Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  There was, of course, an awful lot of myth-making in all this. For although the image of Britain as two nations has become a staple of historical writing about the 1980s, it represents only a simplistic version of what was a complicated picture. For one thing, it was never clear where places like the Midlands fitted in, let alone the more prosperous areas of Scotland. And even at the time, astute observers recognized that the idea of a North–South divide could be very misleading. ‘England is divided’ wrote the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins after a long journey across Yorkshire in the winter of 1981, ‘but not quite as people imagine. The class war isn’t a north–south affair. Great parts of the country remain prosperous in spite of the high unemployment and the worst effects of the recession are concentrated in the areas of deep-seated industrial decline.’ For all the talk of provincial alienation, Jenkins thought people in the capital routinely exaggerated the ‘political and social impact’ of the downturn. He did not deny that the unemployed and the poor were suffering, which was ‘tragic for them’. But they were always in a minority. Above all, he thought, ‘there is no single pattern to affairs but only variety’.28

  While the black-and-white figures of the North–South divide undoubtedly reflected underlying trends, they also obscured the nuances of people’s daily lives. Even in the depths of winter, there were always green shoots: an expanded IBM factory in Greenock, the new Sanyo factory in Lowestoft, the massive new Nissan works in Sunderland. Even in the sunshine of the boom towns, there were still individual tragedies: a long-serving employee laid off, a family firm that went under, a marriage that collapsed under financial strain. It has become a commonplace that in the 1980s Britain was carved up into winners and losers. But most people did not define themselves as either, any more than they saw themselves as combatants in a class war. On any given street, one family might be struggling to come to terms with redundancy, another struggling to work their new video recorder. One brother might be heading out on a Right to Work march, another might be finishing the paperwork for the Right to Buy. Aspiration and anxiety often lived under the same roof: the same people who lamented the death of community and the decline of traditional morality might be looking forward to a night in with a rented film or a summer break in Yugoslavia.

  The place that really summed this up, ironically, was Wigan. People always said that Wigan was a terrible place. Its very name had been a shorthand for industrial grit since Orwell’s visit in 1936. Fifty years on, it seemed that, under some little-known UN convention, anybody writing about England, poverty, unemployment or working-class life was obliged to go to Wigan, a battered copy of Orwell’s book in their suitcase, and shake their head sorrowfully at the disused mills and terraced houses. And if the town turned out to be less grim than advertised, that just proved that things were grimmer than ever.

  When Paul Theroux visited in 1982 he thought the ‘dark red terraced houses’ and pubs with ‘bright mirrors and brasswork’ had not changed for a hundred years. But Wigan struck him as ‘lifeless’; instead of the ‘grubby vitality’ of Orwell’s day, there was only an ‘overwhelming emptiness … a deadly calm – which was also like panic’. In place of the ‘smoke and the slag-heaps and the racket of machines’, he was appalled by the ‘clear air and the grass … and the great silence’. Ian Jack, who visited in the same year, was similarly struck by the silence. As he noted, the cotton mills had closed, the coalfield was exhausted and unemployment was almost 20 per cent. One day, Jack drove out to Pemberton Colliery, where Orwell had gone down the pit. But the colliery had vanished. There was nothing there: ‘no sign that here generations of men had toiled underground for miserable wages … No winding gear, no spoil heaps, no shaft, nothing but green.’29

  But Jack was too shrewd to leave it at that. He was not struck by how awful Wigan was. In fact, he found it perfectly pleasant. Coming from London, he thought Wigan was a ‘very clean town: no graffiti, not much litter, little smoke’. The mills and mines might be gone, but eight out of ten people still had jobs, so it was simply not true that there was no work. Since 1959 Wigan had been home to the largest food manufacturing plant in Europe, churning out Heinz baked beans for the masses, a staggering 960 million tins of processed food a year. Evidently all those beans had a calming effect: despite the closures and the dole queues, Jack detected no burning anger, no simmering alienation, no sense that a bold cry of ‘Justice and Liberty!’ would bring the townsfolk rushing into the streets. ‘Wigan’, he wrote, ‘seems about as close to revolt as Weybridge.’ The market was busy; the bakery windows were piled high with scones and doughnuts; the shops seemed happy and prosperous. ‘Bewildering, isn’t it?’ said Sydney Smith, the owner of the town’s largest newsagent. ‘All these folk on the dole and yet trade still prospers.’

