To the millions watching in January 1980, Hi-de-Hi! must have seemed a poignant throwback to a kinder, gentler Britain, a lost summer of collective holidays, family entertainment and full employment. Written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the team behind the similarly nostalgic Dad’s Army, the new sitcom was extremely successful. Many reviewers dismissed it, yet by 1982 Hi-de-Hi! was firmly established in the BBC’s top ten. In all, it ran for fifty-eight episodes, attracting 17 million viewers at its peak. Later, when cultural critics looked back at the comedies of the decade, they always remembered The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents … and Spitting Image. They never remembered Hi-de-Hi! It was too gentle, too conservative, too nostalgic to be fashionable. But with the headlines dominated by dole queues and disasters, that was precisely why tens of millions of viewers liked it.1
Although the world that Hi-de-Hi! celebrated so fondly was 20 years old, it was not quite dead. In the spring of 1982, Paul Theroux paid a visit to the Butlin’s camp in Minehead, Somerset, which had been built to house 14,000 people. With its ‘barracks-like buildings and forbidding fences’, it reminded him of a prison camp. The weather was terrible, yet the place was packed. There was nobody on the boating lake or the crazy golf course, in the chapel or the pool, but there were hundreds, even thousands of people feeding money into fruit machines, eating fish and chips and playing bingo. But Theroux detected little of the innocent enthusiasm of Hi-de-Hi!, just the deadened unhappiness of a ‘sleazy paradise, in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo’. The whole experience was astonishingly cheap: just £178 per week (about £270 today) for a family of four, including two meals a day. At one point Theroux asked one of the Redcoats where all the guests came from. ‘From all over,’ the man said. Theroux asked what sort of jobs they did, and the Redcoat laughed. ‘Are you joking, sunshine?’ he said. ‘Half the men here are unemployed. That’s the beauty of Butlin’s – you can pay for it with your dole money.’2
For Theroux, as for other travellers, Butlin’s seemed an irresistible symbol of a working-class Britain abandoned to inexorable decay. Its camps in Clacton and Filey closed in 1983, while Barry Island was sold three years later. The British seaside now seemed seedy, downmarket and irredeemably old-fashioned. Visiting Morecambe one sunny June day, a reporter from The Times found the theatres empty, the sands deserted and an elderly couple waltzing alone at the end of the pier. Further south, among the ‘rusting caravans’ of Camber Sands, Theroux was reminded of a ‘Third World country’ where people let effluent run into the sea and rubbish pile up on the beaches. In his three-month odyssey around the British coast, he never found a hotel or guesthouse that was full, ‘though I found many that were completely empty’. Many proprietors were embarrassed by their empty rooms. ‘We’ll be packed in June,’ they said defensively in May. ‘Things are quiet now, but it’ll be a madhouse in July,’ they said a month later. Only sometimes did they admit the truth. People had stopped coming.3
At the beginning of the 1980s, most people went on more exotic holidays than ever before. A decade earlier, British tourists had taken just over 4 million holidays abroad. In 1979 they took more than 10 million, rising, despite the recession, to 12 million a year later. As the dole queues lengthened, so did the lines at the check-in desks. In August 1981, tour operators reported that bookings were up by a third on the previous summer, while the four biggest firms, Thomson, Horizon, Intasun and Cosmos, had invested in bigger planes to cope with the demand. Polls found that more than half of British adults had been to France, while four out of ten had been to Spain. In the summer of 1981, Margaret Bradshaw, the ex-policeman’s wife, compiled a list of her friends’ holidays that year. One family had just spent three weeks in Cyprus and a fortnight in Hong Kong, another had been to Jersey for a week and Malta for a fortnight, and a third had spend two weeks in Miami, a week in Jersey and a week in Scotland. One couple had even come back from five weeks touring Africa.4
