Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But it was cheese, not bacon, that became the symbol of this bold new era. With milk and butter sales falling, the Milk Marketing Board was desperate to find something to do with its dairy surplus. Inside its processed-foods division, Dairy Crest, a ‘special products group’ contemplated ways of getting rid of it, from pre-grated cheese and flavoured butter to powdered yoghurt and, alarmingly, ‘artificial meat’ made from milk powder. What the Milk Marketing Board really wanted, though, was a ‘luxury cheese’, because under their arcane pricing system, Dairy Crest would have to pay them more for the milk. So Dairy Crest began work on a soft blue cheese to compete at home with Camembert and Brie and bite off a slice of the North American market. After testing it in Somerset, they enlisted an advertising agency, Butler Dennis Garland, to devise a name redolent of a ‘lightly wooded region of rolling hills and ancient buildings’. The advertisers suggested ‘Wymeswold’, but somebody pointed out that since there was already a place called Wymeswold, they would be deceiving the shopper. So they changed the name to ‘Lymeswold’.39

  In September 1982 Peter Walker summoned the press to the Savoy Hotel in central London and unveiled Lymeswold to the world. The new cheese was ‘mild and creamy’, wrote one reporter, with a white rind that darkened with age. At more than £2 per pound it was expensive, but the whole point was that it was an upmarket product. What about the made-up name? ‘The Americans are crazy for that sort of thing,’ explained Dairy Crest’s marketing director. And Walker himself was in no doubt. Lymeswold, he said, would go down as ‘one of the great national success stories of the next twelve months’. It was ‘very delicious and very tasty, and I’ve been privileged to have it for some months now … My children are fans, we are fans, and if he can ever get any, my dog is a hell of a fan … What a marvellous bargain it is!’40

  After such an introduction, Lymeswold could hardly fail to be a disaster. But the problem was not the cheese itself, which generally got good reviews. Even the label, which described it as ‘English, Blue and Mild’, seemed to have something for everyone. Nor did people seem to mind that it was entirely inauthentic, a cheese devised by committee. The problem was that the launch had been too successful. By chance, Dairy Crest had chosen a day on which there was very little other news. Almost every paper carried a picture of Peter Walker tucking into a lump of Lymeswold, the BBC and ITV ran reports on the evening news, and everybody remembered the remark about Walker’s dog. Perhaps there was a Falklands factor, too. With popular patriotism at extraordinary heights, news of ‘the first new British cheese for centuries’ went down even better than Dairy Crest had hoped. Quite apart from the news coverage, they had already spent £1 million on a television campaign promoting Lymeswold as the very acme of pastoral Englishness. The advertisement follows two French cheese enthusiasts, driving around Somerset in a Citroën 2CV. ‘Among people who know about good food’, a voiceover says, ‘the word is abroad that we British have perfected a new cheese. The word is … Lymeswold!’

  What followed was a public relations catastrophe. Popular demand was not just higher than Dairy Crest had anticipated; it was five times higher. Although they had spent millions on modernizing their Somerset dairy, production could not keep pace with demand. This was a familiar failing for British manufacturers in the 1980s, not least in the home computer industry. In any case, within two weeks of the launch Lymeswold had disappeared from the shelves. By early November, Sainsbury’s had completely run out. Harrods, where the price had reached £2.80 a pound, claimed to be turning away customers ‘in their thousands’. Even Fortnum & Mason, which had hiked up the price to an eye-watering £4, claimed to be experiencing ‘severe shortages’.

