Plans for Britain

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The audience was pure Tory: pink jowls, white heads, handlebar mustaches, Paisley shawls, monocles and lorgnettes, old school ties and wing collars, repeated references to "the Empah." To this gathering of the Conservative Party (see above), Britain's master of dialectics presented the shrewdest plank in his platform for the postwar election. With Labor fully and the Liberals partly committed to retention of wartime controls to carry out national planning in peacetime, Winston Churchill came out flatly:

"Control for control's sake is senseless. Controls under the pretext of war or its aftermath which are, in fact, designed to favor accomplishment of totalitarian systems . . . are fraud which should be mercilessly exposed to the British public. At the head of our mainmast we fly the flag of free enterprise."

Having damned controls in principle, he came out for them in practice:

"This does not mean that we are likely to run short of necessary controls. . . . Two years ago I declared that we must have a four-year plan for a new Parliament after the war. . . . Immense toil and preparation have been given to the design of this plan. We are making steady progress."

Thus, in effect, Winston Churchill offered his Party and his country his Minister of Reconstruction Lord Woolton, a man who is not a member of that Party or even a politician, but a British businessman in Government.

Blueprints. The plain fact is that no British Government can hope to pilot Britain through peace without a substantial degree of state control over the lives and livings of Britons. The things that Politician Churchill and Businessman Woolton propose would have been damned two decades ago by every Tory in England as shameless Bolshevism. The plans include: social insurance "from womb to tomb"; the "greatest Education Act ever known in these Islands"; sweeping extensions of workmen's compensation awards; reforms in the national health system; vast housing projects. And with them, in all probability, will go peacetime controls over what consumers can buy, how labor will work, what materials industry can have and what goods it can sell.

The change that has brought general British acceptance of these ideas is not merely psychological. It is largely physical. The housing projects are required because of the vast war damage to British buildings. In the present state of the British economy, postwar control of food and materials is practically unavoidable.

With most of her earning assets abroad liquidated, with huge new foreign debts created by the purchase of war materials, Britain not only has to recover her prewar trade but multiply it--twice or even threefold. But Britain's capacity to export will be limited by her capacity to buy, by her capacity to replace obsolete, damaged and worn-out equipment, and by her capacity to produce--which is not merely a matter of machinery but of a healthy, happy, intelligent, secure population.

And Britain's moral strength--her national will to pull in her belt and recover a place in the economic sun--has never been higher. Lord Woolton represents this strength, this will, in British business.

A Red Necktie. The man charged with coordinating Britain's national planning is a very capable businessman, but not on the American pattern.

Frederick James Marquis, the future Baron Woolton (the barony dates from 1939), was born of well-to-do, middle-class Manchester stock 61 years ago. At 18, young Marquis, who thought he had a bent for the arts, studied Greek to qualify for a Cambridge scholarship. The day a telegram brought the news that he had won it, his father confided to him that the doctor had just given him six months to live. The son tore up the telegram and stayed home to look after his father. As it happened, the old man survived for another 44 years.

Having missed Cambridge, young Marquis entered Manchester University, was enrolled in the science section. Graduating as an economist, he taught school for a time, later blossomed into a vigorous young Socialist sporting a vivid red tie and intensely proud of his Fabian Society membership.

A desire to learn more at firsthand of poverty and its cause & cure led him to take the post of resident warden of Liverpool University's Settlement. With his wife, a pleasant, social-minded student from Lancashire named Maud Smith, he expanded the Settlement into a community center, established the city's first dental clinic. The Marquises lived in the Settlement until 1920. By then the young director had taken a long, intimate look at the squalor and slums of Merseyside. But he was not to be a Harry Hopkins.

Rejected for military service on medical grounds in World War I, Woolton introduced a standard well-made-civilian boot (shoe) to ease the clothing shortage. And when war ended he became a businessman, personnel director of Lewis's, Ltd. At 37, Woolton was no longer wearing a red tie.

Pie to Posterity. In the next 20 years Marquis became a big businessman. Lewis's expanded into Scotland, became the biggest chain in the provinces. In learning the art of mass selling and big-scale buying, Marquis made himself a substantial fortune and became managing director and chairman of the board. A knighthood followed in 1935. World War II was only a few months old when another businessman from the Midlands, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, drafted Lord Woolton as Minister of Food.

Within three months of his appointment, Norway, the Low Countries, France-and Chamberlain himself had fallen. Woolton survived Winston Churchill's energetic Cabinet reshuffle. The new Prime Minister soon began to rely on his benign, quiet-spoken Food Minister (whom he was soon calling "Fred"), a man as energetic as himself.

For three and a half years Woolton bossed 52,000 employes whose job was to feed a family of 47,700,000 three times a day. He cached food stocks in odd places, such as cinemas and Baptist chapels, to save them from Luftwaffe, attacks, got experts to fix balanced diets on the basis of the food on hand. This sometimes involved plugging readily available vegetables like potatoes, to the detriment of the nation's waistlines.

Once during that period, the Food Minister murmured: "We haven't done too badly by Gladstone--we've named a useful piece of luggage for him. Nellie Melba gets her eternity in a pleasant peach concoction." Then he added: "But me--they will remember me, if at all, for a pie made of the humblest vegetables."

