The Green & Pleasant Land

Harry Leslie Smith on post war austerity and the fight by the working class to build a Welfare State between 1945-1951

In the winter of 1948, a post-war darkness felled Britain, and happiness, like sweets, was tightly rationed. Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, The Blitz, The D-Day Landings at Normandy, and even Churchill’s V for victory were now past. They were like points of light flickering in the night sky, distant and far away. These events now belonged to history and, in our present age of austerity, only gave comfort to Britain’s wealthier classes.   

 The beer started to grow stale for people like me in the working class not long after the articles of absolute surrender were signed by the Nazis, and the troops demobbed. We had lost too much in the war to return to our shriven lives of 1939. We believed that it was time our Kingdom shared some of its wealth and power with those that had fought the hardest to defend our island during its dark struggle for survival. 

In the General Election held in July 1945, we sent Churchill and his tory government on their bikes and voted Labour. We put a boot up their tory arses for allowing us, the working class, to endure famine during the Great Depression. We rejoiced in the change in government because it gave us hope that maybe an era for ordinary people had begun.  

We believed Prime Minister Attlee could change Britain. We believed a Labour government could make a new country for us. One where people like me born on the wrong side of the tracks, the slums, or near the mills and factories of industrialised Britain finally got our rightful share of our nation's prosperity. 

But there was a problem because by 1948; Britain, like Babylon, the Hittites, Athens, or Rome, had its chips. Britain’s moment of greatness, like a January’s twilight light, had faded into the stratosphere. We were haemorrhaging in red ink and past due notices, and our debts were not to be forgiven or forgotten by those who lent us the credit to combat evil. Ordinary British people accepted that the debt had to be paid and tightened belts that were already near their last notch. Post-war austerity measures were introduced, and rationing of food continued as if the fight against Hitler had never stopped. We were still in it all together. Well, at the least- the working classes; and even lower middle classes were in it all together. They accepted peacetime material privations- under the knowledge that a Welfare State was being constructed as it ensured our aspirations for a better future. 

But the entitled hated the demise of Britain as an empire, and they hated the taxes levied against them to pay for the construction of a more equal nation. They hated most of all, that pragmatic socialism was slowly scraping away their inherited unearned privileges that for centuries they had thieved from the people.  

In 1948, after almost three years of Labour government, conservatives, press barons and toffs were incensed over every alteration Attlee made to better the fabric of our society. They couldn't abide by the nationalising of key industries or the construction of public housing that didn't enrich the landlord class. They were even outraged by the arrival of the NHS because to them, good healthcare was a benefit exclusive to those who could afford it not miners or their families who subsisted on fifty pounds a year.  

I had left school at fourteen but I knew that three years after World War Two, we were not even close to becoming a country where the people mattered more than the wealth of the few.  

So, despite the revolutionary talk, from the green benches in the House of Commons, about giving the common man his due, I feared it would never arrive for me and my kind in any lasting measure.

 I knew the ruling classes had spent the last thousand years building their power, wealth and control over politics. One election win for us wasn't going to wrest control from them and put it into the hands of ordinary people from my background. It was not in the interests of the moguls, the aristocrats, or the royals to surrender their wealth to the masses to build an egalitarian society. No matter what bills or laws Labour passed or were about to pass, in the House, the ruling class was going to bitterly oppose it as they believed God had showered them with the right to rule us. 

Perhaps, I should have been more optimistic about the forty-eighth year of the twentieth century. But even though I was about to turn twenty-five, I felt very old. Hunger as a child and living through a world war in my teens and early twenties will do that to you. It made me suspect that a worker's life will always go pear-shaped in a society that values profit before the rights of ordinary workers. 

It was an uncertain time for me. My seven-year stint in the air force was slated to end in March, of that year. I stayed in the forces after the war ended because I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. The most reasonable option seemed to me was to stick with what I knew best. And, that was being an air traffic controller in the RAF. The service felt like more of a family than my own because, in it, I was guaranteed food and lodging, something that my kin always had trouble securing.   

