Nella Last in the 1950s Read online

  dollies

  stuffed dolls made from scraps of fabric

  embrocation

  liniment

  Esse

  range cooker

  faddy

  concerned with trifles, fussy

  fairings

  presents bought at a fair

  Fynnon

  brand of salts, for rheumatism

  gat

  firearm

  gertcha

  expression of disbelief

  gormless

  slow witted, lacking sense

  hip-blouse

  shirt designed to hang out

  inaffectedly

  without artifice

  ITMA

  It’s That Man Again, a very popular radio comedy programme, starring Tommy Handley

  jankers

  punished with confinement/imprisonment

  kapok

  silky fibre used to stuff cushions, etc.

  keening

  lamenting

  kern baby

  doll/image decorated with grain, flowers, etc. at harvest time

  machine

  to work on a sewing machine

  macédoine

  mixture, medley

  Mail

  North-Western Daily Mail

  marrons glacés

  chestnuts coated in sugar or syrup

  Marshall Aid (Plan)

  American financial assistance to Europe announced in 1947, implemented from 1948

  marshmallow

  shrubby herb with pink flowers

  mealies

  corncobs

  mugs

  fools, gullible people

  nowty

  moody, sullen

  offcome/offcomer

  outsider

  paddy

  fit of temper

  pawky

  artful, shrewd

  petersham

  heavy ribbed cotton or silk used for strengthening

  Phyllosan (tablets)

  a vitamin and iron supplement; it ‘fortifies the over-forties’, it claimed

  pies

  heap (of turnips) covered with earth and/or straw for protection

  proud

  overgrown

  purdah

  women screened from men by a veil or curtain

  rills

  rivulets, small temporary channels formed after heavy rains

  Rogue Herries

  a central character in the historical fiction of Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) which was set in Cumberland

  roundsman

  man who makes deliveries and takes orders from customers

  Sanatogen

  restorative tonic

  scrattling

  making difficult progress

  screw (noun)

  small quantity wrapped in a twisted piece of paper

  Serocream

  a synthetic whipped cream

  shippens

  cattle sheds

  simnel

  rich fruitcake made partly with marzipan; usually eaten at Easter

  slack

  inferior coal

  spiv

  someone shady, unscrupulous

  stopcock

  valve for regulating the flow through a pipe of a liquid or gas

  suited

  made agreeable

  swale

  shady place

  Sylko

  sewing thread

  titfer

  hat

  Turog bread

  wholemeal bread ubiquitous in the North of England

  ulster coat

  long loose overcoat of rough cloth

  union suit

  single undergarment for the trunk and limbs

  wee man

  fairy, spirit

  whims and whamseys

  fanciful, capricious ideas

  whin

  gorse bush

  wrack

  wreckage, flotsam

  WVS

  Women’s Voluntary Services

  Yard

  Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard in Barrow

  MONEY AND ITS VALUE

  In the early 1950s, British currency was calculated in the following manner:

  12 pence = 1 shilling

  20 shillings = £1

  One shilling was written as ‘1s’, a penny as ‘1d’. A farthing was a quarter of a penny. A sum of, say, two pounds and four shillings was usually written at that time as £2–4–0 or £2/4/0; such an amount is presented in this book as £2 4s Od.

  Efforts to propose modern monetary equivalents are rarely helpful. Rather, it is more useful to keep in mind that Nella’s housekeeping budget at this time for one week was £4 10s 0d, and from this sum she had to pay for such sundry items as medications, periodicals and bus fares as well as make her purchases of meat, fish and fresh and processed food, not to mention the shilling a week that she bet on the football pools. Her husband seems to have been responsible for maintaining the car. Nella’s household had little leeway for luxuries, especially with Will now retired. They rarely (for example) ate out in the early 1950s, except on food they brought from home.

  CHRONOLOGY

  The diversity of English life in the early 1950s is richly portrayed in two books by David Kynaston, both of which have impressively panoramic perspectives: Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), especially Part 3 of ‘Smoke in the Valley’, which is now available as a separate paperback; and the first third of Family Britain, 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). For a concise and informative survey of the eight or nine years after 1945, see Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), Part 1 and the first thirty pages of Part 2.

