Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Continental influence was at work in a classic car launched in April 1959. ‘The first small, affordable British car actually to look chic,’ claims an obituarist of Harry Webster, designer of the Triumph Herald, whose ‘sharp, sleek lines came from Italy’ and which ‘was available as a racy coupé and a stylish convertible, as well as a two-door saloon’. In fact, ‘there was nothing else quite like it, especially at the £702 price’. Yet after only four months, in late August, the Herald was overshadowed by the launch of a car that rapidly became not only a classic but an icon. ‘IT’S WIZARDRY ON WHEELS AND “QUALITY FIRST” ALL THROUGH,’ proclaimed a full-page, dots-filled advertisement for the Morris Mini-Minor, made at Cowley:

  Who would have thought it possible . . . Four adults travelling in comfort in a car just 10 feet long . . . with heaps of luggage . . . at up to 70 m.p.h. and 50 miles per gallon? But today Morris make it possible! With one stroke of genius they have turned the engine East-West across the car – and created the Mini-Minor, the roomiest high-performance small saloon in the whole history of motoring!

  Known from almost its earliest days as the Mini, the car’s origins lay in the petrol rationing caused by the Suez Crisis, prompting the BMC’s Leonard Lord to demand that his chief designer, the brilliant, implacable Alec Issigonis (creator of the Morris Minor), come up with a new small car with low fuel consumption. Reaction in the national press to its unveiling was not far short of ecstatic – ‘obviously destined to meet with world-wide success’ (Times), ‘the most sensational car ever made here’ (Daily Express), ‘a new era in democratic motoring’ (Daily Telegraph) – while the bluff, handlebar-moustached John Bolster tested it for Autosport. ‘At first sight,’ he acknowledged, ‘the car is not beautiful to look upon, its very short bonnet, small wheels on each corner, and lack of an overhanging nose or tail perhaps offending convention. Yet, one soon grows used to it, and the sheer good sense of its design appeals enormously.’ A detailed, almost wholly positive technical appraisal followed, including a reference to how ‘quite the most outstanding feature is the suspension’, before Bolster ended ‘on a slightly personal note’:

  I have for long deplored the old-fashioned design of the typical British small car, and have had to go to the Continent for acceptable transport. Now, Britain has produced a really modern vehicle which can teach the Continentals a thing or two. I am so happy that at last patriotism may be combined with enjoyable motoring, and I have expressed my appreciation by signing an order form.

  Unsurprisingly, the Mini – fatally underpriced at just under £500, including purchase tax – attracted enormous attention from the start, with an unofficial strike at Cowley in early September merely stoking up demand even more. ‘No beauty to look at, certainly,’ readily conceded Mollie Panter-Downes on the 3rd of the squat newcomer; but she warmed to its ‘astonishing’ leg room as well as parking-in-London possibilities, adding that ‘every day, the BMC showrooms on Piccadilly are packed with family parties waiting their turn to hop in and out of these obliging midgets.’16

  Even at that price, and despite their significantly enhanced disposable income (real wages up by 50 per cent since 1938, compared to 25 per cent for adults), few ‘teenage consumers’ could afford a Mini. The term itself was coined in July 1959 in a pamphlet by Mark Abrams, who defined the group as unmarried people aged 15–24. Clothing, footwear, drink, tobacco, sweets, soft drinks, slacks, pop records, gramophones, romantic magazines and fiction paperbacks, the cinema, the dance hall – these, according to Abrams, were the things on which The Teenage Consumer spent his or her money, a pattern of ‘distinctive teenage spending for distinctive teenage ends in a distinctive teenage world’. Insisting that ‘the teenage market’ was ‘almost entirely working-class’, given that middle-class teenagers were ‘either still at school or college or else only just beginning on their careers’, Abrams offered other nuggets: fewer than 4 per cent of young women did not use cosmetics; at least two-thirds of all teenage spending was in male hands; over 60 per cent of teenagers visited the cinema at least once a week; the Daily Mirror was easily the most-read paper; and among young (under-25) working-class housewives, the majority used the same brands as their mother and largely stuck to traditional working-class foods (bread, potatoes, margarine), avoiding ‘modern’ foods like fresh milk, eggs, and fresh fruit and veg.

