by Andrew Marr
36
The Revolt of the Chicken Farmer
Ideas matter. And because ideas matter, so too does the story of an Old Etonian Christian Scientist, former RAF fighter pilot, chicken farmer and unsuccessful turtle rancher called Antony Fisher. In the high years of socialism and planning, from 1945 onwards, Fisher stood out as an utterly self-certain individualist and anti-socialist. ‘Communism is the poison offered to the people; socialism is the cup in which it is given; and the welfare state is the tempting label on the bottle,’ he liked to say. In the Britain of the forties and fifties these views made him an eccentric. Once this country had been the world centre for liberal economics, famous for its people’s distrust of big government – a land without identity cards or intrusive central government. Now even its Liberal Party was a keen supporter of the post-war consensus (the party, after all, of Beveridge and Keynes). There were some standing out against it. Not many, but some. Their unlikely spiritual teacher was Friedrich von Hayek, an exiled Viennese economist, who came from the very heart of cosmopolitan intellectualism where socialism, communism, Freudianism and fascism contended. A cousin of the daunting philosopher Wittgenstein, he would help reconvert the British to their old doctrines of economic liberalism.
Hayek had arrived in London to teach economics in 1931 and developed a close rapport with another economist Lionel Robbins, the son of a London market gardener who had been taken up by that creator of the Welfare State, William Beveridge. Hayek and Robbins formed a crucial partnership at the London School of Economics, a subversive friendship which would help, eventually, to change the intellectual climate of Britain. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was one of the most influential books of the age, a full-throated attack on socialism which was received with contempt by many but admired – with reservations – by both George Orwell and Keynes himself. But a book is not a movement. Liberal economists did begin to meet regularly in Switzerland from 1947 but for Britain the key moment came with the arrival on the scene of Fisher, now an almost entirely forgotten man. He had been traumatized by watching the death of his brother during the Battle of Britain and rebuilt his life as a Sussex farmer. A staunch individualist, he had been entranced by Hayek’s book and managed to meet his hero after the war. Hayek told Fisher not to try to become a politician but instead to try to win the battle of ideas by forming some kind of institute or organization to fight the rotting influence of the State. It was a message Fisher never forgot. Luckily for him, the State stepped in to help him spread it. In 1952 his herd of cattle contracted foot and mouth disease and had to be destroyed. Fisher used his compensation money to visit the United States.
There he not only picked up the latest free-market thinking but visited a huge experimental ‘broiler chicken’ farm at Cornell University, where 15,000 birds were being raised under one roof. This, thought Fisher, was exactly what the meat-starved British needed. It was illegal to import the chunky American poultry central to the new factory farming, so the (anti-regulations) Fisher was reduced to covering two dozen fertilized White Rock eggs with silver foil and bringing them through in his hand luggage as ‘Easter Eggs’. Back in Sussex he built sheds with gas heating systems and an overhead rail system to bring in food. Soon twenty-four chickens became 2,400 and then 24,000. Within a few years, his family were raising 1.25 million birds, Buxted Chickens had been formed, and Fisher was a very rich man, the most successful poultry farmer in Europe. Across Britain, affordable roast chicken became a staple of the Sunday lunch table, thanks to Fisher. And with the money they made him, he was able to fund the Institute for Economic Affairs, undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history. Set up by Fisher and the eccentric ex-paratrooper and Liberal, Oliver Smedley, the IEA was intended to combat the socialist influence of the Fabians. Soon they would be joined by others, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Hayek would be proved right. It was the seeding of ideas that mattered most, not conventional political careers.
