Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Kesp had been created in 1972 by Courtaulds, a company best known for its synthetic fabrics, and a spokesperson explained that, although the manufacturing process was an industrial secret, it ‘was much the same as that for making textiles’. The belief that the public would joyously embrace such substitutes was evident in another Courtaulds product of the period: Planet cigarettes. Launched in 1973, and made in equal parts from tobacco and from cellulose derived from eucalyptus and wattle trees, Planets cost the same as normal cigarettes and were aimed at the social smoker, rather than the nicotine addict. Despite the reduction in tobacco content, they were attacked by the anti-smoking pressure group Action on Smoking and Health, and criticized by the health secretary, Keith Joseph, for being marketed ‘before the relative safety of the product has been fully appraised’. He need not have worried; Planets were an unmitigated commercial flop. The idea didn’t disappear, though, and in 1977 a new version of Player’s cigarettes was launched by Imperial Tobacco with 25 per cent NSM (New Smoking Material), whilst Silk Cut also appeared with a tobacco substitute: ‘It offers smokers a touch more flavour than conventional Silk Cut,’ claimed the adverts. ‘And, as you would expect, a touch less tar.’ Despite heavy advertising, the idea of a tobacco substitute was not popular, and the brands soon dropped all reference to its presence.

  The intention behind such products was obvious at a time when the dangers of smoking were becoming more widely known. Cigarette advertising had been banned on television in 1965, a move which had in turn produced the growth of sports sponsorship, however inappropriate the connection might be – snooker was an obvious choice, Formula 1 less so. In 1972 there was a proposal to rename the British Grand Prix as the John Player Grand Prix, which provoked the motor-racing legend John Surtees to protest in the pages of Autosport magazine: ‘This is a disgusting insult to all those who still put British first.’ Even less relevant sponsorship also materialized, notably the Benson & Hedges Gold Award for concert singers, launched in conjunction with the Aldeburgh Festival, while the auction house Sotheby’s lent their prestigious name to a new upmarket brand from Wills, Sotheby’s Special Reserve cigarettes, which debuted in 1971, retailed at one and a half times the normal price, and disappeared rapidly. The truth was that, despite a 1975 Gallup poll showing that ‘30 per cent of British smokers do not believe that cigarettes can kill’, the tide was beginning to turn against tobacco, with the New Inn, Appletreewick, West Yorkshire claiming the distinction of being the first British pub to ban smoking, in 1971; being a little too far ahead of the game, however, it saw an immediate slump in bar takings.

  The failure in the marketplace of TVP and NSM indicated a shift in public attitude during the 1970s away from synthetics and their promise of an artificial future, a trend that perhaps reached its defining moment in February 1976 when Brentford Nylons went into receivership. Eight years earlier the company, founded by Armenian businessman Kaye Metrebian, had been greeted enthusiastically when it opened a £24 million plant outside Newcastle, a project described by the Board of Trade as ‘one of the biggest – in terms of money – to come to the North-East for a long time’. By the early ’70s it had branched out from production into retail, and was fast becoming one of the most distinctive presences on ITV, with a series of adverts voiced by Radio One disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. ‘I’ve got Brentford Nylons sheets on my bed at the moment,’ he gushed to the press. ‘Their stuff is fantastic. I bought it with my own money.’ The impression given was that this was the future, but in fact the business model (who needed a chain of shops that sold nothing but nylon products?) was as flawed as its bedclothes were uncomfortable, and the commercials became almost the primary output of the company: at its peak, Brentford Nylons managed to spend £3.3 million on advertising while its profits amounted to under £1 million. Following its collapse, the firm was bought up by Lonrho, best known at the time for having been described by Ted Heath as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’, who got a £5 million loan from the government for the purpose. Even so it was subsequently ‘acknowledged by Lonrho directors as far from a good buy’.

  The same month that Brentford Nylons went bust, a review in the rock weekly NME gave the first mention in print of a new band, the Sex Pistols. The punk movement that the group inspired, and which impacted on the country’s culture in complete disproportion to its sales figures, was characterized by the gleeful war that it waged on its own heritage, so that Jamie Reid’s artwork for the Pistols took the Union Flag that had been emblematic of mod in the ’60s, cut it up and reassembled it with safety pins. Similarly there was a mocking celebration of the artificial in opposition to the natural, encapsulated in the stage name adopted by Marianne Elliott, who became Poly Styrene, the singer of X-Ray Spex, and in the reinvention of teen-pop band Slik to become the punk-friendly PVC2. The ironic adoption of artificial fabrics as the standard uniform simultaneously scorned the ’60s enthusiasm for plastic futurism, and rejected the alternative hippy ideals of authenticity; in common with the other early symbols of punk, it taunted society with a caricature of itself.

