State of Emergency: the Way We Were Read online

  Not everything about Leeds had changed since the 1950s. It remained a hard, unforgiving town, fiercely masculine and suspicious of outsiders, as anyone who went to Elland Road to watch Don Revie’s Leeds United, the country’s best but least-loved football team, would readily testify. But as the football coaches thundered into the city along the new M1 and M62, their passengers could see that its landscape had fundamentally changed. Like so many other Northern cities, Leeds had keenly embraced the new era of concrete and tarmac. Its Victorian skyline had given way to ‘motorways, pedestrian precincts, shopping centres, multi-storey car parks, high-rise flats’: buildings like the glass and concrete City House, glowering with menace over the railway station, the brainchild of the corrupt West Yorkshire architect John Poulson; or the bleak Hunslet Grange flats, a gigantic pebble-dashed concrete complex opened in 1973, poorly maintained and abysmally heated; or the new Merrion Centre, a statement of brutal, uncompromising utilitarianism in the heart of the city. For their critics, such as the poet Sir John Betjeman, these were ugly abominations, reminiscent of nothing so much as the totalitarian cityscapes of Communist Eastern Europe. The sound of Leeds, Betjeman remarked in a BBC film made in 1968, was that of ‘Victorian buildings crashing to the ground’. To the city fathers, however, they were welcome symbols of modernity. They even adopted the slogan ‘Leeds: Motorway City of the Seventies’, which was franked on all envelopes sent from the city to sum up its new identity as a place of ‘exciting flyovers and splendid roads’.12

  For some observers, Britain’s new urban landscape was merely the outward symptom of deeper social and cultural changes that had radically altered the texture of life for millions of people. It was more than a question of washing the laundry in a machine instead of by hand, or of drinking Nescafé at breakfast instead of leaf tea, or of spending Sunday at a National Trust property instead of in church, or of going out for a curry instead of making shepherd’s pie, or even of going on holiday to Majorca rather than to Morecambe. It was deeper than that, epitomized by the plight of the Bingley Musical Union, a mainstay of male working-class culture in the West Yorkshire mill town for more than eighty years, which in the mid-1970s began to struggle badly for young recruits, because, a visitor reported, ‘young men were no longer following their fathers into the choir’.13

  When the former social worker and radical journalist Jeremy Seabrook went to another traditional working-class town, Blackburn, Lancashire, at the dawn of the 1970s, he found a world of ‘derelict streets and decayed mills’, in which older residents were often full of misery and anger at the changes that had overtaken their home town during the supposed golden age of the 1950s and 1960s. Listening to their laments for the ‘predictability and discipline’ of the old days, he concluded that ‘since the time when two thirds of the working population were employed in textiles and life was dominated by the immutable realities of mill, school, and chapel, the town has been in decline’. Seabrook did not necessarily mean that it was becoming poorer – although parts of it were – because most people led lives of unprecedented material comfort. What he meant was that the old, reliable working-class culture, the culture of hard work at the mill, pints at the local pub, Saturdays cheering the Rovers and Sundays singing hymns, was gone, and nothing had replaced it. It was this, he thought, that explained the ubiquitous racism towards the town’s Pakistani immigrants: a cry of ‘anguish and fear’ based on ‘the decline of their dwindling culture’.14

  When Seabrook returned to the North of England five years later for his book What Went Wrong?, he was even more pessimistic. No amount of affluence, he argued, could compensate for the death of the old culture. In Wigan, a ‘new denim bazaar and a delicatessen’ took pride of place in the ‘shopping arcades full of consolations’, yet they could not make up for the death of the mines and mills on which the town had once depended. Echoing Richard Hoggart’s warnings twenty years earlier, he diagnosed the town’s youngsters as ‘passive and purposeless’, preoccupied by ‘image and fashion, the endless spool of excitement and novelty that has been unwound before their eyes since they were born’. They were ‘anchored in a sea of commodities’, he said grimly, their lives governed by the logic of the marketplace, deprived of the culture that had nourished their forefathers. It was barely ten years since the Kinks, in ‘Autumn Almanac’, had paid tribute to the rituals of football on a Saturday, roast beef on Sundays and holidays in Blackpool. But they might have been singing about a different century.15