The IEA first touched British politics during the winter of 1957-8 when inflation was rising above 4 per cent and wage settlements were in double figures. Like so many political crises of the time this one occurred in deepest private. The question was whether government spending should be cut back as part of a wider drive to curb the amount of money in the economy. Banks were also to be instructed to cut back credit. Macmillan was far more worried about confrontation and unemployment than he was about rising prices. His Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, disagreed. He was insistent that savings had to be made to squeeze inflation and save the pound. His enemies thought Macmillan an unprincipled coward. He was certainly driven by a ruthless enthusiasm for staying in office. But there was another side to the Prime Minister. Brought up in the intellectual shadow of Keynes, he thought that seriously painful cuts were perhaps not necessary and that the economy was already slowing. Though Macmillan was inclined to dither, haggle and to split the difference, this was a shrewd call. And around him he had many spending ministers, looking after the armed forces, the hospitals and welfare, who were bitterly against cutting back. He feared some of them might resign.
On the other side of the argument, as it turned out, were the real resigners, Thorneycroft and his two junior Treasury ministers – the wealthy, sarcastic, ruthlessly logical and nearly blind Nigel Birch, and Enoch Powell. Their insistence that it was vital to control the money supply was not just a technical position, but was intertwined with a personal suspicion of corporatism and the big state that was close to the more intellectual economic case now being pushed by the newly formed IEA. Lionel Robbins had been advising the three ministers, despite much sucking of teeth by more consensus-minded officials, and Fisher’s men would come to see Thorneycroft and his fellow rebels at Macmillan’s Treasury as heroes. They provided the intellectual ammunition and connected through Powell to younger Tories, and gained them as converts. Powell had already been introduced to Hayek’s thinking. In the months before the three Treasury ministers resigned, they had been dropping in on one another for a rolling conversation which showed they had all concluded the same thing – that government spending was too high and had to be severely reined back. Against the instincts of their own officials as well as their colleagues, they put together a planned series of cuts, including a 50 per cent increase in the cost of school meals, freezes on pay rises and the removal of family allowances for the second child. It would have hit five million families, including millions of the very middle-class mothers whose support the Tories most needed.
It was a deliberately tough and provocative package, and battle was duly joined in the cabinet. If there was ever a moment before the great political smash-ups of the seventies when ministers could have gripped the issue of inflation and asserted themselves against the consensus of Whitehall and the unions, this was it. Day after day, the arguments raged back and forward. Compromises were offered, partially accepted, and then rejected again. Tempers grew shorter. The Treasury team trooped in and out of Number Ten. A special cabinet was held on Friday, then again on the Sunday. But Thorneycroft, despite being accused of ‘Hitler tactics’ by irate colleagues, would not budge. Macmillan, anxious to get away for a tour of the Commonwealth, would not concede the cuts. All three ministers then resigned. Thorneycroft would later become chairman of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. Birch would struggle with his growing blindness and never return. Powell’s stormy career had many more crises in it yet. In apparently throw-away but actually carefully considered words, Macmillan dismissed the whole matter as ‘a little local difficulty’, appointed a new team, and swanned off abroad exactly on schedule. It seemed stylish, insouciant, masterly. From it, immediately, nothing flowed. Some cuts were made by the new Chancellor. The economy was in fact turning down, which suggests Thorneycroft’s medicine would have been grim indeed.
Yet this was a turning point – away from the ideas of free marketeers and towards the last phase of the planning economy which would end in disaster. That, in turn, would eve
ntually produce Thatcherism, the IEA’s final triumph and the time when Antony Fisher’s eggs came home to roost. Before that could happen, another pre-election boom was engineered in 1959 and a new idea for improving British economic performance began to take hold, the central plan used by the French. By 1961 there was a ‘pay pause’ to try to hold down inflation, and then the establishment of a grand chat-in, the National Economic Development Council, or Neddy, which brought industrialists, civil servants and trade unionists around a table to discuss how to produce more. Reggie Maudling virtually ordered the carmakers to build new factories in Scotland, Merseyside and Wales in order to combat rising unemployment. The following year saw a 4 per cent growth target. The run-up to the 1964 election under a new Prime Minister featured a giveaway budget by Maudling, by now Chancellor, which would later be blamed by Labour for leaving an atrocious economic crisis. Almost all the weapons used by Labour to try and plan their way out of economic decline, from pay and incomes targets to national plans and regional directives, were already in place under Macmillan and his successor Alec Douglas-Home. All would fail. Antony Fisher knew why.