  Like Orwell, Jack had sought out the cheapest lodgings he could find. Yet ‘of the squalor that shocks’, he wrote, ‘I could find no trace’. Even his landlady’s toilet roll was ‘encased in knitted wool with a plastic fairy on top’, an unmistakeable sign that ‘middle-class gentility’ had seeped into the hearts of the English working class. Did the people of Wigan feel a sense of kinship with their proletarian brethren in neighbouring towns? Hardly: ‘nearly everybody spoke of Liverpool and its inhabitants with dread’. ‘They should build a wall round the place,’ one man told him, ‘just like the one they have in Berlin.’ There was no ‘real solidarity’, lamented the secretary of the local Labour Party. These days, people preferred to retreat behind their castle walls with their ‘computers, video machines and roof repairs’. And perhaps most revealing of all, in this staunchly Labour working-class town, were Sydney Smith’s sales figures. Every month he sold seven copies of Tribune, twelve copies of Labour Weekly and thirteen copies of the New Statesman. But he also sold twenty-two copies of The Economist, twenty-two Investor’s Chronicles and – amazingly – thirty-six copies of The Lady. All these, however, were dwarfed by the 2,500 copies he sold every month of various computer magazines. And this not in Weybridge, but in Wigan.30

  Wigan was not an anomaly. Wherever Jack went, he found the same picture. In almost every corner of the country, hope and anxiety, nostalgia and ambition, were so tightly woven together it was hard to pick them apart. During the steel strike of 1980, he went to Port Talbot, the archetypal South Wales steel town, a place where every ‘mention of Mrs Thatcher or Sir Keith Joseph’ was suffused with ‘total hatred’. On a grey council estate, the front gardens invariably paved over to accommodate stately British Leyland saloons, Jack visited Owen Reynolds, who worked in the shunting yard of the local steelworks.

  Owen, who was out on strike, was not a rich man. Now 51, he had worked since he was 14, had no savings and did not own his home. Usually he made £108 a week before tax, the equivalent of perhaps £650 a week today. Inside his house were ‘a telephone, a colour television, quantities of bright, curved and spongy furniture, a gilt mirror which celebrates Wales’s grand slam in the rugby internationals – and a bar stocked with bourbon, brandy, Cointreau’. The television was rented, and he still had to pay off the car. But he had far higher ambitions than his elderly father, who had worked in punishing heat in the rolling mill. ‘You see in the old days you felt differently,’ Owen explained. ‘There are no poor people if you’re all poor people. It’s only when you see the rich that you realise “God, I’m poor” and in those days in Port Talbot you never met them.’

  Owen and his brother Patrick had grown up in a slum in the 1930s, with candles and oil lamps, an outside toilet and a cold tap in the yard. When Jack invited them to list the ‘essentials for a decent life’, they began modestly: a fair wage, a roof over your head, enough food. ‘But then the list grew. A car? Yes. A telephone? Yes. A fridge? Certainly.’ They were not greedy or materialistic men, and neither were they rampant individualists. Indeed, Owen called himself a ‘middle-of-the-road socialist’. They were simply men of their time, whose horizons had been expanded by social, cultural and technological change. They may not have been
Thatcherites, but their ambitions nevertheless reflected the social trends that had brought her to power.

