth outposts, successive tours of duty requiring interstellar journeys during which centuries pass on Earth, so that each of his return visits to the home planet show us society's massive transformations over the course of the thousand years the war lasts.
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a 'thriller' notable for Clarke's descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley's Comet and Europa
Tagged 1938, Augray, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, Devine, eldil, eldila, Ents, Gulliver's Travels, H.G. Wells, handramit, hman, hnakra, hross, Hyoi, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Malacandra, Mars, Meldilorn, Mere Christianity, Miracles, Original Sin, Out of the Silent Planet, Oyarsa, pfifltriggi, Ransom, séroni, science fiction, Screwtape Letters, sorn, The Problem of Pain, Thulcandra, Weston
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/out-of-the-silent-planet-c-s-lewis/