  In an odd way, this was the mirror image of what fashionable young celebrities like Mick Jagger and Terence Stamp had boasted back in the mid-1960s: that an old world had died, giving way to a new one in which the guiding lights were spectacle, shopping and sensation. Clearly there was some truth in it: the churches, for example, were in deep and apparently unstoppable decline. By 1970, fewer than half of all newborn babies were baptized in the Church of England, while confirmations fell by half between 1960 and 1977. Methodist membership was in free fall: in Manchester, it fell by a staggering 44 per cent in just twenty years. It was hardly surprising that, by 1976, a church was being pulled down somewhere every nine days.16

  To many of the elderly churchgoers who increasingly dominated Sunday congregations, Edward Heath’s Britain did seem a distressingly alien place: a world of new town centres, new tower blocks, new housing estates, new road signs, new telephone numbers, new county names, even the new postcodes. Even that most basic staple of everyday British life, the pound sterling, the symbol of everything solid and reliable in national life, underwent radical change. For centuries, generations had grown up with the system of pounds, shillings, and pence: 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound. But in 1961, during a spasm of self-flagellation in which commentators lined up to blame the nation’s economic problems on its supposedly anachronistic Establishment, Harold Macmillan had set up a committee to examine the possibility of switching to a decimal currency, in imitation of Britain’s European competitors. By 1966, Harold Wilson had embraced the issue as a sign of progressive modernization, and five years later, on 15 February 1971, the currency was formally decimalized. This was not quite the overnight operation that is sometimes imagined. Three of the six new coins – the 5p, 10p and 50p pieces – had been legal tender for more than a year, while the halfpenny and half-crown had disappeared in 1969. The government organized a massive publicity blitz to alert people to the new coinage, and prices were displayed for months in both currencies – something worth a shilling, for example, being sold at ‘1s.(5p)’. The BBC broadcast a series of five-minute programmes on decimal themes, while the singer Max Bygraves even recorded a mildly excruciating single, ‘Decimalisation’.17

  ‘It’s terrible!’ a grim-faced elderly Scotswoman, her hair tightly bound in a headscarf, told the BBC evening news on the much-anticipated ‘Decimal Day’. In fact, polls put support for decimalization at barely 46 per cent, and in the West End ‘anti-decimal terrorists’ distributed leaflets denouncing the government’s ‘failure to consult public opinion’ and begging shoppers to boycott the new currency. Yet despite predictions of disaster in the popular press, ‘D Day’ passed off without a serious hitch. Most major stores were well prepared: Harrods had an army of ‘decimal pennies’, girls in ‘rakish boaters and blue sashes’, to help confused shoppers, while Selfridges boasted a troop of ‘girls dressed in shorts and midi split skirts and other suitably mathematical costumes’. British Rail and London Transport even went decimal a day early. ‘There were no riots, no queues, and only a mercifully few facetious comments about the new toy-shop money,’ reported The Times the following day. Even the surly and suspicious newspaper sellers on the Strand ‘did not take their eyes off them or refuse to accept them’.18

  The group least impressed by the new currency, not surprisingly, was the elderly. Conversion from old to new pence was not always easy: the government recommended the rough and ready trick of doubling the figure in new pence and adding a slash between the digits, so that
17p became 3/4 or 3s. 4d. Canny entrepreneurs, meanwhile, sold ‘Decimal Adders’ that people could carry around the shops, although by the standards of later calculators these were inconveniently clunky and cumbersome. But many older people remained distrustful: according to an internal Conservative report a year later, some even blamed the new currency for the inflation that was beginning to cripple the British economy. It was merely another symptom of a world that seemed to have cast out all tradition, all familiarity, all reassurance, all order: a frightening world beset by inflation, terrorism, crime and delinquency. And for those who vividly remembered the world before the war, nothing seemed impervious to the mania for change. There is a lovely scene in Peter Nichols’s television play Hearts and Flowers (1970), when old Uncle Will, at a funeral service for his brother, stands to recite Psalm 23 with the congregation, only to find that the words have changed. ‘These aren’t the proper words!’ he whispers in horror as his family read aloud from the new prayer book, but nobody is listening. Even something as fixed and unmoveable as the Old Testament, it turns out, has changed, and Will has been robbed of the traditional words of consolation that have sustained him all his life. The world has left him behind.19

