Who Dares Wins
Page 6
‘We’ve booked for Rimini again.’
The new Capri, the drive to Spain and the holiday in Rimini were as much part of the national experience as the plunging pound and double-digit inflation. Indeed, even Louis Heren conceded that the ‘average working-class family’ in 1980 enjoyed what people in 1940 would have defined as an affluent middle-class lifestyle, from bank accounts, foreign holidays and household appliances to a new car and a colour television.27
One telling sign of all this was the kind of books people read. As Theroux observed, bookshops at the turn of the 1980s seemed to be full of titles such as Britain: What Went Wrong? or Is Britain Dying? But none of them made the slightest impression on the bestseller lists. Instead – and despite the political controversies of the next few years – the lists reflected the relative contentment of an affluent, aspirational society. Even if all the books analysing Britain’s national decline were counted together, they never came close to challenging the popularity of Geoffrey Smith’s Indoor Garden (1980) or Alan Titchmarsh’s Avant Gardening: A Guide to One-Upmanship in the Garden (1984). Nor did they come remotely close to matching Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery (1982), let alone the all-conquering publishing phenomenon that was St Delia Smith, whose Complete Cookery Course (1978–80) was still topping the hardback lists in 1983. Even if people were worried about the state of the nation, they were clearly much more concerned about their waistlines: the single bestselling book of 1982 was Audrey Eyton’s diet book The F-Plan, which shifted a whopping 1.2 million copies in just seven months. And were the British really as lazy, unambitious and anti-materialistic as their critics claimed? If so, what explained their enthusiasm for Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel (1979) and The Prodigal Daughter (1982), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies – and which unashamedly revelled in people getting ahead and making no apology for it?28
Far from bearing out the diagnosis of a nation sunk in terminal misery, then, Britain’s bookshelves hinted at a rather more optimistic story. This was a nation spending more money on more books than ever before, self-confident enough to laugh at its failings, curious enough to explore foreign cookery and leisured enough to cultivate its gardens. Indeed, although the newspapers warned that the increasingly demanding culture of the workplace was taking a heavy toll in stress, illness and family breakdown, most people had more free time, and more things to do with it, than ever before. They not only read more books, they listened to the radio more and watched more television. They got out more, too: the Pony Club, the Cyclists’ Touring Club, the British Field Sport Society and the British Sub-Aqua Club had all seen their memberships more than double between 1970 and 1981.29
In the summer of 1983, the Mass Observation Project asked its correspondents to describe how they filled their spare time. What was striking was the sheer length and variety of the responses. ‘Reading, knitting, listening to radio, watching TV, writing poetry,’ began Peter Hibbitt, a Basildon depot supervisor in his late forties. He was a tenants’ representative to the district council and secretary of his local Transport and General Workers’ Union branch. He brewed his own beer, grew cactuses and did all his own DIY; he enjoyed tinkering with his car and cooking the Sunday dinner, and liked to ‘hold profound discussions with my daughter and occasionally doze off in the armchair’. Another correspondent, Stephen Berry, an architectural technician from Chelmsford, sent in an even longer list, which began with shopping, washing up, hoovering and gardening, before moving on to eating out, ‘having a weekly bath’, reading, writing letters, ‘seeing a good film’, planning holidays, going to the library, walking on the Sussex Downs, going to art galleries, ‘drinking wine with friends’, making excursions by train, picking fruit, listening to live jazz and ‘chatting things over with my wife’.
To some eyes, perhaps, all this might seem mundane. Yet just a few decades earlier, much of it would probably have struck many people as gloriously opulent, not least the meals out, the rail trips, the art galleries and the wine. To people in the 1950s, let alone the 1930s or the 1900s, the idea of these lists being compiled during an age of national decline would have seemed so outlandish as to be laughable. Even amid the unprecedented prosperity of the early 1980s, though, one thing stood out. The greatest pleasure of all, Stephen wrote, was ‘watching my children grow up and playing and reading with them’. In that respect, at least, life had not changed at all.30
If there was one thing that embodied the new wealth of the age, it was the home. Every morning the British people read about the woes of the industrial economy, the scourge of strikes, the horrors of terrorism, the latest political disasters and national humiliations. But when they put down their papers and looked around, the evidence of their own homes told a different story.
