State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Even though more middle-class managers brought their work home at evenings and weekends, the suburban home remained an idealized refuge from the pressures of the office. Mass home ownership was a relatively recent phenomenon: in 1950, just over one in four families had owned their own home, but by 1970 half of them did so. And although intellectuals derided the mock-Tudor or mock-Georgian houses of the suburbs, with their clipped privet hedges and regimented flower beds, their garden gnomes, sundials and rockeries, the vast majority of British families held them in high esteem. Almost nine out of ten people told researchers in 1968 that a suburban house represented ‘the ideal home’. And since so many people, even relatively young couples, could remember the cramped terraced streets and crowded tenements of old, it is hardly surprising that owning their own home meant a tremendous amount to them. It was not just a question of wealth and status: it meant success, comfort, liberation. In the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Bob Ferris’s suburban home on the new Hillfields estate in Killingworth is not quite finished, but he and his fiancée Thelma are already entertaining themselves by looking at slides of the estate being built. ‘Oh Bob! The damp course!’ says Thelma with feeling. ‘My house!’ muses Bob. ‘You know, I can’t get used to saying that.’ ‘Our house,’ she gently corrects him. ‘I know, pet. It’s our house,’ he concedes, trying the words out for size: ‘Chez nous.’12

  For fictional couples like Bob and Thelma or the Leadbetters in The Good Life, as well as for millions of real-life couples, the home assumed tremendous importance because it was the centre of the nuclear family. Researchers agreed that the extended family had almost entirely died out: as early as the 1940s, surveys had revealed a ubiquitous dream of marriage, two children and a quiet suburban life, unencumbered by parents-in-law and other relatives. With husbands and wives spending far more time together – playing with their children, shopping, pursuing hobbies, going on holiday – the home was not merely a place where people ate and slept, but where they relaxed, entertained and expressed their values and desires. And just as possession of the right appliances had been a crucial badge of status during the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of people had rushed to buy televisions, fridges and washing machines, so the right furniture and decorations assumed tremendous importance in the 1970s.13

  In the early days of Metro-land, suburban semi-detached houses had preserved a kind of rustic-modern blend, as though the look and values of the English countryside had been trapped and tamed within a distinctly non-rural roadside setting. And despite the fact that most families were more remote from agriculture than ever, this nostalgic ethos still dominated suburban life in the 1970s. Both new estates and individual houses often had faux-rustic names (‘The Larches’, ‘Rose Hill’, and so on), while most families liked to decorate their homes with ornaments and knick-knacks that looked back to an idealized past: reproductions of Constable paintings and Dutch landscapes, Swiss mountain views and gypsy-girl portraits, old-fashioned clocks and barometers, plaster plaques and china models of thatched country cottages, intricate little clipper ships and galleons, china statuettes and painted plates, and of course the flight of ceramic ducks winging their way across the wall. As time went on, these were joined by mementoes of holidays in Spain or France. But the overall effect was both nostalgic and socially ambitious, like the rows of leather-bound encyclopedias that would be proudly displayed in the sitting room, or the stripped-pine furniture that became so popular in the mid-1970s.

  The tragedy, of course, was that while all these things were meant to lift the household into a higher social class, they became unmistakable and faintly comic markers of suburban aspirations to gentility. In Piers Paul Read’s novel A Married Man (1979), the protagonist, a left-wing barrister, is deeply embarrassed by his mother’s collection of china statuettes because her ‘bad tastes betrayed not only her origins but also her pretensions, for she believed that her collection, although not quite equal to the treasures of Castle Howard, was a step in that direction’. Yet he is also ‘ashamed of his own embarrassment’, because he knows it is unfair to expect her to have the good taste of the upper middle classes. ‘It was the social connotations which he minded most,’ he admits, ‘as if she had spoken with a regional accent or had smelt of sweat because she never took a bath. His objections to her china ornaments were snobbish objections and he knew it.’14

