After the War Was Over: 1945-1972

By Jill Quaife

This book is a series of vignettes about the life and times of a child growing up in East Sussex in the years after the Second World War.
It covers the transition from war to peace and the child’s transition from schoolgirl to young adult. At first there is austerity, boarding-school and the social changes of the postwar Labour government, and then a growing sense of freedom as wartime restrictions begin to be relaxed, goods and services become more available and opportunities for travel in Western Europe open up.
The very personal story culminates with the girl’s job as secretary to an eccentric former diplomat who was one of the key figures in the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, and her experiences working with him and his family in London, Rome and South America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dolman Scott Publishers
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838194444

Book preview

Introduction:

Setting the Scene

The immediate postwar years were years of real austerity, not the perceived austerity of the early 21st century but real grinding hardship for many people. Despite the hype generated by the media in an attempt to destabilise the Cameron-Clegg coalition what is called austerity now, which for swathes of the population means having only one, or even no, foreign holiday a year instead of two or more, bears no relation to the real austerity of the second half of the 1940s. On top of it all, there was a Labour government, with the privations that implied.

The election of Labour in July 1945 was totally unexpected, at least by my family, who were shocked, and it was indeed the beginning of a very dark time, the effects of which have never really gone away and keep rearing their heads up even 70 years later. There would have been privations anyway, whoever had won the election, as although we had won the war we had, as the cliché says, lost the peace, and for people of a conservative persuasion a socialist government made that even worse.

The introduction of the Welfare State, the formation of the National Health Service, and the nationalisation of strategic industries were things which were to have a profound effect on everyone. In my family’s case my mother’s mother had not been left well off when my grandfather died and most of what she had was tied up in shares in the old Southern Railway Company, which was nationalised along with the three other big railway companies to form British Railways, later British Rail. The shareholders received what many felt was derisory compensation, and there was much lamentation about this round the dining-table at Little Orchard, my grandparents’ house at St. Leonards. I didn’t understand it but I had seen Mr. Churchill cheered through the streets of Worcester and I ‘knew’ that Labour was not a good thing. At home my father read the Manchester Guardian, when it really was the Manchester Guardian, a different paper from today’s ’Grauniad’, as well as The Times, and he said Clement Attlee was the best prime minister we had ever had, but he was nevertheless a dark blue Conservative and so were my whole family.

The State aimed to control the supply of everything, or as much as it could. That is now an outmoded concept and no successful modern democratic country propounds it, but it was very fashionable at the time, though probably it was already out of date even then. Years of socialism in Russia had not made that country prosper and were ultimately to lead to the break-up of its empire, as will happen in China (though not, alas, in our time) because such countries are too big and diverse to be run as one entity, but left-leaning political parties in Western Europe hankered after the control that socialist governments have over their populations.

In some ways therefore the postwar years, at least the late 1940s, were more dreary than the war years themselves and seemingly endless. In the war even as children we knew it would end one day, and when it did there would be huge celebrations and that was something to look forward to as we knew we would win. In reality, when the celebrations were over, austerity looked likely to go on for ever. All the things we had been promised ‘when things come down’ didn’t materialise. Things don’t ‘come down’, they just go up more slowly, as we very soon realised. There were shortages of everything, especially food. Bread was now rationed which it had not been in the war, and meat remained rationed until 1954, nine years after VE Day. Fuel, which largely meant coal, which powered both industry and domestic heating, was often in short supply, its production in the 1950s hampered by strikes which had not happened in the war. The shortage of paper continued into peacetime and at school our textbooks were dog-eared, scribbled over and often falling apart which no parents would put up with for a moment now but ours knew that we were lucky to have books at all. There were also some of the hardest winters in a generation, not to mention fog, not the low cloud that is often called fog today but real suffocating pea-soupers so thick that people walked in front of cars with torches to guide the driver.

