London History

We read an awful lot of what life was like in the East End during World War 2, but not so much about the immediate aftermath. John Hector sets that right in his new book, ‘After 1945′. Last week we saw John struggling to keep an East End steel company going under enemy bombing. He was to find peacetime also as great a challenge.

With plenty of demand for the luxuries (and necessities) lacking during the war, plus a flood of returning servicemen and women, factories looked forward to working at full tilt. But the UK economy was badly broken, and there was no returning to normal. The East End was suffering from a chronic shortage of housing, and the reuniting of families saw a swift population boom. Prefabs, still seen, dotted around London, were a quick and cheap solution, and they could be built on swiftly cleared bombsites, so families could remain close to home. High-rise flats were to be the longer-term solution, though disasters such as Ronan Point would sour that idea.

Furniture was needed for these new homes, but materials were scarce, so the Government set standards for ‘Utility Furniture’, which swept away weight and fussiness in favour of designs that were remarkably minimal - and which are fashionable today. And if you wanted something fancier, as John required for the boardroom at the works, it was there if you knew where to look. The delivery arrived at dead of night, with £100 on the books and £900 as a cash payment - an astonishing sum.

Feeding the workers who manned the factories was a major challenge, and the London County Council set up ‘Londoners’ Meals Centres’, subsidised canteens to provide food off the ration. A shilling and ninepence bought the fuel to get a day’s work done. The eateries became known as ‘British Restaurants’ and continued well into the fifties and eventual demise of the ration.

The Black Market was as big as it had been during wartime. Though frowned upon, the Spivs and Wideboys who ran the rackets could argue that they were doing an essential job, efficient as they were at getting goods direct to the customer … by any means. Many tins of food were knocked off on their way to barracks. This euphemistically entitled ’surplus’ would often be unlabelled. The mystery of opening these cans which had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’ or were ‘water damaged’ was whether they would contain pineapple chunks, carrots or something impossible to identify.

Many things were changing for the better too, a shining beacon being the establishment of the NHS, born on 5 July 1948. Diseases which had once ravaged the East End, such as measles and scarlet fever, were now held at bay through inoculations of youngsters. Now, nobody had to fear getting sick because of the expense of seeing the doctor. There were improved old age pensions and, as the fifties wore on, the slow appearance of new consumer goods. Now families had their first television or Dansette record player. Even, undreamed of luxury, a motorcar such as the new compact Ford Anglias and Morris 1000s.

The mines were to be nationalised too. It’s difficult to imagine now how big a role coal played in London life. But with every house and every factory running on the stuff, hundreds of coal merchants dotted around the city, and London living under a pall of pea-souper fogs, it was an ever present.

John’s sympathies were with the miners. As a boy during the General Strike he had watched the miners march down to London, and seen the heavy handed use of troops to break things up. He had tipped two pennies into the cap of a striking miner and, on a school trip years later, had gone down a working Derbyshire mine. Nationalisation came, though, just as the industry headed into decline. Nuclear power and pit closures would be the story of the following decades.

Nationalisation of the railways comes even less well out of John’s analysis, with a bureaucratic British Rail struggling to make a profit from the huge and rambling network it was trying to knit together. Brutal cuts would ensue in the early sixties under Dr Beeching, and whole swatches of Britain would be left without railway lines.

But it’s over the nationalisation of the steel industry that John really feels the Government got it wrong. Steel was John’s business, and he watched aghast as the British Steel Corporation, launched in 1967, set out on a 32-year programme of underinvestment and neglect, culminating in its buying-out by Dutch company Corus in 1999. The docks too were looking like a sunset industry after the war, and the business steadily moved out to Tilbury and Southend.

From Collis Browne and coke fires, to the internet and the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, John Hector views it all with fascination and good humour, though these days through sadly failing eyesight. His new book offers a fascinating first-person glimpse of those ‘forgotten years’ after World War 2.