  Young people, the group most enthusiastic about the new decimal currency, were a particular source of worry to the old. ‘They have it too easy today. They don’t care about anything or anybody,’ said John Johnson, an elderly Blackburn man. ‘They’re answerable to nobody. There’s ninety-nine percent of the parents step beside, our John can’t do any wrong, our Mary can’t do any wrong.’ Mr Johnson remembered his own younger days: one of eight children, he had scrubbed his father’s clogs clean every night before bed, and left school at 14 to work in the mill. Only during the First World War, when his father was away at the front, did he ‘get a bit of liberty’ from his mother. But the liberty of the young, with their loud music and outrageous fashions, astonished and disturbed him. A friend of his, walking his dog in Blackburn’s Corporation Park, had recently come across two teenagers on the steps of a pavilion, the girl with her knickers around her ankles. ‘What’s going on up there?’ the man had burst out in shock, to which the boy replied ‘with a four-letter word’. So the man, who knew where the boy lived, went off to complain to his father. ‘Did my lad say that to thee?’ the father said. ‘Well, I’ll say it to thee an’ all, mind thee own eff. business.’ Mr Johnson shook his head in disbelief. ‘Now that’s God’s true word of honour, if I should choke when I have a cup of tea.’20

  To people who vividly remembered the days of the General Strike and the Depression, whose memories were full of tin baths, empty stomachs and Stanley Baldwin on the radio, the Britain of George Best, Marc Bolan and Confessions of a Window Cleaner must indeed have been a shock. And yet, although Jeremy Seabrook was right to note the ways in which traditional working-class culture was dying, it was too simplistic, and too pessimistic, to say that everything had changed. Take the gangster film Get Carter, which was shot in the winter of 1970 and released the following year. Not only was the film’s violence, and especially its brutality towards women, shocking for critics and audiences alike, but its themes – gambling, pornography, local government corruption – reflected the new concerns of the late 1960s. Its very settings, the grim concrete fastness of Newcastle, the Brutalist Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, seemed to represent the radical modernization of British life. Indeed, Newcastle’s council boss T. Dan Smith, who had promised to turn his city into the concrete ‘Brasilia of the North’, turned out to be up to his neck in the Poulson corruption scandal, having pocketed generous kickbacks in return for approving miles of tower blocks. Even the film’s star, Michael Caine, the son of a Billingsgate porter and a charlady, a Camberwell grammar school boy turned Hollywood celebrity, liked to be seen as the champion of the new generation. ‘We are here, this is our society and we are not going away,’ the erstwhile Maurice Micklewhite told an interviewer. ‘Join us, stay away, hate us – do as you like. We don’t care about your opinion any more.’21

  And yet in many ways Get Carter reflected a world that had changed surprisingly little. Behind the gangsters’ violence, as one critic observes, the film shows ‘another world entirely, a city that remains remarkably untouched by their activities; we see pubs, a dance hall, a bingo hall, a kids’ marching band in the streets, a whole community going about its everyday business’. When Caine’s character steps off the train from London and into the North-eastern bar, it is as though he has stepped back in time, to a world of gnarled working-class men grimly supping their pints and glaring at outsiders. And the pub as an institution nicely reflects the way in which Heath’s Britain felt uneasily poised between two worlds. In affluent suburbs like Bexley, many pubs had closed down, victims of the new trend for family- and home-centred leisure. Others were becoming much more upmarket, whether by installing thick carpets and televisions, or by remodelling themselves as Beefeaters and Berni Inns (for example the Mitre in Oxford, or the New Inn in Gloucester), dispensing prawn cocktails, steak and chips and Black Forest gateau to aspirational young couples. ‘The regular users of street-corner locals find to their horror that their pub has been re-designed as a large pineapple, a sputnik or a Wild West saloon to attract the gin-and-tonic and lager-and-lime trade,’ lamented Roger Protz, one of the founding fathers of the Campaign for Real Ale, in 1978. ‘Public bars are ripped out and replaced with lounges with soft lights, soft carpets, wet-look mock leather – and several pennies on the price of a pint.’22