  But the obsession with nostalgia was not confined to ornaments. The very design of the home, its wallpapers, curtains and carpets, was often deliberately ‘period’, to use a popular term of the day, as though the right furnishings would sprinkle timeless elegance on a nondescript suburban house that might have existed for only months. Mock-Georgian tables and chairs were supposedly ‘hand-carved’ by craftsmen in the ‘traditional’ way, while a typical advert in the Sunday Times in 1977 offered the ‘Ambassador’ silver-plated ‘Georgian’ tea and coffee set, designed to be ‘displayed proudly in the home’ (rather than, say, actually used). Stripped-pine and wood furniture was enormously popular: the travel writer Jonathan Raban recorded in 1974 that London shops ‘like Habitat, Casa Pupo, and David Bagott Design sell home-made-looking tables and chairs in bulky stripped pine which are actually mass produced and mass-marketed’. In gentrifying areas like Kensington and Islington he had seen supposedly ‘ “craftsmen’s” shops selling roughly identical lines in clear-varnished wood’, while friends boasted stereos in ‘grainy deal cabinets’ and even a ‘stripped-pine fridge’.

  On their walls, ambitious couples stuck highly decorated, heavily textured Laura Ashley wallpaper; on their floors, they placed fur rugs and extravagantly patterned carpets; in their bathrooms, they laid synthetic tiles imitating mosaics or marble. The effect was meant to be lush, luxurious, elegant. In fact, since many Laura Ashley or William Morris patterns had been intended for much bigger rooms, the real effect was often dark and claustrophobic, a wild collision of lurid patterns, which is why the 1970s became a byword for bad taste. But like the barrister’s mother in Piers Paul Read’s novel, most people had grown up in much more straitened circumstances, had never learned the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, and simply wanted to emulate their social superiors. To a newly affluent couple, the juxtaposition of a mock-fur rug, a gleaming stereo in a stripped-pine cabinet, a row of Toby jugs, Morris-style curtains and faux-velvet wallpaper meant elegance and class. Only later, long after the decade had become synonymous with the colour brown, did they look back and shudder.15

  The popularity of home decorating was just one illustration of the increasingly domesticated, family-centred world of leisure in the Heath years. Where husbands had once gone out to the pub with their friends, they now stayed at home, perhaps pottering about the garden, mowing the lawn, weeding and planting bulbs. Gardening had long been held up as a symbol of the British character, but never had it been more popular: by 1970, four-fifths of all homes had a garden, and an estimated 29 million people regularly lavished time on their little plot of earth, tending their flower beds, building their patios and piling up their rockeries. And although gardening was widely seen as a symbol of British conservatism, individualism and domesticity, it also reflected the technological innovations and mass affluence of the day. Gardener’s World, shown on BBC2 from 1968, was one of the channel’s most popular shows, while garden centres were besieged at weekends by couples hunting for plastic tools, chemical weedkillers and Flymo’s pioneering electric hover-mowers. So popular was gardening, in fact, that it played an increasingly central role in the long-running Ideal Home Exhibition. In 1974, for the first time, gardens dominated the Grand Hall, with an enormous and rather baroque interpretation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon mounted overhead. It was revealing that some of the exhibition’s longest queues formed outside the Garden Advice Centre, set in a mock English cottage garden – and revealing too that its panel of experts included television stars such as Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton.16

  If the popularity of gardening,
which was second only to watching television as the most popular leisure activity in the country, testified to the modesty and conservatism of everyday life in Metro-land, then so did other favourite hobbies and habits, from country drives, car-cleaning and stamp-collecting to the pony clubs and music societies beloved of The Good Life’s Margo. Instead of radically recasting tastes and attitudes, in fact, the affluence of recent years often worked to reinforce them. So while Britain had long been renowned as a nation of animal-lovers and bird-fanciers, it was not until the 1970s that many middle-class families acquired a dog (which was expensive to maintain), or that membership of the RSPB rose above 100,000. Even young men supposedly at the vanguard of glamour and affluence, such as the working-class footballers interviewed by Hunter Davies during his season with Tottenham Hotspur, led markedly conservative lives, settling down in mock-Georgian homes in Enfield and Epping and spending their weekends playing golf and tennis. Britain was still George Orwell’s nation of stamp-collectors and pigeon-fanciers, wrote Anthony Sampson in his New Anatomy of Britain in 1971, a nation of ‘lawn-mowers, pets, caravans and, inevitably, do-it-yourself … the greatest nation in Europe for handymen and potterers-about’. What emerged, he thought, was ‘a broad picture … of the British living a withdrawn and inarticulate life, rather like Harold Pinter’s people, mowing lawns and painting walls, pampering pets, listening to music, knitting and watching television’.17

