In any domestic setting, nothing could stop the irresistible spread of the television set. By 1956 there were sets in some 48 per cent of households, with a majority at this stage having access to BBC programmes only, and generally during the early to mid-1950s there was often keen competition to be the first in a street to have one. In Neasden the father of Lesley Hornby (the future Twiggy) was one such pioneer, and as an inveterate DIY man, ‘forever making “improvements”’, he quickly knocked up a cabinet for it. Crucially, in terms of the ecology of working-class homes, the set more often than not invaded the hitherto sacrosanct parlour, including in miners’ houses in the Forest of Dean. ‘The little screen found its place amongst the cumbersome best furniture and the heavily flowered, deep-bordered wallpaper,’ recalled Dennis Potter some years later:
And, of course, when the family began to watch, furniture got moved around, a few superfluous things were slung out, a giant change in domestic habits was being made. . . Instead of a coal fire once a week ‘to air the room’, to preserve the mausoleum from the damp, fires were lit throughout the winter; some people even began to have a glass of beer or a flagon of cider, to keep on their working clothes and boots, consciously to relax over it all, to create a genuine living space in what had been the lifeless clutter of the old Front Room. When this happened, the former wallpaper was discovered to be irritating and out-of-tune, the best china ‘a pity to keep for looking at’, the heavily framed picture ‘a bit miserable’, and a minor revolution was finally consummated when supper was eaten in the room to the pale flicker of the Lime Grove light. . .
Inevitably, attitudes varied. In Michael Palin’s intensely respectable, middle-class home in Sheffield, the TV was usually covered with a knitted antimacassar; while from a left perspective, Doris Lessing adamantly refused her son’s entreaties for a set, and she recalled that in her circle the typical attitude to the medium was, ‘Our children’s minds would be rotted by this monstrous new invention,’ and ‘What could we all do to save ourselves?’ There was less agonising in working-class homes. ‘In one household,’ reported Michael Young and Peter Willmott about an interview in Debden, ‘the parents and five children of all ages were paraded around it in a half circle at 9 p.m. when one of us called; the two-month-old baby was stationed in its pram in front of the set. The scene had the air of a strange ritual. The father said proudly: “The tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now.”’ Or as one of the Crown Street sociologists recorded after interviewing a middle-aged press tool setter and his wife: ‘Own T.V. – they paid £69 for it – saved up over a long period. Wife admitted that she thought T.V. good because “after you’ve been married for a long time you run out of conversation.”’8
Overall, a greater home-centredness was accompanied by changing patterns outside the home. The cinema-going habit was significantly weakening (an average of 22 visits in 1956 for each person over the age of 16, compared with 34 visits ten years earlier); football and cricket attendances were also steadily declining; and in Bethnal Green in the mid-1950s, Young and Willmott noted how ‘all the publicans lament the loss of trade’, as ‘the men stay at home with their wives and children’, occasionally fetching a bottle in to drink while watching the TV. By contrast, expenditure on motoring quadrupled between 1945 and 1956, and over the same period roughly trebled on hobbies such as playing sports, gardening, photography and looking after pets. Meanwhile, there was an increasing trend for eating out, with the start of the Berni Inns in 1954 – offering a half-pound Argentine rump steak with chips and peas, roll and butter and pudding or cheese for 7s 6d – particularly emblematic. As for holidays, at least half the population took a vacation away from home in the course of 1955, with some 8 per cent of those going abroad, and an increasing proportion using a caravan. In short, mobility and choice were beginning to define consumer behaviour, although both concepts still had a long, long way to go. Moreover, just because Mary Quant had opened a shop (Bazaar) on the King’s Road in late 1955, it did not mean that the rest of the country was even incipiently ready to swing.9
‘Here are just a few of the shops I used, starting with Alfred Street South,’ recalled Joan Priestley about being a housewife in the 1950s in the largely working-class St Ann’s district of Nottingham:
Farnsworth’s Pork Butchers, Barnes Dales little dairy sold Colwick Cheeses, Barber Len for son’s haircut, Coupe’s Furnishing and round the corner into the Square was Plunkett’s Gents Outfitters, Atkin’s Wine Shop, Winfield’s the Butcher. If you’d had some coal delivered, it was up to Brown’s the Coal Merchant to pay the bill on Union Road, down again to the Square, there was Carnill’s Pork Butchers, Briley’s Ladies’ and Children’s Wear, past the imposing Westminster Bank. Crossing over and passing the Cromwell Pub to the Co-op Butchery and Greengrocer’s, Morley’s Cake Shop, Dean’s for Ladies Fashion, past the Cavendish Cinema, then there was Mr Ash, an excellent Fishmonger for many years. . .
