State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  And yet although the press applauded the U-turns, there was no disguising the growing sense of unease. With his stiff, impatient manner, Heath had never been especially popular with the Tory grass roots, and he personally had no feel for the party in the country. Confronted by the extravagantly hatted housewives, blue-rinsed ladies, retired colonels and nasal-voiced small businessmen who stuffed envelopes and organized jumble sales on the party’s behalf, he often looked as though he had trodden in something. But not only were activists less than impressed with their leader’s charm, they were deeply worried by what was happening to their country. It was in the Heath years, after all, that many of the phenomena we lazily associate with the late 1960s – long hair, obscenity, soft drugs, way-out fashions, even superficial things like flared trousers, tie-dyed shirts, long sideburns and affected hippy slang – became popular outside a few corners of London, slowly seeping into the mainstream of British youth culture, to the horror of many middle-aged parents. When they studied their copies of the Telegraph, the Express or the Mail at the breakfast table, they were shocked by the litany of strikes and demonstrations, the tide of pornography and football hooliganism, the student sit-ins, the feminist protests and the Ugandan Asians. When they looked at Britain, they saw a breakdown of politeness and public order, a collapse of discipline and self-restraint, a mounting sense of vandalism, greed and self-interest, embodied by individuals from Arthur Scargill to George Best. And on top of all that, middle-class voters complained of being ‘ground between the cost of living on the one hand and a more or less fixed income on the other’, as an internal Tory report put it in January 1972. ‘Honest middle-class people, good citizens, people with principles and standards’ had been abandoned ‘in a vacuum’, wrote a local official a year later. There was ‘a general fear about the state of our society’, the party’s Advisory Committee on Policy reported in March 1973, and a ‘feeling that we are not in control’.43

  Heath’s failure to appease middle-class anxieties was one of his greatest tactical blunders. As so often, he saw himself as a national spokesman, not a party leader: as Norman Tebbit later put it, the government appeared so eager to please the union bosses that it ‘seemed always to dump its friends in an effort to buy its enemies’. By contrast, Heath’s handling of his own MPs was so inept that it might have been an object lesson in how to prepare one’s own downfall. Almost every Prime Minister has to put up with backbench grumbling at one time or other, and by the end of 1972 many Tory MPs were distinctly restless, registering their discontent by electing Heath’s old enemy Edward du Cann as chairman of the 1922 Committee. But the problem was not merely disquiet at the Industry Act and the new pay policy. What really infuriated many backbenchers was Heath’s dismissive treatment of his own rank and file. He may not have seen them ‘as cattle to be driven through the gates of the lobby’, as the Spectator’s Patrick Cosgrave claimed in December 1972, but he certainly treated them with reckless rudeness, consistently refusing to hear their complaints, to take unwelcome advice, or even to acknowledge that they were there at all. One Tory backbencher later confided to Simon Heffer that Heath had once told him that there were ‘three sorts of people in this party: shits, bloody shits and fucking shits’. He certainly treated most of them as though they belonged in the final category. Rebellion was not yet inevitable. But with every snub and slight, every greeting ignored and every grumpy remark, Heath was creating the conditions for an uprising.44

  9

  Metro-Land

  Well, what’s wrong with being the same as everyone else? What’s wrong with trying to make a little bit of modest progress?

  – Bob Ferris, in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973)

  As London’s commuters trudged home on the dark winter’s evening of Monday, 26 February 1973, the headlines made for miserable reading. With the unions in revolt against Stage Two of Heath’s pay policy, more than half a million people, from Civil Service clerical staff and non-medical hospital staff to train drivers, firemen and Ford car workers were planning to walk out in the next three days. Both the railway network and the London Underground were expected to shut down, and experts were already warning of chaos on the roads. So gloomy were the predictions of traffic jams on the main routes into Britain’s major cities that thousands of people were expected to stay at home. So it seemed supremely ironic that the highlight of that night’s television was a BBC2 film celebrating London’s first and fastest Underground line, the Metropolitan, the original artery of the capital’s commuter network.1

