@laundress the main reason was money - plain and simple really and also lack of competition.
The cost of automatic washing machines in the 1950s / 60s in the UK and Ireland was out of reach of most low to middle income households. There may have been a few well-off sadists who enjoyed laundry for some bizarre reason and there were certainly people who had a 'mend and make do' attitude that was driven into being by WWII rationing and tougher times. However, an automatic washing machine in the 1950s here was running at a similar price to a basic Morris Minor (small car) so, there wasn't really much demand for them as the price point relative to other goods was way too high.
If you imagine a situation where you'd limited income, and the cheapest automatic washing machine was the price of a V-Zug or the current absolutely top end Miele... a lot of people wouldn't buy them.
One of my relatives was involved with appliance sales here in the 1950s-70s era and I asked her about it. She was saying that in the UK at the time, there were very significant barriers to entry for foreign manufacturers until the 1960s - big tariffs and technical trade barriers that often made no sense - Artificially created electrical conformity issues and recertification of basic components again and again that ensured that local production always remained king. For example, Miele regularly failed British electrical conformity standards over really ridiculous things like some internal wire being the wrong colour or something like that.
The result was UK-rebadgers had to tweak Italian machines to get them to market there. So, they technically were 'British built' (which might have meant putting a label on the front and attaching a British power cord).
Ireland didn't have a white goods industry to protect, so apparently we had a much wider range of machines somewhat earlier than the UK did. My relative was saying that value-for-money Italian and German brands arrived on the market here at lower prices and earlier than they did in Britain, and often had to have their continental plugs changed in the shop as they weren't really localised at all.
What changed the market enormously in Britain was membership of the EEC in 1973. That opened up a whole load of new brands to the British market for the first time with only minimal barriers to entry. So, you suddenly saw brands like Zanussi, Indesit, Ariston etc arriving and automatic washing machines becoming main stream.
I'm not for a moment saying that UK companies did not produce automatic machines, Hoover and Hotpoint certainly did, but their early models were vastly too complicated and expensive for the market. The Keymatic is a prime example of that - hugely expensive and extremely over-engineered and reinventing the wheel type technology.
If you notice in the 1970s, the 'match box' Hoovers hit the market with huge success as did similar Hotpoints, and they all followed the standard European sizings that had emerged at that time allowing them to be slotted into kitchens / utility rooms quite easily.
I think it's easy to forget that pre 1970s there was really very little competition in the automatics market in Britain and certainly nothing really at an affordable price.
The US on the other hand had loads of manufacturers in the white goods space (many more than it has today) and there was a lot of innovation in the 1940s/50s around automatics there. So, you'd mass-market, highly affordable, very effective and reliable machines hitting the stores by the early 1950s On the other side of it, the average "blue collar" American in the 1950s could afford a hell of a lot more than their British counterparts who were still very less well off.
The gap between North America and Western Europe narrowed rapidly in the 1970s to today and there's really not all that much difference in lifestyle and expectations in 2015 compared to what existed in the 1950s.
To give you an idea of how exciting an automatic was to some people - I heard a story from one of my own grandaunts who said when they got an automatic in the late 50s all the neighbours came in to look at it!