  Dairy Crest frantically ordered the creamery to step up production, though they privately admitted that ‘they cannot hope to catch up until Christmas’. Almost incredibly, there were now reports of people hoarding Lymeswold. One man even tried to order a million cases, each containing six pounds of cheese, which was as much as the creamery could produce in a year. In the meantime, Dairy Crest commissioned an apologetic new advertising campaign, promising that people would get their Lymeswold eventually. ‘We are going to ask the housewife to bear with us,’ their marketing manager said limply. By a supreme irony, he was speaking on the same day that the British Agricultural Council handed out its annual award for marketing innovation. It went, of course, to Lymeswold.41

  By the time Dairy Crest got their act together, Lymeswold’s image was in ruins. It had been transformed from a symbol of national ambition into a badge of national incompetence. Dairy Crest might have conceived it as an ‘aspirational cheese’, but there was nothing aspirational about being a punchline. When Private Eye began using the name ‘Lymeswold’ as an all-purpose signifier of rural backwardness, the game was up. Even in the Commons, some of Walker’s fellow Conservatives could not resist giving him a ribbing. ‘Does my right hon. Friend agree that the development of Lymeswold cheese has been a significant marketing success?’ wondered Skipton’s MP John Watson. ‘Is he aware that it is still not sufficiently available in some parts of the country? Could it be that his dog is eating too much?’42

  The story of Lymeswold’s rise and fall makes an irresistible metaphor, but for what? The revival of popular patriotism in the early 1980s? The romantic myth of the English countryside? The triumph of advertising over authenticity in a decade obsessed by image? Or, perhaps more simply, the incompetence of British management and the shoddiness of British food? Writing in the Guardian, the food critic Drew Smith thought the basic problem had been a deep national indifference to tradition. Cheeses like Lymeswold and Melbury – another Dairy Crest committee cheese – were ‘jokes’, insults to ‘our national intelligence … about as British as bouillabaisse’. Yet was the problem really inauthenticity, or just bad luck and bad timing? After all, some other ‘invented’ cheeses, such as Shropshire Blue, proved extremely successful. Indeed, Dairy Crest proved that inauthenticity was no handicap when, a year later, they carved a much more successful product out of their vast butter mountain. A ‘low-fat butter’ with an equally pastoral name, Clover was carefully targeted at housewives worried about their health. In a decade saturated with images of beauty, fitness and success, you could make an awful lot of money from women’s anxieties about their weight. Mrs Thatcher could have told them that.43

  In the meantime, Peter Walker continued his crusade to drag the reputation of British food out of the gutter. In November 1982 his ministry sponsored a stand at the Paris food fair, where, on the first morning, President Mitterrand dropped in for some samples. ‘But by late afternoon’, The Times reported gloomily, ‘there was only a trickle of visitors, gazing rather suspiciously at legs of lamb and at a sample of Lymeswold cheese.’ Since they were in France, the Lymeswold had been rebranded as Westminster Blue. But not even the whiff of political prestige was enough to woo Gallic shoppers. Undeterred, an embassy official told the press that Britain’s stand had been by far ‘the best in the show and that that was agreed by everyone’. Nearby, a listening Frenchman shook his head and murmured sadly: ‘Quelle cuisine extraordinaire!’

  A few weeks later, Walker launched a £20 million campaign with the imaginative title ‘Food from Britain’. ‘By the end of the decade,’ he promised, ‘British food will be leading the world.’ The event was held at the Barbican’s cavernous concert hall in the City, where more than 2,000 farmers, grocers, supermarket managers and food manufacturers gathered for instruction on ‘the need for positive marketing’. Originally Mrs Thatcher was going to speak, but she dropped out at the last minute to attend a memorial service. Perhaps it was just as well. After three hours of extremely boring lectures, there was a break for a ‘wholesome British cold lunch’, to be washed down with the very finest English wine. Unfortunately, Walker’s officials had forgotten to provide any chairs, so the delegates were forced to have their lunch ‘in considerable discomfort, squatting on the floor or bending awkwardly over tables’. There was a metaphor there t
oo, somewhere.

  The next day, their cross-Channel rivals, Food and Wine from France, struck back with a magnificent spread of cheeses, followed by a lavish lunch in the banqueting hall of the Stationers’ Company. The French, needless to say, had remembered to put out some chairs. One reporter asked the head of Food and Wine from France whether his compatriots might ever be tempted to buy British food. And if so, what would they choose? The Frenchman paused for a long time, as if lost in thought. Then, at last, he said: ‘Biscuits?’44

  6

  You Are Mad and We Hate You

  We can live without steel for quite a while. People will not die or starve.