In the early 1920s, when the new Prime Minister had been born, fewer than one in four British households had owned their own home. In 1961, shortly after she entered Parliament, the proportion was still less than half. But by the time she moved into her new home at 10 Downing Street, it was 55 per cent and rising fast. Even at this stage, home ownership had already become one of the great watchwords of the age. To many observers, it was the defining feature of Britain’s newly affluent society, the cornerstone of a new landscape of consumerism, domesticity and individualism. And although intellectuals loved to sneer at the suburbs, with their privet hedges, garden gnomes, sundials and rockeries, almost nine out of ten people told researchers that a suburban house represented ‘the ideal home’.
Home ownership was a marker of status, but it was more than that. In an age when so many people could remember damp, dingy housing, with paper-thin walls, outside toilets and indifferent landlords, owning your own home meant not just success but freedom. In the sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–4), nothing better captures the difference between traditional, backward-looking Terry and aspirational, proto-Thatcherite Bob, both from working-class backgrounds in Newcastle, than their attitudes to their homes. Terry lives with his parents in their red brick terrace. But Bob, to his friend’s scorn, has splashed out on a house on a brand-new suburban estate. ‘Oh Bob! The damp course!’ says his fiancée, Thelma, as they gaze lovingly at slides of the new house being built. ‘My house! You know, I can’t get used to saying that,’ he muses. ‘Our house,’ she says gently. And that two-word phrase was one of the keys to the age. When Madness used it in their jaunty Top Ten hit in the autumn of 1982, they meant it as a nostalgic paean to the heyday of the working-class terrace, when ‘our house was our castle and our keep’. But in its unapologetically rose-tinted evocation of place and belonging, privacy and domesticity, ‘Our House’ was the perfect anthem for an increasingly suburban, home-centred people.31
When Mass Observation asked its correspondents to describe their homes, the answers spoke volumes about the comforts and clutter of modern living. Indeed, several correspondents admitted that they really ought to have a clear-out. Carol Daniel, for example, was a 29-year-old Tesco shelf-stacker, living at the end of a terrace in Havering, Essex, with her husband and children. Their living room had an armchair, an orange three-section sofa, a birdcage, a fish tank and a wooden room-divider. There was a large television above a rack stuffed with newspapers, comics and holiday brochures; there were three pot plants, boxes of toys, another box of cassettes and a typewriter. It is worth emphasizing that by no standards were they rich: they had no central heating, even though Carol was always nagging her husband about it. Yet even a few decades earlier, the sheer volume of stuff would have seemed astonishing.
It was the same picture in Darlington, where the 39-year-old Susan Gray, a journalist, lived with her husband and daughter. The Grays’ living room boasted not just a television, a stereo, a typewriter and a computer, but china plates, musical instruments, toys, board games, a biscuit barrel, a bowl of nuts and countless ornaments. And in Lancaster, where the mature student Jenny Palmer and her husband owned a mock-Georgian ‘executive-type’ house, built in 1975, there was even more clutte
r: not just the inevitable television, record player and typewriter, but piles of unread copies of the Guardian, half-read books by Iris Murdoch and Simone de Beauvoir, the ‘latest Habitat catalogue’ and a truly spectacular array of ornaments, including tankards, rice bowls, vases and candlesticks.32
It was easy, of course, to sneer at the materialism of the suburban lower-middle classes. Just think of Mike Leigh’s savage portrait of Beverly and Laurence Moss in Abigail’s Party (1977), with their leather-bound copies of Shakespeare, their olives and Beaujolais, their Demis Roussos records, their Van Gogh and Lowry prints. Similarly, in her state-of-thenation novel The Middle Ground (1980), Margaret Drabble lists the contents of a typical lower-middle-class home:
flowered carpets, best tea-sets, an ingenious variety of draped lace curtains, Spanish-style vinyl tiles, wall clocks rayed like the sun in never-dying Deco, china Siamese cats and pigs and dogs, Toby jugs, glass fish, plastic rabbits, rubbery trolls, outsize turquoise teddies, plastic daffodils, plastic palm trees, fake fur rugs bristling with spidery white acrylic electric light, all the wonderful eclectic bad taste of the English.
