State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Not all British holidaymakers enjoyed the Continental experience. Arthur Scargill, who usually took his holidays in Cornwall, eventually plucked up the courage to take his family to the socialist paradise of Bulgaria, but the overcharging and petty corruption infuriated him so much that, on his return, he announced: ‘If that’s Communism, they can keep it.’ A more common complaint was that with package companies overwhelmed by the demand, their planes were often scheduled to make two or three return journeys from Britain to Spain a day, with no room for manoeuvre when things went wrong (as they invariably did). In the early 1970s, delays of half a day or more were extremely common: the managing director of Gaytours later admitted that ‘if a flight was six hours late, that was good’. And with few organizations to fight for holidaymakers’ rights, service was often downright abysmal: one woman who flew for the first time from Birmingham to Majorca in the early 1970s later recalled that water leaked onto her shoulder throughout the flight, the pull-down table ‘came off in my hands’ and when the steward tried to wheel a duty-free trolley through the cabin, one of the wheels fell off and rolled down the aisle. ‘Of course we never complained,’ she mused. ‘Most people never dreamt of complaining in those days.’

  But times were changing. In 1969, the BBC launched its weekly Holiday series, which was often devoted to scandals and scams, and in 1974 ITV followed suit with Wish You Were Here. Non-existent hotels, beaches that looked nothing like the picture in the brochure, surly locals and atrocious plumbing were all common complaints, but the dark side of the package experience was rarely better captured than in the film Carry On Abroad (1972), in which the familiar team visit the ‘paradise island’ of Elsbels, courtesy of the optimistically named Wundatours. In traditional fashion, their hotel is not quite finished; the drawers have no bottoms, the electrical fittings explode when turned on, and the taps produce sand, not water. They have no need of alarm clocks, either; every morning they are woken by a dawn chorus of pneumatic drills and cement mixers, which for all too many British visitors was an even more unforgettable part of the Mediterranean soundtrack than the songs of Middle of the Road and Sylvie Vrethammar.14

  In Carry On Abroad, the British visitors themselves are hardly models of good behaviour. After a drunken night out in the local town, the entire tour party ends up in the cells, winning their release only after one of the women seduces a policeman. Unfortunately, this was less far-fetched than it sounded; drunk with the heat, the sense of freedom and the local liquor, many holidaymakers did drop their inhibitions in a way that would have been unthinkable at Broadstairs. A common stereotype of British tourists was that women were particularly liable to lose their self-restraint on holiday, opening their arms to the first smooth-talking Don Juan they bumped into. ‘Once they bridge that strip of English Channel,’ says Terry Collier in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, ‘they drop everything: reserve, manners, morals and knickers’ – and this, of course, was before the heyday of Faliraki and Magaluf. But there was also a hefty dose of class prejudice in all this. Social class still played a large role in determining where people went on holiday: according to the British Home Tourism Survey in 1978, manual workers were far more likely to visit seaside resorts, while professional families were more likely to go on ‘country holidays where mountains and moorlands, lakes and streams are the attraction’. And as early as the mid-1970s, mass working-class tourism had become the subject of savage social commentary. In The Golden Hordes (1975), Louis Turner and John Ash complained that package holidays were reducing the Mediterranean to a vast ‘pleasure periphery’, with all sense of cultural distinctiveness submerged beneath a mountain of cheap souvenirs and a vast flood of baked beans, sun-tan lotion and pints of Skol. Tourists were the ‘new barbarians of our age of leisure’, they wrote, treating their hosts as little better than performing monkeys in a zoo enclosure, and expecting them to put up with behaviour they would never have contemplated at home. But perhaps nobody put it better than Monty Python’s Eric Idle in 1972, with his violent rant about the hordes of tourists ‘carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ agrees Michael Palin’s travel agent, hoping to shut him up. But it is no good: from his nightmarish vision of the ‘party from Rhyl’ who cannot stop singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’ to his horrified memory of the ‘drunken greengrocer from Luton’ with last Tuesday’s Daily Express and firm views on Enoch Powell, Idle is only just warming up. And who could blame him?15

