After 1945, by John Hector, part 1
February 22, 2008
Born in Docklands the end of the First World War, John ‘Jack’ Hector was perfectly placed to see the effects of two world wars on the East End. As an infant, John suffered a serious injury that left him with a paralysis that still affects him today, in his early nineties. It kept him from active service in World War II, working in the East End steel industry, and gave him a unique perspective on the ‘land fit for heroes’ that Britons expected in the wake of the war.
In his new book ‘After 1945′, John describes the gradual sense of disillusion that spread through the East End as - far from a brave new world, or at least a return to the relative affluence of the pre-War years - Londoners had to endure privation, upheaval, and another nine long years of rationing.
In December 1930, just after his 14th birthday, John began work at WB Bawn, a long-established cylinder and tank makers in Limehouse. Like the majority in those days, he started at the bottom, as office boy to the works manager and assistant to the works foreman. It was to be a long apprenticeship, and in 1937 he moved to Fraser and Fraser, in the same line of business with a whopping pay hike of a pound a week. John was now earning £3, 10s a week, plus a bonus each March, and was understudying the Buyer and Transport Manager, who was coming up for retirement. A difficult job in peacetime, but things were about to get much harder.
First came the declaration of war in September of 1939. Most of the staff moved out to the Home Counties, with John ducking and diving to keep the operation turning over. It was a strange time, with hostilities declared but no sign of action. That was to change with the end of the ‘phoney war’in May 1940.
The heroes weren’t just overseas. The docks and their factories were a prime target for Luftwaffe bombs, and John had to somehow fulfill orders while the quarter-mile-long workshops suffered continual bombing. Government money helped to rebuild the works in 1945, and Frasers looked forward to getting back to business.
Easier said than done. Orders flowed in for ‘boilers for the tea and coconut oil plantations … for mooring buoys from Trinity House … orders for the Turkish Admiralty’ and many others. But getting the raw materials was tough; rationing for steel, at least, had been removed. ‘Bribery and not so much what you know but who you know’ became vital tools of the trade. To make things harder, peacetime had brought a vast new cadre of bureaucrats, with new rules on what, how and how much of various items could be manufactured. A devastating fire, razing the works’ stores, only piled on the pressure.
Supply was the problem, not demand, and many companies went bust with order books full to bursting. Frasers survived though, and in 1954 John was plucked from his role to be Buyer for the parent company Brown and Tawse. The demand for steel and the possibilities that brought were huge: the whole of Britain was being rebuilt, with a huge housebuilding programme, whole new towns planned, and civil servants getting involved in planning every aspect, from furniture design, to nationalising the railways and the mines, to creating a new health service.
But while the public were only looking forward, and beginning to impatiently wonder why rationing of food was still stubbornly in place, the Government was looking nervously across Europe. The last thing on East Enders minds was another war, they had endured two in two generations, but the new Labour administration had severe doubts about Britain’s erstwhile Russian allies.
Much of the money that Britons assumed was going into rebuilding their country was actually going into fortifying it against World War 3. The fear was that the Russians wouldn’t stop with the Eastern Bloc, but would sweep across Europe, not stopping until Britain was invaded. So started the ‘Cold War’, and millions spent on developing the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell, Oxfordshire. While East Enders were waiting for the end of the ration, the Government was developing a bigger, better bomb, and it was to make London life very hard for a few years yet.
Next week: After 1945, how the peacetime unfolded.
After 1945 by John Hector, published by Melrose Books, ISBN 9781906050368, hardback, £12.99.