Not even that word ‘wonderful’ can hide the condescension.33
To many people, though, these were the signs of status, the proofs of progress. Since even homeowners in their thirties could remember the thin gruel and narrow horizons of the 1940s, it was no wonder their homes were such temples to abundance, their mantelpieces and coffee tables creaking under the rewards of affluence. And it was this eagerness to show off how far they had come that explains why they made so much of their holiday souvenirs. Just as the eighteenth century’s Grand Tourists had shown off their classical booty, so middle-class homeowners gave pride of place to things they had brought back from their package holidays. Among Susan Gray’s ornaments, for example, was a ‘carved wooden plate from Yugoslavia’, while Jenny Palmer’s vast haul included a pottery lady on a mule from Corfu, two museum prints from Cyprus, a jug and vase set from Kos and a woven Cypriot wall hanging. On the coffee table there was even some Turkish delight, yet another reminder of a recent holiday. Who, forty years earlier, would have dreamed of such a collection?
The other striking thing was how colourful all this was. Indeed, judging by the Mass Observation responses, many people had deliberately chosen colour schemes that were not so much violent as downright sadistic. In Stowmarket, Suffolk, the 36-year-old Lesley Hughes, a single parent and part-time industrial cleaner, lived in a semi-detached council house decorated with pictures of daffodils and of the Custom’s House at King’s Lynn, as well as a picture of the Queen with the infant Prince Andrew and a corgi. Her curtains were green. Her paintwork was green with ‘darker green’ over the fireplace. Her sofa was ‘black leather with orange seats’. At its foot was an orange rug, while the carpet was brown ‘with orange and mustard circles’. The ceilings and doors, she added, were ‘mustard shade’.34
Even at the time, some people would probably have considered all this unforgivably tasteless. But to Lesley, as to so many others in the early 1980s, the contrasting colours probably seemed vivid and modern, so unlike the dreary greys of her childhood. The journalist Jeremy Seabrook encountered a similar picture when, on a trip to Bolton in 1981, he visited a post-war council estate. The streets could hardly have been bleaker, but whenever a door opened, he found ‘bright curtains’, ‘brindled green and yellow or crimson’ carpets and pictures of flamenco dancers and Chinese girls. Middle-class homes were often just as colourful: in Darlington, Susan Gray’s living-room walls were lined with beige wallpaper decorated with pink and brown roses, while the paintwork was ‘warm mushroom’ and the carpet a swirling mixture of ‘golds and browns’. But this was positively restrained compared with the scene in Lancaster. There Jenny Palmer’s living room boasted a carpet with a ‘geometric design in green with black, fawn and white’. As even she admitted, it clashed with her wallpaper, a ‘large splodgy design of pale green and beige flowers’. So to ‘try and balance this’, she had put in ‘dark chestnut brown velvet curtains’. The tentative tone suggests that she had not quite pulled it off.35
Reading people’s descriptions of their homes in the early 1980s, one word comes up again and again: ‘electric’. It is easy to forget that millions of people could remember a time without ‘our one source of energy / The ultimate discovery’, to borrow the words of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s splendid single ‘Electricity’, released in May 1979. Half a century earlier, just one in five homes had been connected to the grid, and as late as the 1960s some isolated villages were still without power. Yet in a matter of decades, electricity had utterly transformed the life of the home. By 1979 some 96 per cent of households owned a television, with seven out of ten being colour models. More than nine out of ten households had a fridge; half had a freezer; two-thirds had a telephone.36
When Mass Observation asked its correspondents to list their household gadgets, they often filled an entire page. In Basildon, Peter Hibbitt had two deep fat fryers, a coffee percolator, a toaster, a food mixer, a radio, a washing machine, a fridge, a microwave oven, a television, a stereo and two vacuum cleaners. In Darlington, Susan Gray had two cassette recorders, a television, a sewing machine, a computer, a fridge, a freezer, a washing machine, a slide projector, two hairdryers, a toaster, various blenders and mixers, a coffee percolator, a filter coffee maker and no fewer than four cameras and four radios. Even Mary Richards, a 54-year-old woman who worked collecting eggs on a battery farm in Newton Abbot, Devon, owned a television, a vacuum cleaner, a fridge freezer, a sandwich toaster and a Yamaha organ.37