  1950

  January

  UK recognises Communist China Soviet Union boycotts UN Security Council (until mid-summer)

  February

  Narrow Labour victory in general election; Clement Attlee continues as Prime Minister

  May

  Petrol rationing ends

  June

  North Korea invades South Korea

  July

  United States acts through the United Nations to resist North Korean military advances Churchill warns of a third world war Soap rationing ends

  August

  Major increases in UK defence estimates

  September

  US/UN counter-attacks in South Korea, forcing North Korea to retreat British troops fight in Korea National Service extended to two years

  October

  UN and South Korean forces cross the 38th parallel, the boundary between North and South Korea, and capture Pyongyang, the North Korean capital

  November

  George Bernard Shaw dies UN forces move further north Chinese troops enter the Korean War, pushing UN forces southward

  December

  Talk of the possible use by the US of atomic bombs in Korea (continues into 1951) Marshall Aid suspended Chinese troops cross the 38th parallel

  1951

  January

  Attlee announces major increase in military spending over three years; reservists called up Meat ration reduced

  January–May

  Fighting continues in Korea around the 38th parallel

  February

  Iron and steel industries nationalised

  April

  US General Matthew Ridgway replaces US General Douglas MacArthur as commander of UN forces in Korea Ernest Bevin, post-war Labour Foreign Secretary, dies

  May

  US tests components for a hydrogen (fusion) bomb

  May–Sept

  Festival of Britain

  July

  Negotiations begin to end the war in Korea

  October

  Conservatives win general election; Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister

  1952

  February

  George VI dies; his successor is Elizabeth II

  April

  Sir Stafford Cripps, prominent Labour politician
and post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer, dies

  May

  De Havilland Comet, the world’s first jet airliner, enters commercial service

  October

  Tea rationing ends Test explosion of Britain’s first atomic bomb

  November

  US tests world’s first hydrogen (fusion) bomb Dwight D. Eisenhower elected President of the United States

  December

  Great London smog; some 4,000 people die from respiratory problems

  1953

  February

  Over 300 people die in floods in Eastern England

  March

  Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator, dies Iron and steel industry denationalised

  April

  Road transport denationalised Structure of DNA disclosed by researchers at Cambridge

  May

  Ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

  June

  Coronation of Elizabeth II

  July

  Korean armistice signed

  September

  Sugar rationing ends

  EDITING NELLA LAST’S DIARY

  While the main task for editors of Nella Last’s manuscript diary is to select what to publish and to shape these selections into chapters, there are several other ways in which we have exercised judgement and revised what she wrote. The following are the most important of these editorial interventions. (1) Since Nella did not use paragraphs, wherever they now exist they are our creations. (2) Her punctuation was casual, often whimsical. (Mis-punctuation is a common feature of MO diaries, indeed, of most diaries whose authors lacked the time or incentive to revisit what they had written.) We have routinely re-punctuated her writing to make it as clear and smooth-flowing as possible. (3) Obvious errors – she almost certainly wrote in haste, and usually at night – have been silently corrected. These include misspellings and phrases that lack a necessary word, such as a preposition, article or conjunction. (4) Very occasionally an additional word is needed to convey the meaning of a sentence. In these rare cases we have silently supplied a suitable candidate. (5) We have standardised the usage of particular words in order to ensure, for example, that a word is always spelt the same, or that it is consistently capitalised or not capitalised, and that the prices of goods and services and other numerals are presented in a consistent form. (6) Nella was much given to underlining words for emphasis and to putting a great many words and phrases in inverted commas. We have eliminated these practices except in cases where they are helpful or even essential to grasping her full meaning, such as when she is reporting words actually spoken by others or when she had chosen language that was regarded as colloquial or not yet in common usage. (7) Three dots are used to indicate omissions in a day’s entry other than those made before a selection starts and after it concludes. Omissions at the start and the end of what she wrote on a given day are more the norm than the exception, for her first and last sentences are generally less interesting than what comes in between. Many entire days of her writing – and she wrote almost every day during these years – have been omitted altogether.

  This may seem like a rather long list of editorial interventions. The need to make them stems in part from the fact that Nella had no reason to think that she should edit her own work, to polish or perhaps even to re-read what she had written. So her writing, while frequently rich and robust, tends to be raw. The photograph on the previous page shows a page from her handwritten diary from Friday 24 February 1950 and gives a sense of the decisions that any editors would routinely have to make in converting her handwritten diary into pages suitable for a book.

  MASS OBSERVATION

  Mass Observation,* which was set up in 1937, was created to meet a perceived need – to overcome Britons’ ignorance about themselves in their everyday lives. MO aimed to lay the foundations for a social anthropology of contemporary Britain. Given that so many basic facts of social life were then unknown – opinion polling was in its infancy, social surveys and field studies had just begun (with a few exceptions, such as those of London by Charles Booth in the late nineteenth century) – how, it was asked, could the nation’s citizens adequately understand themselves? This lack of knowledge was thought to be especially pronounced with regard to the beliefs and behaviour of the majority of Britons: that is, those who lacked social prominence, and who had little political or intellectual influence.

