Kenneth Roy
The students missed
their chance to bring down
the crumbling house
Bob Smith
Charles Kennedy
Walter Humes
How can you
tell when politicians
are lying?
The Cafe
Bill Heaney
Jill Stephenson
The spectre of shortage
that shaped my
post-war life
The Cafe
Alex Cox
Alan Fisher
Yemen and
America’s fear
of the franchise
Rear Window
Hydropathic holidays
Andrew Hook
In Barcelona, I was struck
by two presences and
one absence
The Last Word
John Brown
31.03.11
No. 386
31.03.11No. 386
The Cafe 2
I enjoyed David Torrance’s article ‘In defence of the union’ (23 March
There will be no comeback for the Scottish Conservatives, not at this election or any other in the foreseeable future. For a party which places such faith in allowing ‘the market’ to deliver the level of service people want they seem singularly reluctant to accept that ‘the market’ stamped ‘Scotland’ has had a look and asked for a refund.
Their devolutionary recalcitrance is only part of the reason, though far from ‘effectively dumping’ devolution in 1976 as David claims, I seem to recall prior to the 1979 referendum the Tories campaigning for a ‘No’ vote, not on the basis of outright opposition but on the premise that what the incumbent Callaghan government proposed wasn’t enough and that once they won the imminent election Scotland would be offered a law-making parliament, not just a mere assembly. That they subsequently reneged on this promise once the general election was won was presumably because the detailed, informed conclusions they reached in proposing this offer were outweighed by other, more detailed, better informed conclu-sions made available after they occupied Whitehall. Or they lied. One or the other.
Thanks to the joys of the internet we in Scotland now have access to those newspapers which don’t sell very well here like the Daily Telegraph or don’t sell at all, like the English editions of the Daily Mail and the News of the World. I’m sure we’ve all seen just how Scotland is treated in the pages of these papers, the go-to places to gauge the mind set of traditional Conservatism. They are riddled with the most appalling clichés, broad sweep prejudice and offhand dismissal at the best of times but when they write of ‘Scotland’ and ‘the Scots’ their columnists turn it up a notch.
They usually start by mentioning how much they know about Scotland, having once shot animals here, seen something at the Edinburgh Festival, or how their land-owning great-grandfather was adored by genuflecting locals, despite what nasty historians have subsequently said about the Clearances.
They will then mention the word ‘Braveheart’. They always do. I don’t know why. It seems to be an affectation. They will then conclude that ‘Scotland’ or ‘the Scots’ are living the life of Monegasque millionaires on benefits thanks to the continuing generosity of English taxpayers.
If David Torrance wants to understand why a naturally conservative country won’t vote Conservative then that’s just one of the many, many reasons why. Nobody likes to be patronised. After 30 years it gets wearying.
Alex Cox
The spectre of shortage
that shaped my
post-war life
Jill Stephenson
As we know, the past is another country where they do things differently. But perhaps it would be truer to say that the past is a series of other countries, with one’s view of them perceived through the lens of the age group to which one belongs.
A favourite, now deceased, colleague liked to say that, in his experience, people’s happiest memories were of the place where they had been in the 1960s. He had been a lecturer at the new University of Kent in the second half of that decade, and he was newly married, with two children born during the 1960s.
Being a decade younger than he, I find that my happiest memories are, by contrast, of the 1970s. I had my dream job, was recently married and had far too good a sporting and social life. For my parents, born before the first world war, the 1930s were the best of times. During my post-war childhood they used as a mantra the words ‘before the war’. This was habitually in the context of a grumble about the (then) present, where nothing, apparently, was as good as it had been in the relatively recent past – before the second world war.
Yet the years before the war were an age of depression, unemployment and mounting international tension which ultimately led to the distribution of gas masks, and to war. As a result of being regularly exposed to this mantra, in my formative years I came to think of ‘before the war’ as being synonymous with ‘better’. The reason, I am sure, for this usage was that before the war my parents were newly married, my father had a professional job as a science teacher in an Edinburgh school – a step up socially for both of them – and they had a good social life.
It is only in the last few decades that the scourge of litter – with people unthinkingly, and without a qualm, discarding packaging in the street
– has become a problem.
After the war, they were saddled with me, putting a blight on their social life (my interpretation, not something they complained to me about). By this time, my father no longer played rugby and cricket, which he had loved, and my mother was suffering from arthritis. Before the war had definitely been a better place for them. The period after the war was about struggle and shortage.