  And, also in common with other aspects of punk, it was soon assimilated into the mainstream, with Zandra Rhodes the first to pick up on the possibilities. Having made a name for herself as a textile designer in the ’60s, Rhodes had then reinvented herself as a fashion designer in the ’70s, celebrated for bringing ethnic influences from America, Australia, Japan and elsewhere onto the catwalk. Now she saw the London punk scene as another source of anthropological inspiration: ‘The kids were wearing black plastic garbage bags tied up with safety pins, torn rubber t-shirts, black suspenders, laddered stockings, bondage strips of dread black vinyl,’ she noted. ‘It was a revolution – it was repugnant – it was exciting, it was there, a point of no turning back in style.’ By the time the ripped clothes, safety pins and bathroom chains had been absorbed into her Conceptual Chic collection (1977), they were being displayed against a much less aggressive set of fabrics – silk, satin, jersey – and a skirt would set you back £125, with a top coming in at £250.

  The uncertain and ambivalent attitudes towards synthetic products reflected a shift in the culture. Although nothing was to be settled in the 1970s, the decade can be seen in retrospect to have represented a transition from space age to new age. The catalyst for such a change was the awakening of interest in environmentalism, itself partially caused by the culture shock of seeing the pictures of Earth taken from the Moon, the solid certainties of life replaced by images of a fragile planet hanging in space. To the existing fear of nuclear destruction was now added a new sense of vulnerability, and, for some, the determination to protect what we had. There was, though, some doubt at the outset whether this interest in sustainability could itself be sustained: 1970 was declared European Conservation Year, and in a speech that February Prince Charles worried about ‘the whole thing being a temporary craze which reaches a peak of over-emphasis and then deflates itself rapidly’. The economist E.F. Schumacher echoed his concerns: ‘Is this a sudden fad, a silly fashion, or perhaps a sudden failure of nerve?’

  As it turned out, such apprehension was unnecessary. There was in due course an inevitable falling-off in media interest in ecology, but by the end of the century, the decline had turned out to be temporary, as stories of climate change moved from the scientific press to the news pages, causing even governments to profess themselves concerned about the environment. In the ’70s the agenda was related but slightly different, as set out by another royal contributor to the debate, Prince Philip: ‘Problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, depletion of finite resources and the threat of widespread starvation.’

  Different too was the political response. Tony Benn was one of the very few senior politicians to acknowledge ‘the real challenge of the ecologists, who are now saying that there must be a major cut in the population, a major reduction in growth, if humanity is to survive’. There was little evidence in his actions as a minister to suggest that he had be
en much affected by such ideas, but he did at least recognize that environmentalism was an intellectual threat to the growth-based economy, on which the Labour Party had been relying since Anthony Crosland’s 1956 book The Future of Socialism. ‘The traditional social democratic view that if we are going to get socialism now, we must have growth and distribute it fairly,’ Benn wrote in 1972, ‘has got to be re-examined in the light of a possible ban on growth. This will drive us towards redistribution without being able to give us the excess that would make that redistribution painless.’

  Crosland himself clearly understood the same point and, turning defence into attack, was, according to his widow, quick in his condemnation of those whose ‘attitudes, in his view, were anti-democratic, springing – probably unconsciously – from a common enough middle-class and upper-class bias (he threw in princely bias while he was about it)’. As far as he was concerned, environmentalists were ‘kindly and dedicated people, but were usually affluent and wanted to kick the ladder down behind them’. The same attitude was still evident a decade later in the words of union leader Frank Chapple. ‘We cannot afford to dice with the political and technological uncertainties of low-energy options. My members have achieved decent living standards and they want further improvements.’ He added scornfully: ‘They can identify with the advance of new technology and its benefits, not with the muesli-eaters, ecology freaks, loony leftists and other nutters who make up the anti-nuclear brigade. That is surely true of most of our citizens.’

  From an environmentalist perspective, such arguments were dangerous in the extreme. In 1975 some 30 per cent of the British population didn’t have access to a car, but if the socialist argument was that everyone had a democratic right to enjoy the privilege of personal motoring, at the expense of public transport, then something had gone wrong with the priorities of socialism; the greater good of society was being sacrificed on the altar of individual freedom. In this respect, ecology was the most radical challenge to orthodoxy that the ’70s produced, a threat to the assumptions held in common by market capitalists and social democrats alike. And when environmentalists talked of crisis, it was not simply a return to mass unemployment that they predicted, but the destruction of humanity itself, as witnessed by a spate of prophetic, if Cassandraesque, books with titles like Can Britain Survive? (1971), A Blueprint for Survival (1972) and The Death of Tomorrow (1972). Most influential, and most hopeful, was Small Is Beautiful, the 1973 work by Dr Schumacher, who had spent twenty years as economic adviser to the National Coal Board; its subtitle spelt out his intention: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered.

  There was at the time a minority position of deep ecology (the concept that humanity should not be the prime concern of environmentalist thinking), but the principal line of attack was to accumulate the evidence necessary to prove that we were despoiling nature in a way that would ultimately destroy us. To take one example, Schumacher analysed at length our profligate use of fossil fuels: ‘If we treated them as capital items,’ he argued, ‘we should be concerned with conservation; we should do everything in our power to try and minimize their current rate of use.’ Instead we saw the consumption of this finite and irreplaceable source of energy as a kind of social virility symbol, demonstrating that our civilization was technologically superior to that of ‘undeveloped’ nations. Drawing inspiration from the teachings of Gandhi as much as from his own training as an economist, he put forward a case for the reduction in scale of human endeavour so that we might learn to ‘understand the great rhythms of the universe and to gear in with them’.