Internationally America was the most important country in the world and everyone wanted to go to America, to have American things, to speak with an American accent. It was, as the young say today, ‘cool’. The equivalent of that expression then was ‘wizard’ or even the hilarious ‘wizard prang’, RAF expressions left over from the war. America and Russia between them had divided up Europe, resulting in the Cold War. Against that, it was in those years that the foundations of the European Union were laid, with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, as a bulwark against both Russia and America, though Britain was a latecomer to the organisation and now years later is loosening its ties with its own continent and seeking closer ones with America, while America is becoming increasingly isolationist. It’s crazy.

On the domestic front my father’s secret organisation at Hughenden Manor, aka Hillside, had moved to Bushy Park in Middlesex, next door to the large American base there, and as he could reach that by bus from Kew we returned to live at our flat in the Mortlake Road, but we still spent a great deal of time in Sussex as we had in the war. The difference was that instead of being escapes from bombs or mercy dashes to support my grandparents in one crisis or another our stays were now for pure pleasure. The summers, as if to make up for the grim grey winters, were warm and sunny, the beaches were open, and we were free.

The 1940s gave way to the 50s and though that decade is derided for being stuffy and unstylish by people who weren’t there, for those who grew up during it it seemed like a golden age after what we had been through in the war. Churchill had returned to government, a lot of wartime restrictions were lifted, bombed sites were gradually rebuilt on, travel opportunities opened up and we could go all over Western Europe by train.

Then came the 60s and those who mock the 50s have nothing more to complain about!

This is the story of what happened to me in that era.

I

St. Leonards after the war

The bride and bridegroom are staring at the camera, expressions of panic in their eyes. They are standing on a dais, the bride’s train cascading down the steps like at a royal wedding, in the studio of Warschawski at 20 Grand Parade, St. Leonards where they have been driven from their reception for the wedding photographs, wedding photography in 1935 not having reached the pinnacle of technological sophistication it has today. They are my parents. The resulting pictures were so bad that Warschawski didn’t charge for them, and the only good one of the wedding was the one that appeared in the Hastings and St. Leonards Observer taken by its own photographer as my parents left the church.

On the first day of the summer holidays in 1945, on an afternoon at the end of July, it was my turn to stare startled into Warschawski’s lens for the ritual annual photograph, and being dragged off to his studio that day is my first memory of St. Leonards after the war. Warschawski himself had died in 1935 but the business was inherited by a former employee who continued to use the name and my family continued to refer to him as ‘Warschawski’.

Warschawski photographed everyone in Hastings and three generations of my family including all my Bulley cousins. My grandparents at Battle had photographs of Anne and Ursula in his distinctive style in the drawing-room but none of me, as I couldn’t help noticing! Probably they thought mine weren’t good enough as I was not photogenic, but they kept them, albeit shut away in a drawer! The ordeal by camera happened every summer holidays, but if Warschawski couldn’t ‘do’ me on the day of arrival I was free to go to the beach as soon as we got to my grandmother’s and then I would ask my uncle if it was low tide and he would look at the tide table in the Observer. Before I learnt to swim, and even after I did, I only liked bathing at low tide as I was frightened of being out of my depth and I loved running out on the smooth wet sand and into ankle-deep water, but real swimmers had to wade out for about a mile and a half before the water was above their knees.

We would go down to the front via Maze Hill, excitement mounting the nearer we got to the sea, and stop at the newsagents on the corner opposite the Royal Victoria Hotel, which sold everything necessary for a traditional bucket and spade holiday, to buy rope-soled sandals for the shingle beach.

If there were too many people on St. Leonards beach we would get the bus to Bridge Way at Bulverhythe and cross the railway on the footbridge by the old Southern Railway carriage sheds there and have that beach to ourselves. That was near the ‘subterranean forest’, an outcrop of flat-topped rocks covered with the remains of prehistoric trees and exposed at low tide when I used to hop about on them and peer into the little pools left by the receding water. It was clearly visible from the Victoria to Hastings railway line when the tide was out and we often saw it from the train.