  So did the words of Owen’s son Alan, aged 24, who had just got back from picket duty. Alan had been at Sheerness in Kent, where he had seen policemen kicking strikers on the ground, and it had really shocked him. Since he had only recently started at the steelworks, he knew he was bound to lose his job in the next round of redundancies. Now he told Jack about his great ambition: to buy his own house. ‘It’s an investment, something you can pass on to your children,’ Alan said. ‘I’m not being snobbish about council houses, but I just want something better than the place I was brought up in. It’s only natural, isn’t it?’31

  Here was the paradox of life in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. Literary travellers invariably looked back to the 1930s, invoking the dole queues and the hunger marchers. It was an apt comparison, but not necessarily for the reasons they imagined. For the 1930s had not just been the decade of the Depression; it had also been a decade of cinemas, dance halls, whodunnits and Butlin’s. It was a decade of immense hardship but also one of unprecedented prosperity. Even Orwell, who did so much to fix the popular memory of the decade, had been acutely conscious that the innovations of the age, such as ‘invisible heaters’ and ‘rubber, glass and steel’ furniture, would soon transform his idealized working-class family beyond recognition. It is true, of course, that all moments are poised between past and future; there are always reminders of the world of yesterday and glimpses of the world of tomorrow. But there are some moments when the contrast is especially sharp. The mid-1930s was one, the early 1980s another.

  Nobody saw this more clearly than Ian Jack, the most astute of the writers who travelled the country during the darkest days of the recession. The winter of 1982 found him in the Hebrides, lost in the snow on the island of Eriskay. He was searching for a croft where, he had been promised, the crofter would tell him all about ‘the old days’. At last, he found it; and there, huddled in the warm, he listened to the man’s memories. Yet all the time he was acutely conscious of the blaring television in the corner, the man’s wife having refused to turn it off. So, as Jack later wrote, ‘memories of the ceilidhs and the Sunday visiting and the cloth you had to tie over the bucket when you brought water from the well otherwise the water would simply blow away’ were ‘punctuated by Falcon Crest and then Tenko and then some other stuff about people getting married in Los Angeles and not enjoying it very much’. Falcon Crest in the Outer Hebrides: if there is one story that captures what was happening to Britain, perhaps that is it.32

  29

  The Land of Make Believe

  I don’t want love. I want consumer goods.

  Linda Craven (Susan Littler), in Alan Bennett, Enjoy (1980)

  The best thing that can be said about 1981 is: Thank heavens it is 1982 tomorrow.

  This has been a year dominated by the crack of the assassin’s bullet, the cracks in the Labour Party and the crackpot ideas of Mrs Thatcher’s team.

  Daily Mirror, 31 December 1981

  Christmas came, and it was a season to forget. The fact that almost 3 million people were out of work was bad enough, but to cap it all, the weather was atrocious. In mid-December, blizzards left hundreds of thousands of homes in Wales and the West Country without electricity. And then, after days of freezing fog and driving rain, the snow came down. From the highlands of Scotland to the suburbs of London, roads were closed, train services cancelled and thousands of motorists stranded. In Derbyshire, entire towns were completely cut off; in Sussex, drivers abandoned their cars in deep snowdrifts; in Wales, sheep farmers struggled to save thousands of ewes trapped by the terrible weather. In major cities, cars crawled nervously through the murk; on the high streets, shoppers picked their way past great puddles of slush.

  Flights, football matches and horse races were called off, patients airlifted from snowbound hospitals, fishermen swept out to sea by towering waves and howling gales. In the Shropshire hamlet of Preston Brockhurst, an amateur meteorologist found the thermometer reading minus 29.8 degrees centigrade, the lowest reading in Britain’s history. In London, Big Ben’s clock ground to a halt, unable to move because of the ice. In the New Forest, a man’s frozen body was found in a bus shelter, where he had apparently tried to spend the night. In Whitby, North Yorkshire, an old man was found dead in a snowdrift, having tried to walk home after a Saturday evening out. And on a visit to an agriculture college in Baschurch, Shropshire, Mrs Thatcher held an impromptu snowball fight with the accompanying reporters, exhibiting a remarkably good eye by hitting one of them directly in the mouth.1

  ‘Oh! It is unrelieved gloom!’ recorded Kenneth Williams, consoling himself with sherry and crisps, and gleefully contemplating ‘the dire state of the country in the grip of the freeze, with cattle dying and travellers stranded’. But while most of the papers wallowed in the ‘Big Freeze’, the Mirror’s Keith Waterhouse refused to get carried away. Why worry about the weather? ‘Nothing works here whether it is snowing or not. I took a tube journey through the Arctic wastes of London on Friday. The ticket machines didn’t work. The automatic barriers didn’t work. The escalators didn’t work. The train indicators didn’t work. The busker’s violin didn’t work.’ Even when there was no snow, he grumbled, the capital was ‘getting to look like East Berlin just after the war’.2