By now the holiday experience was already moving on from the smoke-filled planes, unfinished hotels and disastrous flamenco evenings of the recent past. The list of the most popular destinations in 1981 would have seemed almost crazily exotic to previous generations. Spain, Greece and Italy led the way, the United States had risen to fourth and Yugoslavia and Tunisia now made the top ten. Yugoslavia’s appeal was particularly remarkable because it was still a one-party state, albeit one desperate to attract foreign currency. In 1979 the Daily Express, not usually keen on the Communist world, published a long feature on the ‘dreamily beautiful’ Balkan coastline, where packages cost less than £200 for a fortnight. Four years later, the same paper ran a gushing report on, of all things, a nudist cruise through the Dalmatian islands, where the British passengers included ‘a fireman, a psychiatrist, a plumber, an actor and a female magistrate’. For less adventurous travellers, there was always the reassuringly British ‘Pontinental’ camp in Istria.5
In the first weeks of 1981, Polly Toynbee visited the Bahamas Hotel in Arenal, Majorca, which specialized in winter holidays for British pensioners. It is fair to say that she was not a fan: the town’s ‘unremitting concrete and tatty vulgarity’, its mock-Tudor pubs and full English breakfasts, struck her as ‘more horrible than any English seaside resort’. But the costs were astonishingly low – just £47 a week for the first month, falling to £28 a week if people stayed longer – and many people found it much cheaper than staying at home to pay the fuel bills. Apart from the free sangria, not much was obviously Spanish about it. The cabaret was British, the tea dances were British and even the food was British (‘meat or liver or kidneys or fish’). The dance organizers, Vivienne and Jim McFarland, came from Coventry. Having worked for Rolls-Royce and British Leyland, they now spent their winters abroad and their summers working in holiday camps, including Butlin’s in Minehead.
As for the guests, most were the kind of people – an ex-foreman in a carpet-sweeper plant, say, or a man who had worked in a Christmas card factory – whose parents would never have dreamed of wintering in the Balearics. Lena Pow had worked in a Bristol laundry, while her husband had been a welder. They lived frugally, never drank or smoked, and put every spare penny towards their holidays. The previous winter they had spent nine weeks in Benidorm; other destinations included New York with a cruise up the Hudson (‘we didn’t like that’), Capri, Rome, Venice and, slightly surprisingly, Moscow. Next year, Lena said, they wanted to go to California. ‘I worked my fingers to the bone in that laundry,’ she explained, ‘and now we’re enjoying ourselves.’
For some British holidaymakers, however, there was a cloud in the otherwise perfect Mediterranean sky, a threat to their happiness that made cancelled flights, lascivious waiters and amoebic dysentery look like trifling irritants. It was, of course, the Germans. ‘They’re pigs, real pigs,’ explained Anne Hebson from Accrington:
I’ve never seen anyone eat the way they do. I’m a big eater, but I couldn’t put away a fraction of what they do.
And they’re up to all the tricks. We watch them. One German this morning ate six boiled eggs, yes six! They need nose bags, not plates. And they steal. They take tea bags, sugar, rolls and packs of butter out of the dining-room. Just yesterday we saw one German woman ask the waiter for something and soon as his back was turned she emptied the fruit bowl into her bag. The waitress saw her and made her empty her bag out. It was full, choc-a-bloc, with food.