  Yet many pubs remained defiantly traditional. In Nottingham, pubs in the poor St Ann’s district still displayed the Queen’s portrait behind the bar. In Blackburn, Seabrook drank in a pub with ‘yellow distemper, frosted glass, dark brown paint’, where conversations were punctuated by ‘the sound of darts as they struck the board, and the squeak of chalk on slate, as well as the sounds of Coronation Street from the next room’. And when Colin Dexter’s detective Inspector Morse goes for a drink in the novel Last Seen Wearing (1977), he finds a public bar barely touched by change, the only innovation a solitary fruit machine in the corner. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air ‘like morning mist’; the chatter is ‘raucous and interminable’; the atmosphere is one of ‘cribbage, dominoes and darts, and every available surface cluttered with glasses’.23

  The survival of the old-fashioned pub, albeit in slightly modified form and reduced numbers, was indicative of a working-class culture that had changed much less, or at least was changing more slowly, than pessimists like Seabrook feared. Although most people in St Ann’s had televisions, for example, they lived in conditions that would have seemed distinctly familiar to residents in the 1930s: tight row upon row of damp, decaying brick back-to-backs, fewer than one in ten with inside toilets, fewer than two in ten with an inside bathroom, only half of them with hot running water. Theirs was a life of ‘damp, rot, decrepitude’, wrote researchers from the local university, in a world of ‘dingy buildings and bleak factories and … functionally austere chapels, a host of second-hand shops stacked out with shabby, cast-off goods; overhung throughout the winter by a damp pall of smoke’. It was a similar story elsewhere. In Bingley, it was not unusual well into the 1970s to see a pony tethered outside one of the pubs, or rabbit-skins hanging from washing lines on the council estates. In Sunderland, nine out of ten families in privately owned houses had no indoor toilet, three-quarters had no bath, and half did not even have cold running water. As late as 1973, more than 2 million people in England and Wales lived without either an inside toilet, a bathtub or hot running water.24

  This is not to say, of course, that nothing changed: for instance, the merciless decline of British manufacturing had a drastic effect on the lives of millions who lost their jobs, while rising wages for the rest inevitably brought lifestyle changes, from domestic gadgets to foreign holidays. Yet most families led strikingly conservative lives. In 1970, an extensive survey of habits and values found that by far the most popular leisure activity was watching televi
sion (97 per cent), followed by gardening (64 per cent), playing with children (62 per cent), listening to music (57 per cent), home decoration or repairs (53 per cent) and cleaning the car (48 per cent). Outside the home, meanwhile, the preferred activities were going for a drive (58 per cent), to the pub (52 per cent), for a walk (47 per cent) and for a meal (32 per cent), with darts and church close behind. And this picture changed little over the course of the decade. An official household survey in 1977 found that apart from watching television, the most popular leisure activities were going for a meal or a drink, listening to records, reading, walking, DIY, gardening, needlework and knitting. Clearly some of these things reflected growing affluence: wealthier families were more likely to go out for meals or to have a car to clean. But few of these activities would have shocked or surprised the respondents’ parents or grandparents.25

  If these figures represented any great change, it was simply that collective leisure was giving way to more individualistic, family-centred activities, as couples elected to spend more time together rather than with relatives, friends and colleagues. This fits with the common interpretation of life in the 1970s, epitomized by Seabrook’s book What Went Wrong?, which holds that Britain was becoming an increasingly individualistic society even before Mrs Thatcher had been given the keys to Number 10. And yet this picture of selfish proto-Thatcherites turning their backs on society feels far too simplistic. For this was also a period in which union membership – for many people, the ultimate expression of collective solidarity – reached its peak, and in which the number of charities and voluntary associations more than doubled. By 1984 one survey found that more than half the population had joined voluntary organizations and one in five people regularly did voluntary work – a stunning rebuke to the caricature of a selfish, introverted society.26