The Benign Aristocrats: British Prime Ministers 1951 - 1964

By David Potter

The years 1951 to 1964 were years of undeniable prosperity and progress. They were the years in which Conservative Governments decided not to dismantle Labour’s National Health Service and Welfare State, and for this they must be given a certain amount of credit. The four prime ministers concerned were all from an aristocratic background, but they had learned very quickly that times had changed and that they had to change with them. The result was that these years (and the periods of Labour rule before and after) saw possibly the best governance that Britain has ever experienced. This book, written from an uncompromising Socialist and working-class background, gives a great deal of credit to “the benign aristocrats”, but does not minimise their failures, in particular the Suez affair of 1956.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528958677

David Potter

David Potter is Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History, and Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. He is author of many scholarly articles, and the books Constantine the Emperorand The Victor's Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium.

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About the Author

David Potter is a retired teacher of Classical Languages. He was born in Forfar, but lives in Kirkcaldy with his wife Rosemary and his dog. He is a graduate of the University of St Andrews. He has three grown up children and five grandchildren. He has written many books on Scottish football and cricket, and a few on politics. His interests are football, cricket, drama and the poetry of Robert Burns.

Dedication

Posthumous Dedications

The late Colin McNab one time teacher of History at Inverness High School with whom I used to discuss politics endlessly.

My late colleague at Glenrothes High School, Charles Wallace, who showed me, after a struggle, the soft and reasonable side of the Conservatives.

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Introduction

It is perhaps odd that a man from an uncompromisingly Labour background born under the NHS in August 1948 and whose subsequent life has conscientiously reflected that upbringing, (for which he is truly grateful) should decide to write a book on the years from 1951 to 1964, the thirteen wasted years of Tory misrule as Harold Wilson used to say.

The uncompromisingly Labour background needs to be qualified. I was brought up in Forfar, Angus which was an uncompromisingly Tory town. It was something that I could not understand that people who lived in council houses and worked in unhealthy filthy jute factories for wages that, although adequate, were far from luxurious, could identify themselves with people like Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. I still don’t really get it, but there were several factors that militated against Labour in that area. One was the proximity of Glamis Castle and the Strathmore family. I was always told that the Queen Mother was born at Glamis (she wasn’t, in fact) and that she considered herself a Forfarian (she wasn’t, either). No one could remember her working in the factories, but the fact that apparently she loved us all meant that we had to show our gratitude by voting Conservative! Similarly, Winston Churchill’s wife was the granddaughter of the Earl of Airlie, so voting Labour was tantamount to treason.

There was also the influence of the DC Thomson Press, based locally in Dundee. Everyone got The Courier to see who was dead and how the football was going and as a by-product found out how bad Labour was. That was during the week, but on Sunday, every single household got The Sunday Post. It was a wonderful piece of journalism, mixing football with The Broons and Oor Wullie in a couthy, Scottish, kailyardie, twee, giggly sort of way along with insidious and subtle attacks on socialism in their AS WE SEE IT column. It had the occasional go at a labour politician or a Trade Union but more particularly at people who were claiming benefits or claiming to be unemployed…"but a Sunday Post man saw him going into a car", while our farmers were struggling having to pay so much tax while trying to feed the nation! Funnily enough, this subliminal, subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) stuff cut no ice in Dundee itself where Tories were permanently and deservedly hated, but it certainly worked in Forfar and the agricultural area.

But the third factor was that it was Forfar, the most couthy and homely Scottish town of them all. Curiously and conversely, there was no real class war there. Generally, employers did not push their workers too far – there were one or two exceptions, mind you and they certainly had done that in the 1930s when they got off with it! – and the workers did have Unions but they were usually easily won round by a few nods and smiles, a cup of tea and an enquiry about how someone’s wife was keeping. Everybody knew everybody, the sexual instinct occasionally surmounted what class barriers there were and employees and employers often happily played bowls and golf together. In particular, Scottish Country Dancing, a very popular pursuit in the 1950s, drove a horse and cart through many class barriers.

