Modernity Britain Page 7

  A mutual friend brought him to see my group. And we met and we talked after the show and I saw he had talent and he was playing guitar backstage and doing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran and I turned round to him right then on first meeting and said do you want to join the group and he said um hmm you know hmm de hmm and I think he said yes the next day as I recall it.20

  The heatwave was over by Thursday the 18th, the date of the next Vauxhall Mirror, monthly house magazine of Vauxhall Motors in Luton. ‘One more Victor rolls off the track and then the family is off on holiday,’ declared the caption to the front-page photo of the assembly line. ‘It’s good to be beside the seaside and it’s good to know that the Victor – like all our products – is going swimmingly. And that is our insurance of happy holidays in the years ahead.’ The monthly ‘20 Questions’ slot featured C. Bradbury of Div 70, whose answers might have been those of any respectable, decently paid working man:

  What characteristic do you most dislike in other people? – Unreliability.

  What would you like to be other than yourself? – Stanley Matthews, because he is my idea of a true sportsman.

  If you had three wishes, what would you wish for? – A little more money for the old folks, continued good health, peace in our time.

  If you could meet anyone living today, whom would you choose? – Her Majesty the Queen.

  If you could do any job at all, other than the one you have now, what would you do? – Pilot a jet airliner.

  What is your secret ambition? – To go on a world tour with my family.

  If you could do something unconventional without let or hindrance, what would you do? – Level off the hill I have to climb to get home to lunch.

  Is Rock ’n’ Roll a vice, a habit, a passing craze, a good expression of high spirits, a form of hysteria, or a mere racket? – Not enough space allotted to express my opinion.

  Which is the stronger sex? – No doubt about it – man!

  The back page was an advertisement for Taylor Woodrow houses. ‘IT’S YOUR WELCOME HOME – never before at so low a cost, has such streamlined home luxury been offered’ (in this case at £2,175 freehold on the Skimpot Estate, Hayhurst Road, Luton). ‘Many features have been incorporated to bring you new pleasure, new comfort. It has spacious rooms, an ultra-modern kitchen, including refrigerator, luxury bathroom, ample space for a garage, good sized garden and – above all – it is designed to a plan which makes for gracious living, and built to make the housewife’s work easier and happier.’

  That evening’s performance at Frinton Summer Theatre was Gerald Savory’s comedy A Likely Tale. ‘The atmosphere of the play is brilliantly created by the two dear old sisters who talk of their past beaux over their crochet and tea cups,’ appreciatively noted the East Essex Gazette’s critic of this latter-day Cranford. ‘Pauline Murch and Vanessa Redgrave succeed in playing admirably these two characters.’ Two days later, on Saturday the 20th, Stirling Moss at Aintree in a green Vanwall became the first British driver to win a world championship grand prix in a British car; Anthony Heap by contrast ‘came nowhere in the fathers’ eat-a-dog-biscuit-before-starting race’ at his son’s sports day in Great Missenden; Judy Haines’s husband treated her and the children to a matinee at the Royal Ballet (‘He bought us a pound box of Mackintosh’s Week-End Assortment’); and miners and their families gathered for the annual Durham Miners’ Gala. Poor weather and the start of a national bus strike badly depleted numbers, but, added the Durham Chronicle, ‘the spirit of the gala was unimpaired’, with boating ‘as usual a popular pastime’, while ‘crowds spent liberally at the “fun of the fair” on the high ground’. Tellingly, ‘while thousands listened to the speeches,’ including one from the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, ‘still more thousands spent their time in other ways.’21

  By six o’clock much of the younger part of the TV public was settling down for Six-Five Special – Josephine Douglas and Pete Murray still in charge but the concert pianist long gone, with this evening’s stars including the crooner Dennis Lotis and the up-and-coming British rock ’n’ roller Terry Dene. In Bedford there was more serious business, however. Amidst rain, some 3,000 assembled at Bedford Town’s football ground, the Eyrie, to listen to the Prime Minister. All seats were under cover at 10s and 2s, covered standing room was free, and most of the intermittent heckling came from League of Empire Loyalists, though right at the start as Macmillan rose to speak, there was a piercing yell of ‘Up the Eagles!’ Resting his notes on a locally made oak box presented to him for the occasion by four Bedfordshire Conservative Associations, the long-sighted speaker, too vain to wear glasses, was about halfway through his speech when, having listed some of the economic progress since 1951, he peered at his typewritten text and read the immortal passage:

  That is all to the good.