  This appeal to reconnect with nature found a receptive audience amongst the British public, as seen in the phenomenal success of Richard Adams’s novel Watership Down (1972), which spent thirty weeks at the top of the Sunday Times best-seller lists, even though that chart didn’t make its first appearance until two years after the book had been published. This epic tale of rabbit mythology, drawing on Homer, Virgil, Norse legends, even King Lear, begins when the runt of a litter experiences a sense of impending doom, and persuades a small group of bucks to leave their warren at Sandleford and to embark on a hazardous journey to found a new home. The disaster that is about to befall Sandleford, we learn, is the clearing of the ground in order to build a new housing estate, and humanity is seen throughout the novel as a lurking danger, unpredictable and devastating in its actions.

  So dominant has this single species become that all nature is shaped by it; the rival warrens that the band of wanderers encounter, and that act as alternative societies, are characterized entirely by their attitudes to human beings. The first such community is Cowslip’s warren, which has made its peace with Homo sapiens, accepting both its food and its snares; as long as the fatalities aren’t too frequent, the rabbits are content to live a comfortably decadent life of aestheticism, creating art and poetry and drifting ever further from traditional leporine ways. The second is Efrafa, a military dictatorship presided over by General Woundwort, and again the distance from nature is stressed, symbolized by the fact that the rabbits here have learnt to bury their droppings in order to conceal themselves from humans. The inhabitants of both warrens are seen as being incomplete, alienated from their true selves: ‘There are rabbits there,’ reflects one of our heroes, ‘who’d be the same as we are if they could only live naturally, like us.’ By contrast, the group we follow are not only at peace with themselves but with nature more generally, befriending other creatures across the species divide, though the mice they meet are, for no immediately apparent reason, depicted as having an Italian accent, while the bird who helps them appears to speak in a mutated East European voice. Despite the awkwardness of this transcription of ‘the very simple, limited lingua franca of the hedgerow’, the key is the fact that all the animals can converse with each other, with the one exception of humans.

  In retrospect, though, the enduring popularity of Watership Down can be seen as being due as much to its archetypal characters of king, soldier, priest, and intellectual – Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver and Blackberry respectively – as to the immediacy of its environmental message. Adams’s subsequent novel, The Plague Dogs (‘a Doomsday Disney’, said the Daily Mail), was similarly a tale of animals fleeing the harmful presence of humanity, in this case two dogs escaping from a research laboratory. It too sold well but failed to make the same cultural impact, perhaps because the satire was too heavy-handed with the unsubtle naming of the laboratory as Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental), or ARSE for short, where experiments are performed ‘for the good, or the advancement, or the edification – or something or other, anyway – of the human race’.

  The Plague Dogs did, however, add to the growing sense of outrage at what were seen as the abuses of scientific research on animals. In 1975 the story broke that the development of NSM involved laboratory beagles smoking thirty cigarettes a day, to ensure (following Keith Joseph’s complaints about Planets) the safety of the new tobacco substitute, and the resultant image came to dominate public perceptions of animal experimentation, despite assurances from Sir Jack Callard, chairman of ICI, that ‘there was no cruelty, and the beagles did not mind being made to smoke’. Labour MP William Molloy suggested that those conducting such experiments should volunteer to be bitten by dogs to aid research into rabies, while Lady Parker, the elderly widow of a former Lord Chief Justice, announced that she was willing to do the requisite amount of smoking herself, if it would spare just one of the dogs. And when, later in the year, a couple of animal rights campaigners were jailed for three years after admitting arson attacks on targets connected with animal research, the controversy over the smoking beagles helped provoke ‘a flood of letters to the Sun – almost all in support of the two protestors’. For those who regarded such expressions as being little more than anthropomorphic sentimentality, the equivalent shock image came in 1977 when anti-hunting enthusiasts dug up the grave of nineteenth-century huntsman John Peel in the Lake District.

  What was notable about such iss
ues was that the initiative came from below, from grass-roots campaigning groups. In his satirical novel Experiment at Proto (1973), Philip Oakes had depicted a maverick right-wing MP, Guy Afton (‘he volleyed and thundered: repatriate our coloured brethren, penalize strikes, make students toe the line’), who seizes, for reasons of cynical politicking, on the use of chimpanzees in a scientific project: ‘People loved the chimpanzee – visitors to London Zoo had voted it their favourite animal. To champion its cause against the demon research was a simple but symbolic act.’ But in reality such politicians were few in number; this was essentially a movement of activists, who found that they enjoyed a remarkably high degree of public sympathy, however passive that might be. The fear that this support might be extended beyond animals to more global economic concerns was expressed in Hollow Target (1976), Paul Bryers’s tale of environmental terrorism: ‘There are people who seem to feel that the major oil companies are a greater threat than the extremists,’ laments the fictional home secretary. ‘It is only a matter of time before misguided people come to regard them as working class heroes fighting the capitalist juggernauts.’