Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics

Coventry, 1945-1960

Nick Tiratsoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429831980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1990. Of all British cities, it is perhaps Coventry which has come to symbolise best the country's experience of World War II and the post-war period. An important engineering centre, Coventry immediately found itself geared up to produce armaments, a specialisation which inevitably brought considerable attention from the German Air Force, which in 1940 and 1941 destroyed much of the city centre. In the 1950s the city emerged as a boom town and as an exemplar of a new type of city, in step with the demands and aspirations of a modern, more democratic and equitable age. Yet this book is more than just a case study. By examining the experience of Coventry in particular, the author poses questions of significance to Britain's post-war development in general. Did the construction of the welfare state after 1945 inevitably hinder the country's long-term economic development? Can the rise and fall of the Labour Party's popularity be plotted in terms of increased popular affluence? By linking Coventry's specific history to wider questions, the book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with Britain's post-war history.

1    Introduction

Few places in Britain felt the impact of the Second World War as vividly or as consistently as Coventry. An important engineering centre, with a history of motor vehicle production, the city found itself from the first caught up in the armaments drive. Such specialisation in turn inevitably brought considerable attention from the German air force, with the raids of 1940 and 1941 destroying much of the urban area’s inner core. The central aim of the chapters that follow is to describe how Coventry recovered from these experiences, and subsequently emerged in the 1950s not only as a nationally known ‘boom town’, but also as an exemplar of a new type of city, in tune with the demands of a modern, more democratic and equitable age. In particular, this means giving considerable attention to the plans and policies of Coventry’s Labour party, since it was this body, using its continuing domination of the city Council, that was most involved in attempting to shape the various facets of reconstruction – physical, social and economic. But emphasis will also be placed on the context within which this shaping took place, and on the incentives and constraints which encouraged or retarded the achievement of the Labour party’s vision. Reference will be made, for example, to the web of connections which linked the city to the variety of interested government departments in London. On the other hand, it will also be necessary to explore Labour’s relationship with the local electorate, and especially the growing disenchantment with the party which began to threaten its dominance during the 1950s.

In one sense, then, this is very much a local study, which seeks to use the kind of integrated approach to urban history adopted by, for example, Waller and Whiting (where the focus is not just on one dimension of a spatial form, but rather on the inter-relationship of its particular economy, society and polity) and apply it to the, as yet, relatively unstudied post-war years.¹ But the detailed local material will also be used to evaluate some broader historical questions. Indeed, specific features of Coventry’s history make it something of a test case for two controversies that are at the heart of all interpretations of contemporary British history.

The first concerns the very nature of the reconstruction process. Most historians are agreed that the war years saw an upsurge of popular radicalism across the country, a phenomenon that posed some basic questions about the future peace-time shape of British society. But there is very much less agreement about what happened subsequently to this impulse. Barnett has argued that the ‘New Jerusalemists’ were triumphant, and as a consequence reconstruction was skewed towards welfare provision. This he judges to have been disastrous, for while a realistic ‘national corporate strategy’ might have secured the country’s economic future after 1945, large-scale spending on housing and hospitals could not, so that Britain has inevitably gradually slipped down the international wealth league.² Against this, a number of leftist critics of Labour – Miliband, and more recently Blackwell and Seabrook, and Saville³ – paint a very different picture. Here, the popular radicalism of the war years is portrayed not as victorious, but rather as effectively neutered, a consequence both of leadership betrayals or pusillanimity, and the sponge-like, absorbent qualities of the British state. In these accounts then, the emphasis is not on reconstruction but rather on restoration – the restoration of capitalism’s potency.

Clearly, the examination of a city which was a bastion of Labour progressivism and at the same time a leading engineering centre will allow some evaluation to be made of these various propositions. It will be possible to comment, first of all, on the ubiquitous assumption that there was a war-time consensus for change. How far did Labour hold sway in Coventry at this time, and on what issues and promises was its support built? Alongside these kinds of questions, a number of others will have to be asked about the subsequent pattern of local reconstruction. To what extent were the Council’s ambitious plans for extending services and amenities in Coventry in fact realised between 1945 and 1960? Is there any evidence of a clash between ‘welfare’ and ‘economic’ objectives in the reconstruction process? And, finally, if there is, can government departments be shown to have leant with any consistency towards one side or the other in their dealings with the city?