  Indeed,

  let’s be frank about it;

  most of our people

  have never had it so good.

  Go around the country,

  go to the industrial towns,

  go to the farms,

  and you will see a state of prosperity

  such as we have never had

  in my lifetime –

  nor indeed ever in the history

  of this country.

  Much of the rest of Macmillan’s speech was about the dangers of inflation, but the five words ‘never had it so good’ would soon become inextricably linked with – even come to define – the main thrust of his premiership. For Macmillan himself, ultimately a moralist, this would prove understandably frustrating; and for a different, less materialistic gauge of satisfaction, he might have appreciated ‘The Letter of the Week’, from Mrs M. S. of Tayport, in the issue dated that day of the homeliest of magazines, the People’s Friend:

  I love to read the letters page every week. How many interesting people write to you!

  But isn’t it a good thing that people aren’t all alike and don’t all do spectacular things?

  I am just an ordinary housewife with a husband and family to look after. My day is a busy full one. I’m happy doing my work and knowing my family need me.

  I think I have one of the most satisfying jobs in the world, and it’s not everyone who can say that. I wouldn’t change it for anything.22

  Part Two

  4

  Catch a Falling Sputnik

  ‘The main change that has taken place in the last few years is that customers no longer seem as price-conscious as they were,’ the Financial Times noted about Marks & Spencer some four months after Macmillan’s speech. ‘Ninety-five-shilling dresses are found to sell better than 65s models.’ Yet none of M&S’s 237 stores had fitting rooms, and, more generally, in terms of the apparently inexorable shift into a shiny new consumerist world, there were by 1957 at least three significant areas of continuity.

  Starting with consumer durables, ownership figures for the second half of the year showed that their penetration was far from total: 56 per cent of adults owned a TV set, 26 per cent a washing machine and only 12 per cent a refrigerator (the figure for the working class specifically being just 5 per cent). In addition, only 21 per cent of adults had a telephone, while even in Colin Shindler’s home in Prestwich, Manchester, where his businessman father kept a Humber Hawk in the drive and a Hotpoint washing machine had recently arrived, they still used a mangle on wash day.

  Nor, a further continuity, were supermarkets anything like ubiquitous. The Liverpool Echo’s ‘Onlooker’ reckoned in September that they ‘seem to have made much more of a mark in the South of England than so far they have in the North. Motoring in London and the Thames Valley, I was surprised to find them in quite small towns and suburbs.’ Would they spread? ‘I suspect,’ added Onlooker, ‘that in the North we may be more reluctant than the Southerners to forgo our cross-the-counter courtesies.’ In fact, there was a total of almost 4,000 self-service shops in Britain, but the great majority were relatively small, at around 1,000 square feet. And although supermarkets
were undoubtedly on the rise – Sainsbury’s with nine so far, Fine Fare (part of the Allied Bakeries Group) with 15 and planning to open another 15 in the next 12 months – these were still, in the long sweep of things, the Dark Ages. ‘The out-of-town supermarket, based on the North American pattern of the out-of-town shopping centre in the open country, has not yet been attempted,’ the FT pointed out around the time of Onlooker’s southern tour. ‘The obvious reason is the comparatively small number of cars owned in Britain [only 24 per cent of the population had a car].’ Moreover, existing high-street supermarkets ‘as yet provide no parking accommodation’ – and thereby ‘probably miss much potential trade which goes to the neighbourhood grocer, the shop at the corner, the grocer who still delivers (which supermarkets do not) and the grocer who brings his shop to the house’.