As Mrs Hebson’s voice rose, more British holidaymakers joined the chorus. A particular target was somebody they called ‘Mr Goatee’, an elderly German gentleman whom they accused of stuffing his pockets with figs. The Germans! They hadn’t changed!6
Actually, popular antipathy to the Germans is easily overstated. When a survey in 1983 asked people to identify ‘Britain’s friends in Europe’, West Germany topped the list, with the Dutch second and the French third. It is perhaps telling that in the BBC’s French Resistance sitcom ’Allo ’Allo!, which started in 1982, the German adversaries are comically
inept rather than truly wicked. It is telling, too, that even ITV’s Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which follows seven unemployed British builders to West Germany, steers clear of the usual stereotypes. Only one of the builders, Jimmy Nail’s Oz, is anti-German, and he gets a stern ticking-off from their leader, Dennis (Tim Healy). ‘I’ve seen blokes like you come and go all the times I’ve worked in Germany,’ Dennis says contemptuously:
Never been out the UK before. Never eaten foreign food, never drank foreign beer. Fish out of water without the wife or the mother to lend a guiding hand. After a week they’ve lost their passports, they’ve got pissed, lost most of their money and become ridiculously nationalistic for the country that can’t even bloody employ them in the first place.7
One of the most common myths about the 1980s is that, under Mrs Thatcher’s guidance, Britain became markedly more nationalistic. True, the tabloids were pretty jingoistic, but they had always been jingoistic. There is no real evidence that their readers were more nationalistic, and no evidence that people were nostalgic for Empire. In 1981 Gallup found that only three out of ten thought Britain should ‘try to be a leading world power’, compared with six out of ten who preferred to emulate ‘Sweden and Switzerland’. Even the Commonwealth barely featured in the public imagination. Two years later, another survey found that only 25 per cent thought the Commonwealth should be Britain’s international priority, compared with 26 per cent who picked the United States and 39 per cent who named Europe. By contrast, in 1961 some 48 per cent had picked the Commonwealth, only 19 per cent the United States and just 18 per cent Europe. In that sense, most people were probably less imperialistic and more pro-European than they had ever been.8
What they were not, though, was enthusiastic about the European project. Decades later, when Britain voted to leave the EU, it was often said that Mrs Thatcher’s premiership had been the turning point. Her biographer John Campbell, for example, argues that her ‘most far-reaching legacy may be Brexit’, since by bashing Brussels in the pursuit of ‘cheap applause’, she whipped up popular antipathy to the European project. But the British public were already exceptionally Eurosceptic, even before she walked into Downing Street. It is true, of course, that in 1975 they had voted by two to one to remain in the European Community. But that referendum was probably an anomaly, having taken place at the absolute nadir of a national crisis of confidence. With runaway inflation and the headlines full of doom and gloom, it was hardly surprising that so many people had wanted to stay in the European lifeboat. Very soon, however, public opinion reverted to its natural scepticism. By the middle of 1978, Gallup found that only 25 per cent were pleased with EEC membership, while fully 48 per cent thought it was bad for Britain – and this almost a year before Mrs Thatcher had come to power.9
Almost every poll in the late 1970s and early 1980s produced similar findings. In November 1979 ITN found that 53 per cent would like to leave the European Community. A year later, Gallup found that the likely Leave vote had risen to 59 per cent, and in September 1982 Mrs Thatcher’s aides sent her a survey which found that, even after a budget rebate, 51 per cent would vote to leave the EEC and only 41 per cent to remain. At this stage, potential leavers tended to be Labour voters, and no fewer than seven out of ten Labour voters said they would prefer to come out. By contrast, only one in three Conservatives wanted to leave. Indeed, the really striking thing – given what happened thirty years later – is how consistent the picture was. Between May 1979 and July 1984, Gallup asked people on twenty occasions whether the EEC was good or bad for Britain. ‘Good’ came out on top just four times, usually by tiny margins. Yet sixteen times a majority said ‘bad’, sometimes by as much as 25 or 30 per cent.10
The truth is that most people could not care less about the European Community. And when they did think about it, they were, by Continental standards, exceptionally unenthusiastic. When the first European Parliament elections were held in June 1979, turnout was a risible 33 per cent, compared with 61 per cent in France, 66 per cent in West Germany and 86 per cent in Italy. Three years later, when Mass Observation asked its correspondents to identify Ivor Richard, who had recently become one of Britain’s two European Commissioners, not a single person knew who he was. ‘It is with real apathy that I approach this subject,’ began Margaret Bradshaw’s reply to a questionnaire about the EEC:
When we joined the Common Market I thought it would be good for our children and the quality of their life. Mainly because of the threat of war diminishing in the light of a united Europe and the power of our solidarity. Since the Falklands conflict I am now unsure of this. It seems to me that our old allies from the extinct Commonwealth rallied round considerably better than our new ones to whom we had to plead.
Economically I just don’t know … I don’t know if it affects our unemployment figures … There is a certain anti-French feeling about but I don’t think this is particularly due to the Common Market; more due to our temperament.
Other correspondents were, if anything, even more bemused. ‘Don’t know … Don’t know … Don’t know,’ wrote Mary Richards. ‘Don’t know who Ivor Richard is. Never heard of him in my life … Don’t know the name of my Euro MP, in fact I didn’t know I had one.’ She asked her family and friends the same question. None of them knew either, though some thought Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan might be MEPs.