The second area of historiographical controversy which will be extensively referred to concerns what has been termed the ‘affluent worker question’. This controversy has its roots in the mid-1950s, when a number of social commentators started arguing that British society was undergoing a profound transition, as large numbers of people – and particularly the upper sections of the working class – began acquiring new kinds of consumer durables (televisions, fridges and washing machines) at an ever-increasing pace.⁴ What made this trend so significant was not so much the pattern of spreading ownership itself, as the changing social and political climate which it was allegedly ushering in. For it was widely believed that the new goods encouraged emulation of middle-class virtues and pursuits (the home, security, self-advancement and possessions) and discouraged older, proletarian beliefs in collective activity – as Harry Hopkins put it, ‘semi-detachment on the Open Plan sapped solidarity’.⁵ The cumulative effect of all of this was that Britain might now be observed becoming what The Economist termed an ‘Unproletarian Society’.⁶

This kind of theorising was not without its critics, who pointed out, amongst other things, that the changes going on were perhaps not as great as some people thought; and that, anyway, the gap between the classes was not diminishing, since middle-class norms were changing, too.⁷ But the question seemed finally to have been resolved in 1959 when the Conservatives, appealing to the newly upwardly mobile with the slogan ‘You’ve had it good. Have it better, vote Conservative’, pulled off a third successive general election victory.⁸ It could now widely be argued that, in the changed circumstances, Labour would be doomed to endless failure unless it ditched its traditional ideology.⁹

Over the subsequent years, this embourgeoisement thesis (as it came to be known) has undergone a chequered career. Labour victories in 1964 and 1966 seemed to cast some doubt on its empirical validity, and scepticism was further increased when the findings from Goldthorpe et al.’s Luton survey were published.¹⁰ For what this enquiry showed was that, certainly in so far as that town’s car, engineering and chemical workers were concerned, little evidence existed for any widespread adoption of middle-class concerns. What was happening, rather, involved a far more subtle change in older patterns, as workers adopted an essentially instrumental view of politics. Support for Labour amongst the ‘traditional’ working class, it was argued, had tended to be almost instinctive, continually encouraged by experiences at work (where ‘us and them’ attitudes were pervasive) and in tightly demarcated, very insular local communities. By contrast, the specific forms of working and living arrangements that were prevalent in Luton – especially the privatised natures of family life and leisure pursuits – encouraged a rather different orientation. Workers were shown to be most concerned with individualistic goals, and while this did not necessarily herald the end of collective action, it did mean that support for Labour was becoming more conditional, dependent on whether the party could deliver a range of social and economic benefits. Labour’s future, therefore, hinged upon how well it could adapt to this new situation.

More recently, however, variants of the embourgeoisement theory have made something of a comeback. Thus, Blackwell and Seabrook have referred to the ‘remaking’ of the working class that was occurring in the 1950s, as ‘capitalism was able to extend its transforming power deeper and deeper into the lives of men and women’.¹¹ A more scholarly study by Crewe also gives some support to the embourgeoisement thesis. Crewe’s focus is on the electoral histories of affluent working-class constituencies – urban constituencies with high levels of home- and car- ownership – between 1955 and 1970, in order to discover whether there was any long-term shift to the right (as the embourgeoisement theory might predict) or whether instrumental attitudes (and thus volatile patterns of voting) are discernible. He concludes that the evidence does not provide any very clear picture, but while there is some moderate support for embourgeoisement from the data, it proved impossible to find even a minority of constituencies that conformed to a pattern of instrumentalism.¹²

Again, the Coventry case study can provide a useful vantage point for reassessing the merits of these various claims, especially since car workers (who made up a high proportion of the indigenous working class) were often cited as at the very centre of whatever changes were going on.¹³ Labour did lose ground in the city over the 1950s, but can this simply be ascribed to the popular experience of prosperity? Conversely, to what extent were purely political factors, like the choice of candidate or leading issue, alone responsible for the pattern of events?

