Fragment 6: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
Life takes a better turn, including my introduction to great literature and science fiction, but also brings a perplexing mystery related to some naughty magazines.
Image: Space fiction, 1950s style (more detail at end).
Next stop was the city of Leicester in the English East Midlands. To recap, this meant that, by my tenth year, I had lived in Plymouth, Truro, Lincoln, Odstone and, now, Leicester. If travel broadens the mind I must have been getting a fair amount of practice.
This move, caused when the death of the farmer’s son destroyed his parents’ world and will, must have been made in a hurry because, for the first few months, we lived in one bedroom of the house of the minister of the Fosse Road Methodist Church. There was a double bed for George (yes, he was out of hospital at the time) and Nellie and a sort of cot-bed alongside it for me. Some semblance of privacy was provided by a sheet that floated between their bed and mine, suspended from a washing line strung up between two picture rails. Mind you, the likelihood of my childish innocence being destroyed by any act of lust between them was, I estimate, zero.
Mercifully, this claustrophobic set-up was short-lived. A few months later, somehow or other, we ended up in a tiny terraced house and, miracle of miracles, George was still out of hospital and actually got a job in the post room at the headquarters of the British Shoe Corporation.
The house was in a dense maze of Midlands- and Northern-style back-to-back terraces. Two tiny downstairs rooms, plus kitchen, and three up. Out in the miniscule space at the back was a lavatory (thankfully with mains sewerage connection, so less odoriferous than the equivalent we had just left) and a coal house. Nellie and George took the front bedroom. I had the back bedroom over the kitchen. The room between, bare-boarded and empty save for a washstand with jug and bowl, constituted ‘the bathroom’.
In this room I remember experimenting with electro-magnetism. Well, ‘experimenting’ is a tad overstating it: I coiled stripped electric flex around an iron magnet and shoved the bare ends into an electric socket. Fortunately, it was the fuse that blew rather than me.
The school arrangements were quite different from the twice-a-day walk-through-all-weathers-plus-bus-ride that had framed schooldays in the Leicestershire countryside. Here in the city, school was just around the corner, a short walk away. And life at Charnwood Street Junior School started well and got better. In my first year there, Miss Wilson taught her 36 little charges (counting from the class year photograph) in her class kindly and well. Then, for The 11 Plus year, a miracle happened – I moved into Mr Dowling’s class.
Introduced in 1944, The 11 Plus was an exam that all children took at age 10 or 11 to determine what type of senior school they would attend. Depending upon the result, a child would be allocated to a grammar school, or a secondary modern school, or a technical school. Grammar schools provided an academic education, secondary modern schools took a less academic approach and focused more on practical work, and technical schools focused exclusively on craft skills of various kinds.
It was all based on IQ. Indeed, The 11 Plus examination was an IQ test … and therein lay both its strength and its weakness, as I shall endeavour to outline. Indeed, this is the basis of the ‘social experiment’ part of my title for this series. Let me explain.
Merit or equity?
The Second World War had a profound influence on British society, resulting in a coming-together of people from right across the spectrum. As historian John Charmley writes:
Spirits - and expectations - rose with the fact of victory. It had been the first war in history where the home front had been as dangerous as the battlefield. … War enforced the roughest egalitarianism of all - an equality of sacrifice before a common danger.1
Post-war, this resulted in a spontaneous recognition of the fact that the war had involved everyone: people from every class and situation, all ‘doing their bit’ and sharing the privations to win against the common enemy. As a result, many of the rigid class divisions that had, hitherto, kept many talented but ‘lower class’ people on the lower rungs of the ladder were at least temporarily eased or, even, swept away.
A former business partner of mine, John Doff, told me of his experiences. Born in 1928, John was brought up in Casablanca, where his father was head of a Unilever import/export business, and educated in South Africa. Then, in 1949, he arrived in London and got a job at London Press Exchange (Lopex), an advertising agency in St. Martin’s Lane. “All sorts of people were getting work there,” he explained. “Many of the old divisions had vanished because wartime had demonstrated that talent was distributed widely, rather than on a class basis. The advertising sector benefited hugely from this.”