  The third continuity, helped by a shopping environment in which only 2 per cent of all food products sold were pre-packed, was thrift. Radio and television repairs; the hire and repair of gas appliances; matches, soap and cleaning materials – all featured strongly in 1957’s pioneer annual household expenditure survey. ‘A really tasty dish, and economical too!’ was the headline in Woman’s Own, two days before Macmillan’s speech, for Philip Harben’s recipe for cold pigeon pie, while Mrs H. had revealed earlier in the summer in the same magazine that ‘I cut my loofah into slices – some for cleaning pans, others for bases to hold flowers steady in a vase.’1 Economical hints from readers remained a staple of many popular publications.

  Even so, there was plenty new on the market in 1957, often being aggressively pushed through the recently available medium of television advertising. Fry’s Turkish Delight, the scientifically devised (by Lyons) instant porridge known as Ready Brek, ‘the new, exciting taste of Gibbs SR’, the original aftershave (Old Spice), the Hoovermatic twin tub, Wash and Spin Dry machine – all were fresh entrants, while in general two trends stood out. One was towards home-centredness, epitomised by the rapid growth of sales of canned beer, up from 1.5 million cans in 1954–5 to 70 million by 1957–8. ‘It’s nice to watch television but it’s even nicer when you’ve got a drink in your hand,’ Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. ‘Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you’re in a posh cabaret.’ The outspoken textile manufacturer Cyril Lord was already plugged in to the home, manufacturing and selling tufted carpets that made use of new man-made fibres and were aimed squarely at the mass market, often replacing linoleum in working-class homes. Soon there would be a TV jingle – ‘This is luxury you can afford by Cyril Lord’, a jungle accurately described by his biographer as ‘relentless’ – and his carpets were set to become a byword for the gathering consumer boom. The other trend, though far from invariable, was towards going upmarket. The launch of Camay soap involved a series of mildly risqué Norman Parkinson photographs in the more superior women’s magazines, with Parkinson himself claiming elsewhere that he used Camay for shaving in the bath. In the autumn Van den Berghs heavily promoted a new soft-blend luxury margarine, Blue Band, with distinctive gold-coloured packaging. And about the same time, faced by a falling market share, the British Patent Perforated Paper Company decided that it needed a new approach if its cheap, traditional, notoriously non-absorbent toilet paper, Bronco, was to thrive against more yielding competitors like Andrex.2

  Inevitably, the pleasure and excitement of new possessions could come tinged with regret, as when shortly before Christmas the parents of 13-year-old Subrata Dasgupta, living in Derby, ‘bought a Bush electric record player’. Admittedly he could now buy records (LPs and EPs) that he had ‘only handled wistfully in Dixons’, but it was still ‘with a great deal of sadness I put away our mechanical, wind-up gramophone’, whose ‘thick, metal-shiny playing arm which held the needle, curled up like a contented kitten, looked clumsy and prehistoric, compared to the lightweight “pick-up” arm on the new player’. The older teen, though, was probably melancholy-free if he or she acquired a Dansette: brightly coloured (usually a mixture of blues, creams, reds and turquoises) and unashamedly lo-fi, it still had the volume to get partygoers dancing.3

  How to choose between competing goods and services? The first Egon Ronay Guide to restaurants appeared in 1957, but the event making greater waves came in October with the first issue of Which?, the magazine of the Consumers’ Association. The CA itself had been started the previous year by a young American graduate, Dorothy Goodman, who on returning to the States had passed it over to Michael Young. For Young, as he recalled some 20 years later, there was a direct, potentially fruitful link with the work he had been doing for Family and Kinship:

  In Bethnal Green we were able to reconstruct what was happening in the 19th century. It was clear that men’s lives were very much centred on their work; they kept a large proportion of the family income for themselves and spent it quite separately from their wives in pubs and gambling and smoking. Partly they did it because the home was such a bloody uncomfortable place to be.