  Little wonder, then, that many people were desperate to get away, with tour operators reporting record sales to ‘destinations ranging from Hawaii to ski-ing resorts’. Even twenty years earlier, the idea of flying to Hawaii would have struck most people as the stuff of fantasy. But despite the shock of the downturn, expectations had changed. Britannia Airways, owned by the holiday firm Thomson, estimated that about 100,000 people had booked flights to Malta, Morocco and the Canary Islands, while Laker Airways said their Christmas and New Year flights had been booked solid since early November. As a spokesman for Cosmos explained, ‘people seem to have decided that they are going to have a good Christmas in the sun and forget about the depressing weather, political situation and so on’.3

  For those staying at home, the obvious temptation was to curl up in front of the television. But as if determined to crush any remaining embers of good cheer, the BBC kicked off Christmas week with the last episode of its science-fiction series Blake’s 7. After four years and an awful lot of alien quarries, it ended with the entire cast of heroic freedom fighters being massacred by their totalitarian foes. Given what was happening in Poland, where the Communist regime had just attempted to crush the Solidarity movement by declaring martial law, perhaps the production team should have been congratulated on their prescience. But the Radio Times was deluged with what the editor called an ‘unusually large number’ of angry letters.

  ‘The BBC must know that the programme is a favourite with many children and that in the Christmas holidays more of them than usual would watch. Yet they chose this episode to kill off all their heroes, one by one,’ fumed Mrs Peat from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. ‘With only three days to go before Christmas, I had all my illusions about their fantasy world cruelly shattered,’ agreed Mrs Street from Brixham, Devon. ‘Was the writer really at such a loss that he had to have them all shot?’ But it was Geoffrey Bowman from Bangor, County Down, who posed the questions that Mrs Thatcher’s opponents had been asking ever since she first walked into Downing Street: ‘Is nothing sacred? Must evil and tyranny inevitably triumph over good and freedom? Why did it all have to end this way?’4

  In the Daily Mirror, the journalist Tony Pratt was asking himself something very similar. What on earth, he wondered, had happened to the time-honoured family Christmas? ‘My son absorbs himself in the latest electronic game and my daughter pours her new Bruce Springsteen tape into her earphones.’ But Pratt was determined to stick to ancient tradition: the last edition of Larry Grayson’s Generation Game to begin with, followed by Paul Daniels’s Magical Christmas, The Two Ronnies and Game for a Laugh. The Guardian’s critic, too, recognized that P
aul Daniels was essential viewing, but thought his readers might also enjoy highbrow fare such as the special editions of Last of the Summer Wine and It’ll Be Alright on the Night. But some, no doubt, preferred to spend their Christmas with the Guardian’s spoof board game, Theseus and the Monetaur. Typical squares included ‘Nigel Lawson becomes Governor of the Bank of Crete. Miss 2 turns’, ‘Tony Benn complains of persistent Medea distortion: Miss a turn’ and ‘Professor Walters resigns to join the Argonauts. Take an extra turn.’ As the instructions sternly pointed out: ‘THERE WILL BE NO U-TURNS.’5

  For London’s shopkeepers, the fog and snow could not have come at a worse time. ‘Only a last-minute shopping rush’, warned the Express, could save the festive season from being ‘the most frugal since wartime rationing’. Some retailers blamed the weather; others thought the recession had created a nation of ‘Scrooge shoppers’. But Debenhams’ managing director thought fears of terrorism had much to do with it. After four IRA attacks on the capital since October, people were staying away from the West End. Even food sales were down: a sign, suggested one supermarket spokesman, that ‘the days of Christmas spending sprees are a thing of the past’. Indeed, when the Express approached a major West End store for comment, its spokesman was too disheartened to discuss the subject at all. ‘It merely leads’, he said grimly, ‘to gloom and despondency.’