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The Skylon, designed by Powell & Moya with Felix Samuely, at the 1951 Festival of Britain. To the very left is the edge of the Dome of Discovery. These modernist icons contrast with the ornate high Victorian style of Whitehall Court in the background.
1945 – A Brave New World
In the 1945 general election, the British people made an amazing decision: they turned their backs on Churchill, the great war leader, and voted Labour – for the party that promised to bring a new world into being, despite the country being almost bankrupt by the war. The gap between rich and poor began to narrow, probably for the first time in modern history, and a progressive post-war consensus was established that survived till the late 1970s.
My parents were excited by the possibilities of this new beginning, and the politics and policies of the day were discussed, sometimes loudly, at every family meal. Unlike many doctors, my father was an enthusiast for the Beveridge Report and the establishment of the National Health Service. The politicians of that era – Bevan, Attlee, Bevin and Morrison – still stand out for me as heroes of modern society.
James Chuter-Ede, who was Home Secretary in that government, was a patient of my father’s. Chuter-Ede and his wife had no children of their own, and he took me under his wing, taking me out in his little boat The Brown Duck on the Thames near Hampton Court. I still have some of the bird-spotting books he gave me. He was the most charming, low-key and unpretentious politician I have ever met and I remember how unhappy he was to be moved from Education to the Home Office in 1945 (where he had to oversee capital punishment, against his every principle). Together with my parents he sparked in me a lifelong commitment to progressive politics. At my school elections I stood for the Labour Party – always an unpopular position in an English private school – winning about two votes.
If politics was progressive at the time, England was still reserved about culture; people bridled at the word. It was seen as something alien, faintly suspicious. Modernity in the visual arts was seen as particularly suspect. In a continental doctor’s surgery, you would see a reproduction of a Picasso or Braque in the waiting room. In an English surgery, you would be lucky to see a sentimental watercolour of a landscape. The country seemed starved of visual stimulus. We didn’t lack the artists – Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Patrick Heron, Tony Caro, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson – but they had limited recognition. It would take twenty or thirty years before Nick Serota at the Tate, Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths and Charles Saatchi would open up contemporary British art to the British people, and to the world.
My parents didn’t share these reservations – they were excited by the modern movement and inspired by what the great Australian art critic Robert Hughes would later call ‘the shock of the new’. But I remember the public outcry that greeted the Picasso exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945; the newspaper critics declaring that donkeys could paint better with their tails, and rolling out all the usual criticisms levelled by those who can’t – or won’t – understand modern art. Modern design was also seen as something foreign, as were grand city plans and there was some truth in this. British architecture had benefited from an influx of brilliant foreigners – exiles from the Bauhaus, architects like Gropius, Lubetkin, Mendelsohn and Chermayeff – in the 1930s and after the war. But there was no modern furniture or even clothing. It was as if everything had to be rooted in the distant past.
Still, the spirit of utility and austerity was starting to stimulate British modernism, and bring its architecture into the mainstream, unlocking creativity in the design of everything from dresses, to furniture, to health centres. Everything had to be constructed with minimal materials, which forced designers to eliminate the showy ornamentation of Gothic revival, Rococo and Baroque architecture. And there was a new sense of the possibility of creating a better society, and a small but growing appetite for the cleaner lines of a contemporary world. So, while England was still grey, the seeds of modernism were being sown, mingling with a more conservative and romantic tradition. It found an early expression at the Festival of Britain in 1951, where my mother and I marvelled at the way that art and science came together in the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon.
The growing influence of modernism was underpinned by an optimistic belief, amid all the scarcity, that communal action could create a fairer world – winning the peace as it had the war, building homes, hospitals and schools. The war had changed society (rationing had actually improved public health), unifying the British socially and politically in a way that would have seemed unthinkable in the 1930s. The modernist style was an expression of a deeper social purpose, letting light and air into a dark and dusty world, creating healthier places for a new generation.
Rediscovering Italy
As soon as the war ended, my parents and I began to travel to Italy every summer to visit our family in Venice, Florence and Trieste. We were hungry for the culture that seemed still to be rationed in England, rediscovering cities that I could barely remember from my childhood. At first we travelled in buses, as the war had devastated much of the continent’s rail infrastructure, then we took trains.
The first place I visited with my parents was Venice, on the way to see my grandparents in Trieste, and I remember very well thinking, as we trailed round church after church and gallery after gallery, ‘I suppose one day all this will make sense.’ Even then I knew that, however boring the paintings seemed to me as a teenager, here was something to file away, rather than to ignore completely. I rediscovered my Italian family, staying with my aunt in Florence, my uncle in Rome, my grandparents in Trieste and my cousin Ernesto in Milan. In Florence, my father was a wonderful guide with a deep knowledge of the buildings and their history, and he would walk the streets pointing out highlights to us, as I do now with my children and grandchildren. My grandfather did the same in Trieste.
At the age of 17, I began to travel independently, hitch-hiking and jumping trains. In Italy, my aunts and uncles would give me enough money to carry on to other relatives’ houses. I was adventurous; I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and dodged ticket collectors by hanging on the outside of trains; I spent a night in the cells in San Sebastián after being arrested by the Franco-ist Guardia Civil for swimming naked in the sea.
One adventure nearly tipped over into disaster. After I had left school, I went back to Venice with a friend who had the self-explanatory name ‘Big John’. We had checked into a hostel and were travelling to the old city on a vaporetto. Suddenly the captain started shouting at Big John to get off the boat, then I was being jostled by the crowd and one man in particular who seemed to be trying to push me into the water. I fended him off without much difficulty, and when the police met the boat I assumed they would be taking him away for his unprovoked attack.
On the quayside, my attacker really went for me, and I landed a punch on his jaw (my schoolboy prowess at boxing showing itself). He went down on the ground, and we were escorted to the police station. After a while, they took my passport, asked me to sign a statement and said we could go.
When I went back to collect my passport the next day, however, I was thrown into jail. I was accused of groping my attacker’s wife on the boat at the same time as fighting with her husband, who now claimed he had lost teeth as a result (this, the magistrate explained, was a permanent injury, making the accusation more serious). So I passed the night in a cell with two prostitutes, an 80-year-old man who had spent most of his life inside, and two cigarette smugglers.
The following morning, I was taken to see a magistrate, and sent off in manacles across Piazza San Marco in a long line of prisoners, then to a squalid prison on one of the outlying islands. I was there for two weeks in solitary confinement, only able to see a crack of light from a high window, without even a belt to hold up my trousers.
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