At certain times of the year at exceptional low tides you can also now see signs of the remains of the Amsterdam, a cargo ship of the Dutch East India Company which sank off the coast here in rough weather in 1749 on her way to Java on her maiden voyage. If she had survived she would have been one of a number of similar ships which serviced the Dutch settlements and garrisons in the East Indies, carrying guns, building materials for the colony’s development projects, and the money to pay for them, on the outward voyages, and the oriental spices, china and silks so desired in Europe on the way back. Much of her cargo is known to be still on board her and as she was on her outward voyage this is assumed to include gold and silver coins which is the real cause of the interest in her, never mind her historic importance, though a great deal of silver was removed by the authorities straight after the shipwreck.

If it was high tide we would go to the old St. Leonards Bathing Pool at West St. Leonards which was almost on the beach so it was the next best thing. The heyday of the pool and of other lidos along the coast was the period between the wars. After the war their popularity gradually declined as more people were able to go abroad. By the late 1940s and early 50s when we used to go there the place was almost empty which suited my mother, and me, too, as I didn’t want to be closely observed while attempting to swim and looking, as my mother once wrote on a postcard to someone, like a large frog. When it was really doing badly it was turned into a holiday camp which lowered the tone of West St. Leonards, which had always struggled anyway, and we didn’t use it any more.

In 1947 the installation of a miniature railway along the front to the camp did something to offset the decline of the area, at least for me as I loved trains and so was enchanted, but local residents were not enchanted and thanks to their complaints the railway was moved back along the front to the Old Town in Hastings, where it still operates. The engine was a reduced-size replica of the Royal Scot and after being exported to America and later returned home it is still working, on the miniature railway at the Royal Victoria Country Park at Netley in Hampshire.

If it was too cold to bathe my mother and I occasionally played tennis, or in my case tried to, on the public courts in Gensing Gardens. Before she was married tennis had been my mother’s life. She played at the Green Lawn Tennis Club in St. Leonards, which still exists, and won a lot of tournaments, but as an amateur she couldn’t receive monetary prizes. But even in those days there were ways of getting round it! Winners were given vouchers ‘to the value of’, and with one that my mother got for £5 she bought a very large, heavy and handsome Sheffield plate tea tray, later valued at £3,000!

Hastings produced a number of very good players in the interwar years, including my mother’s friend Phoebe Holcroft Watson, who won the Ladies’ Doubles at Wimbledon twice, in 1928 and 1929. When my mother got married and moved to London she stopped playing but she still followed the game closely in the press, went to Wimbledon and throughout my early childhood looked forward to the time when I would take up the sport and love it as much as she did and be as good at it as her. In my innocence I looked forward to that, too, as she talked about it so much and was certain that tennis was in my genes. But, alas, it wasn’t, as these sessions in Gensing Gardens showed, and it was a let-down both for her and me when we realised this.

It had never occurred to either of us that I simply would not be able to play. For one thing being very thin I had weak wrists and my mother had unaccountably bought me a full-sized racquet which was too heavy for me when everyone else my age at school had junior Slazenger or Dunlop ones, but the real problem was that I never realised that you had to keep your eye on the ball. Years later on summer Sunday afternoons at Weybridge, where my parents moved in 1953, we would hear our neighbour Ciaran Purcell coaching his son at cricket in the garden and repeating time and again ‘Keep your eye on the ball, Patrick!’ and it was only then that it suddenly dawned on me that that was what you had to do in tennis, too! No teacher or coach at school had ever told me that and my eyes were always riveted on my opponent to try and guess what she was going to do and though I would take an almighty swipe at the ball when it approached me it always passed harmlessly above or below my racquet while I was still looking at the girl on the other side of the net.

Gensing Gardens had a pond where I sailed a model yacht I had been given which my uncle, with his love of sailing, named Mischief after a famous ocean racing yacht and America’s Cup contender in 1881, and I liked that much better than tennis, though I was almost as bad at it. This was before radio-controlled model boats and there was no means of steering poor Mischief or of getting her back if she stopped in the middle of the pond, as she usually did. Eventually a long string was attached to her stern so that I could haul her in but this was very infra dig and I was mortified at doing it in front of other people.

