given rations of vitamin-rich food — orange juice, for instance — and had to do without sweets. Many children attended day nurseries because their mothers were working; the diets of these nurseries were supervised by doctors who had a power that they had not previously experienced, and the health of that generation was far better than that of its predecessors. Women had been brought into wartime employment, often classed as ‘national service’, and most remembered these years as a good time. There was an almost universal belief that the war economy had been very successful, despite German bombing and submarine attacks on shipping. One third of it had been devoted to the great Bomber Offensive, and Germany’s smashed cities were a testimony to its success. For the State to take over, to plan, and to develop a Welfare State therefore seemed sensible.
People who argued to the contrary were in a small minority — derided by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as similar to ‘Jacobites at the court of Louis XIV’, men who had lost any connection with the reality back home as they tried to support the lost cause of the Stuart dynasty — but even in the later 1940s these supposedly half-demented figures were starting to have reality on their side. It struck with a ferocious blow, in the second post-war winter. The money began to run out, and the government became quite badly divided as to priorities. A saying at the time was that ‘France is getting order through chaos; England chaos through order’, and, even now, a classic post-war problem with trade unions emerged.
The nightmare winter of 1946-7 went on well into April; brief thaws only added to the problem in that they created small ice-rinks. In all of this, the miners went on strike, and their output generally, let alone individually, was considerably below what it had been before the war. Then the dockers went on strike as well, such that exports were badly affected: without these there would be none of the vital imports (though it was maybe characteristic of the era that more dollars were spent on tobacco than on machinery: cigarettes were regarded as a vital import, as almost everyone smoked and there would probably have been a general strike if tobacco had given out). London, still with huge areas of bombed-out buildings, was a very depressed and depressing place as that winter went ahead. Rations now meant that you could get a pair of socks every four weeks. There had already been, in 1946, an American loan of $3.75bn. That had in effect allowed dollars to be spent — even on the import of timber for ‘social’ (‘Council’) housing — but it had come with the condition that the pound could be changed into dollars, free of wartime restrictions. The historian Kenneth Morgan even claims that it made the Labour programme possible. There was an implication, too, that the Americans would be able to trade freely with the British Empire, which, in places, had vital raw materials still priced in pounds.
In 1947 convertibility was introduced, and foreigners, in droves, changed their pounds into dollars. Almost ?200m was being lost every week. The Labour government was in effect broken by this: there was never the same drive in it again; its huge majority collapsed at the next election, in 1950, and in 1951 it lost. The money ran out, but it had already been so programmed domestically that there was no room for going back: the various reforms that constituted the ‘Welfare State’ were mainly in place. It is notable that no other country copied the British formula in these matters, or at any rate not without substantial emendation of it. The Germans in a way were fortunate, in that they experienced that winter before any post-war social reforms had taken place: their state was constructed without the illusions of 1945.
However, the worst position for a Cabinet minister to be in was probably the Foreign Office. The country may have been badly weakened internally but there was no end to its responsibilities, and these were turning very sour. The problems went back to the first post-war period, in 1919, when men had joyously assumed that Empire made them rich, and the British Empire, already enormous, received a considerable extension in the Middle East. In 1929, the world slump in the end particularly affected agricultural prices, such that lambs were simply slaughtered rather than eaten, because the profit margins were lost in transport costs. India, ‘the jewel in the Crown’, became instead a liability and the nationalist leader there, Gandhi, rightly said that the Empire consisted of millions of acres of bankrupt real estate. But the British were nevertheless responsible for these problems. Of course, they tried hard to keep order, and they often inspired considerable loyalty, being uncorrupt, and holding the balance among various peoples. The Governor of Uganda was a much loved figure who got about on a bicycle. But the bottom had dropped out of the Empire, and a war for succession was under way — in India, between the Moslems who eventually set up Pakistan (‘land of the pure’) and the others, including Moslems living in southern India. In Palestine, there was a three-cornered war between the British, Arabs and Jews. Then there were the problems of Europe, and the drain of hard currency into Germany — ?80mn in 1945-6 alone. Even in 1945 there had been some desire for a joint Anglo- American zone in Germany, but the USA was not minded, then, to do much more than leave Europe to sort itself out, maybe with the aid of the new IMF and World Bank. True, early in 1946 George Kennan, who was a very influential diplomat in Moscow, famously warned as to Soviet policy (Stalin had made a threatening speech in February), but even when Churchill talked of the ‘Iron Curtain’, Truman was careful not to associate himself with the idea. Crisis was needed, if the Americans were to intervene. The British had tried to attract support by showing themselves worthy of it. Now they used a different tactic. They would just collapse.
The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was an old trade unionist, whose ways ran very counter to those of the old imperial Foreign Office, but he inspired much loyalty and admiration. Though born illegitimate, and lacking schooling, he was literate (using phrases such as ‘with alacrity’) because, like so many of his class at the time, he could and would make use of the after-hours workers’ education libraries and self-help mechanisms without embarrassment. He was an astute trade union leader, and that gave him some insight into the ways of Communists, who would exploit an industrial crisis for their own political ends rather than for the workers’ own good. Bevin ran his machine well at the Foreign Office, and he needed to, because his in-tray was a very gloomy one. Was Great Britain bulldog or bullfrog, ran one question.
After 1945 the Western empires fell apart. The Japanese had already broken their prestige, the ‘charisma’ that had kept, say, British India going. There, apart from the army, there had been only 60,000 British in a subcontinent of 400 million, and a unique combination of circumstances kept them in control for an extraordinary length of time. A good part of the story had to do with divisions within India (Churchill said that it was ‘no more a nation than the Equator’), but there was also the army, which worked remarkably well almost to the end, and the British themselves respected the rule of law (with one or two notorious lapses). In 1904 a Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who was not at all a stupid man, remarked that the British should stay in India ‘as if… for ever’. But by the 1930s the formula was coming apart. A nationalist intelligentsia emerged, men such as Nirad Chaudhuri, a Bengali whose English and whose knowledge of literature were better than most Englishmen’s, and whose life story,
In the later 1930s it was clear enough that the British would not be staying. The great difficulty was to find a successor element on which to rely, and, here, the war made problems much worse. The Japanese invaded Burma, causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to the already overcrowded north-east. Boats were wrecked, so as to deter further Japanese invasion over the sea. In 1942 the main Indian nationalist movement demanded immediate independence and refused to have any truck even with sympathetic British politicians who asked them to wait until the end of the war. A movement of civil disobedience was put down with some harshness in the same year, and was broken in effect only when a great famine broke out — partly a consequence of the Burmese disaster, partly because of a terrible cyclone that wrecked the rice crop, partly for lack of transport, and partly because the British gave priority to war transports rather than to civilian needs. The (Indian) government of Bengal itself proved none too efficient, and 3 million people starved to death. India had been radicalized, the prestige of the