37
Things that Fall on your Feet
The best answer was clearly for British industry to produce more that the rest of the world wanted to buy, reliably and at the right price. Was that impossible? In the fifties there were plenty of successful British corporations. There were the oil giants such as Royal Dutch-Shell, product of a merger in 1906 and by then a vast international business, headquartered in London. There were the consumer combines, notably Unilever, another Dutch and British joint venture dating from 1928 which squatted across everything from soap powder to sausages, toothpaste to frozen food, and which was run on the latest principles of market research, ruthlessly targeted advertising and properly trained managers. There was the privatized-again steel industry. The Steel Company of Wales whose vast Port Talbot works in South Wales (‘the city of steel which never sleeps’) employed 20,000 people and could boast one of the most modern mill systems in the world. Other private steel firms, at Consett for instance, were also working at full pelt and seemed competitive with their European rivals. There was ICI, the chemical combine created in the twenties, which enjoyed a near-monopoly in many products, which employed 6,000 research workers and by the end of the fifties was spending more on R&D than all Britain’s universities combined. There were electronic companies like Ferranti’s and the sprawling engine-making, light bulb, fridge and washing machine group AEI; the still-successful engineers such as Rolls-Royce and Vickers and tightly run metal-bashers like Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds.
These and other groups were not allowed to sit pretty, or lack for competition. The fifties had seen the start of ruthless ‘corporate raiding’ by tycoons who took over, broke up and reorganized flaccid and poorly managed firms. There was much talk of learning the latest American management techniques; the big US advertising companies were already growing in London and influencing British thinking; better design was being eagerly sought out from Italy, Denmark and France. In his Anatomy of Britain (1962) the journalist Anthony Sampson paints a vivid picture of one of the new property tycoons who was making a fortune by breaking up the inner city portfolios of great old companies and putting up new developments – what he called his ‘Canalettos’, the new skylines of booming Britain.
Jack Cotton, a Birmingham boy made good, was living in a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, surrounded by surveyors, maps and paintings by Renoir, a jaunty business impresario – ‘short, red-faced, fifty-nine, with smooth black hair, shrewd eyes, a pointed handkerchief in his pocket with a bow tie to match…His cars are called JC1 and JC2.’ Then there was Hugh Fraser, the Glasgow draper’s son who was building a huge network of stores and other businesses across the country. In 1948 he floated House of Fraser and created a private company Scottish and Universal Investment Trusts (SUITS) which became a mighty force in the fifties; by 1957 he had bought London’s John Barker group, and two years later, Harrods. Then, another outsider, the Italian-born Charles Forte who had emigrated to Alloa in Scotland was quietly building a modest chain of roadside cafes into a huge hotel and catering business. He opened some of the first motorway cafés. From 1971 he added the Little Chef chain to his group and from 1978 he had control of the Happy Eater restaurants too, which while not necessarily the finest examples of cuisine, kept generations of travelling Britons fuelled. These men are also part of the story of the fifties, alongside the more familiar images of tweed-suited Old Etonians ambling around grouse-moors. Even in government the rumbles of modernization could be heard. The hyperactive Tory minister Ernie Marples, a self-made businessman and rare working-class arriviste in Macmillan’s cabinet, a fireball of energy in the Jack Cotton mould, was busy recasting Britain’s ancient transport system; the first parking meters, for instance, went up in London in 1958 in Grosvenor Square. Under his appointee and friend Dr Beeching, brutal cuts in the rail network would soon follow. Investment went instead to new roads and traffic management systems. During those thirteen Tory years, car ownership quadrupled to eight million and huge amounts of commerce was diverted from rail to lorries.
