Memory lane
Norman MacKenzie
The 1945 Revolution William Harrington and Peter Young (Davis-Poynter £6.50)
Among my Christmas reading was a facsmile copy of Picture Post for 4 January 1941, which contained its 'Plan for Britain' by Thomas Balogh, A.D. Lindsay, Julian Huxley, J.B. Priestley and others; and it vividly recalled the mood which Mr Harrington and Mr Young have sought to catch in their account of Britain's wartime drift to Labour. With this copy of Picture Post as a case-study of the prog. approach to peace, and the Harrington-Young volume as a text, anyone who can whistle a Vera Lynn tune can take a trip down the memory lane of politics.
It is a straightforward book, with a neatly organised narrative, simply written, and it contains little analysis or even provocative questioning of the propaganda process it describes. A younger reader could get a good sense of the naive style of those six years from it as well as an overview of the facts, for the authors seem to have absorbed the idiom of the times with their research — a scissorsand-paste job which brings together about a hundred interviews and some beavering in the files.
Those who lived through the war will find themselves in all the old familiar places as the chapters roll by. Documentary film: Harry Watt, Cavalcanti, Jennings and Grierson. Theatre: Michael Mac Owan, Unity, Ted Willis, John Clements and They Came to a City . Publishing: Victor Gollancz, of course, and Penguin Specials stuffed into battledress pockets. Radio: ITMA, the Brains Trust, and all its imitators scattered about stations, army camps and airfields as an ideal forum for politics; and the impact of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. And so on, through Christian socialists (Archbishop Temple and the Red Dean), the planners (Beveridge, Boyd Orr, and the magical incantations of Scott, Uthwatt and Barlow), Common _Wealth (Acland, Wintringham, and those heady by-election victories at Skiptonand Chelmsford which were the harbingers of 1945), the journalists (Frank Owen, Michael Foot, Kingsley Martin) and lastly the amateur politicians, led by Harold Laski and the Fabians, heading the parade
towards the polling booths of 1945.
Mr Harrington and Mr Young do not have anything new to say about that election, although the fact that their account is so clearly written in the Spirit of '45 provides nostalgic gloss on their subject-matter. What strikes me, in retrospect, however, is the extent to which the 'progressive intelligentsia' — the contemporary cant phrase seems appropriate — got its hands on the machine which shaped public opinion. Perhaps that was really the 'silent revolution' which culminated in 1945, a triumph of cultural permeation which was the finest hour of the utopian middle classes.
Previous page