  The most common bone of contention, though, was the food. As Idle’s disgruntled tourist notes, the first item on many supposedly ‘international’ hotel menus often bore a disturbing resemblance to warmed-over Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. In fairness, many tourists were glad of anything that reminded them of home, recoiling in horror from the supposedly greasy, garlic-infested local fare. Accounts of the early days of package holidays teem with stories of holidaymakers gagging at the sight of pasta, noodles or grilled fish, manfully trying to eat spaghetti with a knife and fork, or even marching into the kitchens and ordering the local cooks to prepare them a traditional British meal, which no doubt won them plenty of friends in the Mediterranean catering trade. When Hunter Davies accompanied Tottenham’s footballers on a trip to Nantes in November 1971, he wryly observed their horror as they were served steaks with little daubs of garlic butter. ‘They all said they hated garlic,’ he noted, and ‘they tore at it furiously, swearing, and wiped all marks of it from their steak’.16

  Within just a few years, however, even working-class tastes were changing. By 1975, Newcastle United’s Malcolm MacDonald was telling Shoot that he liked ‘all types of food … Indian, Italian, Greek or plain old English’. By now there were already thousands of Indian takeaways from Scotland to Cornwall, thanks to the flood of Commonwealth migrants in the 1950s and early 1960s, while in 1976 the number of Chinese takeaways officially overtook that of fish and chip shops, with kebab shops not far behind. Then there were the theatrical Italian trattorias with their ‘low-slung lighting, strings of empty Chianti bottles, bread-sticks in tumblers, and conically folded napkins of unearthly whiteness and rigidity’, as one writer put it in 1974, or the Greek and Cypriot tavernas that sprang up during the political turmoil of the early 1970s which drove thousands of refugees to London. Increasingly, too, foreign foods were finding their way into the ordinary British household, from beef goulash and lamb moussaka to coq au vin and chilli con carne. ‘Why should you wait for a dinner party to enjoy them?’ asked adverts for Brie and Camembert in 1978. Even the laziest cooks had the opportunity to experiment, thanks to Vesta’s mouth-watering ‘Package Tour’ ready meals. From Italy came Beef Risotto (‘the real taste of the Continent’); from India came Curry and Rice with Chicken (‘Pineapple, apples and sultanas, coriander and cumin make this delicious curry’); and from China, with added political correctness, came Chow Mein with Crispy Noodles (‘You like, yes?’).17

  The other obvious European innovation was wine, hitherto a treat reserved for the rich and famous, or perhaps for special occasions, but now an essential ingredient of even a modest suburban dinner party. Tottenham’s players might hate garlic, but their manager Bill Nicholson liked his wine; Davies noted that his taste for Sauternes was ‘the only sliver of middle-class life which appears to have rubbed off on him’. When Nicholson had been growing up in the 1920s, one of nine children in a working-class Yorkshire family, a taste for wine would have been condemned as sissified French pretentiousness. As late as 1950, only 5 per cent of the population drank wine once a week or more, 36 per cent drank it on special occasions only, and 59 per cent said they never touched it at all. But tastes were changing. In 1960, the British drank 3.6 pints of wine per head per year; by 1971 they drank 7 pints, by 1973 9 pints, by 1975 11 pints and by 1980 almost 20 pints. One obvious reason was that it was cheaper than ever, with the du
ty having been slashed when Britain joined the EEC; another was that people picked up the taste on holiday; a third was that wines were advertised more successfully, being associated with glamour, luxury and ambition, and aimed particularly at young women. As The Times’s wine critic Pamela Vandyke Pryce pointed out in 1973, there was still a long way to go, given the keenness for chilling wines to ‘iced lolly texture’, filling glasses to the absolute brim or knocking back vast amounts of Blue Nun, Black Tower and Mateus Rosé. ‘You’ll like this, sir,’ a wine waiter tells a diner in one memorable Private Eye cartoon. ‘It’ll make you very drunk.’ Still, although later generations poured scorn on the wine-drinkers of the 1970s – Alan Partridge, for example, is a big fan of Blue Nun – the point is not that British tastes were inherently terrible but that they were simply untutored, since the great majority had only started drinking wine within the last twenty years. But then as Basil Fawlty so rightly observes, it is ‘always a pleasure to find someone who appreciates the boudoir of the grape. I’m afraid most of the people we get in here don’t know a Bordeaux from a claret.’18

