The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  - And this D. in your name, what does it stand for? David?

  - David it is.

  - My name is Charles, I said, as one does.

  One time last week, we were talking over beer about what a person really and fundamentally needs in order to get through the day, and when it was my turn I confessed: A tomato with morning tea, that’s probably it. The next morning I found in front of my door a clear plastic bag full of tomatoes, grown and nurtured in a private garden, and I also know in and from whose they were.

  In this part of the world, electrical devices are sold without plugs, and I said once, while purchasing such an object, seemingly helpless but sure of what would follow: Well I guess I could use a plug too. — I’ll throw one in, the man said. First of all, we knew each other; secondly, the weather was really pleasant.

  [Uwe Johnson, letter to Lore and Joachim Menzhausen, 2 September 197844]

  Initially consoled by this estuarial manifestation of the “cunning of history”, Pahl illustrated the new ways of “getting by”45 with the help of two case studies drawn from his pilot researches in Sheerness. “Mr Parsons” had been made redundant five and a half years previously, when the plant at which he had worked full-time closed down. The children had grown up and left, and “Mrs Parsons” worked in a wallpaper shop and made good use of the 40% discount available to her for purchases. He, meanwhile, was conventionally employed as a postman in the mornings but Pahl was interested to see that he had also improvised a lot of informal work as a gardener — growing his own food on an allotment, storing it in a freezer, and also working for others. Their new livelihood depended on possession of “capital equipment” (a deep freezer, pressure cooker, etc.) and “a familiar world of friends and relations”. Mr Parson’s home-improvement skills were enhanced by his army training as an electrician, and both his reputation and his list of clients were strengthened by the social standing he gained as a postman.46

  Pahl’s second Sheppey character, “Mr Simpson”, was unskilled and, though only thirty-three, seemed unlikely ever to find conventional employment again. Yet he too was keeping busy and, together with his wife who was involved — sometimes with the help of their children — in various forms of home selling and manufacturing in the “hidden economy”, making more than the household could expect from social security. Indeed, Pahl suggested that Mr Simpson “had reverted to a pre-industrial pattern of hunter and gatherer”. He raised vegetables in an uncle’s garden and did decorating for relatives, but he also lived by fishing, ferreting, poaching and, on occasion, buying a bullock from a Sheppey farmer and selling on the butchered meat. In doing this, he appeared to be resuming activities long-familiar to the working classes of coastal England.

  As Pahl wrote, “Pre-enclosure traditions live on in some places where the power of the squire was less strong”.47 Thanks partly to the Anopheles mosquito, Sheppey was surely just such a place. “In the locality where I am doing my fieldwork the main landowner withdrew in the later seventeenth century and only smaller farmers actually lived on the land. Many of the workers in factory and steel mill come from farming backgrounds and preindustrial attitudes may linger on. Mr Simpson has been convicted of poaching”. Questionable as this assumption of long-standing settlement definitely was, Pahl enjoyed the thought that Sheppey, which most middle-class visitors saw only as an “ugly and polluted industrial wasteland”, was actually a place where the memory of pre-industrial England survived as a contrary resource: “it seems as though some workers are slipping out of their chains and walking out of the system’s front door”.48

  *

  In those early articles Pahl urged that the “informal economy” he had discovered on Sheppey should be recognised as “a viable ‘culture of unemployment’”49 and, indeed, that “appropriate public policies” should be contrived in order to harness it to “socially progressive ends”.50 These romantic speculations provoked a number of his academic colleagues into far from “theoretical” expressions of concern. In 1979, some of these emerged at a conference, chaired by Richard Hoggart, at which Pahl and his colleague at the University of Kent, John Gershuny, presented their findings. Written by a journalist from the Times, the report of this event claims that Pahl, in the course of drawing out the implications of his initial survey, had suggested that not everyone needed a nine-to-five job, and that people could cope with the experience of being thrown out of work in the formal economy by “resorting to domestic work at home and odd jobs for neighbours and friends in exchange for cash … by growing food from allotments and hunting, and by gaining support from working men’s clubs”.51