As far as Thirteen Wasted Years, the much-repeated quote of Harold Wilson, is concerned, this writer will disagree, to a certain extent at least, with his Yorkshire hero. The years were not all wasted. They could have been better; there was at least one appalling moment when Britain might have precipitated the world into nuclear war; the Americans nearly did so as well once or twice; the country was not always quite as cosy a place as it is sometime painted. All these things are true. But the point was that prosperity was around. It was as if the country had said that slums, unemployment, poverty and war – (these inextricably interconnected evils – the 20th-century equivalents of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) now belonged to the past and that a page had been turned. It was now time to go forward. In another context, Sir Winston Churchill had, frequently, said Advance, Britannia. We were now advancing in a more advantageous direction. Britannia was now no longer marching across Africa or up Italy, but it was marching to prosperity and even a certain amount of social justice.

It was the decade when the Conservatives, although never daring to state it publicly, effectively said that Labour was right. Labour had of course from 1945 to 1951 created the National Health Service and built the Welfare State. It had been resisted at the time by the Conservative opposition who perpetually claimed that Labour were taking money from the people. Churchill was forever telling the people to emigrate. Some took his advice. Fortunately more didn’t and stayed to enjoy the admittedly slow development of the new Jerusalem. A perceptive left-wing journalist called Kenneth Younger summed it up well in 1951 when he said, I don’t think the Tories will be able to throw over the really important things we have done. Labour has performed the essential task in a democracy by shifting the whole political thinking of the country out of its nineteenth century groove so that there can be no going back.

To their eternal credit, then, the conservatives did not dismantle Labour’s achievements. They didn’t, although one fears that at least two of their subsequent leaders might have tried to do so. But the four Prime Ministers in question – Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home – quietly realised and admitted that Labour had a point and that a well-fed, well-educated, well-housed and healthy working class might be a better way of forwarding British capitalism than the slums and poverty of their predecessors. Churchill, in particular, in 1951 might well have been the man who could have pulled the plug on the progress of Attlee and Bevan. He didn’t. He had, after all, been a Liberal at one point and was rightly and to his credit, associated with the Liberal reforms of 1906 until 1914 which had laid the foundations of the Welfare State. He had also said, There is no finer investment in the future than putting milk into babies. Not the least of the achievements of this remarkable man was his quiet acceptance of Labour’s social progress. He realised the truth of the political dictum that if your opponents have got something right, far better to shut up and quietly agree with them.

The four Prime Ministers of the 1951 – 1964 years were all undeniably aristocrats. They were not even middle class. The poorest was Macmillan and he had a massive publishing firm behind him! Macmillan was from the entrepreneur capitalist classes; the others were the landed gentry of a previous century. It was very easy to poke fun at them and claim that they were totally out of touch with current trends. Not so! Colonel Blimp-ism still existed in various areas of society – the Army, the Church, the Civil Service and even Parliament itself, but each one of the four Prime Ministers mentioned was intelligent, shrewd, sensitive to people’s needs and totally aware of what was happening in the country and in the world. One of them (Churchill) was already one of the greatest men the world had ever seen before he became for a second time Prime Minister in 1951, another (Douglas-Home) was not really Prime Minister for long enough to make a valid judgement, another (Macmillan) was generally reckoned to have been one of the country’s best ever Prime Ministers, while another (Eden) reminds one what Tacitus says, epigrammatically, about the Roman Empire Galba omnium consensu capax imperii…nisi imperasset – in everyone’s opinion, capable of being Emperor…unless he had become Emperor None of the four of them was a bad man. The evil capitalist who owned mines and factories and inflicted poverty and misery on his workers – such people undeniably still existed even in the mild 1950s – could not be recognised among these four men.