Britain’s car industry, which would later become the ultimate symbol of industrial failure, was looking strong. The tangle of small competing companies that had marked the pre-war industry had been radically pruned. In 1952 the two great rivals, Austin and Morris, came together to form the British Motor Company. Herbert Austin’s company at Longbridge, Birmingham, which traced its history to 1906, had dominated the inter-war years with its Austin Seven. This was the first British car which could be bought in large numbers by the less wealthy: good enough to be built under licence by BMW and copied by Nissan, it had sold nearly 300,000 by the outbreak of war. By 1948 a new range of Austins, the Princess and Sheerline, were spattered across magazine and newspaper adverts, and the A40 Somersets and Devons were arriving. Lord Nuffield, over at Oxford, had been one of the great industrial pioneers of modern Britain, building his first car just before the First World War, and still going strong enough at the time of the merger to become president of the new BMC. His Morris Eight and Morris Ten had won pre-war devotees. After the war, it was the Oxford company which produced the first great British car of the age of mass motoring, Alec Issigonis’s revolutionary Morris Minor of 1948. This would become the first British model to sell over a million, and would still be in production as late as 1971. Lord Nuffield had not been an immediate fan, describing the car as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.
38
The Great Arragonis
Alec Issigonis deserves a short aside in the narrative, a space for himself. He not only designed the Morris Minor but in 1959, the year Macmillan, at the height of his reputation, called a particularly successful election, he produced the Mini too. This was the nearest thing to chic Macmillan’s age produced, though of course Macmillan himself would never have bought anything so small and vulgar. Issigonis can lay claim to being one of the more influential figures in the history of the car in Britain as well as being about the only industrial designer anyone has heard of. The son of a Greek engineer living in Turkey who had taken British citizenship, and a German brewer’s daughter, his early years had been lived on the site of his father’s marine engineering business, watching the drawings transform themselves into engines.
He is as good an example as any of the benefit that immigration brought to the country. He was a war refugee: the First World War peace treaties had carved up the Ottoman empire and given Smyrna, the port where Issigonis lived, to Greece. The Turks won it back and many foreigners fled. Issigonis’s father died on the way and he arrived with his mother in London in 1922, virtually penniless. He learned engineering and industrial drawing in London before getting work first for Humber, then Morris. An unconventional designer, he loathed teamwork and mathematics, describing the latter as the enemy of every truly creative man. He learned in part by hand-making his own racing car, which he
raced himself before the war; later he would ridicule such innovations as car radios, seatbelts and comfortable seats.
Issigonis’s Morris Minor had been radical in design and structure; it was the nearest of any British car to the Hitler-era Volkswagen Beetle. His Mini-Minor was commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the Suez crisis when petrol shortages had focused attention on the case for cheap, economical cars. The country was already latching on to the cheap bubble cars being imported from Italy and Germany, and soon being made in Britain too, at a Brighton factory. Issigonis’s brief was to produce something for the British Motor Corporation that could take them on, but was also a proper car, not a motorbike with pretensions. He not only made it look good, but by turning round the engine and placing it over the wheels, he found a way of packing far more space for passengers into a smaller area than any previous car. His design was so radical it needed a complete set of new machine tools to produce; Issigonis designed them, too. The Mini would become an icon of British cool, a chirpy, cheeky little car we liked to think represented the national character at its classless best. Yet the true story of the Mini is not quite as flattering to British industry. The early Minis were shoddily built, with a series of mechanical problems and poor trim; more importantly they leaked so badly people joked that every car should be sold with a free pair of Wellington boots and one journalist said he was keeping goldfish in the door pockets. Issigonis was short-tempered and intolerant with more junior design and production colleagues, who called him Arragonis and Issigonyet? He had spoken before about building a ‘charwoman’s car’ but the lower-income families the Mini was aimed at initially took against its unfamiliar shape, small size and austere lack of trim.