But perhaps the most impressive thing about homes in the early 1980s was something future generations would take completely for granted. They were warm. For people who could remember the bone-chilling cold of a winter morning, the advent of central heating seemed an extraordinary blessing. Indeed, banal as it may sound, the take-up of central heating says a great deal about the unprecedented comfort of so many people’s lives in the 1970s and 1980s. Even as the newspapers were wringing their hands about national decline, the proportion of homes with central heating surged from just 37 per cent in 1972 to 55 per cent in 1979, and continued to grow thereafter. But since it was expensive, people were understandably keen to keep their costs down, providing the perfect opportunity for that great villain of the age, the double-glazing salesman. By the autumn of 1981, despite the recession, demand for double-glazing was greater than ever, and by the following spring British homeowners were spending some £400 million a year, behind only the West Germans in the European double-glazing championship. One exception, however, was the Daniel household. As Carol told Mass Observation, a salesman had visited Romford and quoted £2,000 to do their windows. ‘His sales pitch was very good and a lesser mortal would have been talked into signing for them,’ she wrote, ‘but my husband’s will is very strong’.38
The mania for home improvement did not end there. A decade or two earlier, many people would have regarded showers, fitted carpets and built-in wardrobes – let alone patio doors, conservatories and double garages – as the luxuries of the professional classes. Not now, though. In 1981, reported The Times, the ‘home improvement business’ was already worth some £5 billion a year; by 1983 it had reached £8 billion, ‘and the end is nowhere in sight’. Loft conversions were increasingly popular, but the supreme status symbol of the age was the conservatory. A new conservatory was very expensive: the largest firms typically quoted at least £7,000, including installation, the equivalent of well over £20,000 today. Still, by the spring of 1983 the country’s top three firms were putting up some 600 conservatories a year, a figure inconceivable even a decade earlier.
For The Times, Britain was going through a ‘great conservatory revival’, driven partly by a wider interest in all things Victorian, but also by a desire to maximize light and unite house and garden. ‘Conservatories are enjoying something of a renaissance,’ agreed the Guardian, which preferred a rather more cynical explanation
: a conservatory was ‘cheaper and less drastic than divorce when she wants to extend the living room and he wants a bigger garden’. Both papers thought the garden was more important than ever, with Britain becoming a patchwork of ‘vegetable plots, hen runs, goldfish ponds, billiard-table lawns, swimpools, pigeon lofts and patios’. Indeed, it is a safe bet that millions of people would have nodded at the Guardian’s definition of the good life in the spring of 1982: ‘a patio on which to relax with a drink among sweet-scented flowers on rare summer evenings’.39
There were, of course, millions of people for whom the dream of a flower-decked patio was never remotely close to becoming a reality. Yet although poverty and unemployment were never far from the headlines, the fundamental fact about life in the 1980s is that most people were better off than they had ever been. It is easy to forget that in the first half of the decade, households’ total disposable income rose, in real terms, by more than a tenth. Often they spent the extra money on going out: cars and caravans, restaurant meals and shopping expeditions, day-trips and package holidays. But as the sales figures for televisions, microwaves, central heating and conservatories show, they were increasingly spending it on staying in. Even as the dole queues lengthened, spending on appliances went through the roof. Every year, sales of washing machines, tumble dryers, fridge freezers, even toasters and coffee machines, reached new heights. In twelve months, reported the Guardian in October 1983, sales of microwaves had gone up by 70 per cent, colour televisions by 31 per cent, even deep fat fryers by 30 per cent – and this when Britain was limping out of the worst downturn since the Depression. Even sales of takeaway food and cans of beer had recorded similar increases: a sign, wrote the columnist Victor Keegan, that ‘the average Briton’s response to the first microchip recession is to retreat into his home and make that the centre of his entertainment and an escape from the outside world’.40