  One obvious addition to the list of hobbies, however, was shopping. It was not long since most housewives had visited their local high street several times a day, with food kept covered in the larder rather than chilled in the fridge. Even in 1971, according to one survey, the average housewife went shopping for groceries three times a week. But at least one of those trips was now a ‘major’ trip, usually to a supermarket. By the beginning of the decade there were about 3,000 little supermarkets in Britain, and bigger versions were on their way. In September 1972, Carrefour opened the first out-of-town, 60,000-square-foot ‘hypermarket’ in Caerphilly, and a second opened in Telford a year later. Despite the warnings of environmental campaigners and consumer advocates, they proved enormously popular; so popular, indeed, that Carrefour took the unusual step of asking customers to stay away because the traffic jams were so bad. And where Carrefour led, others were quick to follow. By 1974, Asda had opened 27 ‘superstores’ of more than 25,000 square feet, while the Co-op had opened 23, Fine Fare 21, Tesco 20 and Morrisons 11. Although some protesters objected that they were bound to damage local traders, a much wider complaint was that there were not enough superstores, and press reports often suggested that, in this respect as in many others, Britain was lagging well behind its neighbours. A spokesman for Debenhams even predicted that the ‘trendy, out-of-town superstore with its cut-price shopping and easy parking will become a British institution’. The Times, however, thought this was a little unlikely. Town centres would continue to thrive, it observed, because most people would surely baulk at having ‘to travel three or four miles for shopping’.18

  What The Times had overlooked was the phenomenon of shopping not as a necessity but as a pleasure, a leisure activity in itself. Although some housewives complained that they missed the local gossip of the high street, others said that they actively relished the vast choice of the hypermarket. As one explained in 1974, she loved supermarket shopping ‘if I’ve got the time and lots of money, and I know I can choose all these lovely foods’. And of course many housewives no longer went shopping alone. Even in the late 1960s, more than one in three husbands regularly accompanied their wives on shopping trips, and by 1982 one in four husbands often did the grocery shopping themselves, armed with a shopping list and stern instructions ‘what to buy where’. Children also played their part: it was estimated in 1970 that they exercised some influence over 15 per cent of family purchases, especially cakes, biscuits, confectionery and cereals, which were often packaged with toys or offers appealing to youthful consumers. Shopping, in other words, had become yet another kind of family entertainment, and canny entrepreneurs were quick to cash in. By 1976, the nation’s first major shopping centre had opened at Brent Cross, north London, and within three years it had been followed by similarly vast malls such as the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton and the Arndale Centre in Manchester, temples to the new gods of affluence, consumerism and material ambition.19

  In many respects, what people bought at these new shopping centres was simply ‘more of the same’, as the historian Arthur Marwick puts it. By the late 1970s, almost all households had at least one television, 88 per cent had a fridge, 71 per cent a washing machine and 52 per cent a car. Only half, though, had a telephone, and just 3 per cent a dishwasher, which was a treat reserved for the richest or most forward-thinking. There was much talk of calculators and home computers, but not until 1980 did Spectrum release the pioneering ZX-80, which sold an unprecedented 50,000 units and paved the way for Britain to lead the world in computer ownership during the Thatcher years. Video recorders, too, were keenly anticipated, but few families owned one: by the end of 1978, just 136,000 had been sold, although in the long run home videos obviously represented the beginning of a seismic shift in broadcasting and entertainment. And there were other signs of change in what people bought in 1978: the £1 billion spent on DIY products, for example, or the surging sales of wine, soft drinks, perfumes and deodorants, or even the staggering 44 million pairs of jeans.20