II

Bomb damage and reconstruction in Hastings and St. Leonards

There were bombed sites all over the borough, Hastings having been one of the two most bombed places in Sussex (the other was Eastbourne), but by this time we were so used to them that we hardly noticed them, knowing that in due course they would be built on once more though we didn’t know that what went up on them would in some cases be so monstrously ugly and out of place.

The nearest damage to my grandmother’s house in Brittany Road was sustained by St. John’s Church, on the corner of Brittany Road and Dane Road, where my parents had been married and I myself christened. St. John’s was restored to its former state and reopened in 1951, and this was achievable because it wasn’t totally destroyed, unlike St. Leonard’s, the Parish Church, on the front in the heart of ‘Burton’s St. Leonards’, that part of the town designed and built in the 1800s by the architect James Burton, the father of the more famous Decimus, who also had a hand in its development. Old St. Leonard’s Church was obliterated in 1944 by a flying bomb which had been hit by gunfire from an RAF fighter over the Channel and damaged but continued flying. It came in from the sea at a height of about 25 feet and was heading straight for Marine Court, the controversial 1930s block of flats on the front built to look like an ocean liner, but it suddenly veered to the west and crashed on the doorstep of St. Leonard’s, demolishing it completely.

Mercifully it was a Saturday night and the church was empty so there were no human casualties, but the church itself was a casualty because it was old and loved, and was replaced by a modern structure designed by Giles and Adrian Gilbert Scott and built of dun-coloured brick completely out of character with the surrounding white-stuccoed Regency houses and the graceful Burton colonnade along the front. My paternal grandmother’s family worshipped at the old church when they lived at Wyncliffe, a big house on the cliff above West St. Leonards station. The church, old and new, was and is almost unique in England, and certainly on the south coast, in being built north to south instead of east to west as most churches are, and as it is elevated you get the impression on coming out of the main south doors that the sea comes right up to the bottom of the steps. It is now a listed building, one of only a few churches to be granted that status since the war. It is also a blot on the landscape.

The trouble with modern architecture is that if you dump an ultra-modern, or even mildly modern, building down in the middle of a lot of traditional ones it loses impact itself and at the same time detracts from the pleasant aspect of the older ones. Marine Court is another example of this in St. Leonards. Modern buildings only work when they are not set cheek by jowl with older ones. That is why the Sydney Opera House is such a success. Had it been built in the middle of the city, with other buildings all round it, it would have been a different matter. Guildford Cathedral, in itself very ugly, is in the same category, sitting on the top of Stag Hill in splendid isolation, and so is the Sainsbury’s with roof sails at the entrance to Plymouth, which is greatly enhanced by being on a large open site at the bottom of a hill so that you see the whole effect of it as you come down the A38 into the city. But the impact of another interesting modern Sainsbury’s in south London (now demolished) was lost because it was fitted tightly into the middle of a row of 19th century terraced houses that came right up against it on either side.

Of the many regrettable postwar buildings in Hastings those that appeared while we were still there included the flats built by the LCC on the east side of Warrior Square and the new Plummers department store, a typical 1940s eyesore especially when seen from the main coast road at the back where it is a carbuncle in the middle of Robertson Terrace. One wonders how the Council sanctioned these and other monstrosities, like the former College of Further Education in Archery Road and the tax office in London Road opposite Gensing Gardens, though the tax office, a 1960s square box, was not built as a result of war damage but was a postwar redevelopment of the site on which an abattoir had previously stood. In my childhood we often saw cattle grazing in the field behind the building which sloped steeply down to the parapet above the tunnel at the west end of Warrior Square station and I was delighted to see what I thought was a country scene in the middle of the town. That was until I discovered what the site was really used for, and it seems amazing that an abattoir should have been tolerated in the midst of a then smart residential area.

