by Tony Judt
By far the largest expense in a traditional household budget was food and clothing, which together with housing took up much of a family’s earnings. Most people did not shop or ‘consume’ in the modern sense; they subsisted. For the overwhelming majority of the European population up to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘disposable income’ was a contradiction in terms. As recently as 1950, the average western European household spent more than half its cash outlay on necessities: food, drink and tobacco (sic). In Mediterranean Europe the figure was distinctly higher. Once clothing and rent were added, there was not much left over for non-essential items.
In the next generation, all this was to change. In the two decades after 1953, real wages almost tripled in West Germany and the Benelux countries. In Italy the rate of income growth was higher still. Even in Britain the purchasing power of the average citizen nearly doubled in these years. By 1965, food and clothing absorbed just 31 percent of consumer spending in Britain; by 1980 the average for northern and western Europe as a whole was less than one quarter.
People had money to spare and they were spending it. In 1950, West German retailers sold just 900,000 pairs of ladies’ nylon stockings (the emblematic ‘luxury’ item of the immediate post-war years). Four years later, in 1953, they moved 58 million pairs. In more traditional commodities the major impact of this revolution in spending came in the way goods were packaged and the scale on which they were sold. Supermarkets began to appear, notably in the 1960s, the decade when the impact of the increase in purchasing power was felt most dramatically. In the Netherlands, which boasted just seven supermarkets in 1961, there were 520 ten years later. In the same decade, the number of supermarkets in neighboring Belgium rose from 19 to 456; in France from 49 to 1,833.125
The rationale for supermarkets was that shoppers (housewives for the most part) would spend more in any one shopping trip if most of what they wanted—or could be tempted into wanting—was conveniently available in one place. But this in turn presumed that women had somewhere to put their food when they got it home; and that implied, increasingly, the presence of a fridge. In 1957 most west European households still did not possess a fridge (the figure ranging from 12 percent in West Germany to less than 2 percent in Italy). The reason was not so much technical (by the mid-1950s virtually all of western Europe had full electricity service, with the exception of parts of rural Norway and southern and upland regions of Italy) as logistic: until housewives could afford to buy a lot of perishable food at one outing, and could transport it home, there was not much point in spending large sums of money on a fridge.126
It is thus symptomatic of many other related changes that, by 1974, the absence of a fridge in most places would have been remarked upon: in Belgium and the UK, 82 percent of households had one; in France, 88 percent; in the Netherlands and West Germany, 93 percent. Most remarkable of all, 94 percent of Italian households now owned a fridge, the highest ratio in Europe. Indeed, Italy had become Europe’s largest manufacturer of refrigerators and other ‘white goods’. In 1951 Italian factories made just 18,500 fridges; two decades later Italy was producing 5,247,000 a year—almost as many as the USA, and more than the rest of Europe put together.
Like the domestic fridge, the washing machine made its appearance in these years. It too was aimed at easing the work of the newly affluent housewife and encouraging her to extend her range of purchases. The washing machine, however, took longer to catch on than the fridge—partly because in the mid-1950s running water had still not arrived in more than half of all households in Belgium, Italy, Austria, Spain and many parts of France and Scandinavia, partly because the electricity grid in many places could not support two large appliances in a single residence. 127 Even in 1972, by which time most west Europeans lived in homes equipped with indoor toilets and full plumbing, only two households in three owned a washing machine, a ratio that increased steadily but slowly with each decade. Washing machines remained for many years beyond the reach of the poor, especially large families that had greatest need of them. Partly for this reason, the washing machine—like dishwashers after the mid-1970s—remained associated in commercial imagery with the domestic accoutrements of the affluent middle class.
Washing machines and fridges were becoming cheaper. Like toys and clothes, they were being made on a far larger scale than ever before, as investment at one end and sustained high demand at the other brought prices down: even in France, where mass production always lagged a little behind, turnover in the toy industry increased 350 percent in the early baby-boom years 1948-1955. But the virtuous circle of millions of newly employed commodity-consumers had its most significant impact not in the home but outside. The greatest single measure of European prosperity was the revolution wrought by the family car.
Until the 1950s, the motor car was a luxury for most Europeans and in many parts was scarcely to be seen. Even in major cities its arrival had been very recent. Most people did not travel great distances for pleasure, and when travelling to work or school they used public transport: trains, trams and buses. At the beginning of the 1950s there were just 89,000 private cars (not counting taxis) in Spain: one for every 314,000 persons. In 1951, just one French household in twelve possessed a car. Only in Great Britain was car ownership a mass phenomenon: there were 2,258,000 private cars there in 1950. But the geographical distribution was uneven: nearly a quarter of all cars were registered in London—much of rural Britain was as empty of cars as France or Italy. And even so, many Londoners didn’t own a car and there were thousands of market traders, costermongers and others who still depended in their work upon a horse and cart.
