Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  And then, with just days to go till Christmas, came the rush, and all the gloom was forgotten. Over the last weekend before the holiday the snowstorms eased, and suddenly the streets were packed with shoppers. On Saturday 19 December, so many people descended on Oxford Street that the major West End stores took more money than on the same day in 1980, despite the recession. In the north of England, the Morrisons supermarket chain defied the law to open on Sunday, explaining that after being so ‘badly hit by the heavy snowfalls’, they had no choice but to make up for it. The manager of Woolworths in Slough followed suit. At first, he said, he planned ‘just to open the sweet counter but in the end I opened up the lot and did a roaring trade’.

  Not even the deepest recession since the war could dent the British people’s love of shopping. For the first time, reported the Mirror, Britain was set to spend more than £1.2 billion on alcohol over the holiday. There were ‘now 25 million wine-drinkers in Britain’, and the paper advised them to invest in a new-fangled ‘three, four or five litre box’, with wine ‘ready to drink at the turn of a tap’. Indeed, the Mirror’s Christmas party suggestions would surely have astonished its working-class readers a few decades earlier. The look this Christmas, it said, was ‘frothy, romantic’, with ‘pearls’, ‘frills’ and ‘flounces’. ‘Brash neck ornaments which mix with matching earrings are THE jewellery to wear,’ its fashion columnist advised. ‘Adorn yourself with “rich” looking jewellery, anything that glitters or jingles.’ Among the nation’s teenagers, meanwhile, the New Romantic look was approaching its peak. When, a week before Christmas, Duran Duran played the Hammersmith Odeon, the Guardian’s critic could barely move for youngsters in their ‘frilled shirts, floppy hair, scarves, headbands’, casting ‘sidelong glances into mirrors, checking their eyeliner’.6

  With one in ten people out of work and so many families counting every penny, all this talk of frills and glitter could easily sound insensitive. Yet even as people told pollsters how much their hearts bled for those on the dole, they continued to splash out. Food sales were higher than ever, with families gorging on a record 13 million turkeys and 5 million chickens. And as the hours ticked down until Father Christmas’s arrival, many stores could scarcely believe how well they were doing. Demand for consumer electronics, for example, was unprecedented. Rumbelows reported that sales of video recorders and Teletext-enabled televisions had trebled since 1980, while, in a sign of the times, sales of the new Sinclair ZX81 and Commodore VIC-20 computers were running at a record 5,000 a week.7

  Even more striking, though, was how much people were spending on toys. Many parents, Susan Gray told Mass Observation, ‘go mad when buying for their children’. Her daughter, with a Christmas haul worth £15, the equivalent of at least £80 today, was ‘well behind in the loot stakes’. By contrast, her 8-year-old nephew had been given presents worth ‘£60, if not £100’ from his parents alone. And he was not alone in collecting so much booty. For every child under the age of 10, parents in the early 1980s typically spent at least £35 on Christmas presents. As is traditional, older observers were convinced that the greedy little monsters were being spoiled to the point of decadence by their weak-willed parents. One woman recalled that, as a child, she had had ‘a doll made from an old gippo’s clothes peg and I loved her’. By contrast, she said, her granddaughter did not ‘know how many dolls she’s got, ugly bloody things they are as well, all painted and dressed up like whores’.

  Meanwhile, another Mass Observation correspondent, Sheila Parkin, had been helping her sister-in-law cope with the Christmas rush in Zodiac Toys, Ilford. In the final weeks, Sheila wrote disapprovingly, their takings had been ‘£2,000 over target’, with many customers using their credit cards to buy the latest electronic games. ‘It seems children cannot go without anything they want these days,’ she lamented. ‘Bit different from the war years when we were content with anything. Personally, both my children and grand-children are given only what I can afford after I have paid all my bills.’8