  What we saw was the beginning of a change. The younger men, although interested in their work, were giving more interest to their homes, having something more like a partnership with their wives in building up their homes. And this was symbolised by the material goods that people bought.

  They had a terrific pride, an emotional investment in these material goods, and it seemed that they would be more satisfied if they could feel that the things they were buying were efficient and functional. Anything, we thought, that could tell them that, would strike a chord. It struck much more of a chord with the middle classes than it did with the working classes.

  The unfortunate class differential was no doubt inevitable, but perhaps less so was the dramatic whoosh of Which?’s early life. ‘At 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning,’ Young wrote on Friday the 10th to his benefactors the Elmhirsts, ‘when we opened the doors of this office which we have rented for 10s a week, a special messenger arrived from Sir Simon Marks [chairman of M&S] with a standing order for 20 copies; and ever since then the letters have been pouring in.’4

  Press response was initially cautious – no doubt on account of anxiety about advertising boycotts by upset manufacturers – but a favourable article and editorial in The Times helped ignite interest, as did an item by Marghanita Laski on the 11th in Woman’s Hour, and within a month there would be some 10,000 members of the CA, few agreeing with the electrical retailer who told the Electrical Times that ‘all these well-meaning but voluntary unofficial watchdogs are making much ado about nothing’. Among those do-gooders, the key editorial figure from early on was the hugely capable, clear-sighted Eirlys Roberts, fairly described on her death in 2008 as ‘the mother of the modern British consumer movement’. Meanwhile Which? itself focused in its first issue – after a bold declaration that its mission was to supply ‘the information, impartial, accurate and thorough, which will enable people to get better value for their money’ – on electric kettles (the Russell-Hobbs failing one of the insulation tests), sunglasses, aspirin, cake mixes, scouring powders and pastes (Mirro, Vim and Ajax as the top-rated three, followed by Chemico and Gumption), and no-iron cottons, with additionally the results of Swedish tests of two popular British cars, the Austin 35 and the Standard 10 Saloon. ‘Somehow it seems to belong quite well to a “classless middle-class” society,’ Young wrote a week after the launch to the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, thanking him for his subscription. ‘From now on everyone can have the same article, “the best”.’

  Sadly, what one does not get in the pages of Which? – undeniably imbued, for all its sterling work, with a whiff of paternalistic puritanism – are the voices of the consumers themselves. For those one can still turn occasionally to Mass-Observation (albeit by now an organisation devoted to market research rather than sociological enquiry), specifically to its Detergent Survey of late 1957 and early 1958. Among 40 housewives interviewed in London, Liverpool and Manchester, a headmistress said she would ‘rather pay for a good all-rounder’ and was ‘old-fash
ioned enough to want to see the bubbles’; a part-time shop assistant declared herself ‘very sensitive to smell’ and thought ‘they scent them too much, especially Daz’; and a Liverpool docker’s wife, who went ‘to the wash house to do the big wash’, explained how ‘I used to use Persil quite a lot’ but had ‘changed to Fairy Snow’ because ‘Persil is very hard on the hands’. One of the interviewees, in a small, untidy Paddington flat, was a childless 38-year-old who worked as a part-time researcher and was married to an Encyclopaedia Britannica sales rep. Not exactly a bright, bushy-eyed consumer, she described her washing routine:

  Always on Sunday morning after I read the Sunday papers. It has to be very much of an emergency to wash any other time. I often find my husband’s things on my chair or my ashtray, for me to wash up, if my husband wants anything done he’ll follow me about with them, put them on my bed, my pillow and so on till I wash them. I can’t wash things while I’m running the bath, because the bath looks too tempting. My terylene curtains, it’s essential to wash them once a fortnight – I go on with mine till people mention it, but I don’t care personally if they’re black, and if my dog could speak, he’d ask for his bedding washed. In other words you can gather I don’t like washing.5