  The government formally opened talks with the members of the EEC in Brussels at the end of October 1970. Originally, the head of the team had been Anthony Barber, but when he was promoted to Chancellor, his place was taken by the much more colourful Geoffrey Rippon, who had a quick mind, a healthy impatience with details, a fondness for large cigars and – unusually for the time – a telephone installed in his car, much to the amazement of his officials. As on previous occasions, the talks were mind-numbingly boring to all but the most dedicated Euro-enthusiast, with endless haggling over New Zealand cheese and butter, Caribbean sugar, the Community tariff, and economic issues such as sterling’s role as a world currency. Tedious as they might seem, however, these were hardly unimportant issues: the Common Fisheries Policy, for example, proved a bitter bone of contention for years afterwards, with British trawlermen complaining that they had been done out of a living by the government’s surrender to European interests.

  At the time, the Labour Party protested furiously that Heath had caved in to his Continental chums, and in later years Heath’s name was mud among Conservative Euro-sceptics, who blamed him for Britain’s excessive contribution to the EEC budget (later partly recovered by Mrs Thatcher) and the abomination of the Common Agricultural Policy, a gigantic subsidy scheme for inefficient, obstreperous French farmers. But the brutal truth is that the British were hardly in a position to dictate their own terms. If they had entered the Common Market in the 1950s, as the Europeans had urged, then they would have had a much bigger say in its rules and conventions, so the Common Agricultural Policy might never have got off the ground. But by 1970 it was too late; as the chief civil servant in the negotiating team, Sir Con O’Neill, later noted, the British were faced with a staggering 13,000 typewritten pages of European enactments, all reflecting compromises between the existing members, and they were hardly likely to make friends by demanding that all these issues be reopened. The only solution, O’Neill said, was to ‘swallow the lot, and swallow it now’, which inevitably meant bad bargains on dairy products, fishing rights and the EEC budget. That was the price Britain paid for having stayed aloof for so long; the choice was not between bad terms and good terms, but between bad terms and nothing.19

  Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, it would all be for nothing if the French again vetoed Britain’s application. From the very beginning, Heath knew that he had to succeed where Macmillan and Wilson had failed, persuading the French that Britain was genuinely committed to the cause of European unity, and was not merely a stalking horse for American influence. ‘It was to the French that we should pay attention,’ Douglas Hurd wrote later, summarizing his master’s views. ‘We must gain friends in France and outmanoeuvre our enemies.’ This was easier said than done, of course. Fortunately, General de Gaulle, Britain’s chief antagonist in the past, was off the scene, having died suddenly in November 1970. His successor, Georges Pompidou, was a shrewd banker with rural origins and pragmatic instincts, not a nationalistic showman like de Gaulle. Even so, Pompidou was not necessarily sympathetic to Britain’s application; indeed, he harboured a deep suspicion of Harold Wilson, dating from an unfortunate incident in 1967 when Wilson had turned up late and dishevelled for an official dinner because he had been at a Commons debate on Vietnam – a moment, Pompidou thought, that spoke volumes about Wilson’s subservience to American interests. But as luck would have it, Heath was already a good friend of Pompidou’s private secretary Michel Jobert, whom he had first met, bizarrely, on a beach in Spain in 1960. Rather implausibly, Heath had gone to Spain to try to lose weight, and was lying on the beach one day when Jobert came across and murmured: ‘If you don’t eat any more, you’ll never be able to deal with de Gaulle.’ The diet was forgotten; the two men called for sherry and prawns, and a close friendship was born. A few years later, when Heath gave a series of lectures on European integration, he made sure to send them to Jobert. ‘Pompidou knows that you are serious,’ the Frenchman reported back a few weeks later.20