Such a variety of shops, there was no need to go into town. . .
Most of these shops (including also ‘Meakin’s the cobbler, Marsden’s, Mr Chettle the dentist, Ridgards for cookers, Mr Clarke the Chemist, Hopewell Furnishers and Wayne’s Poodle Parlour and Pet Shop’) probably flourished, and would continue to do so for a while yet, but it was already becoming a different story away from the main shopping streets. In the Crown Street survey, ‘an irascible old lady who is very acute and capable’ was the proprietress of ‘a small corner general shop’, and her incisive views on the plight of such shops in the area were paraphrased by the interviewer in February 1956:
Nowadays, there is too much competition in this kind of retail trade. This is one reason why it is necessary for them to stay open from 10 a.m. till 9.00 p.m. and often for a spell on Sunday mornings too. They are tied to the shop, and are just about making a living.
The local people purchase only small quantities of goods at a time as they require them. For teas, they wait until their children come home from school & ask them what they want, & then send out to the corner shop for it. Although they come in for ‘a little tittle-tattle’, their custom is not regular, and ‘they only make a convenience of these little shops’, or ask credit in them.
‘When goods were rationed,’ she added bitterly, ‘people did a constant trade here. Now they come in only for odds & ends.’
Even a reasonably thriving independent shop was coming under increasing competition – but not yet intolerably stiff competition, given continuing resale price maintenance – from the chain stores, whose share (excluding the Co-op) of the total grocery provision market rose from 19.9 per cent in 1950 to 26.9 per cent by 1961, while that of the independents (defined as less than ten stores) declined from 56.8 per cent to 52.3 per cent.
The two most emblematic chain stores (or multiples) were, in their different ways, the Co-op and Marks & Spencer. ‘All the Co-ops were laid out the same,’ remembered Geoff Phillips, who grew up in Newcastle’s Byker area:
On the left when you went in were dry goods. On the right were bacon and cheese and meat. At the back were fruit and veg. The fruit was polished and displayed in doilies and silver paper. One person served you at the dry goods counter, then one person at the bacon counter, and so on. They would then put all your purchases together in a parcel which was tied up with string. Most women had baskets with a cloth cover. If required, a boy on a bike would deliver your groceries to your home. You had to quote your store number and get a ticket so as to claim your divi. The Co-op dividend was sometimes as high as a 1/- in the pound.
Largely stuck in its ways, though, the Co-op was in slow but sure decline, its grocery share going down from 23.2 per cent in 1950 to 20.8 per cent by 1961. The fortunes of M&S were, by contrast, almost vertiginously rising, to the point where it was fast becoming a national institution – an institution whose purpose was, declared Fyfe Robertson in a lengthy 1955 panegyric, ‘to serve the new mass-prosperity market by bringing good quality, and good design and finish, wit
hin the reach of moderate purses’, and he noted that ‘sample analysis shows that the proportion of the firm’s customers in each economic group is about the same as their proportion in the population’. The same year another, more radical journalist was equally impressed by the democratisation of demand being fostered by this highly acceptable face of capitalism. ‘Before the Welfare State there were broadly two classes of consumers, the middle class who had the money, and the working class who hadn’t,’ wrote Laurence Thompson in the News Chronicle. ‘Now there is only one class and I am told that many a débutante wears a Marks & Spencer nylon slip beneath her Dior dress as if she were just a Gateshead factory girl.’10
As for the traditionally inegalitarian department stores, the 1950s now seem like their heyday. ‘Fish paste and cress sandwiches’ in the restaurant, served by ‘tired, kindly women in little pinafores and frilled caps’, the food department in the basement where ‘assistants in white cotton coats’ stood at the counters ‘weighing out tea’ and ‘cutting cheeses with wire’, haberdashery where one could buy ‘tape and elastic, bales of bias binding, Sylko in any shade of any colour you needed, dress-making shears, very small scissors, their blades fashioned like a stork’s beak’, and a shoe department in which ‘the children would be bought crepe-soled sandals and peer at their weird black bones in the x-ray machine’ – so Penelope Mortimer recalled going, as a young mother, to John Barnes in Finchley Road. Even so, department stores by the mid-1950s were increasingly conscious of both rising competition from the chain stores and an untapped, newly affluent working-class potential clientele that they had previously ignored, prompting the managing director of Selfridges to assert in the Financial Times in May 1955 that it was only through ‘providing an environment and attractions, which convert shopping from a chore to an interesting relaxation’, that they could hope to ‘win back trade’.