  Around this time, interviews in Sheffield with those about to leave school, or who had just left it, revealed a little more about teenage spending habits:

  Bus fares for leisure alone take a lot of money. Dancing costs 3s 0d and 2s 0d for fares and a drink. I go to the cinema about once a week, but a boy friend pays about two out of three times. I buy two hair shampoos a week at 7d or 9d each. And I have to buy combs and hair grips. My mother buys my nylons, but they are supposed to last for two weeks. If I ladder a pair soon after getting them, I have to pay for a new pair.

  I go [to the cinema] with my friend three times a week. We don’t go to the Ambassador, because it is full of coloured people. And we don’t go to the Regent, because not many people go there, and it is usually old people who do. We like the Victoria best – it’s people of your own age more, there.

  ‘While you have the money,’ fairly typically remarked a third teenager, ‘you might as well spend it and enjoy yourself.’17

  Inevitably, across the age range, not all shopping trends pointed in the same direction. Woolworth’s opened in 1959 its 1,000th store (at Portslade in Sussex), though would soon be losing its way; another expanding multiple chain, Littlewoods, took over Oxford’s long-established Grimbly Hughes; British Home Stores paid £140,000 for the huge Trinity Methodist Church in Scunthorpe High Street, so that it could be demolished and have a BHS store put up in its place; Edwin Jones of Southampton, one of the Debenhams group of department stores, opened what was claimed to be ‘the most up-to-date store in the South’, including ‘high local intensity’ lighting, Formica plastics ‘on counters, table tops, walls and doors’, and, in the large self-service food hall, ‘Sweda Speeder moving belt check-out counters, designed to smooth out rush-hour peaks and eliminate queues and delays’. Self-service generally was by now reckoned to produce a 30-per-cent increase in a shop’s turnover within six months of conversion, but the roughly 5,000 self-service stores still represented only about 3 per cent of grocery outlets. In Northampton, the entrepreneurial Frank Brierley opened the first of his cut-price discount stores, which rapidly spread across the East Midlands, and, befitting the self-confessed ‘Pirates of the High Street’, adopted the skull and crossbones as their logo. At Burton’s menswear shops, the tone was becoming both more upmarket and less relentlessly masculine, with wives actually encouraged to be present, or at least on hand, during the fitting ritual, while at another multiple tailor, John Collier (formerly known as the Fifty Shilling Tailors), the emphasis was on younger customers and new fabrics, with heavy promotion from 1959 of the John Collier 4 Star Policy, each of the stars (gold, blue, white and silver) representing a particular cash price for a range of suits, overcoats and waterproofs. Anywhere and everywhere, meanwhile, there was potentially the American-imported attraction – or threat – of Muzak, as pioneered by a company called Readitune, which by this time boasted the availability of over 5,000 ‘unobtrusive and relaxing’ melodies, thereby creating ‘in shop, store or showroom an atmosphere of goodwill and the background for better and increased business’.18

  In prosperous Coventry, the recently built shopping centre in the city’s heart was becoming particularly busy on Saturdays, as shoppers flocked there from the new estates, where local shops supplied food and essentials, to buy bigger items like furniture, radio and TV sets, kitchen equipment and larger items of clothing. ‘They like to have a lie-in and then a good breakfast,’ one retailer told a journalist about customers’ Saturday habits, ‘driving in at about 10.30 to do their shopping and make a day of it.’ What did the shoppers want? ‘Coventry people, say retailers, are quality and brand conscious, partly because of
television advertising. Attractive prices are not enough; shoppers want selection, and the increasing popularity of the city as a shopping centre is due partly to the greater choice that shops are able to give.’ Even so, and perhaps especially in rather more typical working-class areas, a strong counter-trend was towards mail-order shopping, the total sales of which virtually tripled during the 1950s. ‘Slowly chipping away at the fixed-price structure’, according to the Daily Mail in March 1959, and dominated by three major players (Littlewoods, Great Universal Stores, Grattan Warehouses), it was a type of shopping ‘largely done on a friends-and-neighbours basis in industrial areas’ – i.e. involving local organisers who received a commission – ‘and only recently have there been signs that it is now spreading to suburbia also’. One such organiser was Mrs Isabel Stewart, a compositor’s wife living in Battersea. ‘I have 20 members, mostly neighbours, and with £25 in hand I can order goods worth £125,’ she told the Mail. ‘I usually manage to make enough commission for the family holiday, and enjoy meeting the friends it has brought me.’ Was a possible third way, though, the development of planned shopping centres away from established town centres? Later in 1959, A. D. Spencer of Boots addressed the Multiple Shops Federation on this nascent trend. Delegates were generally sceptical, with a speaker from the British Shoe Corporation adamant that ‘the women shoppers who provided the greater part of retailers’ business preferred the congestion, the bright lights, the noise and the traffic of the High Street.’19

