Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  According to City legend, the man who really rescued the British sandwich was a man called Robin Birley. Yet Birley was an intriguingly implausible candidate to become the saviour of the sandwich. His father had founded the upper-class nightclub Annabel’s in 1963, for which Robin’s mother, the eponymous Annabel, rewarded him by running off with Sir James Goldsmith. At the age of 11, Robin was mauled by a tiger owned by his parents’ friend John Aspinall, the society bookmaker best known for his association with Lord Lucan and his unfortunate habit of losing zookeepers to animal attacks. He survived, though, and in September 1979, at the age of 21, he opened his first sandwich bar, Birley’s, in Fenchurch Street. Soon he had two more, offering eighteen different fillings from prawn and avocado to curried turkey. At around £1.50, the equivalent of about £6 today, Birley’s sandwiches were not cheap, and he also sold lager, Muscadet and Côtes du Rhône, which says something about his customers. But demand was booming, and by the turn of 1985 his runners were delivering some 600 orders a day to offices across the City.26

  Birley was far from alone in spotting an opportunity in the capital’s new office culture. In May 1980, the Observer’s Fiona Malcolm reported on the increasingly ‘long queues inside and outside sandwich bars’, as London’s workers poured out of their buildings every lunchtime. Too many places, she lamented, specialized in ‘the uniquely British combination of wet blotting paper smeared with yellow motor oil and filled with a slice of soapy cheddar or processed ham and a limp lettuce leaf’, and there was a special place in hell for Olive’s Pantry in Covent Garden, which packed its sandwiches with ‘lumps of overcooked beef, fatty pork, tinned ham, pressed chicken and processed cheese’. But there were decent places, too. In Covent Garden, she recommended Neal’s Yard, where for 50p the staff would fill a wholemeal sandwich with ‘avocado, egg mayonnaise, peanut butter, banana and honey, cheddar, vegetable paté [and] hummus’, though presumably not all at once. She was also a great fan of the ‘scandalously expensive’ sandwiches at the Danish Food Centre on Conduit Street, as well as the salt beef and pastrami sandwiches at Carroll’s in Great Windmill Street, which was decorated, slightly oddly, with signed photographs of the glamour model Fiona Richmond, The Good Life’s Richard Briers and the one-eyed Israeli general Moshe Dayan.

  One prediction Fiona Malcolm got completely wrong, though, was her belief that Londoners would prove easy pickings for sandwich-makers from the North, whose products were so much better. ‘You wouldn’t get many canny northerners paying the kind of prices you pay in London for pre-packed rubbish,’ she insisted. ‘I can’t wait for cold roast pork and stuffing and saveloy and pease pudding sandwiches to come south at reasonable prices.’ Yet the future lay not with the sandwich-makers of Harrogate and Hull, but with the giants of the high street. Once again Marks & Spencer led the way, selling four different flavours – salmon and cucumber, prawn and cream cheese, ham salad, and egg and tomato – in triangular containers in 1980. Boots soon followed suit, producing ‘sand-wedges’ of their own. What the workers of the 1980s wanted, it turned out, was not pease pudding, but prawn mayonnaise.27

  The rise of the sandwich bar was part of a wider trend. Despite the economic downturn, these were boom years for eating out: as Christopher Driver remarked in the preface to the 1980 edition of the Good Food Guide, the ‘visible popularity of restaurants, and the apparently affluent youth of their customers’, suggested that the market was expanding every year. But he was honest enough to admit that visitors to Britain’s restaurants faced some daunting challenges. Some owners seemed to regard Fawlty Towers as a model, such as the unnamed restaurateur ‘who won a bet with his head waitress that he would not walk through the dining room without his trousers on’. Most establishments were immensely unfriendly to children, regarding smaller customers ‘as an intrusion and their tastes an inconvenience’. Then there was the problem of smoking. ‘There are plenty of places in this book’, Driver admitted, ‘whose atmosphere late on a Saturday night can only be compared with the residual smoking compartments on London tube trains, which even hardened smokers often try to avoid.’