Car ownership was to increase spectacularly in the next two decades. In Britain, where an initial take-off in the 1930s had been stalled by war and post-war shortages, it doubled in each decade from 1950 to 1980. From two and a quarter million vehicles in 1950, British car ownership had risen to 8 million by 1964, and reached 11.5 million by the end of the Sixties. Italians, who owned just 270,000 private cars at the outbreak of the war and 342,000 in 1950 (less than the number of cars in Greater London alone), had two million vehicles by 1960, five and a half million by 1965, over ten million in 1970 and an estimated 15 million five years later—two cars for every seven residents of the country.128 In France, car ownership rose from less than two million to nearly six million vehicles in the course of the 1950s, then doubled again in the next ten years. Symptomatically, parking meters were introduced at the end of the 1950s—beginning in Britain, then spreading through France and elsewhere in the course of the Sixties.129
If Europeans could buy cars for their personal use in such unprecedented numbers it was not merely because they had more money to spend. There were many more cars available to meet the pent-up demand of decades of Depression and war. Well before 1939, a number of European car manufacturers (Porsche in Germany, Renault and Citroën in France, Morris in Britain), anticipating a post-Depression lift in demand for private automobiles, had begun to think about a new kind of family car—analogous in function to Henry Ford’s Model T of twenty years before: reliable, mass-produced and affordable. The war delayed the appearance of these models, but by the early 1950s they were rolling off newly installed production lines in ever-increasing number.
In each Western European country there was a dominant local make and model of car, but in essence they were all remarkably alike. The Volkswagen Beetle, the Renault 4cv, the FIAT 500 and 600, the Austin A30 and the Morris Minor were tiny, two-door units of family transport: cheap to buy, cheap to run and easy to fix. They had thin, tinny frames; small, under-powered engines (designed to consume as little fuel as possible); and were equipped with the minimum of accessories and fixtures. The Volkswagens, Renaults and Fiats were rear-engined and had rear-wheel drive, leaving the compartment in front of the driver to accommodate a small amount of luggage, as well as the battery, spare wheel, crank handle and tools.
The front-engined Morris, like its contemporary and competitor the Ford P
opular (American-owned but made at Ford’s UK plant in Dagenham, near London, for the domestic market), aspired to a slightly higher level of comfort—and would later spawn a four-door model, as befitted the rather greater prosperity of Britain in the years of its first appearance. Citroën of France introduced its utterly distinctive 2CV (initially marketed to farmers seeking to upgrade or replace their ox wagon), complete with four doors, removable roof and seats, and the engine of a medium-sized motorbike. Despite these cultural variations the little cars of the fifties had a common purpose: to render automobile ownership accessible and affordable for almost every west European family.
For some years after the start of Europe’s post-war transport revolution, the supply of cars could not keep up with demand (a situation that remained the case in Eastern Europe right up to 1989). Thus bikes, motorcycles and motorcycle-sidecar combinations flourished for a while—the latter as a makeshift family vehicle for those who could not afford a car or could not yet get hold of one. Motor scooters appeared on the scene—in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated—the Vespa model in particular—in every contemporary film from or about Italy.
But by the beginning of the sixties the car was firmly in command in Western Europe, displacing traffic from rails to roads and from public to private means of transport. Railway networks had peaked in length and user-volume in the years following World War One; now, unprofitable services were cut back and thousands of miles of track pulled up. In the UK the railways carried 901 million passengers in 1946, close to their historic peak. But thereafter the numbers declined each year. Elsewhere in Western Europe, train traffic held up rather better; in small, crowded countries with efficient networks—like Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark—it actually grew; but far slower than road traffic.
The number of people using buses also began to decline for the first time ever, as more and more people went to work by car. Between 1948 and 1962, in Britain’s congested capital, the overall passenger traffic on London Transport’s buses, trams, trolleys and underground network fell from 3,955 million people a year to 2,485, as commuters took to their cars instead. Despite the distinctly inadequate condition of Europe’s roads—outside of Germany there had been no significant upgrading of any national road network since the late 1920s—individuals and especially families used cars increasingly for discretionary travel: for shopping trips to hypermarkets newly situated at the edge of cities, and above all for weekend excursions and on annual holidays .130
Recreational travel in Europe was not new, though it had hitherto been confined first to the aristocracy and latterly to the better-heeled and more culturally ambitious middle classes. But like every other economic sector, ‘tourism’ had suffered through war and economic recession. The Swiss tourist industry in 1913 boasted 21.9 million nights of lodging; it would not recover such numbers until the mid1950s. And when it came, the tourist boom of the 1950s was different. It was facilitated and encouraged by the availability of private transport and above all by the growing number of people enjoying paid vacations: by 1960 most employees in continental Europe were legally entitled to two weeks of paid holiday (three in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and France) and increasingly they took that holiday away from home.