  Television advertisements were of course on the front line of the consumer boom, but there were indications, with commercial TV almost four years old, that viewers were starting to tire. In March, shortly after Gallup had revealed 81 per cent expressing irritation about adverts in – as opposed to between – programmes, the Rev. R. G. Bliss, living near Midhurst, wrote to Geoffrey Gorer (who in a letter to The Times had played down the menace): ‘These breaks so madden all my household that we now just cannot look at ITV even when the programme is excellent. We live deep in the countryside, without other evening entertainment, apart from what we make ourselves, which makes it all the more infuriating.’ Beverley Nichols disagreed. ‘During those two minutes in which the screen is filled with the rival claims of the detergent giants, one can leave the set in order to powder one’s nose, replenish one’s glass, and let out the cat. This is impossible during the chaste, non-commercial productions of the BBC. One must sit it out to the bitter end.’ And, argued this veteran, versatile writer in his letter to the New Statesman, ‘though some of the advertisements are admittedly idiotic, many of them – particularly the cartoons – are brilliant little cameos, worthy of Disney’. Predictably, the diarists sided with the grumblers. ‘Now we are “settling down” to Television,’ reflected Nella Last in July, ‘I find much of the Commercial advertising irritating.’ After citing the ads for two soaps, Camay and Knights Castille, as particularly ‘distorted’ and ‘misleading’, she added: ‘I always take the chance of the advertisement “breaks” to let the dog out, or in, lay breakfast in the front room – any little needed job.’ So too from a less house-proud perspective, that of John Fowles. ‘The Roman putridness of ITV,’ he declared in August during a spell of enforced television-watching at his parents’ home at Leigh-on-Sea. ‘Advertisements for detergent and budgerigar seed – why so many?’20

  Plenty of activators may have worried in 1959 about the working class being swept along in a degrading consumer frenzy. The Labour politician Christopher Mayhew, for instance, launched another campaign against commercial television; Shopper’s Guide (published by the Consumer Advisory Council) described as ‘fit only for the nursery’ the language of ‘magic new formulas’ and ‘exclusive ingredients’ used to sell Omo, Daz et al; and I’m All Right, Jack included cheerful, mindless jingles for ‘Num-Yum’ and ‘Detto’. But around this time two sociologists were uncovering salutary evidence. ‘I don’t need one, my wife is my washing machine’ and ‘My wife wouldn’t have it’ were frequent responses when Ferdynand Zweig asked working men in different parts of the country whether they had a washing machine. Regarding the material possessions they did have, and the general home comforts they enjoyed, gratitude and a degree of pride predominated over acquisitive greed, with remarks like ‘I have many things which would be unthinkable to my father’ and ‘I have achieved something which I thought would have been impossible for me’. As for burgeoning automobile ownership, Zweig found that a car was prized less for status reasons than as ‘a toy, a tool for pleasure’, and he quoted one man: ‘It is my main luxury; others spend £2 or more on beer, I spend it on a car and have something to show for my money.’ Peter Willmott’s relevant fieldwork was concentrated on heavily working-class Dagenham, where ‘the overwhelming impression’ he gained from his interviewees was that ‘the improvement in material standards has generated very little tension or anxiety’. He quoted some:

  There’s more pride – when you buy something now, you go out to buy the real thing. But that’s not because of the green-eyed monster, or keeping up with the Joneses. It’s because we’re all reaching up for the same sort of thing at the same time.