  Above all, though, there was the issue of quality. Driver thought the nation’s restaurants had improved enormously in recent years; so too, hearteningly, did the authors of Fodor’s Guide. The British no longer thought it ‘shameful or sinful to enjoy good food’, and American visitors would find that the days of ‘stodgy, steamed puddings and over-boiled vegetables’ were over. But the Let’s Go guide for 1982 was more cautious, suggesting that young Americans stick to bangers and mash, cream teas and something the authors called ‘Spotty Dick’. They should never order vegetables, which were ‘often overcooked – ask for salads instead’. And when it came to hot drinks, Let’s Go issued a stark warning. ‘Always choose tea … British coffee is not well made.’28

  What might a visitor in the early 1980s expect to eat? At the top end, the food was still French-inspired and, by modern standards, dementedly rich. At the Oven d’Or in Orpington in south-east London, customers might expect to find hot pâté in puff pastry with Madeira sauce, roast crab with herbs and cream sauce or Crêpes Edouard VII, ‘stuffed with smoked salmon in a delicate curry sauce’. And even the 1980 Good Food Guide was horrified by the chaos at Walton’s in Knightsbridge, which had been bombed five years earlier by the IRA’s Balcombe Street Gang. Hazelnut omelette; mousseline of sea trout with saffron sauce; pan-fried collops with pickled walnuts; ‘a concoction of banana, raspberries, mint ice-cream and chocolate sauce’: here was a menu to bewilder even the most experienced gourmand. At least Walton’s had the decency to provide a menu in English, which many upmarket establishments still refused to do. Fodor’s claimed that London offered ‘dozens of possibilities with exciting, adventurous cooking served in intriguing surroundings’, which sounded a bit ominous. But the Let’s Go guide advised young Americans to eat at pubs or wine bars, instead of wasting their money at supposedly high-end places. More than anything, it begged its readers to ‘avoid at all costs’ the steak houses in the West End – advice that generations of tourists have ignored at their peril.29

  It would be cheering to report that outside the capital the food was better. Fodor’s certainly thought so, claiming that standards improved ‘the further north you go in England’. But the Good Food Guide’s survey of restaurants outside London, based on the testimony of ordinary customers, was the stuff of nightmares. One Huntingdon hotel came warmly recommended, ‘if you don’t mind eating and sleeping on an overgrown traffic island’. (‘Vegetables dire and the beef tough,’ reported another reader.) Shropshire was a ‘gastronomic Arizona’, a land not of blue remembered hills but of ‘dreadful pub sandwiches’. Manchester’s finest dining room, the Midland Hotel, boasted ‘soft and leaden’ pastry, obviously reheated tripe and ‘inept service’. In ‘the best restaurant in Newcastle’, meanwhile, diners could look forward to ‘disastrous vegetables’, ‘overcooked steak’ and ‘cheesecake with too much gelatine’. If this was the city’s best restaurant, what were the others like?

  In Edinburgh, one recommended restaurant specialized in ‘very fatty goose’ and a ‘ratatouille overcooked and short of aubergines’, while another offered ‘appalling mushroom savoury and lasagne’. Nor did Wales offer much relief. Visiting the Red Lion in Llangynidr, Powys, one reviewer waited for an hour and finally ‘settled for [a] meal abandoned by less patient people: beef not bad, but under-cooked potato, near-raw cabbage’, as well as something called ‘Black Death’, a very brave order given the standards of the day. But another Powys establishment offered a warmer welcome. Some guests raised their eyebrows at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel’s signature ‘kipper en croûte’, but its ‘tongue braised with raisin sauce’ went down very well. As one reader observed, ‘it was the sort of meal my late headmaster would have greatly enjoyed’.30

  One thing that might have surprised his old headmaster, though, was what people were drinking. Twenty years earlier, wine (‘a foreign drink’, according to The Times) had b
een perceived as something for special occasions, yet by 1981 sales had increased by 250 per cent in just two decades. Drinking a bottle of wine was a way of looking stylish and sophisticated, a citizen of the world, but it was also becoming a common pleasure in parts of the country where it would once have been exceptionally rare. In Lambeth in 1981, Margaret Bradshaw and her family ate a traditional Sunday roast every weekend, just as her parents would have done. But now they liked to have a bottle of wine, too – something her parents would surely have considered unimaginable.31