  Edward Mirzoeff’s film Metro-Land, which follows the poet Sir John Betjeman along the Metropolitan Line’s north-western branch from the heart of the capital into rural Buckinghamshire, was not so much a tribute to the capital’s public transport network as a lyrical celebration of what had followed in its wake: the sprawling suburbs of Greater London, from Neasden and Harrow to Pinner and Amersham, a mosaic of grand houses and modernist stations, country hedgerows and suburban golf courses, mock-Tudor villas and art deco cinemas. During the early decades of the century, Metro-land had been a marketing slogan, designed to promote both the line and the housing estates that sprang up around its stations. It was a symbol of the middle classes and of Middle England, of suburban gentility and material ambition; it was a marriage of urban and rural, neither town nor country, tantalizingly close to London but (at least according to the brochures) surrounded by quiet, empty fields. Millions dreamed of owning their own Metro-land home, their own bow-windowed, fake-timbered house in Harrow or Ruislip. Intellectuals saw it as the supreme symbol of narrowness, materialism and sheer bad taste, the symbol of mass affluence and suburban banality. Yet even suburbia’s most virulent critics temporarily put their hatred aside after Betjeman’s tribute to Rickmansworth and Chorleywood, so taken were they with his blend of melancholy and celebration. In the Observer, Clive James called it an ‘instant classic’, and predicted that it would be repeated ‘until the millennium’. But the review Betjeman liked best came in affectionate verse from his friend Simon Jenkins in the Evening Standard: ‘For an hour he held enraptured / Pinner, Moor Park, Chorley Wood. / “Well I’m blowed,” they said. “He likes us. / Knew one day that someone should.” ’2

  What was so striking about Metro-Land, as Betjeman pottered amiably from a half-timbered mansion at Harrow Weald to the golf course at Moor Park, was his deep affection for London’s suburban fringes, which emerged as far more interesting and quirky than most viewers had suspected. For the Poet Laureate to be waxing lyrical about the joys of Neasden (the ‘home of the gnome and the average citizen’, as he put it) seemed quite extraordinary, for everyone knew that the suburbs were terrible places, dull and soulless at best, claustrophobic and confining at worst. In Private Eye, for which Betjeman had once written, Neasden was the symbol of everything base, boring and banal, the very worst of Middle England, the place where romance and imagination came to die. Indeed, hatred of the suburbs had an impressive pedigree: in the early years of the century, intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton to E. Nesbit and E. M. Forster had queued up to denounce their ‘dullness and small-mindedness’. To the high-minded and well bred, the fact that Metro-land represented a dream come true for millions of ordinary families, not just in London but across the nation, was beside the point. Intellectuals loathed its mock-Elizabethan façades, its quiet leafy streets, its crowds of clerks on the station platforms at dawn and dusk. For the writer Cyril Connolly, the suburbs were ‘incubators of apathy and delirium’, while Graham Greene shuddered at their ‘sinless, empty, graceless chromium world’, Suburbia is ‘just a prison with the cells all in a row,’ says the narrator in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939), imagining thousands of clerks, just like himself, ‘with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches’.3

  Although the 1950s and 1960s had been decades of tremendous growth for housing estates and New Towns, Metro-land’s imag
e remained as bad as ever. Architects and planners were quick to condemn what they saw as the suburbs’ ugly, monotonous conservatism, while in the novels, plays and films of the period, to be suburban is to be cheap, crass, joyless and materialistic. Urban legend had it that the suburbs were unfriendly, loveless places, without warmth or community, where husbands mechanically washed their cars every weekend and wives pined for excitement behind their net curtains. Even pop and rock music, which had millions of followers in the suburbs, presented the same mocking picture. The Kinks’ album Muswell Hillbillies (1971), which affectionately evokes the Davies brothers’ youth in the suburbs of North London, was a rare exception: more conventional was the attitude of the punk bands of the late 1970s, which took a uniformly hostile view of suburbia and its inhabitants. The very first lines of the Members’ song ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ (1978), for instance, caustically describe the atmosphere of a ‘same old boring Sunday morning’: Dad outside washing his car, Mum in the kitchen cooking Sunday dinner, Johnny upstairs annoying the neighbours with his electric guitar. That the same year saw the release of Siouxsie & the Banshees’ ‘Suburban Relapse’, narrated by a housewife who snaps and lashes out while washing the dishes, reinforces the impression that punk bands had their knives out for Metro-land. The suburbs were ‘middle-class’ and ‘puritanical’, full of people ‘always going on about Hitler,’ remarked the singer Siouxsie Sioux – actually Susan Ballion from Bromley.4