  It was vital, according to MO’s founders, to focus on norms, customs, routines and commonalities. The goal was to help bring about a ‘science of ourselves’, rooted in closely observed facts, methodically and (sometimes) laboriously collected. And in order to pursue this science of society, MO recruited hundreds of volunteer ‘Observers’, who were asked to describe, to pose questions to others, to record sights and sounds, and sometimes to count. Their efforts at observing were likened to those of an anthropologist working in the field. One of the early publications that drew upon these findings was a Penguin Special from early 1939 written by MO’s two leading lights, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain, by Mass-Observation, which attracted lots of attention at the time.

  Volunteers were crucial to MO. Without them it would not have been possible to acquire the facts on which a proper social science would have to be based. And it came to be accepted by MO’s leaders that these Observers would not only be data-collectors; they could also function as ‘subjective cameras’ that captured their own experiences, feelings and attitudes, and circumstances of living. This acceptance of the legitimacy of subjectivity in MO’s enquiries was a major reason why diary-keeping came to be promoted as a promising vehicle of both social and self-observation. A diary was one way of recording; and it was a way that inevitably tapped into the individuality and inner life of one personality. MO’s striving for a better social science, then, facilitated the production of a particularly personal form of writing; and from late August 1939, with another great war imminent, some people responded to MO’s invitation to keep a diary and post their writing regularly (usually weekly, fortnightly or monthly) to MO’s headquarters. Nella Last was one of the dozens – eventually hundreds – who responded to this initiative. She was, though, one of the few who wrote regularly during the war and continued to write regularly after 1945 – and her diary entries were unusually detailed.

  These diaries – some 480 of them – have been held since the 1970s in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Numerous books have drawn upon these riches. Sandra Koa Wing (ed.), Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War, By the Writers of Mass Observation (London: Profile Books, 2008), is an excellent anthology of extracts from MO’s wartime diaries. Dorothy Sheridan’s edited volume Wartime Women: An Anthology of Women’s Wartime Writing for Mass Observation (London: Heinemann, 1990) includes extracts from numerous diaries. Simon Garfield has edited three collections drawn from the MO Archive, all published by Ebury Press: Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain, 1945–1948 (2004); We Are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2005); and Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us – Our Intimate Diaries (2007).

  Nella Last’s wartime MO diary was the first to appear on its own as a book, in 1981, and others followed, including Dorothy Sheridan’s edited Among You Taking Notes …: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939–1945 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985). Several other MO diarists have recently been published in volumes of their own. These include Wartime Norfolk: The Diary of Rachel Dhonau 1941–1942, edited by Robert Malcolmson and Peter Searby (Norfolk Record Society, 2004); Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary, 1939–1942, by Olivia Cockett, edited by Robert Malcolmson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005; 2nd edn, Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2008); and three volumes edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson – A Woman in Wartime London: The Diary of Kathleen Tipper, 1941–1945 (London Record Society, 2006); A Soldier in Bedfordshire, 1941–1942: The Diary of
Private Denis Argent, Royal Engineers (Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 2009); and Dorset in Wartime: The Diary of Phyllis Walther, 1941–1942 (Dorset Record Society, 2009). James Hinton, who is preparing a history of Mass Observation, has recently published a stimulating account of some of MO’s most interesting diarists: Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  The Mass Observation collection is open to the public and is visited by people from around the world. In 2005 it was given Designated Status as one of the UK’s Outstanding Collections by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Much helpful information, including details of the Friends scheme that helps to finance the Archive, which is a charitable trust, is available on its website: www.massobs.org.uk.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Since this edition of Nella Last’s writing builds on the work that we did in preparing Nella Last’s Peace, almost all the debts we acknowledged there still apply, since advice and support provided up to 2008 has continued to be helpful as we moved editorially beyond the 1940s. Erin O’Neill of the BBC Written Archives has helped us on a number of matters, and we are very grateful for her well-informed advice. Nella Last in the 1950s has also benefited from suggestions and information kindly given by Peter Last, Joanna and Oliver Murphy, Kate Pearson of the Cumbria Record Office and Local Studies Library in Barrow, and Karen Watson, Jessica Scantlebury and Fiona Courage at the Mass Observation Archive. We are especially grateful to Catrina Hey at the University of Sussex for her excellent work in providing us with copies of Nella’s voluminous writings; without her help our work could not have continued. We are also glad to acknowledge the support of Camilla Hornby, formerly of Curtis Brown, and Matthew Taylor, our copy-editor, who saved us from numerous errors and suggested several improvements, almost all of which we adopted.