Perhaps it was this spirit that motivated the Churchill-led wartime government to pass new legislation in 1944, before the end of the war, to bring in The 11 Plus. All the more ironic, then, that by 1969 the exam had been cancelled on the grounds that, in today’s language, it was elitist. Opponents argued that The 11 Plus gave unfair advantage to those who were awarded grammar school places: these people, it was argued, benefited from a disproportionate share of the available funds and would, in any case, ‘pull up the ladder’ after themselves to prevent others enjoying the same benefits.
This ‘push-pull’ thinking has dogged our discourse ever since and, right now, selection on the basis of merit is under ferocious assault from those who promote ‘equity’. Equity, by the way, is defined as ‘An administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal’ which, as James Lindsay points out, sounds an awful lot like socialism - but with social and cultural capital added in to the mix alongside economic and material capital.
I shall return to this topic at some point because it is a focal issue in the present. But, for now, let’s return to my story. Back when I was of the appropriate age, The 11 Plus was still in use. And to prepare for it, I was gifted Mr Dowling as my form teacher.
Life opens up for the first time
Mr Dowling was wonderful. And I responded. Ironically, one of the greatest events took place when I was off school, sick with the very unpleasant affliction of mumps. Mr Dowling came round to our house to see how I was and brought with him a copy of Oliver Twist. The degree of association was remarkable. I became Oliver Twist. I related to his orphan existence. I experienced the pain of his poverty and misuse. I longed for the arrival of my Mr. Brownlow. He never came, of course, but what was to remain was a love of literature.
The thing was, I really didn’t have to try at junior school. I could just do the reading, writing and arithmetic. That’s not boastfulness or pomposity: my ability to do the tasks seemed innate. No effort required. I didn’t understand it at the time, but this ‘advantage’ meant that I didn’t learn how to learn. Consequently, a few years later when I reached the limit of my inbuilt capacities in some subjects the need to actually apply myself came as a hell of a shock.
The ‘automatic know how’ advantage led to my being appointed paper monitor because it didn’t seem to make any difference to my progress at this stage if I was absent from numerous lessons. So it was that I was able to slope off on my own to an isolated ground-floor room to delve into the piles of newspapers and magazines that parents donated to the school. My task was to sort the materials into bales for collection by the people who took them away in exchange for funds.
It was a matter of wonder to me that, tucked in with the mountains of papers to be sorted, there were some naughty magazines. Tame as all get out by today’s standards, no doubt, Health & Efficiency magazine was a real eye opener to a 1955 nine- and ten-year-old. Here, I found, were pictures of naked women. Wow! This was something I had never seen before. However, it was also deeply confusing because the pubic area was always airbrushed. What the ...?
Other extra-curricular activities had to do with my friendship with the two brothers, one my age and one a little older, who lived in the house that backed on to ours. The family was a little better off than us – they actually had a television. That said, my favourite programme of the time was on the radio: Journey Into Space featuring Jet Morgan, Doc Matthews, Mitch Mitchell and Lemmy Barnet. The fifties was a golden decade of science fiction and conjecture about rocketry and space travel. We followed it all closely, learned all we could about the solar system and built model rockets ad nauseam.
I recently managed to get my hands on a copy of a book that I loved around that time, Tas and the Space Machine by E.C. Eliott. The story centres on “the huge Woomera launching grounds” in Australia. From 1947, Woomera actually was the rocket development site for Britain and its Commonwealth. Although the Allies’ victory in the Second World War had nigh on bankrupted Britain, there was still the sense that we were a significant world power, and the development of rocketry was a forward-looking expression of that power.
Tas and the Space Machine is a simple tale of good and evil, a re-presentation of the ethics that had prevailed when Britain stood firm, and enlisted support, in the fight against Nazism. Tas (short for Tasmanian) and his friends hide aboard a new ‘space machine’, the P.X.Q. When it comes under attack from a wicked aggressor, they help defend it. Afterwards, when Tas asks the pilot, “Did you know they would attack us, sir? he replies:
I didn’t know for sure, although I had an idea they might because they wouldn’t identify themselves, and any space ship which refuses to do that is up to no good. ... I don’t like guns and I don’t like destruction, but sometimes you have to meet fire with fire.2
Good Boys’ Own stuff and a further reinforcement of the moral stance that dominated my childhood.