  The most sustained and popular indictment of suburbia, however, came in the television sitcoms so popular in the mid-1970s. In a sense, the fact that so many sitcoms were set in greater Metro-land, from Bless this House and Happy Ever After to Butterflies and George and Mildred, was a testament to its newfound place at the centre of Britain’s physical and imaginative landscape. And yet their portrait of a monotonous world of lonely, frustrated housewives and henpecked husbands might have been scripted by the upper-class intellectuals of the inter-war years. When Terry Collier first visits his friend Bob Ferris’s new estate in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, his indictment is pure Cyril Connolly. ‘There’s just something depressing about these estates,’ Terry says gloomily. ‘It’s the thought of you all: all getting up at the same time, all eating the same sort of low-calorie breakfast, all coming home at half-past-six and watching the same programme at the same time and having it off the same two nights of the week.’ The only way residents can ‘tell the difference’ between the individual houses, he concludes caustically, ‘is by the colour of your curtains.’5

  But while Bob angrily defends his new suburban existence, pointing out that his new home represents a ‘little bit of modest progress’, not all sitcom characters were so content with their lot. The struggle of the individual against his suburban shackles is one of the central themes of mid-1970s comedies, encapsulated most famously in the series The Good Life (1975–8) and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9). In the former, the Goods begin the series as a classic suburban couple: Tom a draughtsman designing toys for cereal packets, and Barbara a perky middle-class Surbiton housewife. But the real incarnations of Metro-land are their neighbours, Jerry and Margo Leadbetter (played by Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith): the former urbane, ambitious but a little henpecked; the latter one of the great fictional characters of the era, a humourless, snobbish social climber, a pillar of the Pony Club, the Music Society and the local Conservative Party. Hers is a world of manicured respectability, with everything in its place and no room for surprises – which is precisely why the Goods’ decision to become sustainable farmers horrifies her so much. And no doubt Margo would have been equally appalled by the antics of Reginald Perrin (Leonard Rossiter) in David Nobbs’s series – an ostensibly respectable middle-class executive, driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown by insecurity and impotence, by simmering rage at late-running trains, by the sheer monotony of life in Metro-land.6

  As a bored middle-aged sales executive for a company making trifles and ice cream, Reggie Perrin was well placed to appreciate the changing world of middle-class work. When men like Reggie entered the workplace in the mid-1950s, most middle-class workers expected to follow a straight and stable career path, often spending their entire lives within the same organization, rewarded not just with progressively rising salaries, pension plans and investments, but with a sense of professionalism, status and respect. Men who worked for established institutions such as banks and insurance companies often talked of having a job for life. ‘If I worked hard, I had a really worthwhile career ahead of me,’ reflected one man, who left school in the early 1960s and joined Lloyds Bank. ‘In return for that, the bank expected loyalty from me and my colleagues, but it repaid that loyalty by the job continuity and the salary and career opportunities which were offered to us.’ Another man, who joined the Prudential, echoed his sentiments. ‘The Pru were good employers,’ he said later. ‘We always felt they liked their pound of flesh, with perhaps a drop of blood as well, but they looked after us if we were in trouble.’7