  John Hoskyns to Mrs Thatcher, 9 January 1980

  The TUC meets in Brighton this week, but for all the effect its speeches will have upon the Government it might as well be in Timbuctoo …

  The Government regards them with a coolness little short of contempt. They are not treated as beasts of the jungle any more. Only paper tigers. And there is little they can do about it.

  Daily Mirror, 1 September 1980

  At the beginning of 1979, things were going well for Bob Simpson. He had been married to Morag for ten years, and they had a 4-year-old daughter, Sharon. Like his wife, Bob had been born in Scotland, but after a spell in the shipyards he had moved south to Northamptonshire to find a steadier job. Now he worked as a plater for British Steel, earning more than £100 a shift, while Morag worked as a part-time cleaner. They had lived in the same house since they were married, with a garage and a little garden. After renting from the council, they had bought it in 1973 and every year had made improvements, from new wallpaper to central heating. In the future, Morag hoped, they might put in new carpets and redo the lounge. And every year they had managed a holiday, often at home but sometimes in Spain. This year they had bought a caravan and were planning a trip to France. It was hardly the high life. But it was their life, and they were proud of it.

  There was, however, a cloud overhead. Bob and Morag Simpson lived in Corby, a town dominated by the chimneys of the huge British Steel factory. And in the spring of 1979 Corby was in trouble. For years the steel factory had lived in the shadow of the axe, and at Bob’s union branch there were rumours that the management were planning to close the doors. The dole queues were already longer in Corby than in the other towns of the East Midlands, and when Bob thought about the future, a chill ran down his spine. He was perfectly prepared to get on his bike and look for work. But the only jobs in nearby Northampton paid far less than he was getting already, and that was even before the cost of petrol. He had talked to Morag about moving to Australia. But how would they sell their house? Who would buy it? Who on earth would want to move to Corby now?

  To outsiders, Corby seemed an extraordinary place, a Scottish enclave in the heart of the East Midlands. Half a century earlier, it had been a quiet village. But in the early 1930s the steel firm Stewarts & Lloyds chose Corby as the location for a massive new plant, and brought in thousands of workers, most of them from depressed areas in the west of Scotland. In 1979 seven out of ten people were still first-or second-generation immigrants from Glasgow, Clydebank, Paisley and Greenock. Every year Corby hosted its own Highland Games. Local children followed Rangers and Celtic, drank Irn-Bru and spoke with Scottish accents. Its neighbours treated it as an embarrassment, a black hole, even a disaster area. Visiting in early 1979, the Guardian’s Lesley Adamson was very conscious of its reputation as a ‘one-class working-class place, a dirty industry town of “foreigners” in a county which has never known heavy industry … a rough place where the population is usually drunk and brawling, where you daren’t park your car for fear of slashed tyres, where you must not walk alone because of muggers’. There was a fair amount of prejudice in this. But there was indeed more crime in Corby, more violence, more unemployment and more alcoholism. Even the heart disease and infant mortality figures were the highest in Britain. Still, Adamson thought it a ‘warm and friendly place which welcomes strangers, because everyone in Corby is a stranger’. And for Bill and Morag Simpson, and thousands like them, it was home.

  Even before Mrs Thatcher came to power, Corby was doomed. The town’s iron ore was of relatively low quality, which made it very expensive to produce. In six years the Corby plant had lost £75 million. In August 1979 alone it lost £3 million, three times more than forecast. Since British Steel was already producing 5 million tons of unwanted steel a year, and had been ordered by the government to cut its losses, everybody knew that meant curtains for Corby. They also knew closure would be a social catastrophe. ‘They are already calling Corby the ghost town of the eighties,’ wrote Adamson.fn1 In January 1979 Corby was already suffering double-digit unemployment. Visitors remarked on the ‘derelict shops and decaying flats’, the council houses ‘boarded up with bits of wood and corrugated iron’. Social services reported record levels of vandalism and juvenile delinquency. And now, in a town where two out of three men worked for British Steel, they were going to close the steelworks.1

  British Steel announced its long-dreaded decision on 1 November 1979. In Corby, where thousands of people demonstrated outside the local British Steel office, the mood seemed one of ‘resigned desperation’ rather than outright defiance. The town’s industrial padre, Canon Frank Scuffham, ‘an out-of-step cleric with longish grey hair and a copy of the New Ecologist under his arm’, tried to see a silver lining. Corby without steel, he said brightly, ‘could show us the future where there will be ways of living without work’. But few people shared his optimism. As a local policeman mordantly put it, ‘they will be cutting them down from the rafters within a couple of years’.