Later that year, Mass-Observation conducted a survey on behalf of Browns of Chester to try to establish what local people felt about a department store that over the years had been known as dear and exclusive. The resulting all-female vox pop showed social class alive and well in Cheshire, with ‘B’ denoting upper middle-class, ‘C’ lower middle-class, ‘D’ skilled or semi-skilled working-class, and ‘E’ unskilled working-class:
I never go there now. I think they have lowered their standards. I wouldn’t go into a shop that has placards in its windows advertising credits and hire-purchase. I think it’s dreadful for a firm of such old standing to sell clothes on credit. (60B, wife of proprietor of newsagents)
It’s a lovely shop of course. You can walk round and you’re under no obligation to buy. One time they used to cater for one class, and now they seem to cater for all. I think that’s all their hire purchase and credit schemes have come into being. (43C, wife of plumber and pipefitter)
You pay just to breathe the air of that shop. I keep away. (32C, wife of cattle dealer)
Well, everything’s very expensive. When you go to the shop you never feel comfortable. (38C, wife of manager of furniture shop)
I don’t go there. They’re expensive people. I’m just frightened to go in and ask anything there. (34C, wife of cash clerk)
If you’ve got the money all well and good, but it’s definitely not for working classes. (41D, wife of aircraft labourer)
Well, I think to go to those stores you’ve got to be posh. I know it’s the same money but I think the assistants seem different. (37D, wife of wagon repairer)
I think it’s too superior for people like me – I would be scared of the assistants. (51DE, wife of engine driver)
Too many women about in it looking down their noses at you. (48D, wife of farm worker)
It was a further sign of the need for department stores to broaden their appeal when Beatties of Wolverhampton, wanting to advertise its January sale in 1957, became the first to use television. Still, there was always the danger of alienating the traditionally well-heeled base – and when in 1956 the venerable Whiteley’s in Bayswater tried to introduce self-service, there was such a revolt that, in the words of the historian Bill Lancaster, ‘the ageing, fixed-income clientele won back their cherished counters’, thereby condemning Whiteley’s to a further cycle of stagnation and decline.11
Self-service itself was steadily on the rise (including at the Co-op), up to about 3,100 stores by 1956: still less than 3 per cent of all food shops, but accounting for over 10 per cent of food sales. M-O that year undertook a survey for the International Tea Company, asking housewives in Liscard – a largely middle-class village near Wallasey – what they thought of the concept. Opinion was about evenly divided:
Very good. You can walk round and everything’s out for you to see, everything’s out in front, and you’re not waiting in a queue to be served, you can just pick out what you want and get away.
Oh, I don’t know. I think you’re just as well off with assistants to serve you. You know what you want and you’ve only to ask for it.
Some do like them, but I don’t because I feel you just don’t get that personal attention.
I think they’re too impersonal. You just go wandering round and out. I’ll tell you what I really dislike – seeing the bacon and cooked meats all sliced in the window – dark and dry-looking.
I think it’s quite a good idea myself. You see what you want and the price is on everything. You can see what different makes they have.