  When the Oxford Street stores threw open their doors for the New Year sales, the crowds were as big and boisterous as ever. As early as Christmas Day, hundreds had been queuing in the cold, wrapped in scarves and anoraks. One couple were hoping to get a fitted kitchen for their new house, knocked down from more than £2,000 to just £199. Even the retailers seemed amazed at the demand. According to a spokesman for Army & Navy, people were determined to spend ‘their money on things for the home – furniture, TV and videos’. But the woman at the front of the Debenhams’ queue, Mrs Imelda Saich, had her eye on a coat. ‘There’s a mink reduced from £3,000 to £300,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m having that.’ Something went terribly wrong, though. Within moments of the doors opening, Mrs Saich had become embroiled in a full-on fight with a secretary over the coat, and eventually the two had to be dragged apart by security guards. Tragically, Mrs Saich had to settle for a lesser coat, once £395, now just £39.50.9

  As Mass Observation’s correspondents confirmed, the Christmas and New Year spree was not just a London phenomenon. In Basildon, Peter Hibbitt wrote that he was looking forward to ‘a good blow out and [a] few luxury foods and drinks’, while his neighbours seemed to be ‘spending as though there was no tomorrow’. In recession-hit Darlington, Susan Gray spent £137.35½ on presents for her relatives, from old favourites such as chocolates, cigars, alarm clocks and jigsaws to relatively new-fangled treats such as a ‘3D viewer’ and the inevitable ‘Star Wars model’. She and her husband were ‘stunned’ when they totted it all up, and this did not include food, wine or their New Year’s Eve buffet party for a dozen friends. In the local off-licence, her husband was astonished to see a man handing over £50 for wines and spirits, and when they went to MFI for the New Year sales, they were again ‘amazed’ to see so many people pushing trolleys ‘piled high with boxes of self-assembly furniture’. Wherever she went, battling through the crowds, Susan heard the same refrain: ‘You wouldn’t think there was a recession on, would you?’10

  How on earth did people pay for all this? ‘We’re wondering where all the money is coming from,’ a Selfridge’s spokesman remarked during the New Year sales. But he must have known perfectly well. For the nine out of ten people who were still in work, the recession had brought only a slight fall in their real incomes. Many were better off than they had ever been. And even those who had taken a hit made up for it by borrowing, a habit they had acquired during the 1960s and 1970s. People had become used to the good life, to a world of rising living standards and rising expectations, to a lifestyle funded by Access and Barclaycard. In 1981, said The Times, ‘people in Britain borrowed more than they have ever done before’. In just twelve months, personal lending had risen by a fifth, reaching its highest level since the credit boom of 1973. For the government, this was a mixed blessing. In The Times’s words, the explosion of borrowing had driven a ‘coach and horses’ through the Treasury’s money supply targets. Yet at the same time, it had ‘enabled people to maintain their spending … preventing the recession from being even deeper’. In that respect, perhaps Mrs Thatcher was lucky that people did not listen to her.11

  One of the great ironies of Mrs Thatcher’s legacy is that she is so often blamed for turning Britain into a nation dependent on credit. With the government lifting many of the old restrictions, this was an age of credit cards, loans and mortgages, and during her time in office personal borrowing rose sevenfold. Yet with the notable exception of her enthusiasm for home ownership, it is almost impossible to find examples of her encouraging people to borrow. Quite the reverse: more than almost any other politician of the age, she loved to talk about saving, prudence and thrift. One reason she hated inflation, after all, was that it encouraged the profligate and undermined the frugal. Inflation, she told one audience in 1980, ‘cuts the value of every pound the thrifty have saved. It means spending money you can’t afford, haven’t earned and haven’t got.’ She herself hated the thought of debt and never owned a credit card. In private,
remarked the Tory monetarist Jock Bruce-Gardyne, ‘the PM gets very emotional about the plastic cards and she thinks it’s all very damaging and dangerous’.12

  She was not alone. In the spring of 1982, Sheila Parkin recorded that she owned neither a credit card nor a chequebook, and did not want them. She worked in a camping shop and had been astonished by the Christmas trade: up 40 per cent, she thought, on 1980. She was troubled, though, by the ‘live now, pay later’ attitude of her customers, many of whom paid with cheques or credit cards. Some ‘admitted to owing money on mortgage-gas-electricity, yet [were] still getting into more debt for Christmas’. But like Mrs Thatcher, Sheila was out of touch with the mood of the moment. People in their twenties and thirties had grown up in an affluent society, where hire purchase offers or credit cards were easily obtained. To them, debt was simply a fact of life, to be rolled over from month to month until it could eventually be paid off. It was no longer a source of shame.