  Although the disappearance of these cosy assumptions is often associated with Thatcherism, the signs had been there for years. For a new generation of ambitious white-collar workers, often boys from working-class homes who owed their success to a grammar-school education, the old values of deference, hierarchy and organizational loyalty held little appeal. Writing in the Radio Times in 1968, one social analyst described a typical example: a working-class boy who had passed his eleven-plus, left school to join an office equipment firm, became a travelling salesman and bought a suburban home with all the trimmings, including a pink plastic pelican on the manicured front lawn. Married at 27, he had joined the local Conservative Party and sent his children to private nursery schools, and he had no intention of resting on his laurels. Thrusting, ambitious, he was precisely the kind of man Edward Heath admired and that Reggie Perrin hated, and he was a common archetype in the popular culture of the 1970s. In John Betjeman’s poem ‘Executive’, published in 1974, he is the ‘young executive’ with clean cuffs, a Slimline briefcase, a company Cortina and a scarlet Aston Martin, as well as a ‘speed-boat which has never touched the water’, named Mandy Jane ‘after a bird I used to know’. In Alan Ayckbourn’s play Absurd Person Singular (1972), he is the socially inept, much-derided contractor Sidney Hopcroft, who claws his way up the ladder by turning himself into a local property tycoon, and ends the play a triumphant proto-Thatcherite figure, literally forcing his architect and banker friends to dance to his tune in a game of musical forfeits. And in Martin Amis’s novel Success (1978), he is the aggressively proletarian Terry Service, who goes to evening classes, works in an open-plan office in a ‘big efficient building’ fittingly called Masters House, and rapidly overtakes his arty half-brother Gregory. ‘The yobs are winning,’ Gregory says in despair – a sentiment often repeated during the following decade.8

  For those like Terry Service, willing to work long hours and clamber over their colleagues to get up the ladder, the rewards were great. Many observers lamented the new culture of middle-class materialism: writing in Encounter in October 1974, the market-research pioneer Mark Abrams warned that ‘the value system of most people in Britain today is solidly grounded in materialism’, and that many were satisfied only by ‘the act of spending by itself … almost irrespective of what is bought’. But neither the woes of the stock market nor the cancer of inflation could check the new ‘money culture’, as some called it. By the end of the decade even the mass-market Daily Mail had a Wednesday ‘Money Mail’ page offering advice on financial affairs, while the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia opened a special Money Mail section in 1979, including stands run by the Stock Exchange and the School Fees Insurance Agency.9

  But with greater rewards came greater pressures. In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the ambitious Bob admits that for all the trappings of success – the secretary, the company car, the candlelit dinners and foreign holidays – he is virtually sick with worry about ‘the sheer volume of things you ha
ve to do: study, go to work, service the car, claim rebates on the rates, worry about whether I can take Thelma to Morocco’ – a far cry from his lazy friend Terry’s daily grind of betting shops and billiard halls. But Bob was far from alone: in workplaces across the country, expectations and anxieties were greater than ever. Open-plan offices replaced the old warrens of hierarchical little rooms, so that everyone could see what their colleagues were up to. Perhaps not coincidentally, even before the advent of Thatcherism and the Big Bang, City workers were giving up their long lunch breaks in favour of spending more time at their desks. Executive dining rooms began to die out, City restaurants reported falling lunchtime demand, and in 1979 Robin Birley opened the Square Mile’s first sandwich bar in Fenchurch Street. Even the beloved tea trolleys of old were disappearing, replaced by vending machines that were no good at making tea but made a better fist of providing Nescafé instant coffee – the ideal drink for a highly pressured, hard-working environment in which white-collar executives faced the real prospect of being sacked if profits fell, if they failed to meet their targets, or, even more frighteningly, if a computer could do their job more cheaply and more quickly.10

  It was hardly surprising, then, that researchers in the mid-1970s found that managers and executives were spending more and more time at weekends worrying about their work. ‘When I’m in the bath or mowing the lawn, I’m often trying to figure out some problem or other,’ confessed a sales manager from Sutton. ‘If you saw me very happily sitting in the garden with a drink at my side I might be thinking over a problem,’ agreed a manager from Caterham. ‘If you came along beside me you might be talking to me for ten minutes and I wouldn’t hear you, I’d be so concentrated.’ Perhaps it was no surprise, either, that so many marriages broke up. ‘I said that I never take work home,’ said a service manager from St Albans. ‘That’s true – not paper work. But unfortunately it remains in my head. There are the usual domestic problems as a result.’ And with wives and mothers increasingly joining the workplace, the report’s conclusion was bleakly prophetic. ‘Strains will be inescapable,’ wrote Michael Young and Peter Willmott, warning that if the trends continued, ‘there will inevitably be more divorces’.11