  But the really fashionable drink of the early 1980s was not wine, lager or even real ale, which had recently begun to make a comeback. It was water. Even a decade or two earlier, people would have laughed at the idea of paying for water in a bottle when you could have tap water for free, yet by 1981 some 500 million gallons of Perrier, Evian and Malvern Water were changing hands a year. Indeed, the craze for bottled water was such that in January 1982 the British Tourist Authority tried to market drinking water from Britain’s fading spa towns. The Guardian’s reviewer liked Harrogate Sparkle (‘freshly brisk, with a touch of stimulating impatience, though perhaps a little thin and nervous’) but disapproved of Sparkling Ashbourne (‘bland and assured … full-bodied and flat’). Surely, though, this was just a fad? Not a bit of it: in 1982 the British spent some £50 million on mineral water, and when water workers went on strike in early 1983, demand was such that many supermarkets ran out. As one observer put it, the strike had done for mineral water ‘what television has done for darts and snooker’. The Consumers’ Association objected that expensive bottled water was no better for you than tap water, but it was no good. Nobody ever looked like a citizen of the world by drinking water from the tap.32

  The rise of so-called ‘sparkling’ water was nothing short of sensational. In the course of the 1980s, Perrier’s annual sales rocketed from 12 million bottles to 152 million. Playing up their product’s Continental élan (‘Eau la la!’) and supposed health benefits (‘Neau calories’), their campaigns were aimed squarely at that emblematic consumer group of the early 1980s: young, socially ambitious, professional women. It was also this group who frequented that supremely symbolic institution of the Thatcher years, the wine bar. After all, the point of wine bars was not so much that they served wine, or even water, but that they served women. Pubs belonged to men, but as the Guardian explained in July 1982, the wine bar was ‘providing a vast section of society with a freedom they never had before … that of sitting in a drinking place without being accosted, pinched, chatted up or loudly and anatomically commented upon’. Wine bars’ popularity was a question of atmosphere rather than alcohol, agreed Derek Orme, who had opened an establishment in Balham. ‘Women can go into them and be reasonably sure that they won’t get hassled.’

  The story of Derek Orme’s bar, one of some 250 wine bars in London by 1982, nicely captured the social and economic forces transforming Britain in the first half of the decade. Previously a sales executive for Procter & Gamble, Derek had spent years ‘moaning to friends at dinner parties about how you never make any money unless you work for yourself’. Now in his early thirties, he gave up his job and began renovating a dilapidated house in Clapham, which he had bought for £9,000. Four years later, he sold it for £38,000 and poured the profits into Orme’s, a ‘wine bar-cum-bistro’ in south London. The location, a formerly run-down area now being gentrified by young middle-class couples, was perfect. So was the atmosphere, all plants, wood and ‘subdued lighting’.

  But while Derek Orme was a wine enthusiast, not all establishments were labours of love. The Guardian complained that most wine bars charged gigantic mark-ups on their wines and carried out ‘sheer candlelight robbery’ when it came to the food (‘some terrible things are done in the name of smoked mackerel’). The following year’s Which? Wine Guide was even more damning, attacking the ‘overpricing, poor service and uninspired choice of wines’ in most new establishments. Among other things, wrote the editor, they were too keen to exploit their customers’ ignorance, with lists reading only ‘Beaujolais £5’ or ‘Volnay £13’. ‘It would be hard to find a bunch of people selling to the public who are as secretive about their wares’, she remarked, ‘as the average wine bar owner.’33

  For diners who preferred to avoid anonymous Beaujolais and ancient mackerel, there was, at least, a good choice of exotic alternatives. After three decades of Commonwealth immigration, the British diet was more obviously globalized than ever before. By 1982 the Good Food Guide’s entries for London included eighteen Chinese restaurants, sixteen Italian, twelve Greek or Turkish Cypriot, four Spanish, three Japanese, two Portuguese and one each from Afghanistan, Germany, Hungary, Korea, Lebanon, Sweden and Thailand. Even people wanting fast food, said The Times, could choose ‘spring rolls from China, samosas from India, kebabs of the Near East, Mexican tacos and Italian pizzas, as well as British breakfasts and good old baked potatoes’. No other city in Europe could claim to be such a melting pot.34

  As Christopher Driver admitted, all this gastronomic larceny often came without much attention to authenticity. Many of the nominally Italian, Indian and Chinese restaurants that flourished in the 1980s were heavily adapted to save money and pander to the locals. ‘The tandoori chicken is dyed, not marinated; the taramosalata is flavoured with smoked roe rather than made of it; the Pekin duck is not Pekin duck because it is deep-fried not roasted,’ Driver wrote. When, in an ostensibly Italian restaurant, he asked for his spaghetti al dente, the waiter replied solemnly: ‘It will take a little longer, sir.’ Yet the novelty of foreign food had long since faded. Pasta, aubergines and coriander were no longer exotic; they were mainstream. Indeed, the largest pasta factory in Europe had just opened, not in Rome or Naples, but in St Albans. The academic Lincoln Allison, born in 1946, had grown up in Colne in Lancashire, ‘a town with only one café’. Now he lived in Leamington Spa, where he could easily find ‘restaurants and delicatessens in a dozen national styles … yams and tortillas, cabanos and cracowska, grappa and pitta bread’. With five bistros and five Indian restaurants, Leamington in 1981 felt like ‘London and New York rolled into one’, with ‘a level of luxury and extravagance to tempt the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah’.35