As for Carol Daniel, she was not a fan of the EEC at all. ‘I wish we hadn’t joined,’ she wrote. ‘We lost a lot of our tradition and have been forced to conform with everyone else.’ Among other things, she blamed Britain’s new partners for metric measures (‘a mystery to me’), and was convinced that soon ‘we will have to drive on the right hand side’. She had not, of course, heard of Ivor Richard, nor could she name a single MEP. ‘I know it is one of the cabinet members,’ she wrote. ‘Could it be Mr Primm, I think I recall him at a meeting during the Falklands Crisis discussing the common market’s veto of Argentinian exports.’fn1 Like Margaret Bradshaw, she thought the Falklands had shown the Europeans in the worst possible light. ‘I do know one thing,’ she wrote, ‘the EEC were not exactly a pillar of strength during our last little bit of trouble. With friends like these, who needs enemies?’11
Margaret Thatcher would, of course, have agreed with every word. Or would she? For when she came to power in 1979, there was no reason to doubt that she was a committed European. She had been happy to back Harold Macmillan’s first bid to join the EEC in the early 1960s, and wholeheartedly supported Edward Heath’s bid ten years later. It is true that during the referendum, just months after she became Tory leader, she played only a supporting role. But like many Conservatives, she still saw Europe, and in particular West Germany, as a model. Welcoming the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, to Downing Street a week after the 1979 election, she told him that his country offered ‘an enviable example of economic and social progress combined with social and political stability’. She was ‘committed’, she said, to EEC membership: ‘We believe it is not only right for Europe but right for this country.’ And although she was already making ominous noises about the Community budget, she struck a similar note at her party conference. ‘It is no use joining anything half-heartedly,’ she told her activists in October 1979. ‘Five months after taking office we have done much to restore the trust and confidence that the last Conservative Government enjoyed with our partners in Europe, and which the Labour Government did not. We are a committed member of the Community.’12
It was no accident that she drew an explicit contrast with Labour. Wilson and Callaghan might have backed the EEC during the referendum, but Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn had been in the vanguard of the ‘No’ campaign, the Brexiteers of their day. After the election, Labour returned to its default position, portraying the EEC as an elitist project to undermine parliamentary sovereignty and frustrate the advance of democratic socialism. In October 1980 the Labour conference voted by a two-thirds margin to make withdrawal from the Community a priority, with
tumultuous applause for the Shadow Foreign Secretary Peter Shore’s verdict that European membership had been a ‘rape of the British people and of their rights and constitution’. To the government, all this seemed a gift. Peter Walker declared that Labour’s position ‘would be warmly welcomed in the Kremlin’, while Mrs Thatcher never failed to remind voters that she, unlike her opponents, was a good European. ‘They are running out on Europe,’ she warned during the next general election campaign. ‘More than 2½ million British jobs depend on British membership of the Common Market.’ If people voted Labour, ‘every single one of those jobs would be at risk’.13
But Mrs Thatcher’s enthusiasm had its limits. She hated talk of a ‘United States of Europe’, and almost physically shuddered when people talked about European federalism. ‘They are paid much too much – from our taxpayers’ money. It looks like a real gravy-train,’ she scribbled on a note about Brussels salaries in February 1979. More fundamentally, she was just not one of life’s Europeans. As her foreign policy adviser Sir Percy Cradock recalled, ‘she did not like the Europeans; she did not speak their languages; she had little time for their traditions’. Her father had told the Grantham Rotary Club that he would ‘sooner be a bootblack in England than a leading citizen in a good many of the other leading countries in the world today’, and she almost certainly agreed with him. ‘They are all a rotten lot,’ she explained to the former Labour politician Roy Jenkins, who had become President of the European Commission. ‘Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only ones who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.’ In particular, she was outraged that her European partners were not permanently grateful for Britain’s help during the Second World War, a debt that could never be repaid. ‘How on earth can Britain be treated in this way?’ she asked her aides during one European squabble. ‘After all, we saved their skins in the war.’14
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