  As for Jenny Palmer, the mature student from Lancaster, she confessed to being ‘haunted’ by her father’s words: ‘If you have to use the “never never” then it means you can’t afford it. You must save up until you can afford it.’ She did not think credit cards were a ‘good thing’, having heard too many ‘middle class students at university boasting about how mummy or daddy let them put their purchases on their credit card’. And yet, by the summer of 1984, she and her husband had a Barclaycard, a Visa card, a Debenhams’ charge card and an Austin Reed card. They had no choice, she explained, but to rely on credit in order ‘to maintain something like what I would consider a reasonable lifestyle – which I feel that now in our 40s we are entitled to’. That telling word ‘entitled’, which owed as much to the 1960s as the 1980s, was something her father would never have understood. But she was simply a woman of her time.13

  There was nothing unusual about the roaring sales at the end of 1981. Every Christmas in the 1980s broke records of one kind or another. Every year brought awestruck articles about the surging popularity of imported liqueurs and luxury chocolates, colour televisions and video recorders, microwave ovens and home computers. Given that the same pages often carried doom-laden essays about the shadow of George Orwell and the parallels with the 1930s, this might have seemed incongruous. But even Orwell had remarked on the ‘cheap luxuries’ that so many working-class families enjoyed during the Depression: the ‘fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools’ that had, he thought, ‘averted revolution’. But in the early 1980s these things were not cheap luxuries. They were cheap staples.14

  The truth is that, despite the hardship of the towns blighted by unemployment, Mrs Thatcher’s Britain remained one of the most prosperous countries in the world, an affluent consumer society in which even modest working-class households generally owned washing machines, fridges and cars. Of course this did not mean everybody had been liberated from poverty, anxiety or debt. But, as The Times’s Louis Heren pointed out, it did mean that by the time she took office even ‘the average working-class family enjoyed what Orwell would have defined as a middle-class life’. Even in the darkest hours of the downturn, sales of central-heating installations, tumble dryers, fridge freezers, toasters and microwaves continued to break records. Between 1978 and 1982, sales of coffee makers went up by 238 per cent. In the next twelve months, sales of colour televisions went up by 31 per cent, deep fat fryers by 30 per cent and microwave ovens by 70 per cent. Of course there was more to life than buying and owning things. Yet as Ian Jack wrote a few years later, these everyday appliances reflected the underlying reality that ‘most people in Britain are better off than they have ever been’.15

  In the summer of 1981 the Guardian’s young foreign correspondent Alex Brummer returned to Britain after two years in Washington, DC. Travelling around the country, he was shocked by the decline of Britain’s cash-strapped public infrastructure: the ‘increasingly shabby transport system, cracking pavements, potholed roads, mounds of rubbish [and] crowded hospitals’. Yet, when he went shopping, Brummer found a far more reassuring picture. ‘It may be the worst recession since the 1930s,’ he wrote, ‘but Marks and Spencer, Boots, British Home Stores and Mothercare get bigger and better and look as crowded as ever.’ Waiting to pay at the Marks & Spencer till, he found it hard to credit that this was the same ‘riot-torn Britain’ he had seen on American news bulletins. ‘The shopping centres appeared busy, the mood buoyant … Notes changed hands as if everyone, despite the 10 per cent plus unemployed, had enough to spend.’ The Guardian gave his piece the headline ‘Garbage and greed’. But the people queuing for cosmetics in Boots or baby equipment in Mothercare were hardly greedy. They were simply doing what people had done for centuries: buying things to make their lives better.16

