Family Britain, 1951-1957 Read Online Free PDF

bowled by Hazell. The future actor Milton Johns, then a Bristol schoolboy, was taken to the match by his father, complete with ‘a flask of tea and enough tomato sandwiches to feed half the crowd’. Owing to three changes of bus they arrived too late, ‘Oh dear’ being his father’s restrained comment on seeing the scoreboard. ‘He had slipped through my fingers and was lost forever, leaving me with a lifelong conviction that one should never go back, but always forward,’ reflected Johns over half a century later. ‘Did Wally Hammond feel the same, as he mounted those long pavilion steps that day? Maybe, or should I say probably?’5
    There were no twilight shadows for Margaret Rose, 21 later that month. Whole packs of reporters pursued the glamorous, vivacious, fairy-tale princess to Balmoral, where their lack of access did not prevent torrents of gushing, breathless prose about the latest developments. ‘Yes, HE WAS on the 9.46,’ started the despatch from Mamie Baird in the
Daily Express
on the actual morning of her birthday. ‘He’ was 24-year-old Billy Wallace, who had arrived to join the royal party having ‘at the last minute changed his plan to drive all the way from London to Balmoral in a dashing red sports car’. Next day the paper’s Eve Perrick gave the lowdown:
    The Princess’s birthday party was such a cosy affair.
    After dinner – grouse again – at Balmoral Castle, the green carpets were rolled back, the radiogram moved in, and Princess Margaret’s grand birthday ball began.
    After all the scarcely suppressed excitement there was no shiny dance floor swept by the trains and trailing skirts of romantic gowns, no famous bands, no floodlit gardens, no coronets, and no fuss.
    Just high spirits and friendly fun, with the two Princesses, their best friends, and some of the Duke of Edinburgh’s cousins participating . . .
    But
The Times
, in its leader to mark the occasion, warned against a new intrusiveness – ‘having wished her many happy returns of the day and been told how in general she spent it, her fellow-citizens would be glad if the family party were left undisturbed’ – before concluding that ‘her future will be followed with kindly good wishes by all, in every corner of the Commonwealth, who know the priceless value of a happy home background’.6
    A month earlier, on 17 July, illness had prevented the King from opening the Steel Company of Wales’s huge new continuous-strip mill at Port Talbot, though he did send a message heralding its contribution to ‘our ability to maintain our historic position in a free world’. Instead, Hugh Gaitskell, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the honours – appropriately enough, given that the steel industry had recently been taken into public ownership. The site had previously been some 500 acres of marshland and sand dunes, and it was claimed that the conversion into steelworks was the biggest single project in Britain since the railway age. ‘Today the 200-ton ladle was seen to pour metal from one of the eight new open-hearth steel furnaces into moulds,’ reported the man from
The Times
at the opening ceremony. ‘The 20-ton ingots, still brilliantly red, were run one by one down to the slabbing mill to be rolled into slabs. The process was controlled by a flick of the finger and a movement of the foot.’ It was a great day for the locals, not only in terms of future employment prospects, as Gaitskell led a party of some 1,200 luminaries, including (in the words of the
Port Talbot Guardian
) ‘the most fabulous names in British industry’. But steel was not quite everything, and that Tuesday evening, at a meeting of the Port Talbot Borough Council, there was a disquieting moment as Councillor Idwal Hopkins alleged that burial forms were being issued incompletely. He cited a recent case: ‘The husband of the family had died, and the funeral had been all-male. The only son had gone away for six weeks following the funeral, and he