  These things like washing machines have become necessities for working-class people. It’s not a matter of copying other people. It’s everybody wants them when they can get them.

  I was telling the young woman over the road about the Marley tiles my husband had just put down in the scullery. She seemed interested, so I said, ‘Why don’t you come over and look at it?’ Now she’s seen it she’ll tell her husband about it. I gave her a sample, as a matter of fact. I expect her husband will put some down for her in their scullery. We don’t mind about that. Why should we?

  ‘There’s not a bit of jealousy about these things, as far as I can see from people round here,’ another wife observed to Willmott. ‘People seem to be glad if someone else gets something. They don’t grudge it. They say, “Good luck to them.”’

  As so often, it is the brief, suggestive fragment that tells the larger story. Towards the end of August 1959 the Hampstead & Highgate Express ran a front-page story on the ‘storm of protest’ that had broken out in Hampstead Village about the Tastee-Freez (i.e. ice cream) and Wimpy Bar that had opened in Heath Street a month earlier. The result was a petition to the paper, signed by over 150 residents, calling on it to mount an investigation into ‘how and why this particular tasteless design complete with mock mosaic pillars of different patterns, diamond-shaped multi-coloured facia, and the lettering Tastee-Freez, was passed’. The Ham & High seems to have declined to do so, instead quoting the proprietors – brothers Tony and Brian Burstein – of this, the first combined Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Bar in London. ‘It is our policy,’ they simply stated, ‘to try to please the majority.’21

  14

  Beastly Things, Elections

  ‘In my belief the Socialist Party in its present form cannot survive a third successive defeat,’ declared the Conservative candidate for Southall on Saturday, 12 September at the North Hanwell Conservatives’ annual garden party. ‘We have,’ insisted Michael Underhill, a barrister, ‘the opportunity of dealing it a death blow.’ It was yet another glorious day, and before everyone returned to the other attractions – a cake stall, a ‘white elephant’ stall, a flower display, a demonstration of square dancing by the Foot and Fiddle Dance Club – he added that he was just back from the seaside, where ‘the remarkable prosperity being enjoyed at all social levels was visible on every hand’. Five days later at Grimsby Town Hall, 350 people attended Wilfrid Pearson’s adoption meeting as Crosland’s Conservative opponent. ‘I would suggest to the working man,’ said this local fish merchant, ‘that he puts his faith in the Government which puts money in his pocket. Surely his loyalties lie first with his family.’

  Both men were on message. The Tories had been engaged in an unprecedentedly expensive press and poster advertising campaign for the past two years, but since the spring there had been a single dominant slogan – ‘Life’s Better with
the Conservatives; Don’t Let Labour Ruin It’ – accompanied by visuals showing either a family gathered round a well-laden table or a family washing its new small car. Now, in the campaign itself, few opportunities were lost to emphasise Labour’s ruinous capacities, typified by Macmillan on radio on the 26th condemning as retrogressive ‘the old socialist system of controls, nationalization, extravagant expenditure and all the rest of it’. Macmillan himself – barely a year after Mollie Panter-Downes had reflected that he ‘has always seemed a politician’s Prime Minister’, being ‘popular and admired in the House but leaving the general public oddly cold’ – was by this time undeniably an electoral asset. The self-confident member of the governing class, the courageous war veteran, the Keynesian sympathiser, the businessman, the loyal churchman, the unflinching patriot: altogether, notes his biographer D. R. Thorpe, he ‘appealed to a remarkably broad cross-section of British society’. To which were added not only a flair for publicity (the fur hat on his Moscow trip) and remarkable phrase-making (‘a little local difficulty’) but that delightful, conspiratorial sense, conveyed by twinkling eye and urbane manner, that we were all in on the joke together. Doubtless there was a degree of acting involved – ‘Beastly things, elections,’ he muttered to one young candidate, Julian Critchley, as they toured the Medway Towns – but The Times got it right. ‘Labour will do well to take the true measure of Mr Macmillan,’ observed the paper at the start of the campaign. ‘They are in the ring with a consummate politician.’1