west) and it was supposed to be run under the general auspices of an Allied Control Council, at which the Russians were strongly represented. At Yalta, early in February 1945, there was a famous meeting of men who were known in the news as the ‘Big Three’. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin undoubtedly deserved the title. The American war economy had been extraordinarily productive, with one mass production miracle after another — especially the ‘Liberty ships’ turned out in six weeks, partly prefabricated. The USA fought wars in two hemispheres but even managed to improve the home population’s standard of living as well. Stalin for his part controlled a huge war machine which had recovered from disastrous defeats, and, from the summer of 1943 onwards, had rolled into central Europe and the Balkans, flattening all before it. The third of the ‘Big Three’ was Winston Churchill, who had defied Hitler from the start, and who now counted as the great hero of the Second World War. But Great Britain had suffered, and was really kept going by American troops and money. Churchill did not have the strength to resist Stalin, and the Americans did not have the will. The old man had been forced to fly, very uncomfortably, in stages over Malta and Cairo to the Crimea, and even then, on arrival, had an eight-hour journey by road, through high hilly country, to a residence some way away from the main palace, where the other two were installed. He had put a good face on things, waving his trademark cigar, but the real business was done despite his wishes. The Americans — Marshall was there, as Chief of Staff of the Army — wanted Soviet help to finish the war with Japan. As things turned out, they did not need it. On 6 and 9 August they dropped two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that brought a Japanese surrender, but until then everyone had expected the Japanese to fight on and on, fanatically and suicidally, as they had done for the past three years in a chain of Pacific islands (some individuals had still not surrendered, decades later, and had gently to be persuaded that the war had been lost). But in February 1945 no-one foresaw this: the atomic bomb was not successfully tested until July. The American-Soviet deal had already been in the air at an earlier conference, held at Teheran in November 1943. Now it was confirmed. Stalin could control much of central Europe and the Balkans. There were other concessions. The United Nations was set up, with a five-country Security Council, in which each member had a power of veto. There were suggestions of the Soviet Union’s joining in the new world financial arrangements, with a large American loan; for a time, consideration was even given to a sharing of the secrets of the atomic bomb. Great Britain did not rate such treatment. The Americans of course supported her, but they did not mean to help the British maintain their empire. At the time, that accounted for a quarter of the world’s land surface, and most Americans did not like it.
To start with, in 1945 the USA assumed that Great Britain would take the main responsibility for Europe, and American troops left, in droves. She also halted the economic help, ‘Lend-Lease’, that she had been giving, and ships were even turned back in mid-Atlantic. But the winter of 1947 saw crisis in Britain as well. There had been five and a half years of fighting, and the start, in 1940, had been Great Britain’s finest hour, when she did indeed stop Nazi Germany from taking over Europe, and probably Russia as well. As the war went on, the American share in it became more and more important, and there was a decisive moment late in 1944, when American troops outnumbered British ones on the battlefield in France. The Americans also had the money, because the US economy had prospered greatly with production for war, and in 1945 it accounted for fully half of the entire world’s manufactures. But, still, the British thought that they would be an equal partner, together with America and Russia, in making the post-war world. Even very sober, disillusioned commentators thought so. George Orwell, who had reported the troubles of London, the dreadful food, the unpredictable bombs, to the American
Twelve million tons of shipping had been sunk. Imports stood at six times the figure for exports, and, with such demand, American prices rose by 47 per cent in 1946. There was a large debt. The country’s overseas assets, most of its foreign investment, had been sold off for the war effort. The worldwide prestige of the wartime leader, Winston Churchill, was vast, and he was treated with respect and affection almost everywhere, but he was a very old-fashioned figure — an aristocrat brought up in the imperial Victorian certainties, and now presiding over a country that had greatly changed. Wartime arrangements were carried on for years to come. For example, you registered with a grocer and handed over stamps which entitled you to a loaf every three days. There was a South African fish called snoek, which could be bought without dollars: its taste was revolting but there was not much alternative at the time. This world, of permits and privation, went on for several years after the war had ended (until 1954), and one could hardly recognize the country. The novelist Evelyn Waugh — his trilogy about wartime England,
As with Denis Hills, bright British emigrated, but the reason was not just the privation. In 1945 a Labour government had been elected with a landslide, and it proceeded with social revolution. ‘We are the masters now’ was the claim (characteristically it was said, and is generally slightly misquoted, by an upper-middle-class lawyer, Hartley Shawcross, who subsequently moved to the Right). The world gasped that the great Churchill had been overthrown, but events were moving in the direction of Labour. The Conservatives were associated with the 1930s, with mass unemployment and also with the attempts to buy off Hitler, ‘appeasement’ as it was called. Most people were persuaded that if the Western Powers had stood up to Hitler in 1938, he could have been stopped, and the most powerful writers argued in this sense. Then there was the English class system, an outcome of England’s peculiar history. There were ‘two nations’ which dressed, spoke, ate and were educated differently. Orwell told his American readership that Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the USA early in the war, was as representative of his country as a Red Indian chieftain would be of the United States. In 1945 class resentment was strong, at least in the big cities, and it affected even many solidly middle-class figures themselves. Labour drew its strength from the trade unions, but there was an important element made up from men who had a background in grand schools or at Oxford (or, more rarely, Cambridge, which was less politically minded). They resented the sheer inefficiencies that the class problem entailed. Woodrow Wyatt, with an Oxford background and a good war behind him, was typical of such men, largely because he believed that fairness and efficiency could be combined.
In the election of 1945 Labour swept in and it had a radical programme. It nationalized the heavy industries, coal, the docks, the railways: what were called ‘the commanding heights’ of the British economy. Education had already been made costless, even for parents who could afford some fees. Health was to become so, under a National Health Service (inaugurated on 5 July 1948, but debated since 1946). It replaced earlier charitable or for- profit arrangements, and also the extensive private insurance schemes which had grown up since the nineteenth century (under the ‘Friendly Societies’ which sprang straight from the respectable working class and much of the lower-middle class). Curiously it did not abolish private (or ‘public’ as they were bizarrely called) schools, which were a key element in the class structure. If the State supplied a decent and costless education, then why bother to abolish them? In any case Labour believed in equality, and the tax arrangements were such that equality was largely attained. Paying school fees became a problem for families that traditionally could afford them.
There was an argument behind all of this — that the State would do better than private arrangements ever could. The basis for this lay in the thirties, when private enterprise had indeed been associated with mass unemployment. But there was also the example of the war itself, and, there, the British were pleased with themselves, supposing also that their example was one to be widely followed as some sort of ‘third way’ between American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Early in 1945 Michael Foot, later to lead the Labour Party, told Parliament that the country was at the summit of its power — with ‘something unique to offer’, combining the ‘economic democracy’ of Communism and the ‘political democracy’ of the West: socialism without labour camps. Rationing had worked quite well, and health improved vastly during the war because working-class children were