  This description of life as Pahl had imagined its possibilities on the Isle of Sheppey had been hailed by another contributor, Alec Dickson, the founder of both Voluntary Service Overseas and Community Service Volunteers. He commended Pahl’s suggestion that many of the “psychological needs” once met through full-time employment, including “socialisation”, could also be satisfied through the “informal economy”, and, in a remark that may, once again, reflect Marshall Sahlins’ influence, also pointed out that his depiction of getting by on Sheppey was an “almost exact description of the life of a tribal community in New Guinea”. There were more critical listeners, however, who mistrusted the political liquidity of the phrase “informal economy” and suspected Pahl was implying that it was “fun to be unemployed and working illegally”. These respondents, some of whom may indeed have felt that Pahl needed less history and more rigorous “theory”, rejected his apparent suggestion that the development of the informal economy was “a desirable trend” that would “substantially contribute to preventing mass unemployment”.52 They warned Pahl that “some people might suffer and be exploited” in what was inevitably an ill-regulated sector of the economy, and that the “informal economy” was close to the “black economy”, with its perks and tax avoidance, and its tendency to “merge into crime”.

  “The black economy on wheels?” (Ray Pahl)

  Pahl himself would become increasingly worried about the reception of his early findings. Indeed, one of the most engaging aspects of his 1984 book on the Sheppey researches, Divisions of Labour, lies not in the self-justifying and waspish stings he continues to aim at “theoretical” colleagues and some of his own collaborators too, but in the candour with which he admits his own early naïveté. As he acknowledged with some concern, his first articles on Sheppey were soon being translated and cited around the world. Indeed, as the translations and speaking invitations accumulated, he worried that his suggestion that people were learning to “get by” without “formal employment”53 was becoming an excuse for complacency and, as a crude form of “monetarism” became the dominant economic creed under Margaret Thatcher, for just letting “deindustrialization” rip. “The idea”, so he would confess, “that ‘the informal economy’ was a positive alternative to an ailing capitalism was the kind of good news people wanted to hear”.54 By 1980, which was still only the first year of “Thatcherism”, he was feeling like “a character in a Greek drama who has unlocked something he cannot control”. He suffered the same shock of recognition a few years later, when Patrick Minford, the right-wing economist who has recently been dug out of the past to declare how wonderful everything is going to be after Brexit, announced “that unemployed people ‘can do useful things at home and even earn some small amounts legally while claiming benefits’”.55 By 1981, when Margaret Thatcher’s Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit urged the unemployed to follow the example of his own father in the Thirties and “get on their bikes” to search for work, it was obvious that these were not the “public policies” Pahl had earlier imagined might make a positive force of the “informal economy”.56

  With this anxiety growing in his mind, Pahl resolved to dig deeper into island life. He raised more funding, latterly from the government’s Economic and Social Research Council, hired the now-qualified Dr Claire Wallace as one of his research workers and, in 1980, bought and refurbished a house at 18
Delamark Road — a few steps from the Contant family at No. 7 — from which he and his assistants would conduct fieldwork when they weren’t “overwhelmed with problems of damp, cracking plaster and marauding drunkards”.

  The new phase of investigation, which would reveal that Sheppey was not at all the same as a tribal society in New Guinea, was intended to go beyond his first “more unstructured and anthropological” investigations to produce “a more complete understanding of the social composition of households and their division of labour”.57 The plan was to investigate every activity on the island that might be construed as “work”, be it done by young or old, men, women or children, and belonging as it might in any of three distinct spheres — formal, informal and communal/household.58 As a central part of their investigation, Pahl, Wallace and their associates came up with questions about no less than forty-one different tasks and then interviewed 730 island households to see how they were carried out.59

  By the time they had finished, Pahl’s researchers had the data to strengthen his belief that understanding of work must be refocused around the household rather than only the full-time, predominantly male job. The fact that 32% of their respondents had made jam for themselves was among the results demonstrating the importance of understanding women’s work, much of it going on within the household. A male form of self-provisioning was indicated by the discovery that 25% had mended the brakes on their own cars (Pahl and his assistants took photographs of men doing this sort of thing on the streets of Sheerness). A few, meanwhile, had engaged in activities that were not always on the right side of the law.