I rather like it myself – it’s more convenient. The only thing is that sometimes a lot of people get at the paying counter and you have to wait.
Well, I like to be served – it’s so much more personal.
Well, to be quite honest with you, I’m not at all keen on them. I prefer to see the cheese cut before my eyes, and potatoes and vegetables – I like to choose them and see them weighed. I don’t like them in these bags.
I think it’s very good. You see things you wouldn’t normally see if you had to ask for them.
The great majority of self-service shops were on too small a scale properly to be called supermarkets, of which there were only about a thousand at the most by 1956, with for instance Tesco opening its first true supermarket that year, in a disused cinema in Maldon, Essex. The miles of aisles still lay ahead, while out-of-town shopping was barely a gleam in anyone’s eye.
Nor was shopping yet a leisure activity, but rather a daily or near-daily drudge, with the prevailing lack of refrigerators meaning that housewives by 1957 were still making an estimated average of 7.6 visits per week to the grocers and 3.3 visits to the butchers – visits that, in the context of early closing on Wednesdays and very limited Sunday trading, often had to be carefully planned. Of course, some housewives enjoyed shopping more than others, but the replies of the Liscard housewives, asked by M-O whether ‘shopping for groceries and day to day things like that’ was ‘something you like, or not’, probably give a fair sense of how housewives generally felt about this taken-for-granted (by others) part of their lives:
Oh, I don’t mind. It’s a change to get out for a bit of fresh air – a change from doing housework.
Well, I don’t dislike it. It’s a part of housekeeping isn’t it? I think it’s just a matter of looking after the family.
Well yes, I like shopping all right, but it’s simply terrible the prices these days.
Oh yes, I don’t mind it. It’s just part of everyday life. I’ve done it for so many years and you get used to it. It’s a habit the same as everything else.
Well, I do like shopping if I have plenty of time.
Well, I ask you, the prices put you off.
Well, you get a bit tired of it, don’t you? From day to day the same, but it’s got to be done.12
‘More than nine out of ten houses visited showed signs of recent redecoration and alterations – usually a new fireplace,’ recorded Tom Brennan in June 1956 after visiting tenements in the Gorbals. ‘Several scores of families had obviously spent a lot of time and money trying to improve their one or two rooms. The prosper
ity of recent years showed very clearly. It has not all been misdirected as is often suggested.’ There was indeed a reflex middle-class tendency to criticise the frivolous, extravagant expenditure of the newly better-off working class, a tendency embodied by Nella Last in Barrow. ‘Mrs Salisbury often makes me gasp,’ she wrote a few months earlier about her cleaner. ‘She was paddling round in a nasty old pair of rubber soled shoes. I said, “Oh Mrs Salisbury, look, you are making marks all over the carpets. Haven’t you brought your old slippers?” She said a bit mournfully, “No, they have fallen to bits, these booties are all I’ve got” – & she is paying for a £108 T.V. set, & a “racing” bicycle for her schoolboy, though he owns one good enough to go to school on it!!’ There was also a more general sense of unease, typified by the reaction of the Glasgow-based Evening Citizen, about the time of Brennan’s interviews, to the pronouncement of the Scottish Under Secretary, J. Nixon Browne, that two vital ingredients for a happy home life were a ‘kitchen to be proud of’ and a ‘room for a TV’. ‘Fine,’ riposted the paper. ‘But many people manage very well without a dream kitchen – and a lot of folk were quite happy before TV existed. Material comforts help, but it is a mistake to over-accentuate them. No home will be a happy one – whatever the amenities – without the mutual love, respect and unselfishness of the family.’ From the left, as evidenced by the painful saga of commercial television, there was palpable discomfort with the whole area of advertising and consumption, forcefully though Crosland argued that ‘the wide and plentiful diffusion of consumer goods’ was a perfectly valid ‘route towards social equality’. And from the guardians of high culture and high-mindedness generally, the dismay was almost total. ‘All that solemnity in the 1950s, it just seems so remote,’ the poet and critic Ian Hamilton poignantly reflected in 2001 shortly before his death:
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 81