Since Moses. Although Britons are notoriously creatures of habit who love to eat the food to which they are accustomed, however dull it may be, Lord Woolton was not destined to attain the unpopularity of Leon Henderson or Jimmy Byrnes. He had not lived at University Settlement, Liverpool, without learning how to appeal to the ordinary Englishman. He taught them to do without things they had eaten all their lives--and not mind.

The man somebody called "the greatest quartermaster since Moses" reduced the weekly diet of every bacon-loving, tea-bibbing Briton to four and two ounces respectively, his sugar to eight ounces, meat to a shilling-and-tuppence worth (about 26-c-), fats to eight ounces, and milk to two and a half pints.* Woolton got Britons to tighten their belts and live with the notches permanently drawn in. To the Bill and Lizzie Smiths across the length & breadth of the British Isles the name Woolton stood for honest control without favoritism, or, in his own Lancashire idiom, for "a fair do all round."

Part of Britons' faith in his fairness was because he belonged to no party. Since most of them bore no party labels between elections themselves, they trusted his rationing because they felt it was not mixed with politics.

Uncle to Architect. At the peak of his popularity, in November 1943, Churchill suddenly switched Woolton to a newer, much tougher assignment--the unpalatable duty of persuading regulation-weary Britons that control must continue into their peacetime lives as well.

The Ministry of Reconstruction had been created to put Britain's postwar plans on paper, to coordinate the knotty problem of providing "food, work and homes." The first incumbent would have to be an architect in ideas--and a nonparty man, since no one knew what party would execute his program. For a soup-tasting, handshaking "kind uncle" like Woolton, this was a long leap into the unknown. Reluctantly, and only on Churchill's insistence, he accepted.

He gave up his staff of 52,000 people and retired to a new office with a staff of six helpers, to make plans instead of execute them.

Two months later he appeared before his peers in the House of Lords to draw the first outlines of a better postwar deal for Britons. There must, he said, be a speedy but smooth conversion of war industries to civilian production. Food supplies must be assured throughout the transition period. And Britain must herself produce most of what she needed. A staggering program of four million new houses must be started immediately for the blitzed Britons who were roofless or in damaged homes. Full employment, social security, education, national health services he also made "musts."

"Happiness and Prosperity." By June 1944 Woolton had produced the first governmental attempt to shoulder a major postwar responsibility: the prevention of depressions. His white paper proposing to stabilize employment was a bold assumption of government responsibility, although it did not espouse drastic economic means (TIME, June 5). Four months later, Woolton hit the headlines again, this time with his social-security plan, or, as he exuberantly dubbed it, his "prosperity and happiness program" (TIME, Oct. 9). Famed Sir William Beveridge, stepfather of the plan, gave it his blessing, even thought it an improvement on his own ''cradle-to-grave" proposal.

In short order Woolton unrolled blueprints to provide higher expenditure on national health ($250 millions to $600 millions annually), family allowances, old-age pensions. A far-reaching Education Act, raising the school-leaving age from 14 to 16, will go into operation next month.

Practical Tories. Few of the plans are Woolton's own. Most are the distilled product of many minds, but Woolton channeled and coordinated the flow of ideas and gave them practical character. His self-confident experience drew the blueprints that might well prove to be Britain's footprints of the future.

Half a century ago such acute, social-minded critics as Sidney and Beatrice Webb mistakenly believed that an enlightened British electorate would produce socialism by communal action. Brash young Bernard Shaw, when asked how long it would take to get English socialism into working order, answered airily: "A fortnight would be ample for the purpose."

But, as often happens in real life--especially in England--Britain waited decades for the head of a department-store chain, a man who has three telephones near his desk, works for a Tory Prime Minister and rides to work every morning in his limousine, to bring the country nearer to socialism than all the ideologues who preceded him.

Politically this is not so strange as it might seem to many Americans, for the Tory Party has a long record of enacting the measures for which its opponents have fought. With a popular demand from every family in Britain for a better home, employment, education and medical attention--and with Labor and the Liberals promising them--it was time for the Tory Party again to seize reform by the legislative handle.

But there is a great deal more than opportunism in Tory support for Lord Wool-ton's plans. The relatively youthful, forward-looking left wing of the Party--the Tory Reform Committee--which believes in the practical approach to progress, looks upon them with favor. The big industrialists, who have largely succeeded the old aristocracy as the backbone of the Tory Party, are also more than halfwilling.

Looking on Britain's internal debt of $80 billion, her external debt of more than $12 billion, and the enormous job of reconstruction and of reconquering markets which lies ahead, they want Government help and protection for their industries--which they know means Government planning and Government regulation. Free enterprise may be their slogan, but they demand help from their Government, and they expect help from it, even in technological matters.

Whether the prospects are good or bad for Britain, they unite Britons in a common postwar determination. Five and a half years of war have seared two beliefs into the British mind: 1) only a prodigious effort by every man, woman & child has enabled the nation to survive the war; 2) only a similar effort will enable it to survive afterwards. Therefore, to fight her way back to lost markets, lost shipping routes, and lost living standards, Britain is ready to act like a nation at war--with many socialist-seeming appurtenances.

With a roof over his head, three meals a day, and a job, the British worker is eager to face the future. On the same terms, so is British business.

* Woolton's successor will, it appears, soon have to reduce these amounts further. With supplies of meat and cheese still shrinking in the U.S., and new demands coming from the liberated countries, the news was broken to Britons this week that U.S. meat exports to Britain would be cut from 207 million lbs. to 25 million (see U.S. AT WAR).

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