Largely forgotten now, the decade after 1945 in Britain witnessed much more than the “austerity and rationing” favoured by the history books. A pre-war atmosphere prevailed, based on the news of Communist expansion both in Europe and beyond. Demobilisation was followed quite quickly by the resumption of military conscription, news of which affected most families in the land. Alongside the rapid Sovietisation of much of Central Europe the public became aware of the effort to oust the Western Allies from Berlin, of the Communist-inspired civil war in Greece, of the outbreak of the particularly bloody uprising against British rule in Malaya and, in mid 1950, of the full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula. China itself, which would become directly involved in Korea, had fallen to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. From that year onward no opposition of any kind would be tolerated there, nor would there be any chance for the Chinese people to freely choose their own governmental path or social system. A further quarter of the world’s population had at a stroke been joined with Stalin’s Soviet Union and its satellites in the Communist orbit. Many people felt that it was only a matter of time before hostilities of some sort would break out directly between the major players, the Soviet Union and the United States, and that Britain would undoubtedly be involved in defence of the West.
A new totalitarian threat to the way of life which the British and American peoples had done so much to defend so few years before, had very rapidly overtaken Western Europe. What was the public reaction?While Britain had not been misled as to the antagonistic and expansionary intentions of Stalin’s Russia in the last years of World War II , as had the Roosevelt administration, there did remain a significant feeling of admiration for the Soviet fighters who had taken on, and eventually beaten back, the massive Nazi invasion of their homeland. Everyone knew of the shocking level of casualties and the extent of sacrifice made by the Soviet people. This awareness of what a Communist state had done and how it had contributed to victory for the Allies as a whole was to be a factor in the cultural transformation of Britain that was to occur from the mid-1950s.
In the critical years from 1947 to 1952, this awareness was overshadowed by the threat posed, the threat of yet another major war to follow those of 1914 and 1939. Many observations are made about the Britain of this time. One description, popular especially in the academic and theatrical world, is of ubiquitous greyness, of shortages, boredom, of a country tired after the exertions of the war, a country to all intents and purposes in a rut. On the other hand, I myself once met a market trader in central London in the 1970s who told me that this period was the best time of his life, the last time he had felt a genuine sense of community in his workaday life. And while assessments of the period are clearly subjective, it does seem that, despite huge political shifts at home and abroad, social conservatism in everyday life was generally dominant. There was a reversion to the well-understood features of British life which had “got us through the war”: a sense of national community which included all the easily-recognisable classes and a reliance on the qualities of modesty, reserve, and quietness (Don’t show off!) which were played out against a backdrop of shared ironic humour and understatement. Most people in the late 1940s and early 1950s would have agreed with the observation that Britain, and especially England, did not have an expressive culture. The national mood and the associated world view were projected across the continents by the BBC General Overseas Service, and by the pre-television Pathe and Movietone News. The excitement associated with the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945 had very little effect at this time in moving the culture away from its well-trodden path. It was the defensive posture, as in 1939, but because the culture was so well known, and despite dissidents on the extremes, the country was, on the whole, comfortable with it. The kind of films and shows that were popular, and the length of the cinema queues of the time, provide considerable evidence of the social mood.
Rather than the shortcomings of the Labour government it was probably a re-assertion of this underlying national conservatism and individualism that led to the big improvement in Conservative Party support in the election of early 1950 and later to their eventual re-election at the end of 1951. And while the population as a whole continued to rebuild their lives after the ravages of the war, it was the new world struggle with totalitarianism that was to determine the direction in which the national culture would develop. Already dubbed the Cold War the new conflict was at the time raging particularly in Korea, Malaya and in what was then still French Indo-China. The policy of the West was to attempt to block the progress of what the Soviets saw as the Communist world revolution wherever it exhibited aggressive tendencies. This had been done in Greece, where the Americans had become involved, and by the early 1950s progress was being achieved by the British in Malaya.
The intensity of the fighting between the liberal capitalist (in Communist parlance imperialist) countries of the West and Soviet-led Communism began to lessen – at least for the time being – in 1952 and 1953 and even in French Indo-China there was a a ceasefire in 1954. The ensuing Geneva Conference of that year, at which compromises were made and agreements reached, ushered in a feeling that perhaps the worst was over, and that a new world war had been postponed, if not avoided altogether. Coupled with the ending of wartime rationing this brought about a general lightening of the mood, and greater optimism. While the attention of the public moved more to the conventional problems of life, the massive underlying issues remained unsolved. Founded on the achievements of the Soviet Union, not least on the determination shown in defeating the Nazis, but also on their success in improving the Soviet people’s standard of living, there was no doubt that communism as a system was potentially popular in vast swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in Europe itself.
The Communist approach was to combine propaganda with ruthless and brutal direct action. Given a situation where in 1945 much of the less-developed world was either under the direct or indirect control of European empires, the Communist message was idyllic and utopian. Modern science and invention gave all peoples the possibility of constructing prosperous, co-operative and peace-loving societies. This could only be accomplished by collective struggle on the part of the local people, led by a disciplined Communist Party, which had been schooled to understand the forces at work and the nature of the task at hand. Such a goal was obviously impossible to achieve as long as European countries remained in control, and while mainly European capitalists owned much of the economy. The prospect of sweeping this away wholesale was a tempting one for many, while the propaganda emanating from the tightly-knit groups of determined fighters would only serve to further brighten the image of the future. The brutal aspect of the struggle included the deliberate killing of those previously respected local people who worked for or with the colonisers and took positions of responsibility. The message given was clear to all, supporters, converts, or neither: the old social order was passing and a new one was about to be built.
These post-war developments spelt out an immense challenge to the West. Any pause in the West’s struggle with Soviet expansionism was a signal only of the planning of some newly identified area for Communist or Communist-front advance. Inherent in the theory, with which all Communist leaders were familiar, was the dialectical nature of history. Things were always in flux. Struggle was an unavoidable component of life, with movement and change tending over a period towards human progress. There was, however, the possibility, as Marx pointed out, of universal barbarism; all the more reason for Communist militants never to give up on the struggle.
The policy makers of the West were by now only too aware of all of this themselves. While many of them had foolishly placed some hope in a constructive building of the post-war world where the USA and the Soviet Union at least co-operated, it was clear by the end of the 1940s that a long-term strategy was required which might go beyond the policy of containment which only sought to dam up further Communist gains. This strategy obviously included counter-propaganda to dismantle many of the myths spread by the Soviets. But the kernel of the Western response was to involve the twin aims of
a) establishing a growing prosperity in all the countries within the capitalist sphere around the world, a development which would mean that the average person would feel that life was getting better and
b) making good on the features of life that Western leaders had always stressed. The freedom of the individual to think, express, create, build for him/herself as each person desired, had always been central to the free market society. And this would be impossible as long as enormous areas of the world were politically under the control of European powers, principally Britain and France. Large-scale decolonisation and liberalisation were now not only desirable but essential if hearts and minds were to be won and the temptations of the Communist message outflanked.
To the policy makers in the West these aims were not optional. The dimensions of the threat of Communism as a competing world system that sought to supersede capitalism and the free market were too great. Inasmuch as they raised the spectre of totalitarianism (again), of the end of freedom of speech and endeavour, of the closing down of different sides of an argument, they went to the essence of life. The cultural repercussions of the policies as set out were also enormous, even revolutionary, but they have been radically underestimated (or overlooked) both in the interpretations of post-1945 history and probably by those living at the time. What was the true nature and extent of these repercussions?
to be continued.
Junius 2 