Statistics afford a more precise sense of some of the key changes in Britain during the twentieth century. The number of permanent dwellings trebled, and the rate of owner-occupation of property increased from around 10 per cent to around 70. The number of children in the average family halved. The population of England and Wales increased by roughly 20 million (about 60 per cent). Life expectancy for newborn children increased by thirty years, and the rate of infant mortality declined from 15 per cent to 0.5. In 1904 there were 1.4 telephones per 100 people in London; in 2005 the figure nationally was 56.4 landlines per 100 people, while the number of mobile phones exceeded the number of people. At the start of the century there were 8,000 cars in Britain; by its end, the figure was above 20 million. To take a longer view: the crowd today attending a sold-out football match at Wembley Stadium contains more people than lived in the whole of London 500 years ago.
The data relating to phone ownership are arresting. Immediacy of access to people has had numerous beneficial effects, professionally and socially. But it erodes formality and privacy. While working on this chapter, I found myself on a bus sitting next to a fortyish man who began a phone conversation as follows: ‘Hi, it’s Dave, right? I just want to tell you to fuck off .’ Nothing so very unusual in that, but imagine how the same communication would have had to be handled a hundred years ago. Standing on someone’s doorstep and haranguing him, or penning a poisonous letter, is much more demanding than simply calling him up and insulting him. Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1962, referred to the telephone as a ‘pernicious device’, observing that ‘People leave all arrangements vague in the knowledge that they can always ring up at the last moment and change them.’7 This makes me wonder what Waugh would have thought of the mobile phone.
The telephone can also be held responsible for the popularization of the greeting hello. Thomas Edison suggested this as an alternative to the word favoured by the device’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, which was ahoy. Hello established itself, and in 1880, at America’s first National Convention of Telephone Companies, there was a debut for the ingratiating ‘Hello, I’m Henry’ style of conference badge.8 The rise of hello seems a small thing, but originally the word was a variant of hallo, which expressed a degree of surprise. A note of surprise remains in hello; it is a greeting more ambiguous than an assured ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good evening’. The telephone changed not just our ability to communicate, but also the way we talk; when we don’t have face-to-face contact with the person to whom we are speaking, we have to find verbal rather than visual methods of conveying attitudes, confirming attention and giving feedback.
Increased car ownership, beginning in the 1920s, played an even larger role in creating new departments of manners. There are rules of the road: the Highway Code has since 1931 been the official version of these. Then there are common courtesies: I acknowledge someone who lets me out at a junction, avoid tailgating other motorists, park so as not to block a driveway or the entrance to a garage. Behind both the rules and the courtesies is an awareness, which we necessarily blot out, that the car is a weapon. Kate Fox comments that English drivers are justly renowned for their orderliness and courtesy. Notwithstanding the way drivers shout insults and honk their horns, or even occasionally indulge in violent road rage, the norm is restraint, ‘an extension of our queuing behaviour’, redolent of inhibition and insularity.9
The car has transformed society, by enabling us to travel alone or only with people of our choosing. Traditionally, private travel has been the preserve of the rich; everyone else has had to share. The rise of the automobile created a new flexibility, and it also changed the landscape: suburbs grew, the function of streets narrowed, and motorists were better able to socialize beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. Increased use of cars led to public transport being thought of as a location of incivility. Meanwhile, in reality as in the advertisements, the car was a vehicle of fantasy and escape, allowing its owner to luxuriate in solipsism. In the late 1930s the American car-maker Nash Motors advertised one of its models with the apposite slogan ‘It’ll lead you astray – and you’ll like it!’
As cars became more affordable and ownership grew, people drove themselves rather than being driven. By taking responsibility for something that would traditionally have been done for them, the new motorists made certain roles obsolete. This was also happening through the proliferation of domestic appliances such as vacuum cleaners. The double-edged nature of the term ‘labour-saving’ was implicit in the slogan ‘Let electricity be your servant.’
Here we touch on a major change that took place in Britain in the twentieth century: the decline of domestic service. In 1901 the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, a voluntary group that had sprung up in the 1850s, published a booklet entitled Rules for the Manners of Servants in Good Families: ‘Move quietly about the house’, ‘Never sing or whistle at your work’, ‘Always answer when you receive an order or a reproof … to show you have heard’, ‘Do not smile at droll stories told in your presence.’10 By the 1940s such publications were redundant. There was a sharp fall in the number of men and women – especially women – employed in other people’s houses. When P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves first appeared in 1915, the immaculate valet was a familiar contemporary figure; by the time of the last Jeeves novel, in 1974, Wodehouse’s creation had become a benign archaism. In America, too, domestic service declined; Emily Post first thought to pen a chapter ‘On the Servantless House’ in 1928.