  In terms of white goods, though, the big success story of the 1970s was the deep freezer. In 1970 only about 4 per cent of British homes had one; by 1972, 8 per cent; by 1978, 41 per cent, a tenfold increase in just eight years. Frozen food was already associated with laziness, obesity and morbid addiction to the television: during the 1950s, Elizabeth David had bitterly attacked restaurateurs and housewives alike for using frozen peas, and in 1972 the critic Barry Norman mocked ‘the average pleb, dozing in his carpet slippers in front of his set with his pre-frozen dinner congealing on his lap’. None of this, however, seemed to deter the average pleb. By the mid-1970s, even small grocery stores had brought in freezer chests to hold Birds Eye fish fingers, McCain’s oven chips and Walls ice cream, with frozen Vesta curries, coq au vin and chicken à la king for the adventurous. Meanwhile, dedicated ‘freezer centres’ had made their first appearance on the high street, the most successful, Iceland, having been opened in Oswestry in 1970 by a group of bored Woolworths employees. Woolworths promptly fired the founders from their day jobs, but, like most things from Shropshire, the venture proved a roaring success. By 1975, there were fifteen Iceland stores across the northern Midlands and North Wales, and three years later Iceland opened its first superstore in Manchester. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the 1980s Birds Eye were making almost £13 million a year from their frozen Oven Crispy Cod, £12 million from their Steakhouse Grills and £5 million from Viennetta ice cream. They had rather missed the boat, however, on that other great frozen success story, the pizza, which accounted for a staggering £60 million a year in total sales by 1983. As one marketing man explained, the pizza looked set to become ‘the beans on toast of the eighties’.21

  Frozen food, which probably transformed the British diet more than any other innovation of the post-war years, succeeded simply because it was so convenient. With middle-class Britons working longer and more irregular hours, and with even married women flooding into the workplace, frozen food naturally appealed to harassed parents and exhausted mothers. There was even a minor genre of frozen-food cookbooks, advising women how to prepare shepherd’s pies, casseroles and goulash in bulk before parcelling them into containers for freezing, how to quick-blanch peas and carrots before freezing them too, and even how to freeze cottage cheese, pâtés and, bizarrely, sardine sandwiches. Convenience was all; even cooks who disdained frozen food often found themselves tempted by dishes like Marks & Spencer’s Chicken Kiev, launched in 1976 to become the unrivalled bestseller of the ‘ready meal’ world. Then there was Cadbury’s Smash, a packet of granules aimed at p
eople too busy (in other words, too lazy) to make their own mashed potatoes, and famously advertised on television by a group of robotic Martians. Even the Great British Breakfast was not immune from the lust for convenience: by 1976, a study for Kellogg’s found that only 20 per cent of the working public began the day with bacon and eggs, compared with 40 per cent who ate cereal and 25 per cent who had nothing but a cup of tea or coffee. And as people became used to speed at home, so they demanded speed when they ate out: it was in 1974 that the sinister arches of McDonald’s were first raised over the streets of London.22

  The paradox is that while many people ate terribly during the 1970s – an evening meal of a boil-in-bag chicken curry followed by Angel Delight, say, or tinned chilli con carne and Neapolitan ice cream – the possibilities for eating well were greater than ever. Popular accounts of the decade often present it as a time when chillies, aubergines and courgettes were unheard of: when Sam Tyler, the detective from the future in the BBC’s twenty-first-century series Life on Mars, ponders buying olive oil and coriander, Gene Hunt warns him that in Trafford Park ‘you’ve got more chance of finding an ostrich with a plum up its arse’. But Britain in 1973 was not just a wasteland of spaghetti hoops and cheese-and-pineapple skewers. Visiting inner-city Nottingham a few years earlier, researchers had been struck by the Central European delicatessen selling Polish delicacies, the Indian shops stocking ‘sweet potatoes and yams’, the Chinese chop suey restaurants and the ‘crowded Italian corner-shop … with its baskets of aubergines and green peppers outside, and inside a passing glimpse of pasta in every shape and size’. Still, while most people were keen to try new things, their tastes remained strikingly conservative. When Piers Paul Read’s barrister protagonist takes his mistress out for lunch, they have ‘avocado pear with prawns’ followed by fillet steak; when Kingsley Amis’s Oxford don Jake Richardson makes himself a slap-up dinner, he has ‘avocado pear with prawns’ again followed by trout with almonds and Brussels sprouts; and when a policeman in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age (1977) describes the best meal of his life, it consists of pâté, prawn cocktail, steak and chips, and Black Forest gateau. And when Gallup asked people in 1973 to choose their ‘perfect meal if expense were no object and you could have absolutely anything you wanted’, the ideal menu turned out to be sherry, tomato soup, prawn cocktail, steak and chips, sherry trifle and cheese and biscuits, a line-up almost identical to the one people had chosen twenty-five years previously.23