  The survey revealed that various factors — he cites the plotland holiday industry, the dockyard, the availability of EEC mortgages for steelworkers — had combined with the island’s low house prices, to encourage a remarkably high degree of home ownership. Pahl saw evidence of the latter in the skip-lined streets of Sheerness, in the upgraded plotland developments of Minster, Warden and Leysdown, and in the peripheral council estates, where he, like Tony Benn a little later, noticed the newly-painted front doors with which many former tenants would register their newly-possible access to the “housing ladder”.60

  “The collapse of the apprenticeship system means that some young people learn their trade in the street”.

  One of the survey’s most arresting discoveries in this connection was that as many as 14% of surveyed households claimed to have fitted a rolled steel joist into their own properties. For Pahl this was not to be understood only as evidence of a retreat into private life. As he pointed out, fitting an RSJ is standard procedure when it comes to upgrading houses in Victorian terraces such as are common in Sheerness. Noting that just over half his respondents had lived in three or more houses on Sheppey, while 15% had lived in “five or more”,61 Pahl concluded that many Sheerness households had incorporated buying, upgrading and selling properties into their financial strategies. It was a manoeuvre that Pahl himself carried out in Delamark Road (and also, he was not ashamed to admit, in Tuscany, where he restored the considerable hill-top country house in which he could accommodate some of his art collection — later donated to the British Academy — and write much of Divisions of Labour). In Sheppey, however, such preparations were often assisted by the availability of cheap holiday chalets into which families could move while working on their main property. This realisation represented a considerable novelty for those involved in the study of work. As Pahl himself concluded, “By emphasizing housing as much as employment, the narrow conception of a local labour market has been broadened to include the role of the state and the rules and regulations that structure social relations in different contexts”.

  *

  Pahl found a number of his early assumptions challenged by this later research. He had anticipated that the consciousness of the predominantly working-class people of Sheppey reflected their experience as long-term residents with “deep roots” on the island, and that the more he understood about the past, the more he would be able to share the experiences of the islanders. On the contrary, as he discovered, the majority of respondents had not been born on the island, and two fifths of those interviewed had moved there since the dockyard closure of 1960. Far from being grounded aboriginals — or “Swampies” as the mainland stereotype has it — still instinctively in touch with the traditions of pre-enclosure England as he had fondly imagined, the population was about as mobile here as elsewhere in Britain.

  The survey also suggested that Sheppey may not actually have had a huge quantity of “informal” labour going on and that it would be wrong to assume this was particularly widespread.62 The class structure of the island turned out to be broadly similar to that elsewhere in the country, but with a higher measure of home ownership and considerably more working-class “couple-based” households than elsewhere. Working-class women may have been somewhat better-placed on Sheppey (some employers on the island are said to have preferred to employ women), and it also became apparent that “household structure” was probably more important than social class in defining patterns of work.

  As he considered how unemployed households in Sheppey were reacting to their situation, he also began to doubt there was actually anything “unprecedented” about the new situation of the British economy. Indeed, he came to realise that the boom years of the Fifties and Sixties, in which full employment had seemed an achievable goal, were actually exceptional: “The period of rising real wages, of demand for teenage and immigrant labour and of expanding state expenditure in health, social services and education has formed the base level, the conception of what is normal, for politicians, media commentators and many academics”.63 With the shipwrecking of that set of assumptions, his survey suggested the resumption of an earlier and longer pattern of activity as conventional jobs were withdrawn.