  Criticism of consumerism is as old as consumerism itself. On the left and among middle-class progressives there had always been plenty of people who shared the critic Richard Hoggart’s distaste for the ‘shiny barbarism’ of modern mass culture, or who nodded approvingly at Aneurin Bevan’s view that the ‘so-called affluent society’ was a ‘society in which priorities have gone all wrong’. Jeremy Seabrook was a classic example. His long Guardian essays on the plight of the poor often referred to shops and shopping, but only ever in the most damning terms. It was the tyranny of consumerism, Seabrook told his readers, that lay behind the riots of the summer of 1981. Brainwashed by ‘the invasive quality of the market place … the praise of commodities and hymns to materialism … the shrill insistence on buying all the things that have become indispensable’, people had simply lashed out in fury at the downturn.17

  For writers like Seabrook, the supreme symbol of this meretricious Britain, the high altar of the marketplace, was the American-style shopping mall. From north London’s Brent Cross to Dudley’s Merry Hill, the new shopping centres built between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s embodied everything left-leaning writers loathed about Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, which probably explains why they could never resist visiting them. Beryl Bainbridge, for example, made a pilgrimage to the enormous £24 million shopping centre in Milton Keynes, which had been opened in September 1979 by the Prime Minister herself. To Bainbridge, this ‘glittering hall of glass’ was ‘a church, a cathedral dedicated to the worship of the credit card, a place where people could come and pay their respects to the consumer society’. To her surprise, she rather admired its ‘cleanliness and brightness’. When she got outside, though, her enthusiasm ebbed and she began ‘to despise the place all over again’.18

  Yet Milton Keynes’s shopping centre had plenty of admirers. The architecture critic Deyan Sudjic was impressed by the ‘restrained opulence’ that made it ‘a worthy successor to Mies van der Rohe’s austere elegance’, while the environmental writer Tony Aldous thought it offered ‘the pleasantest and most convenient covered shopping in Britain’. Above all, as Aldous pointed out, it was enormously popular. On Saturdays, its familiar names – John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Boots, Woolworths – were packed with 100,000 people, some from nearby Bedford and Northampton, but some brought by coach from as far afield as South Wales. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation used the shopping centre in their full-page magazine adverts, which pictured a genuine couple, Mr and Mrs Davies, who had come for the day from the nearby village of Silsoe, Bedfordshire. ‘For us,’ the caption read, ‘Milton Keynes city centre is like a glimpse of the future.’ But as Mrs Davies explained, she had been slightly misquoted. ‘We didn’t actually say those words,’ she told the Sunday Times. ‘We said we liked the shopping centre.’19

  What Milton Keynes’s architects had grasped, and what writers like Seabrook never recognized, is that people like Mr and Mrs Davies did not go shopping to stuff their homes with commodities and dull the pain of their economic alienation. Often they just wanted a warm day out. So when, at the turn of the decade, Chapman Taylor Partners were asked to develop the new £23 million Ridings
Centre in Wakefield – which, revealingly, occupied the site of a former pub, a dance hall, a Salvation Army hall and a public toilet – they designed it as somewhere families would go for fun. The model was unapologetically North American, and the council’s planning officer even went on a fact-finding mission to New York, Boston, Atlanta and Toronto, which must have been a real comedown after Wakefield. The results, though, were widely praised. Even the Guardian, not always notable for its close attention to the West Yorkshire shopping scene, thought the Ridings would ‘set the pattern for shopping centres in the future’.

  The Ridings boasted three levels, with daylight flooding in from a glazed roof, while a glass lift, inspired by the elevator in the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, carried shoppers up through a central atrium. Around the food court – ‘an Edwardian style garden, complete with a band-stand, trees, a waterfall, sun umbrellas, and tables and chairs for over 300 people’ – there was a professionally run playgroup, a nappy-changing room and ten different food outlets, including an Indian restaurant, a pizzeria, a patisserie and a seafood bar. Meanwhile, glass and mirrors accentuated what the Guardian called the ‘sense of lightness and activity’. Wasn’t it just a shopping centre? Not to the people of Wakefield. When, on 16 October 1983, the Ridings opened for the first time, some 4,000 people walked through the doors – even though they could not buy anything, because it was a Sunday. The next day, when the shops did open, local schools declared a half-day so that Wakefield’s consumers of the future could look around for themselves. Jeremy Seabrook would have had something to say about that.20