  On 22 April 1980, in front of a funereal little group of older workers, Corby cast its last steel. Afterwards, at the Strathclyde Hotel, the wake lasted until long past closing time. ‘Coming to the Chinkie?’ one man asked his friend when the last bottle was gone. ‘I’m on the dole next week,’ the other man said. ‘Yeah, but with a few thou,’ said the first man. ‘Come on.’ So they went.2

  What happened to Corby was a symptom of a wider and grimmer story. In the nineteenth century, Britain had led the world in making steel. Even in 1950 it was still the world’s third largest exporter, behind only the United States and France. But from then on it was all downhill. By the late 1960s exports were in steep decline, factories were antiquated and over-manned, firms were short of capital and investment had fallen off a cliff. So in 1967 the Wilson government took the steel companies into public ownership. Unfortunately, things got worse. Shielded from competition, British Steel became a symbol of everything that was wrong with British industry. Exports collapsed: overtaken by Japan and West Germany, Britain’s share of the world market plummeted to just 5 per cent. Even domestic customers complained that British steel was poorly finished, and the Ford car giant started ordering steel from the Netherlands instead. And productivity was simply abysmal. In 1975 a British Steel worker typically produced 122 tons of crude steel a year. By contrast, an American steelworker produced 280 tons, a West German 370 tons and a Japanese worker 520 tons. For British Steel to catch up with its rivals, advised a report by Sheffield Polytechnic, it should either sack half its workers, some 110,000 people, or double its total output. Neither seemed likely. But as The Times remarked in 1977, people were fooling themselves if they thought this could go on forever. ‘Without higher productivity’, it said bluntly, ‘there is no future for Britain as a steelmaking nation.’3

  Since the unions resisted any attempt to cut jobs, the government’s initial answer, as so often, was to reach for the chequebook. Between 1975 and 1979, Britain spent £3 billion on steel subsidies, six times more than its French counterpart. In effect, the steel industry had become a sink into which politicians poured vast sums of public money. Yet still the losses continued. In the first half of 1979, British Steel lost £145 million. To Margaret Thatcher, there could scarcely have been a more flagrant example of political cowardice. British Steel simply had to ‘run down t
he numbers of people they employ’, she insisted during the election campaign. ‘The lesson is that nationalisation does not and cannot save jobs when they are yesterday’s jobs and you are not competing on the product … Steel is a classic example, and you cannot avoid redundancies.’4

  In Mrs Thatcher’s eyes, British Steel’s problems were bound up with the fact that it was owned by the state. ‘I think monopoly is bad,’ she told Weekend World’s Brian Walden in January 1980. ‘If steel hadn’t been nationalised we should not have the problem we’ve got now.’ To many people, of course, nationalized industries were a natural feature of the economic landscape, employing some 1½ million people and accounting for about 10 per cent of Britain’s GDP. But the Conservatives had long been hostile to the idea of nationalized monopolies. And as British Steel, British Leyland and the National Coal Board haemorrhaged money, some of Mrs Thatcher’s younger advisers began to contemplate a massive programme of industrial privatization. In the autumn of 1980, John Hoskyns suggested the ‘liquidation’ of British Steel as an example to ‘managers and workers in the remaining nationalised industries’. But his boss was more cautious. She agreed that the nationalized industries were ‘over-subsidised, uncompetitive and monopolistic’, but thought radical change would alarm floating voters. In opposition she ruled out ‘rushing into mass denationalisation’, and her election manifesto did not mention privatization at all. As her aide Oliver Letwin put it, her real priority was not selling off the nationalized giants; it was ‘getting the industries concerned to run properly and getting rid of their subsidy’.5