I volunteered for the RAF in 1941 when I turned eighteen. I didn't join up out of patriotism, love of King and Country or a burning need to defeat fascism. I did it because I wanted to get as far away from the shit life I lived as a boy and a teen at the wrong end of society. I wanted to run as far away from remembering hunger and family tragedies I witnessed growing up rough and ready in Barnsley, Bradford and then Halifax.

I was lucky in the RAF because my war was a good one. Outside of the odd plaster for a shaving cut, I walked away from that most terrible war without injury. I never came close to paying the ultimate sacrifice for my nation. But it had never been requested of me. Had it been, I am not sure if I would have quickly jumped to the request because I believed I owed my country little after the way it treated my kind since time immemorial. 

I was one of the lucky ones. I only had to remit to the nation my feet to march, my lungs to roar like a lion when a sergeant-major beckoned, and my right hand to salute officers, NCOs, big dogs, and telephone poles when I had too much to drink.  

It was only near the war’s end that someone in the Air Ministry decided it was about bloody time that my unit got its feet wet, and we were packed off to Europe. We landed in Belgium and made our way to Holland before ending up in Hamburg Germany. Our task was to take control of liberated axis airfields and make them operational for the allied war effort.

There is no proper explanation as to why I outlived the war while millions of other young men and women became extinct. One thing was for certain: it had nothing to do with divine grace. I was sure that if God existed, He’d be better at doing sums. It just didn’t make sense for my worth to the cosmos to be greater than twenty million Russians, six million Jews, a million Roma people or fifty-five thousand lads in bomber command. So much love, laughter, and potential were extinguished during the war that it was evident to me that God was of no bloody use to any of us mortals.

My survival was just the computations of a blind and amoral universe. Still, if a ripple in the solar wind disturbed a proton, bumped an atom and propelled good luck my way; I wasn’t going to complain. Being alive and not being maimed after the rivers of Europe flowed with the blood of both the innocent and the guilty taught me that for most, life was all too brief and usually painfully unfair. I survived the war by random luck, but I knew that peace in post-war Britain was a different matter. There, despite a Labour Government, the cards were still stacked against me because I had been born into an unhappy and desperately poor family who had no connection to anyone of influence or dosh. We were on our own in Tory times and until the Welfare State was built firm and strong in Labour times too.  

Anyone who knew my parents and our early circumstances would agree that I started out life a tuppence short when it came to good fortune. Even my mother said I was buggered from the day I was born when it came to luck. Since we had so little of it, she advised me to,

“Grab it while you can because, for every day of sunshine, there shall be three that piss upon thy head.” 

My mum held many incorrect opinions about the world, but I was willing to concede to her the wisdom in knowing that bad luck favours the poor. It was something, she understood all too well as we came from Yorkshire’s harsh and unforgiving South and West Counties. 

It was a region abundant in coal mines, cotton mills, and workhouses. T.B., rickets and black lung trolled the dirty cramped slums and overpopulated terrace houses of my youth. As a boy, I had become all too familiar with the holy trinity for the poor: the rent collector, the money lender, and the bailiff.

I suppose it was only natural that after the war ended, I wanted something better for myself than the hand-to-mouth existence of my parents. I didn’t want anything extravagant; I simply believed I deserved more out of my time on this Earth than flogging my Sunday best at the pawn brokers because there was nothing to eat in the larder.

 I wanted my post-war life to have élan and a touch of stardust, and I didn’t think that was too much to ask considering that I had endured the Great Depression and survived the Second Great War. I was a young man that needed a purpose, but above all else, I wanted to find someone to love. I wanted my life to have meaning, and I believed the only way it was worth living was with a woman who would return my affections with equal ardour. I hoped a kiss from my true love, a look, or an embrace from her might reveal to me the enigma of my existence. 

Since I was an adolescent, I’d pursued love, but until I was stationed, in Hamburg, Germany, I’d never found my heart’s equal. It was there I encountered a woman who became the greatest love of my life. She was a German named Elfriede Edelmann, and she was unique. I was smitten the moment I set eyes, upon her when I encountered her at a black market bartering silverware for food. I thought her rare personality and movie star good looks were created from magic rather than from her topsy-turvy home life. Eventually, we became lovers, and she inspired me to do great things with my limited talents. 