Of course, this is not the first survey of Coventry’s post-war history, and so this brief overview should conclude by outlining what the existing accounts have to say, and how they fit into the wider debates on reconstruction and affluence. The first wave of studies of the city, completed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, were generally celebratory in tone, and emphasised both the degree of co-operation that was evident in the post-war years (with very different interests and personalities broadly supporting the Labour Council’s overall planning perspective) and the considerable element of success that marked the translation of aims into reality.¹⁴

More recently interpretations have tended to be very much less favourable. Indeed, for some, Coventry is a prime example of ‘what went wrong’ – the eclipse, during the 1950s and the 1960s, of the idealism that had fuelled Labour’s 1945 election victory, and the subsequent resurgence of iniquitous urban and economic arrangements.¹⁵ Specific explanations as to why Coventry should have conformed so closely to this pattern vary, with stress being placed on factors like the machinations of local building and engineering employers,¹⁶ and the penetrative and transforming power of the market.¹⁷ More commonly, the heart of the problem is seen as lying with one or more parts of the city’s labour movement. Hinton argues, for example, that a key moment came during the last eighteen months of the war, when the Communist party, which had previously maintained a strong local presence, found itself increasingly at odds with leftward moving public opinion. This mistake, which originated in the party’s over-concern with Moscow rather than Coventry, meant that the radical upsurge was leaderless and therefore ultimately impotent.¹⁸ For Lancaster and Mason, the culprits lay one step to the right, in the Labour-dominated Council. Coventry, it is suggested, was strongly behind a socialist programme for reconstruction in the post-war years, but the local authority’s lack of preparedness in planning (particularly over housing) and lack of political will in execution (which meant that, perhaps because of interest group pressure, redevelopment of the central shopping area took precedence over all other kinds of building) led, once again, to a growth in popular apathy and disillusionment.¹⁹ Thirdly, reference must be made to Thompson’s recent analysis of factory culture in the Coventry car industry.²⁰ Thompson’s major concern is with how Luddite values on the shop-floor retarded technical innovation and economic progress. However, in parenthesis, he is quite critical of the local engineering unions, and certainly implies that, had they adopted a more open perspective (as their counterparts in Turin allegedly did), Coventry might have turned out a very different place. The general thrust of these arguments will have to be given very careful attention in the course of the following pages.

It remains, then, only to provide a brief guide to how this book is organised. For ease of exposition, the text has been divided into two sets of four chapters, so as to reflect the break between the post-war Labour Governments (1945–50, 1950–1) and the Conservative administrations of the 1950s (1951–5, 1955–9). The structure of each section is broadly comparable, covering, first, ideas and plans (Chapters 2 and 6), then the economy (Chapters 3 and 7), next the built-environment (Chapters 4 and 8) and finally politics and culture (Chapters 5 and 9). Chapter 10 presents some conclusions on Coventry, and tries to set the city’s experience in a wider, national context. Fairly full references are included in the hope that these will be of help to other scholars (particularly other local scholars) who wish to follow up some of the points raised.

2 The politics of reconstruction: war-time plans for a new Coventry

In comparison with many other British cities, Coventry’s experience of the Second World War was unusually intense. Long an engineering centre, the city was quickly assimilated into the national drive for munitions and weapons, so that, at a peak, perhaps 70 per cent of its working population were engaged on war work.¹ Such an intense involvement could only bring pressing social problems, since an already ill-formed built-environment had now to cope with waves of immigrants drawn to the booming local factories. Superimposed on all of this were the effects of the German air-raids of 1940 and 1941 – damaged housing and amenities, and an almost destroyed city centre.

This chapter traces the evolution of war-time thinking about how to cope with this legacy, and about what kind of future the city was to have with the coming of peace. Necessarily, this will mean giving considerable attention to the activities of the Labour Council, since this body was uniquely placed, with the cessation of electoral politics from 1939, to dominate many fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The politics of reconstruction: war-time plans for a new Coventry
• 3 Economic reconstruction: Coventry’s local economy, 1945–51
• 4 City reconstruction: building a new Coventry, 1945–51
• 5 Social reconstruction? Politics and culture in Coventry, 1945–51
• 6 Planning the 1950s: the construction of the 1951 Development Plan
• 7 Sustainable growth? Coventry’s local economy in the 1950s
• 8 City reconstruction: building a new Coventry, 1952–60
• 9 An ‘affluent society’? Politics and culture in Coventry, 1952–60
• 10 Some conclusions
• Statistical appendix
• Guide to sources and abbreviations used in the notes
• Notes
• Index