Another aspect of the same moral issue was covered by the movie Invaders from Mars3. George took me to see it when it was shown in Britain in 1954. I was riveted. In the film, a young boy called David sees a Martian flying saucer land near his home. David’s father, called George, is one of an increasing number of people who are captured and dehumanized by the Martians. I’m sure it was the coincidence of given names for these key characters that grabbed me more than the metaphor for communist infiltration … that and the fact that young David is instrumental in saving his parents, his town and, yes, the world. I was hooked. Plus, of course, the fact that it all fitted with the outer space obsession.
So, for a time, the solar system (1950s version with nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto), rocketry and associated technologies were top of our agenda but, at the ages we were, you have little patience and, one day, one of the brothers suggested that space travel was still too remote so we should be more practical and focus on aircraft instead. Overnight, I became an aircraft aficionado.
This new passion was demonstrated and reinforced by my joining the local Air Training Corps, Leicester being home to 1(F) Founder’s Squadron. At that stage this was, if I remember right, a one-evening-a-week commitment, learning about all matters to do with flight and aircraft. I also bought as many Airfix plastic model kits as I could, sometimes at extraordinary emotional cost. I remember when Airfix launched their biggest, best kit yet, the Lancaster bomber, that cost 7/6d (37.5 pence in today’s money). George and Nellie really, really could not afford it but I made their lives a misery until they borrowed the money. To this very day I feel guilty about that. George also bought me a bike, second-hand from the brothers’ family. It cost 10/- (50p) which he paid in four monthly instalments of 2/6 (12.5p, aka half a crown).
And, oh yes, in school I made friends with the class toughie, Dickie Knowles. This apparently amused Mr Dowling so much that he commented about it to Nellie. It wasn’t that Dickie was particularly aggressive – he just had that kind of presence that deterred folks from giving him or his friends any aggro. I was a fairly timid kid and this association afforded me protection.
I spent time at Dickie’s house, a few streets away. I remember the sewing machine and big bobbins of thread in their tiny front room where his Mum did overlocking on piecework for a local hosiery manufacturer. So, you see, working from home is not a 21st century, post-pandemic creation - it was alive and well in the 1950s.
I remember, too, our playing on the flat roof of their coalhouse. On one occasion when our galleon was in full sail crossing the Spanish Main we were intercepted by marauding pirates and forced to fight them off. This energetic defence, to which I was entirely mentally committed, caused me to fall overboard or, more literally, to fall off the roof of the coalhouse.
Dazed, I got up and looked around. Still up on the roof, Dickie pointed at my legs. I looked down. My right leg was covered in blood. Then came the pain. Dickie was despatched to fetch Nellie while his mum tied a cloth around my right knee. When Nellie arrived, I was hoisted astride my 10-bob bike and wheeled to our doctor’s surgery, a trail of blood marking our progress.
The surgery was a room in the doctor’s home. He was an avuncular, comforting chap. He sat me in his leather chair and told Nellie to put her hands on my shoulders to keep me as still as possible. Uncovered and cleaned, the wound was revealed to be around 2 inches (5 cm) long on my right knee. The cut was spread open, the leaf-shaped gash leaving the kneecap visible. The doctor poured a white anaesthetic powder into the wound and stitched it up. This constituted mid-1950s emergency surgery. Then, with a fresh wound dressing in place, I was released once again into the wild, although I wasn’t up to fighting off pirates for a few weeks while it healed.
Image: the image, by A. Bruce Cornwell, is from E.C. Eliott’s Tas and the Space Machine, 1955.
Thanks for reading.
Charmley, John. The Post-War Forties, essay within England: 1945-2000 (Folio Society 2001)
Eliott, E.C. Tas and the Space Machine (1955)
Invaders From Mars (1953) Director: William Cameron Menzies.