At the beginning of our courtship, she loved me with the ambivalence of a woman jilted by the cruelty of the era we occupied. After the brutality of the Second World War, hesitant love was perhaps the most two people from opposing sides of the conflict could expect from each other. 

She was known to her intimates as Friede and to me as Luv. Being in her company was like being in dazzling warm sunlight after a lifetime spent in a land of cold, winter rain. I was dangerously infatuated with her. I was besotted and entranced by her physical beauty, her style, and her individuality. But it was her profound emotions and thoughts that trapped me for good. I was love-struck and wanted her to be my life’s companion. 

Exactly what Friede made of me, her Tommy boyfriend was more of an enigma. Some days I was her lover and, on other occasions, I was her provider, and sometimes I was just her friend and confidant. Living under Nazism had damaged her. It had warped the frame that encased her spirit. 

Friede recognized the harm done to her and her generation. 

" I lived in a country where we feared the midnight knock of the Gestapo against our door. The way; I grew up makes me suspicious about people and their true intent. Sometimes, I feel ashamed that I survived this war. I hate my country. But I still love so much what is Germany for me- like my friends, my foster family and even my mother. I need someone who will love me without reservation and be patient as I learn to live free of the Nazis." 

I was persistent in my devotion to her, and in 1946, Friede agreed to marry me. But it was a long road to the altar. It would take another year before we could wed because there were laws preventing a Brit from marrying a German woman at the time. 

Wedded life proved to be more formidable for me than I had anticipated because, within a few months of my marriage to Friede, I was transferred to an RAF base outside of Manchester-Ringway. My superiors assured me that, in due time, Friede was to be permitted to follow me to my new post. But I didn't trust them after all the struggle it took me to get their permission and the government's to marry Friede.   

Reassignment left me worried and frightened at the prospect of trying to integrate my wife into the-if there be muck; there is brass world found in the north of England. 

Being Friede’s husband in Germany was a lark compared to what I knew awaited me in Britain. While stationed in Hamburg, I was part of the conquering forces and any problems that arose for her or me; were easily overcome because I was a well-respected member of the RAF. 

In Hamburg, my uniform gave me an influence I never had in British civilian life. It allowed me to do something that was impossible for me to contemplate in England: change the fate of myself and those I loved. In Germany, I was able to use my authority as an occupier to keep Friede and her family alive during a terrible time known as the “Hunger Winter.” But once I returned to Britain, my ability to manipulate events for the well-being of Friede or me would cease to exist.

The night before I flew out of Hamburg for London, I felt overwhelming fear for my future and for my marriage. I was terrified at the prospect of trying to make something of myself in a land abundant in rain, shoddy housing, limited opportunities, and soot. No matter the optimism that the Labour Government may have given many in the working class. I was not yet convinced; that I would reap any rewards from being loyal to them. I had seen too much despair and evil as a boy and teenager during the Great Depression. In my mind, I couldn't shake what my grandmother had told me long ago.

 “You were bred and born near the pits of Barnsley, and nowt ever going to change that.” 

I didn’t let on to Friede; I was petrified of what awaited us in England. If she knew what I knew about life at home for someone like me, I believed, she’d whisper Auf Wiedersehen and be gone from my life. 

Before I flew out for England, Friede said,

“I will follow you soon even if it were to the ends of the Earth.”

Little did she know that many parts of Britain in 1948 were crueller than any end of our earth. 

Up until my dad Harry Leslie Smith's death in November 2018, he was revising two of the books he wrote at the beginning of his Harry's Last Stand mission. The chapter you have just read is from his book about post-war life in Britain under Attlee and then Churchill. I hope to get a new edition of his book, The Green and Pleasant Land printed for 2023 as it is the centenary of his birth. Your subscriptions to my substack are always appreciated because what I am attempting to do is keep my dad's legacy alive and also the legacy of the working class struggle to achieve dignity, good health, love and purpose in societies that value the entitled too much for their own good.