The decline of domestic service is part of the larger story of the changing world of work: more jobs in the service sector and fewer in industry and agriculture, women’s increasing participation in the labour force, global competition, outsourcing, rising unemployment, and employers seeking more flexible arrangements with those who work for them. This accelerated in the final decades of the twentieth century as technology destabilized old notions of employment and blue-collar jobs vanished. While political rhetoric about job creation has not abated, temporary and freelance work have come to seem ordinary. As with the rise of car culture, the changes in infrastructure have affected not only practicalities, but also attitudes. Modern workers’ feelings about their jobs are likely to be insecure, uncommitted or mercenary. In the late twentieth century, perhaps for the first time ever, it did not seem absurd to claim that on average the rich worked harder than the poor. This is not to deny that some of the richest people are gallingly indolent. But members of today’s affluent executive class are shackled to their jobs, and one consequence of this is that they are embarrassingly remote from members of all other classes.
At the same time, the physical experience of being at work has changed, in all sectors, thanks in large measure to new technology. This is true for those employed on the land, in factories and in offices. For Britain’s legions of office workers, conduct in the workplace is shaped by the design of the workplace and the systems that are used there, as well as by the law, the particular culture created by an employer, and of course the nature of the work being carried out.
In the final decades of the last century, there were significant changes in the architecture of offices: a move from the cellular to the open-plan. This in fact had less to do with architects than with the insights of management consultants: the watchwords were flexibility, democracy, teamwork and reduced overheads. The German consulting firm Quickborner revolutionized office landscaping in the 1950s; in America, Hewlett-Packard pioneered open-plan office space, apparently leading to a surge in demand for ear plugs.11 Additionally, the commercial development of air conditioning in the 1950s made it possible for offices to have ‘deep space’. Those who have spent much time in this kind of space will attest that, while it seems convenient to planners, it suffers from a depressing lack of sensory richness and dampens cognitive activity. Only in one sense is it deep.
These changes have meant that in the realm of business, where class distinctions were previously tenacious, hierarchy has been flattened. But the push for egalitarianism hasn’t
really eradicated images of status, and, for all the rhetoric about creativity and collaboration, mutual respect and team players, flexibility and informality, the modern workplace is a sphere still stiff with etiquette. It is one kind of etiquette replacing another, rather than the eradication of any such code: now we are obliged to believe in a professional world where the transaction is more important than the relationship, though we talk about relationships more and more, to make up for our flitty, momentary work life, the defining feature of which is impatience.
22
Location, location, location
the rules of place
The phrase I have chosen for the first half of this chapter’s title could easily have come up before now. Grating though it may be, it is more than just the smug mantra of estate agents. Our understanding of all behaviour is tied to location. Our very sense of self is positional: when I think of myself, it is not as a dislocated entity, but as a being in a place. The ways we express our psychological and emotional states are similar to the ways we express physical ones. The language we use of our everyday activities and feelings is suffused with in and out, up and down, here and there, towards and away. Principal among these words is in. We have a consistent sense of being located, in space and in time. We also think in terms of boundaries: we have strong feelings, not necessarily explicable, about when here becomes there and in becomes out.
When we think about manners, we think about places: the places that bring on particular kinds of behaviour, the places where we are likely to face challenges. We are conscious of the rules of place. At the same time, the unconscious is sensitive to circumstances. Two episodes from my own life may serve to illuminate this a little.
First, I am sitting in a café in a small town in the West Midlands, eating a late breakfast. A burly man in his forties flumps down at my table. ‘Mind if I sit here?’ It isn’t really a question. He personalizes his side of the table, lining up sauce bottles and slapping his newspaper into submission. He looks at the book I am reading – short stories – and eyes me in a manner I find threatening. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ I acknowledge that I am from London. He snorts (‘Not a London type of place, this’), apologizes for having a cold (‘It’s not even a proper cold’), and asks what my politics are. The conversation unfurls: football, TV, the music buzzing from the café’s radio. We somehow miss out the weather. He offers to buy me a cup of tea – ‘Oh, coffee, is it? Very cosmopolitan’ – and we keep talking. After twenty minutes he gives me his email address, explaining that he will be coming to London soon and it would be useful to get the details of one or two decent pubs. ‘I like a personal recommendation,’ he says. ‘Nothing posh, mind, just pubby pubs.’ He insists on paying for another drink for me (‘I spoiled your lunch, didn’t I?’), and then leaves, saluting most of the other customers by nicknames as he exits and belching theatrically in the doorway. ‘Couldn’t help myself,’ he says with undisguised glee. When I look again at the email address he has written down – a playful handle – I realize I didn’t ask his name and wasn’t told it: this is one of those things foreigners remark on, the English tendency to withhold their names as if guarding a secret (or making a mystery out of something prosaic, for until we know that Bob is Bob we may imagine he is Duwayne or Galahad). A moment later he pops back to ‘grab a sandwich for later’. ‘We’re not good at goodbyes,’ he muses. He could be speaking for himself or a whole nation.