  In May 1971, Heath and Pompidou were due to meet for the first time in Paris, and Heath prepared as though he were a schoolboy facing an exam that would decide his entire future. ‘For hours on end the Prime Minister sat under a tree, dunking biscuits in tea,’ Douglas Hurd remembered. ‘Experts were produced individually and in groups … They each had their session under the tree, while ducks from the park waddled amorously across the lawn, and over the wall on the Horse Guards workmen banged together the stands for the Queen’s Birthday Parade.’ It was clear, however, that mood music was more important than mastery of detail: what mattered was to persuade Pompidou that the British were ready to become good Europeans. Interviewed on Panorama a few days before the summit, Pompidou explained that the ‘crux of the matter is that there is a European conception or idea’, and ‘the question to be ascertained is whether the United Kingdom’s conception is indeed European’. He even mischievously told a French newspaper that Britain must agree that French was the main language of the EEC, because English was the language of the United States. But Pompidou had not taken into account Heath’s capacity for linguistic vandalism, for when Broadstairs’ favourite son recorded a message to be shown on French television, the results were truly excruciating. The next day, when Heath arrived at Orly airport and said a few words in French for the cameras, the welcoming party had to stifle snorts of derision. Heath might consider himself a good European, but never had the language of Voltaire and Flaubert been so cruelly abused.21

  Fortunately, Pompidou was in a forgiving mood, and when the two men met at last on 20 May, the talks were a triumph. Leaving their officials behind, Heath and Pompidou decided to thrash out the issues on their own, accompanied only by their interpreters. They ‘clicked’, Con O’Neill recalled later. ‘They liked each other and they trusted each other.’ Outside, their advisers waited nervously, anxious that their masters were merely exchanging amiable pleasantries without getting down to brass tacks. But they need not have worried. At the lavish banquet at the Elysée Palace that night, wrote one reporter, the room ‘glowed with the warmth and satisfaction of an estrangement ended and a friendship regained’. Pompidou’s remarks at the dinner were notably generous – ‘Through two men who are talking to each other, two peoples are trying to find each other again’ – and the next morning’s talks continued in similar vein. Indeed, they went so well that, instead of calling a press conference immediately after lunch, Pompidou suggested they keep talking. It meant that Heath would have to miss an important race in his beloved Morning Cloud, but in the interests of Britain’s European future, he thought it was worth it.

  At last, at nine that evening, the two men emerged for a press conference in the splendid gilded Salon des Fêtes, the very room in which de Gaulle had announced his devastating veto in 1963. By now the waiting pressmen were convinced that something had gone badly wrong, and even Heath’s senior advisers were pale wit
h nerves since – in typical style – their boss had decided to tease them by saying nothing and looking as miserable as possible. Their surprise was therefore all the greater when Pompidou broke the good news. ‘Many people believed that Great Britain was not and did not wish to become European, and that Britain wanted to enter the Community only so as to destroy it or to divert it from its objectives,’ he said. ‘Many people also thought that France was ready to use every pretext to place in the end a fresh veto on Britain’s entry. Well, ladies and gentlemen, you see before you tonight two men who are convinced of the contrary.’ Even Heath could not suppress a broad smile at that. ‘It was marvellous to see the looks of astonishment on the faces of so many of those present,’ he later wrote. ‘We had secured success and also triumphed over the media. For me personally, it was a wildly exciting moment. Just forty years after my first visit to Paris, I had been able to play a part in bringing about the unity of Europe.’22

  With Pompidou’s blessing, the British team now found the waters a lot smoother. The French negotiators adjusted their positions overnight, deals were reached on everything from New Zealand butter to the sterling balances abroad, and at the end of June Geoffrey Rippon returned in triumph from Luxembourg, ‘wearing a red tie and with a scarlet handkerchief sprouting jauntily from his jacket pocket’, reported The Times, as though he had picked up a dash of Continental flamboyance. Even Heath’s men privately admitted that the terms were not perfect, but to have got them at all was a great achievement, and there seemed every chance that Britain could press for changes in the years to come. Meanwhile, Heath wasted little time in parading his accomplishment before the British people. On 7 July, the government issued a White Paper setting out the terms, accompanied by a glossy 16-page brochure on the case for British membership. ‘Either we choose to enter the Community and join in building a strong Europe on the foundations which the Six have laid,’ said the White Paper, ‘or we choose to stand aside from this great enterprise and seek to maintain our interests from the narrow – and narrowing – base we have known in recent years.’ And on television that night, Heath was in typically sweeping but banal form. ‘For twenty-five years we’ve been looking for something to get us going again,’ he told the nation. ‘Now here it is. We must recognize it for what it is. We have the chance of new greatness. Now we must take it.’23