  Pahl’s widely distributed suggestion that the informal economy might convert “unemployment” into a more benign way of life would be an early casualty of his revisions — challenged not just by the finding that women were still doing the majority of domestic work in Sheppey households, but by the discovery that conventional employment and self-provisioning actually went together, and that the latter was not working as a simple substitute for the former. Indeed, the investigation suggested that “a process of polarization is developing, with households busily engaged in all forms of work at one pole and households unable to do a wide range of work at the other”. Pahl now concluded that those with more skills and resources would be in a position to make the most of informal opportunities too. Households that were completely without formal employment found it difficult if not impossible to find other forms of work and could not be expected to make the leap. Opportunities for informal work appeared to be declining among the unemployed while those in employment were “better placed to engage in all other forms of work as well”.64

  Having found no evidence that unemployed men on the island did more or less “informal” work than the national average and, indeed, having discovered that more DIY-style self-provisioning was done in working-class households with multiple earners, Pahl recognised that unemployment was actually drawing the “informal economy” into new divisions of labour.65 He saw an emerging pattern in which perhaps as many as 65% of households have become home-owning and consumption-orientated. These “high self-provisioners” were also “more privatized, inward-looking, home-centred and autonomous”. They reflected higher levels of home and car ownership, were largely content with a “style of life based on small-scale domesticity” and were more likely to vote Tory.66 Beneath them, however, was a “deprived” group of 20–25% living in poverty, and above a “well-salaried or capital-owning” bourgeoisie of 12–15%: “the new line of class cleavage is now between the middle mass and the underclass beneath it”.67 The sociologist who had gone to Sheppey full of optimism about the informal economy had discovered something quite different”: “In so far as there is now structural unemployment, a distinctive form of poverty is being created”.
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  In the end, then, Pahl’s Sheppey was not a deeply-settled island populated by natives who had triumphed over the problems now facing many communities on the mainland by reviving older, pre-industrial, if not exactly “stone-age” ways of life. It was instead a place where “some of the characteristic problems of de-industrialising Britain” could be seen in a “particularly extreme form”.68 While it remained a prophetic land in which something of the world to come could be glimpsed, “the Sunny Isle of Sheppey” was a place of dark warnings rather than naïve utopian promise.

  One of the most important messages relayed by Pahl concerned the importance of place, locality and “area” in the new economic reality. Then, as now, prevailing economic ideology was on the side of mobility. Pahl, however, took the opposite view. He ventured that, if the recession bit really hard, “strength in the labour market” might even become disadvantageous for some who found themselves out of work. His point, which was informed by consideration of some of the new “executive” housing being built around the country (although not yet on Sheppey), was that the “strength” of people with marketable knowledge had conventionally been linking with mobility — “any one locality is merely a staging post in the long haul up a career”.69 This sort of shuttling about had the effect of cutting its people off from any grounded community, and it might leave them particularly bereft when unemployment loomed and local connections became more important.

  While rejecting the conventional distinction between (rooted working-class) “locals” and (mobile middle-class) “incomers”, Pahl nevertheless insisted that the local context was rendered much more important by the new forms of household economy. Sociologists should “recognize that most people read their local newspapers with greater care than the national ones”.70 Physical separation made this “sharp disjunction between the national and the local” particularly evident on the Isle of Sheppey, but the gap would continue to loom elsewhere too. Pahl conceived this rising localism as a new form of “social consciousness” in which people would come to rely on local self-managed initiatives to “organize various forms of informal and communal work”. He anticipated that ongoing economic developments would distribute “life chances” most inequitably between localities in the late-twentieth century. Some would develop rapidly, “with new jobs and capital investment”, others would continue to decline, and it was in places such as these — nobody had yet thought to insult the inhabitants with names like “the left behind” — that “all the forms of work outside employment have their greater salience”. Just as households in such places might go into internal retreat, local communities might also come to “look more within themselves”. A sense of national abandonment was part of this story, but it also suggested the possible development of “greater vigour and determination to cope with social and economic problems at a local level”. On Sheppey, Pahl saw signs of this “nascent localism” emerging “very vigorously”. “It is not, perhaps, too fanciful to expect the rediscovery of local products, local crafts and ways of marketing local identity and historical associations”. A defence of local memory would also be part of this “nascent” social consciousness. Noting a rising interest in old photographs, old postcards, old people’s memories, he ventured that “the stubborn concern of many people on Sheppey not to forget what they see as their ‘past’ should, perhaps, be considered seriously”.