CHANGING BRITAIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 75, Issue 6442, 5 November 1947, Page 4

CHANGING BRITAIN

MORE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY SPREADING ACROSS LAND “GOOD AND WELCOME TREND” A visitor from overseas coming to Britain after a lapse of several years would find the country poorer and more drab than it was before, but, said Harold Nicolson, in a talk broadcast by the BBC, he would also find a ‘good and welcome change’—a new sense of more equal opportunity spreading across the land. Someone said to me the other day: ‘I wonder what changes a visitor from overseas would observe in English habits after an absence of several years?’ The expression ‘several years’ is a vague expression. Does it mean 10 years, or 20 years, or 30 years, or 40 years. I am old enough’ to remember the days of Queen Victoria.

I can remember how, on Mafeking day itself, the old lady drove over in a large landau with two white horses, and an Indian servant on the box, to visit my school, \yhich was not far distant from Windsor. She drove round the college buildings, had a cup of tea at the head-master’s house, and then drove back again along the long avenue which gave upon the Windsor road.

We had been given a whole holiday for the day, and we all carried little Union Jacks upon white sticks; we had spent the morning painting those sticks with white paint in order to make them look smarter; the paint was still sticky when the afternoon came; and when Queen Victoria drove' away up the avenue between the lilacs and the rhododendrons, we all ran beside her carriage shouting ‘hooray! hooray!’ The Queen was tired after her long day, and she hunched back in the carriage with her head bent. All we could see were two cheeks, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, and the neat, parted hair under her bonnet. I can recall her funeral only a few months later, and can remember that the balcony upon the house opposite was draped in black and purple and gold. It was before the days of the internal combustion engine, long before the days of the aeroplane. When one went to the country, one drove to the station in a four-wheeler; there was no heating in the train, and the porters would push in long, tin footwarmers filled with hot water on which one placed one’s feet. Those were the days before proper plumbing had been introduced into Britain, and even when the great houses were without bathrooms. A tin, sitting bath was brought into one’s bedroom and laid upon a bath mat in front of the fire. The two huge cans of water would be carried in and covered under a warm rug.

It was an agreeable way of washing in so far as it went; but it entailed upon the servants an immense amount of work. When I gaze to-day at the tall houses in Belgrave or Berkeley Squares, I wonder how anyone can ever have expected housemaids or footmen to carry cans of hot water up all those stairsGaiety and Extravagance Then came the reign of King Edward VII, and tfie solemnity of the last years of Queen Victoria was succeeded by the gaiety and the extravagant luxury of the Edwardians. What strikes me most upon looking back upon that epoch is the enormous amount of food that people ate. My father, one year, was invited by King Edward to accompany him on a yachting expedition in the Mediterranean, and I remember him describing to me on his return the amount of meals that were served.

In the morning, there was breakfast consisting of every type of breakfast food, with cold ham and grouse upon a side table. At eleven, another meal was served on deck, consisting of soup and sandwiches and lobster salad. At one, there followed. a rich luncheon of six courses. At five, tea arrived, not merely the sort of hot toast and cake of ordinary tea, but more lobster salad and liver sausages. Then came dinner at eight-thirty, with six more courses; and at eleven, before retiring to a well-earned rest, they served what was called ‘a light supper.’ My father assured me that it was not light at all. That is one of the greatest changes that have occurred in England during any lifetime. It is not merely that, owing to food restrictions, we are all obliged to eat much less; it is that we actually do not want, or need to eat so much.

I remember, also—it must have been in the yeay 1902-1903—coming-up from my school in Kent, and beingmet at the London station by my elder brother. He said: ‘I have got a wonderful treat for you.’ I asked what it was. He said, ‘come outside’— and there in the yard of the station was a motor car which he had hired to take me from the station. It was an open car, and shaped to look as much like a carriage as could be. We drove off in stateThereafter, these engines of destruction began to invade the streets, and in five years or so, the happy,

jingling hansom cab, which was the gondola of London, disappeared. It lingered for a year or so at Oxford; it lingered for many years in New York; but the London hansom was by 1910 almost a thing of the past. Then came the German war, the four years of strain and anxiety, and the final victory of 1918. I went over to Paris for the Peace Conference, and did not return to London till the autumn of 1919. I remember, one evening, going to see my father at his house. He was then an old man, and I found the French Ambassador sitting with him. ‘Ah, yes,’ sighed the French Ambassador, ‘Ah, yes, my dear friend, it is not for you or for myself that I feel regrets. We have had our life and we have enjoyed it. It is this young man with whom I commiserate,’ and as he said this he placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘He will never know how pleasant life can be.’ I mumbled some polite rejoinder, but I was thinking something wholly different. I was thinking: ‘But my dear old man, I do not like the things you like; I do not want things to be the same. What you enjoy are stately dinner-parties, grand receptions, duchesses in diamonds receiving you in all their beauty at the top of immense staircases, and, from time to time, huge week-end parties in the stately homes of England. ‘But I loathe these things. I loathe having to dress up smartly and wear a top hat and gloves- What I enjoy are small meals in cheap restaurants, with my own particular friends; what I like is being able to wear any old clothes, and to ride, if I want to, on the top of an omnibus and smoke my pipe; and when the holidays come, I shall not spend them on grouse moors or by salmon rivers; I shall take my little car and motor through to Italy or Spain—gay and careless and exposed to all the beauties of life.’ Shabbier To-day Well, let me revert to my main theme. What changes would you, as an. overseas visitor, notice if you came back to London, let me say, after an absence of 10 years? Your first impression, of course, would be that everything and everybody had suddenly become shabby. It would not be the devastation that you would notice so much, although in every street, almost, you would find a tooth or two missing, and only jagged stumps left behind; but you would be struck with the fact that London was in great need ofc a wash and brush up; .that the winliw-boxes with their gay flowers had almost disappeared from the window-ledges, that the front doors were blistered and peeling, that the stucco was showing gaps here and there, and that everything, even the pillar boxes, needed a fresh lick of paint. Then you might notice that people were looking rather jaded and tired, and that their clothes and hats were not as spruce as before.

After the first few days, these changes would seem quite natural, and you would see more below the surface. You would notice, of course, that the rich were much poorer, and that the poor, in a way, were much better off. Not so much in expenditure, since there is little to buy, but in the new colour which has come into their lives. People of small incomes had little amusement or entertainment in the days of Victoria or King Edward VII. To-day, they have their football matches, their football pools, their dog races, their cinemas, their wireless, and so on. Even 10 years ago, the life of a young bank clerk, let us. say, was far emptier than it is to-day. It may be that his mother, or his wife, grumble at having to queue for bread, or beingshort of fuel—but they know that all this will not continue for ever; and they ’ know that the old restrictions, by which they were hemmed in and segregated, the cold emptiness of the old life, is giving place to something more coloured, more varied and more adventurous.

Of course, you would find England poorer, and more drab than it was before; the evidences of wealth arc fat- less apparent, but the old, undue differences in income are being levelled out.

You would not find that the young people look tired; you would not find that, they believe that life can never be as pleasant for them as it was for their parents. You would find that they have, as never before, a sense of personal opportunity, a sense that they can make and expand their livesYes—that is, I believe, the main change that you would notice: a feeling that, somehow, a sense of more equal opportunity is spreading across the land; and that is a good change, a welcome change.