A few days later I go to the bar of a hotel in London’s Mayfair. It is a five-star establishment and not the sort of place I usually visit. Although I am not dressed all that differently from other patrons, and although my companion certainly doesn’t look out of place, we are treated shabbily. We seem to be invisible to the bar staff. They are not invisible to me; I register the studiousness with which they ignore me. In the end we do manage to order drinks, but, once we have sat at a table, we are unable to order a second round. Staff look past us, and fawn over other customers. The table next to ours is cleared, slowly, by three waiters: this is intentional inefficiency, a passive-aggressive move. We decide to find a more congenial location, but it takes more than ten minutes to interest someone in bringing the bill. This includes a ‘discretionary service charge’. I ask for it to be removed, as the service has been non-existent. I am told that it cannot be removed. Perhaps I should make a fuss, but instead I meekly pay. I use cash, which is examined sceptically. As we leave, the manager ushers me towards the exit with a ludicrously insincere flourish. At no point does anyone tell me I have done anything wrong, let alone tell me what I have done wrong.
Our reactions to places are strongly linked to our experience of people we encounter there. Thus we dislike a restaurant because of bad service or the proximity of obnoxious diners. We find a health spa calming not only because of the facilities it offers, but also because of the unruffled demeanour of its staff and the placidity of other patrons. The reverse can apply: a spa fails to restore us because it is full of abrasive people, and a restaurant’s appeal stems partly from its clientele. A space’s tone can have a positive influence on those who use it, but it can also be violated.
Particular locations call for particular kinds of behaviour. This may seem an obvious point, but, precisely because it feels obvious, we do not tend to scrutinize it. We understand the tonal purposes of spaces: location influences what we think of as acceptable behaviour. And, in ways that we are barely able to recognize, the imagery with which we are surrounded orients our behaviour.
Even within an apparently unified culture, and at a specific time, manners vary. We know this well. One person’s idea of necessary decorum is another’s of archaic fussiness. The shepherd Corin in Shakespeare’s As You Like It tells Touchstone, a witty townie, that ‘Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court.’ Quite so. What’s more, as individuals we apply different standards of manners in different situations. This is akin to code-switching (or style-shifting, as it is also known) in language: I speak and behave one way in a job interview or at a funeral, and in another when at the races or in a roadside diner. This isn’t a sinister feat of dissimulation; it is a largely predictable and strategic move, driven by our sense of what is appropriate in a particular situation as well as by our need to define our relationship to that situation.
I am likely, unconsciously or semi-consciously, to alter the way I express myself according to whether I’m speaking at a wake or trying to defuse an argument in a bar, and in much the same way my sense of what’s offensive will change according to whether I’m visiting a shrine or sitting in a jacuzzi, shopping at a supermarket or browsing in an antiquarian bookshop. Many instances of rudeness stem from a failure to suit words and actions to occasion and setting. But the capacity to judge suitability is not innate. Rather, it relies on a grasp of convention. In the Chamber of the House of Commons one must not refer to another Member by name, but it is all right for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to drink alcohol while delivering his Budget – Gladstone used to take sherry with a beaten egg. This is hardly a state of affairs one could intuit.
Our experience of rudeness has a lot to do with our sense that the conventions of place are being breached. Contrary to what we might imagine, the locations of incivility are not places where we feel out of our depth (a ‘dodgy’ area) so much as places we frequent: the supermarket, the road when we are driving, residential streets near where we live, pubs and bars, cafés and restaurants, public transport, car parks, the gym, and maybe the cinema, a park or a concert venue. We experience rudeness more when ‘getting somewhere’ than when ‘being somewhere’. In their study of the role of the rude stranger in everyday life, sociologists Philip Smith, Timothy Phillips and Ryan King conclude that we meet with rudeness mainly among ‘ordinary’ people and in ordinary places. In fact, the peak moment for experiencing it is around lunchtime. The explanation is straightforward: the denser our interactions, the more pote
ntial there is for rudeness (or at least for spying it). Rudeness most often occurs when the victim and the perpetrator are in motion.1
The home is usually thought of as a refuge from such abuses. The idea of home as a place of sanctuary is summed up in the well-worn line that ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’ This is more than just an image of the inviolable threshold, of the delight we take in pulling up the drawbridge and lowering the portcullis; it touches upon questions of law, politics and psychology. Privacy is paramount. This is why English people like their homes to be hard to find, and make expertly unhelpful use of signs and barely visible house numbers to ensure this. It is also why front gardens exist for display, whereas the garden at the rear of a property, much less visible and usually much less carefully tended, is for enjoyment.
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