Lower down London Road was the Regal Cinema where in the Christmas holidays of 1949 I was taken to see Little Women, the classic version with the young Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and the even younger Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Margaret O’Brien was the same age as me and I had already seen and admired her in Our Vines have Tender Grapes, and imagined myself being a film star like her. I loved the scenes of a New England Christmas in the snow in Little Women and I still remember that it was snowing in St. Leonards when we came out of the cinema at dusk and that somehow seemed magical and as if the film carried on into real life, especially when we got home to the log fire, lamplight and crumpet tea at Little Orchard.

The very first film I saw was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1944, to which my parents had to take me because they had no one to leave me with. We saw it at the little cinema in Battle and as I was much too young it was enough to put me off Shakespeare for life, or at least until I was old enough to rediscover him through Verdi’s Shakespeare operas. Doing King Lear for O-Level English didn’t help either. The little cinema in Battle is now an auctioneer’s but still has the original canopy on the front and traces of its art deco decoration inside. The Regal in St. Leonards was pulled down in the 1960s and replaced by a supremely undistinguished red brick office block.

On the front another eyesore of a different kind was the twisted metal framework which was all that remained of St. Leonards Pier. In this case its demise was due to the war but not to enemy action and was because the pier had been cut in two in 1940 to deter enemy forces from gaining access to the town by landing on the seaward end, and it had rusted away ever since until it was finally removed by the Council in 1961. In stormy weather it looked particularly sinister, starkly black against the angry sea and lowering grey sky. Sometimes at low tide I ventured among the debris where jagged bits of metal poked through the sand, and I was not stopped by my mother, neither of us having any idea that it might be dangerous!

Hastings Pier survived the war but when it reopened afterwards about the only entertainment it offered was ‘What the butler saw’ penny-in-the-slot machines. Over the years it deteriorated, fell into the hands of rogue foreign owners, was closed down and suffered a catastrophic fire. There seemed to be a happy ending because after years of trying the Council finally managed to repossess it and it was restored by public subscription and reopened in 2016 in a new minimalist guise, light and airy with a glass pavilion suitable for weddings, and in November 2017 was awarded the Stirling Prize for the best new building in the UK by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The following month, unbelievably, the pier company went into administration and the pier was to close in 2019, a huge let-down and disappointment for the local people who had so staunchly supported its regeneration*.

Across the road from the pier was the White Rock Pavilion as it was then called (now, more boringly, it is simply the White Rock Theatre) with its clean cream walls and mock Della Robbia medallions set into the stucco. There my parents had seen and heard some of the premier musicians and opera singers of their day, and actors and comedians who later became famous and started their careers there in revues put on by the Fol-de-Rols, a seaside music hall company which was still going in the 1950s and early 60s when I was just grown up. Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Leslie Crowther, Jack Warner and his sisters Elsie and Doris Walters (‘Gert and Daisy’ of radio fame), who were to my parents’ generation what television personalities were to later ones, all appeared with the Fol-de-Rols.

After the war children’s films were shown at the Pavilion on Saturday mornings and I longed to go but I didn’t have anyone to go with and I knew all the other children would and was too shy to go by myself. I wanted my mother to come with me but she wouldn’t, probably foreseeing that she would be the only adult which would have been embarrassing for her as it would have indicated that she had a child who couldn’t manage by itself. She said I could go alone which was strange as although it might have been good for my self-confidence confidence was not a thing encouraged in children by parents and teachers and I’m sure it was the last thing my parents wanted me to have. It was something that you were supposed to acquire magically when you left school but until then too much of it was seen as a potential source of trouble.

The lower promenade was nicknamed Bottle Alley because the bottoms of thousands of glass bottles had been embedded in the concrete walls by Sidney Little, the ‘Concrete King’, who had built a lot of things out of reinforced concrete in Hastings and was ahead of his time. In spite of being natives of the town my family never mentioned him and I only heard of him many years afterwards, when he began to get the recognition, albeit