It was always, as I have said, a matter of mystery to me (and still is) how people who worked in factories and lived in council houses could bring themselves to identify with the landed gentry, but the undeniable fact was that they did. The Conservatives won elections in 1951, 1955 and 1959 with their share of the vote and the election of 1964 was only won by Labour by a whisker. Only to an extent can one claim that the working classes were intimidated or pressurised into voting Conservative by the educational system or the Church. Such pressure did exist, it has to be said, and did influence weaker souls who feared that Labour would take away all their money and give it all to the scroungers and the unemployed, not to mention the strikers or even the immigrants

There were other more valid reasons for the Conservative success. One was that Labour spent the ten years of the 1950s tearing itself apart, another was that Scottish and Welsh nationalism barely existed, (the province and the domain of the eccentric and the esoteric – the Wendy Woods and the Douglas Youngs of this world), the Liberal Party had been in a steep, self-inflicted decline since 1922, but the main reason was that the Conservatives were in fact producing the goods. Unemployment had gone, inflation had not yet reached the ruinous extent that it would in the 1970s, and council houses with indoor toilets and running water were a new luxury, described as palaces in comparison with what the working class had been forced to live in before. When Harold MacMillan was able to say in 1959 We’ve never had it so good, he was not wrong.

There was thus a feel good factor pretty much throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Things were not perfect, but they were better, infinitely better than they had been before. People were healthy – stern, stout nurses regularly visited Primary Schools to stick needles into the children, the better to drive off the horrible, preventable illnesses of earlier in the century and school dentists plied their own sadistic but beneficial craft – fathers had jobs, the cinema was going strong, football and other sports kept people happy, television had made its tentative appearance, more and more people could afford motor cars, education offered more and more opportunities for college and university education. Adequate grants were given to intelligent boys and girls to pursue their studies. All these things encouraged the status quo, and the Tories were further helped by an institution that had proved dubious in the past, (and would certainly do so in the future) but in the 1950s was a major asset – the Royal Family.

The Coronation of 1953 was a major propaganda victory for royalists and Conservatives, and the sight of the young, pretty Queen with a dutiful husband and charming children was also a great boost for the establishment and the status quo. The Duke was outspoken, but managed, by and large, to avoid any obvious sexual scandal, and continued to do his conjugal duties. The Queen, having already produced twice before becoming Queen, duly gave birth again in 1960 and 1964, and the socialist rebels had little ammunition other than inherited wealth to throw into any argument. In later years, this would change and change radically, but for the moment the Queen’s family had not yet disgraced her and people identified with the Royal Family, with the stress on the word Family.

It would generally be agreed in later years, that the perpetual abandonment of the Royal children by their parents was not a good thing in spite of what the Newsreels tried to make out, but the effects of poor parenting would not become apparent till further down the line, and everything seemed wonderful at the moment with the Royal Family held up as impeccable role models. Prince Charles was born a month or two after me and HE never played football on the street, HE always went to bed at the right time and HE always tidied up his room. Later years however would prove more favourable to me!

The early 1950s saw a clearly defined establishment centring on the Conservative Party who were born to rule and if anyone else got a look in, that was an aberration. The Conservative Party was Britain at work, Eton and Harrow were Britain being educated, The Daily Telegraph was Britain at breakfast and the Church of England was Britain at prayer. That was the way things were! But the difference now was that nobody else suffered. And that a collective social conscience was slowly beginning to develop.

Chapter One

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

There is no problem finding details of the life of Winston Churchill. He is in danger of becoming the most biographed character in history, the best in recent years being Churchill written by Roy Jenkins. There is also a more recent one by Leo McKinstry called Attlee and Churchill which compares the two of them throughout their lives – two totally differing characters but who had a curious symbiotic relationship with each other.

Whenever someone holds a poll for the greatest Englishman or the most important man of the twentieth century, one can guarantee that Churchill will be in with a shout. This is as it should be for the man who saved the western world from a monstrous tyranny, but there is a downside to him as well. He must incur the charge of being a political chancer and one would not have to search very far into his psyche to find evils like war-mongering and racism, and he would readily admit to and even boast about imperialism, but to a very large extent, he was in this respect a man of his time. But all the down sides of him pale into insignificance in comparison with saving Great Britain from Hitler and the Nazis. All his sins must be forgiven for that.

Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on St Andrews Day 1874, the son of Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie Jerome. They had married as recently as April that year, so it may have been that she was already pregnant when they married, although the story given out is that Winston was born prematurely and that he should have been born in January 1875. One can believe that story if one likes it, but it seems that they had been at it before they were married! How shocking in Victorian Britain! Yet widely practised!