  There was, however, one culinary import that no sane person, even in the early 1980s, would have associated with luxury and extravagance. This was American fast food, spearheaded in Britain by Kentucky Fried Chicken. Having opened its first branch in Preston in 1965, Colonel Sanders’s chain had some 250 British outlets by the mid-1970s, though their reputation took a bit of a battering when health inspectors denounced their ‘unhygienic conditions’. In 1976, therefore, KFC began to introduce open kitchens, copying McDonald’s, which had arrived in Britain two years earlier. Yet at first there was some confusion about their target audience. One of the first mentions of McDonald’s in The Times, for example, came in a survey of places offering pre-theatre dinners. The reviewer, who had clearly never been to McDonald’s before, was not impressed (‘I would regard a pre-theatre snack here as a really desperate measure’). And as late as 1983 burger bars still had a surprisingly upmarket image. The Times’s diarist spotted City workers having breakfast at McDonald’s on King William Street, while at the Wimpy on Piccadilly Circus he was pleased to see three people reading the Establishment’s favourite paper. At the Burger King on nearby Coventry Street, meanwhile, the customers were so upmarket that the manager played piped classical music at lunchtime.36

  To some visitors, the ethos of the new fast-food restaurants seemed almost offensively American. ‘In the shiny shiny fast food stores where every sales host and hostess smiles a fresh disposable smile, service is smoother than even the Concorde lounge at Heathrow,’ began a long Guardian feature in May 1980. ‘Your order is programmed to reach you in 90 seconds. Here is sanitised scoffing such as the British have never known.’ Why, the writer, wondered, did it take Americans to sell fast food in Britain? The obvious answer is that such places succeeded precisely bec
ause they were American, trading on an image of slickness, speed and modernity. Indeed, by the end of 1980 the competition among American or faux-American burger bars was more intense than ever, with Wendy’s joining McDonald’s, Burger King, Trumps, Huckleberry’s Strikes, Wimpy, Burgerland and Burger Master in an attempt to gain a foothold in the British market.

  With competition so intense, the right image was absolutely crucial. KFC, for example, were thrown into a panic when market researchers found that, during the recession of the early 1980s, they had become identified with unemployed or very low-paid young men, who came in after the pubs closed for a cheap chicken dinner to take home. By contrast, McDonald’s relentlessly targeted families with young children. ‘Britain seems full of middle-class parents protesting that they only go to McDonald’s because the kids drag them there. Two-year-olds are seen climbing out of pushchairs to pull their mothers in,’ wrote one observer in late 1983. But in a country notorious for treating families with cold contempt, McDonald’s had identified the perfect market. As a boy, I went to McDonald’s for the first time in about 1982 for my friend Robert Greenwood’s birthday party. We all had cheeseburgers, a grinning Ronald McDonald handed out balloons and afterwards we were given a guided tour of the kitchen. I found the whole experience mind-bogglingly thrilling, and no sooner had I got home than I was pestering my parents to take me again. ‘The chain practically eats children,’ sighed The Times, and of course it was right.37

  Despite her grocer’s shop background, Mrs Thatcher had much better things to worry about than the remorseless advance of McDonald’s. By an extraordinary coincidence, the man she asked to run the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) had also grown up in a grocer’s shop. Smooth, clever and ambitious, Peter Walker, the son of a greengrocer in Brentford, west London, had left school at 16 and made millions in the City before becoming one of Edward Heath’s chief lieutenants. Although MAFF was hardly one of the great offices of state, Walker’s energy and reforming ambition put even the most ardent Thatcherite to shame. The nation’s farmers, he insisted a year after taking the job, must adjust to the changing tastes of the nation’s families. It was time for British fruit juice, British yoghurt, British pizzas and British pâtés. And shoppers must do their bit, too. ‘The time has come’, Walker declared, ‘for the British housewife to see that when she brings home the bacon, she brings home British bacon.’38