For those born in the 1930s and early 1940s, the war was a major formative influence. Even those of us too young to remember what it had been like to live through the war – including those of my year of birth, 1944 – had our attitudes to many mundane aspects of life shaped by the war and the immediate post-war period. If the adults of the 1930s constantly, and sometimes subconsciously, worried about being reduced to poverty (24 March
Rationing, dried egg, the unavailability of many items that were not rationed, power cuts…these are memories that for long made us feel guilty about waste. Sitting in a living room listening to the radio (or ‘wireless’), with only the light of the coal fire to make possible rug-making from a ready-to-assemble purchased kit, while in the hall a weak Calor gas heater was the only protection against the winter chill, is an abiding memory of my childhood. Another is being in a local group transported to Brownies one evening in a post van because all the street lighting was out.
Young, middle-aged and even some elderly people nowadays have no idea of how scarce everyday items were. In my early childhood, I tended to rush about and fall over, skinning my knees regularly. There was much tut-tutting as the last roll of cotton wool in the world – or that was how it seemed to me, from my mother’s reluctance to use it – was brought out from my parents’ bedroom cupboard. She would tear off a very small piece, saying that we didn’t want to waste it. What she refused to do, perhaps because we did not have food left over after meals – but I suspect there was also an element of snobbery in it – was to use the ‘piggy bins’ that were half-way along our street in Edinburgh. The girls next door were regular visitors to the pig bin, with surplus ‘pieces’ (slices of bread and jam). Waste not, want not.
The extent of the waste – of food and much else – that there is now would have been incomprehensible in the years after the war. This was before the days of plastic carrier bags and the absurd amount of packaging that now makes so many purchases inaccessible without scissors or a sharp knife. The paper bags that shopkeepers issued as wrapping for virtually any smallish item that one bought were carefully stored in the home for future use. It is only in the last few decades that the scourge of litter – with people unthinkingly, and without a qualm, discarding packaging in the street – has become a problem. At least into the 1960s, wrapping paper was conserved for reuse.
The post-war generation (ie those born after the war, from the later 1940s) grew up when rationing and power cuts were in the past and, gradually, living conditions were improving.
I have always thought that there is a major difference between those of us who (in my case, just) remembered rationing and those who did not. In April 1948 or 1949, my father took me to the local shops. In the confectioner’s, he had a lengthy negotiation with the proprietor. I was mystified when we left without a purchase. But some days later we returned, and a box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates was produced ‘under the counter’. Again I was mystified. The counter was utterly solid, and heavy manual labour would have been required to get under it. This, however, was my father buying – in a ‘black market’ transaction – a long-denied treat for my mother’s birthday, to try to remind her of what life had been like before the war. He did not have enough ration coupons for such a purchase, but a sum of money changed hands and the deal was done. It would be a few years yet before the rationing of sugar and sweets was ended.
The post-war generation (ie those born after the war, from the later 1940s) grew up when rationing and power cuts were in the past and, gradually, living conditions were improving. No wonder, then, that they had the luxury of being disillusioned which explains a lot about the self-indulgent shenanigans in 1968 on student campuses and elsewhere. For many of my (slightly younger) colleagues in German history, 1968 (Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, Castro and Rosa Luxemburg, were the heroes) was the defining moment of their lives, the time when old authorities were being challenged and revolution was in the air. Decades later, they looked back with nostalgia to this time of posturing.
For me, by contrast, 1968 meant the heart-breaking spectacle of Warsaw pact tanks rumbling into Prague and the depressing probability that the Soviet empire in eastern Europe would persist indefinitely, and would certainly see me out. And all the while, the ’68ers’ were giving at least an implicit, and sometimes an explicit, defence of the Soviet system compared with the ‘oppressive’ systems of de Gaulle and the grand coalition in West Germany. In and after 1989, some of these people did very nifty footwork, posing as long-time critics of the Soviet system. Those who were more honest about their previous allegiance were disorientated for some time, some of them regrouping to affirm that what had been practised in eastern Europe was not true socialism and that the struggle to achieve that should continue. Others ultimately reconciled themselves to the new order.
Perhaps those of us who have had the spectre of shortage in our minds, if at the back of them for decades, will fare better in a world where the supply of some fuels and items of food looks uncertain than will those who are not much younger but who have not lived with this spectre all their lives.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
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