He was a direct descendant of John Churchill, one of the Marlboroughs, who had won so many battles in the War of the Spanish Succession in the first few years of the eighteenth century and his family was undeniably aristocratic. He cannot have been said however to have been particularly fortunate in his parents, and it is hard to avoid the belief that if he had been born of working-class parents in the twenty-first century, a conscientious Social Worker would have been obliged to take young Winston away from them. As it was, he and his younger brother Jack were left more or less entirely in the hands of a conscientious and loving nanny by the name of Elizabeth Everest of whom Winston speaks highly and calls womanie. She is one of those ladies about whom little is known but to whom subsequent generations have every reason to be grateful.

But if history has been kind to Elizabeth Everest, it has been a lot less so to Randolph and Jennie. The tradition that Randolph died in 1895 thanks to cerebral softening brought about by syphilis has been challenged in recent years, but it remains beyond the shadow of any kind of doubt that as parents, they were far from satisfactory with words like hedonistic and sybaritic applied to them.

Sexual overindulgence was, undeniably, a common problem in rich Victorian society, made all the more acute by the general denial that it went on. Modern eyes and ears are perhaps more tolerant and accepting, but what is more difficult to accept is the neglect of their children. The neglect was hidden under the idea that boarding school for good for the young, and toughens them up. It was an almost universal practice at that level of society, but neglect it certainly was, nonetheless. Winston was at a very early age shipped away to Preparatory school and then on to Harrow, (with all its discomforts and brutality) and not without cause does Roy Jenkins talk about a non-relationship with his father, while being a little kinder to his mother in whose context he talks about a semi-relationship.

The irony was that young Winston grew up always trying to prove himself to his father. Long after Randolph met his early death, this idea of trying to at least emulate or even to better his father was a potent one, and such desires did not abate even long after he had reached and bypassed that goal. As for his mother, Winston always said that he loved her – but at a distance! Other people loved Jennie as well – and not at a distance! Even the Prince of Wales, that disreputable roue found himself linked with her now and again.

Lord Randolph Churchill was a politician who was often in the public eye, but never for the best of reasons. He was brash, arrogant, cutting and quixotic, and yet there were times when he could be charming, polite and even urbane with the ability to wrap up a few crazy ideas in fine verbiage. Yet he could not be trusted. He found it hard to make up his mind about things, changed sides in arguments with distressing frequency, and often got himself involved in aspects of politics that he would have been better out of e.g. at one point, he played the Orange card, as it was put, as he attempted to ingratiate himself to the Ulster Unionist faction.

Young Winston did not do particularly well at school with frequent references in his school reports to his lack of attention and to his mind being elsewhere. It is not difficult to work out why. Perhaps he was what we might nowadays call autistic or on the spectrum but there can be little doubt that would have found the rigidity and sheer boredom of the Harrow rote learning something stifling. He hated the brutality of corporal punishment, and the amount of times in later years that he was quoted as saying something about buggery or sodomy is clearly an indication that he had experience of these practices at school. In fact, he would have been a very remarkable boy if he had been able to avoid such things altogether.

He was never great at sports, but there were a few things that he picked up. He loved Latin, once he got past the narrowness of grammar, he was interested in history, not least that of his own family and he also began to pick up the first elements of an English style, both written and spoken, in which he would excel in later life. He would also later on in his life look back on his days at Harrow with a certain amount of affection, saying on one occasion that he would allow and encourage boys to learn Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat. The tradition that he was bottom of the class at school is manifest nonsense. If that had been true, the chap at the top must have been good!

He was happier at Sandhurst which he managed to enter, after several abortive attempts, in September 1893 when he was just a month or so short of his 19th birthday. He stayed there until December 1894. His father was happy about this, one assumes, but Randolph was on his last legs and died the following January at the age of 45. This was obviously a blow to his son, but Winston had now finished Sandhurst and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars.

He saw action in India and Sudan, but it was the Boer War that brought