Leisure travel was becoming mass tourism. Coach companies blossomed, extending the tradition of factory and farm workers’ annual char-à-banc seaside trips into commercial services within and between countries. Fledgling airline entrepreneurs like Britain’s Freddie Laker, who had bought up surplus Bristol Brittania turbo-prop planes, developed charter services to newly opened summer vacation resorts in Italy, France and Spain. Camping—already popular before the war among less affluent vacationers and outdoor enthusiasts—became a major industry in the later Fifties, spawning coastal and pastoral camp-sites, camping equipment emporia, printed guides and specialized clothing outlets. Older holiday resorts—along the coasts and in the countryside of northern and western Europe—thrived. Freshly discovered (or re-discovered) locations emerged, gaining prominence in glossy brochures and popular mythology. The French Riviera, once a sedate wintering escape for Edwardian gentry, was given a seductive and youthful makeover in a new genre of ‘fun-in-the-sun’ movie: in 1956 Roger Vadim ‘invented’ St Tropez as a showcase for his new starlet Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu . . . créa la femme.
Not everyone could afford St Tropez or Switzerland—though the French and Italian coasts and mountains were still inexpensive for travelers from Britain or Germany, exchanging sterling and Deutschmarks for the undervalued francs and lire of the day. But domestic seaside holidays, still much sought-after by British, Dutch and Germans in particular, were now truly cheap. Billy Butlin, a Canadian fairground worker who opened his first operation at Skegness in 1936, went on in the Fifties to make a fortune selling ‘cheap and cheerful’, all-in family vacations in holiday camps strategically set along the seashore of industrial England: ‘Walmart with overnight accommodations’ as one critic dismissed them in cynical retrospect. But Butlin’s was immensely popular in its day—and was the unacknowledged institutional ancestor of France’s Club Med, the collective recreational preference of a later, more cosmopolitan generation: even down to the ‘gentils moniteurs’ (or ‘Redcoats’, as Butlin called them).
For the slightly more adventurous there were also the newly opened resorts of Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where visitors could choose between bed-and-breakfast establishments, pensións or modest seaside hotels block-booked by a new breed of package-tour operators. And all of these could now be reached by car. Dressed in summer leisure clothing (itself a new product—and evidence of the new affluence), millions of families would squeeze into their Fiats, Renaults, Volkswagens and Morrises—often on the same day, since official vacation dates tended to cluster around a block of weeks in August—and make their way to distant coasts, along narrow, inadequately serviced roads designed for an earlier age of travel.
The result was unprecedented and quite awful traffic jams that grew worse every year from the late 1950s. They followed predictable arteries: the A303 road south-west from London to Cornwall; the Routes Nationales 6 and 7 from Paris to the Mediterranean coast; the Route Nationale 9 from Paris to the Spanish border (from a few thousand tourists in 1955, French visitors to Spain numbered three million by 1962, seven million two years later—in Franco’s Spain even the French franc went a long way, especially after the Gaullist revaluation).131 German tourists followed the medieval trade route south, pouring through the Austrian Tyrol and over the Brenner Pass into Italy in ever increasing numbers. Many continued on into Yugoslavia which, like Spain, opened itself to foreign tourism in these years: already at 1.7 million in 1963, foreign travelers to the only accessible Communist country in Europe (blessed with a long and very cheap Adriatic coastline) numbered nearly 6.3 million per annum a decade later.
Mass tourism, it has been well observed, may be environmentally insensitive but it has distinct re-distributive benefits. As prosperous northerners flocked to hitherto impoverished Mediterranean lands, jobs opened up for building workers, cooks, waiters, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, prostitutes, porters, airport maintenance crews and others. For the first time, unskilled young men and women in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and Spain could find low-paying, seasonal work at home instead of seeking it abroad. Rather than migrate to the expanding economies of the north, they now serviced those same economies in their own lands.
Foreign travel may not have broadened the mind: the more popular a foreign destination, the quicker it came to resemble—in all essential features save climate—the tourist’s point of origin. Indeed, the success of large-scale tourism in the 1960s and after depended upon making Brits, Germans, Dutch, French and other neophyte travelers feel as comfortable as possible, surrounded by
fellow-countrymen and insulated from the exotic, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. But the mere fact of going somewhere distant on a regular (annual) basis, and the novel means of transport used to get there—private car, charter flight—offered millions of hitherto insular men and women (and especially their children) a window onto a far bigger world.
Until the 1960s, the chief source of information, opinion and entertainment available to the overwhelming majority of Europeans was the radio. It was from the radio that people got the news, and if there was a common national culture it was shaped far more by what people heard than from what they saw or read. In every European country at this time radio was regulated by the state (in France the nationalbroadcasting network closed down at midnight). Broadcasting stations, transmitters and wavelengths were licensed and typically owned by national governments: symptomatically, the few radio stations transmitting from outside national frontiers were usually situated on ships or islands and colloquially referred to as ‘pirates’.
Ownership of radios, already widespread before the war, was near universal by 1960: in that year there was one radio for every five people in the USSR, one for every four people in France, Austria and Switzerland, one for every three people in Scandinavia and East Germany. In effect, almost every family owned a radio.132 Most domestic radio sets had evolved little from the large, unwieldy, valve-driven wireless units of the inter-war decades. There was usually one per family. It occupied a prime site in the parlor or kitchen and the family had perforce to listen to it while gathered in one place. Even car radios altered little in this respect—the family that traveled together, listened together, and parents chose the programs. Wireless radio was thus a naturally conservative medium, both in its content and in the social patterns that it encouraged and sustained.