Compton Verney is currently hosting the Exhibition,
Britain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration, looking back to the time when Harold Macmillan announced that 'most of our people had never had it so good'. A time when everything was new. Modern. The exhibition starts with the Festival of Britain and follows through to 1959, the end of the decade and the dawn of the Sixties and Withnail's 'greatest decade in the history of mankind.'
The emphasis is on design, everything from fabric to furniture and household goods. The exhibition allows us to look with new eyes at everyday items easily overlooked or dismissed as 'ordinary'. We are invited to see that things that we might unthinkingly assess as unexceptional, dull, even ugly, were actually different from anything that had gone before. It was the decade when everything was new. Not new exactly, but the design movements of previous decades in furniture, ceramics, fabrics, architecture were no longer exclusive, they were being made available to Macmillan's newly prosperous, aspirational middle classes.
New, bright, boldly patterned designer materials might be available but women still routinely made their own clothes. Shop bought 'gowns' were for the rich, or for special occasions. Few households were without a sewing machine as this spanking electric machine, array of dress patterns and impressively stocked sewing box illustrates.
New materials, like formica, and a host of mechanical gadgets and appliances from fridges, to washing machines, electric cookers, electric mixers and teasmades were set to make women's lives much easier.
The display shelves themselves are an example of the new design. The appliances arrayed show what housewives aspired to, or desired: a Kenwood Chef, a teasmade, a portable radio, stainless steel toast rack, an electric kettle. The styling was American or Scandinavian. The aptly named 'Maidsaver' with it's multiple cupboards and counter, replaced the larder, scullery and notional 'maid'.
The introduction of a television into more and more living rooms was poised to transform everybody's life. The advent of ITV, launched in 1955, and the 'commercial break' were about to make people want the above illustrated innovations and all the household products that went with them: Persil, Flash, Fairy Liquid. Their slogans and jingles would become part of our consciousness and culture.
All this innovation is neatly illustrated in a series of artfully created rooms, deceptively simple but carefully curated. Meticulous in every detail, each one re-pays close attention. The television, showing the Coronation on a loop, is twinned with a large radio standing rather forlornly in the opposite corner. The previous source of all home entertainment was about to be eclipsed. Many of the exhibits were loned by local people like my friend, Barbara Crowther, items still in use 'part of the furniture'. This adds to the illusion that these are rooms in real homes rather than artefacts in a museum.
They certainly spark much memory and reflection. The rooms murmur with the chatter of re-discovery:
"We had one of those..."
"My mum made me a dress in that material."
'I had one just like that!"
"I remember..."
'I remember' is repeated over and over again, sometimes as an exclamation of recognition, sometimes prefacing a deeper memory, a longer anecdote. The display of bathing suits (stout to our eyes, frilled and ruched) seems particularly redolent, sparking memories of trips to the lido, the seaside, family holidays with sisters and brothers, mum and dad. When I visited the exhibition with friend and fellow author Linda Newbery, we were exclaiming at every turn over one thing or another, adding our voices to those around us.
The lifestyle depicted is neatly summed up by a series of panels from Ladybird books in their pre-ironic incarnation.
Mother is dressed to go shopping in a hat, heels and costume, the little boy is in his school uniform, the little girl in a smart red coat and beret. She carries a basket, a miniature of the one her mother carries. They visit different shops to make purchases. I remember such trips with my mother going from shop to shop, to George Mason's (grocer), Dewhurst (butcher), Simpson's (fishmonger), Warden's (draper & haberdasher), Timothy White and Taylor (chemist), Midland Educational and Twig's Toy Shop. This was how my mother shopped. There were no supermarkets in our town until the 1960s.
My mother went 'up the village' most days, buying little and often. She had to shop like this because we didn't have a fridge. Or most of the shiny gadgets and appliances on display. We were a middle class household but we didn't have a washing machine. My mother made do with a wringer then a spin dryer. An odd fact of British consumerism is that the front loading washing machine, the Bendix as it was known from its manufacturer, was eschewed for the twin tub top loader. Front loading made washing too easy. As it says in the accompanying notes to the exhibition, 'in practice many of these new, much trumpeted machines failed to liberate women from the kitchen, but instead tended to re-enforce gender stereotypes - resulting in more rigid gendering of domestic spaces.' In some ways they made more work, not less. Ease of cleaning and washing meant these chores were performed more often.
This exhibition offers a snapshot of a certain kind of life style. It shows a revolution in design that has one way or another influenced all our lives. The title is Design and Aspiration and, by default, the lifestyle shown is middle class, even upper middle class. Most households, even middle class ones like mine, didn't have all the 'mod cons' on display here and some had nothing at all. The new council houses, much of the design a bargain basement version of what we see here, were not available to all. Slum and back to back housing was still very much with us. Not everybody could aspire to live like this.
As historical novelists, we are always interested in visiting exhibitions that re-create a particular era and this one does it very well. It is important, however, to remember what is not shown here. I lived through the Fifties, so I could fill in some of the gaps. Remember things that no exhibition can show. The cold in winter when few people had central heating. Coal grates, gas fires and single bar electric heaters didn't heat much of the house. Frost on the inside of the windows as well as the out.
And smells. Smoke from those coal fires and steam trains, people smoking indoors. I don't specifically remember, but its not hard to imagine the body odour. Baths rather than showers. Some houses still without bathrooms. Talcum powder at best, the use of deodorants was not widespread. Sounds that are lost, like the early morning rattle and whine of the milk float. The noise, or lack of it, in a world with far less traffic, fewer aircraft, ubiquitous machines in cafes, musak in every shop. If we can remember the era, we have to remember hard. If not, we have to imagine if we are to re-create how people really lived then.
Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com
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