A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively
At the start of the new century, they are eroded by some degree of redistribution of wealth and, essentially, by consumer goods. Except for those at the top or bottom of the scale, most Britons eat much the same food, wear similar clothes, drive the same makes of car, the decay or otherwise of which is probably now the most potent signal of income (or inclination). Where and how a person lives tells you much, but no longer everything. And a street crowd today is far removed from that of the 1900s or even a quarter of a century later, when details of dress and appearance could nail pretty well everyone.
None of which means that we have achieved the classless society so blithely invoked by politicians. Indeed, the very fact that prime ministers of both political parties have gone in for aspirational talk of the classless society over recent years suggests that they are well aware that it is not yet with us.
Half a century ago, at Golsoncott, the bon-bon dish, the salver, the ivory-handled crumb scoop and the rest of all that symbolic metalware went into retirement; an obscure local non-event reflected a changing national climate. The place adjusted, as buildings do. It became very cold, in a world growing accustomed to central heating. The house contracted to an occupied heartland amid infrequently visited territories where things went their own way. By the 1980s the wisteria had sent leafy tendrils into the drawing-room and there was a magnificent wasps' nest in the attic sewing-room. The old nursery had long since become my aunt's studio. The enforced simplification rather suited her; she had never set much store by domestic niceties, preferred anyway to sleep under a tarpaulin on an open-sided balcony, and was relieved to be excused the tyranny of set mealtimes. Outside, only its bone structure and a number of tenacious growths were a reminder of what the garden had once been. The rose beds in the terrace were turfed over, the irises in the canal garden had dwindled away, bulrushes choked the canal itself. But the choisya bushes flourished, the Fuchsia magellanica showered down around the pasture that had been the tennis court, the rare hydrangea species in the front of the house grew sturdier by the year, and Erigeron karvinskianus was exuberant.
In 1995 there was still a tin of Silvo at the back of the silver cupboard, its contents long since dried up, unused for many a year. Eloquent of household change, but with further resonances in time and space. Silvo was, and is, made by Reckitt and Colman, the Hull-based industrial concern. Its use at Golsoncott was not just expedient but also a matter of loyalty. My grandfather, Norman Reckitt, was a grandson of the founder of the firm, Isaac Reckitt, an archetypal Victorian industrial entrepreneur. Trade, in other words: in the subtle hierarchy of the Victorian and Edwardian upper and middle classes the family would have been put firmly in its place. My grandfather was an architect and had no active involvement in the firm, but his son Basil was a director and ultimately the chairman. My information on the fortunes of the firm is drawn from his history, published in 1951. That defunct tin of Silvo evokes another world – that of timely industrial exploitation of the population's abiding demand for household cleaning products.
There is something neatly appropriate about Reckitt & Sons' products in any discussion of social change, wedded as they are to the nation's domestic circumstances. Starch, grate cleaner, metal polishes: the goods reflect an age and a lifestyle. An advertisement of 1939 (illustrated in Basil Reckitt's book) catches perfectly both the time and the tone. A buxom, aproned sixty-something passes an appreciative hand across what looks like a fine damask tablecloth: 'This is a lovely bit of work, Mum! It's just as well you've Mrs Rawlins by you when you've things in the wash like this. Heirlooms, I call them. Not that I can do anything more than what I've already told you, Mum. Pop it into my Reckitt's Blue so that it comes out dazzling. And when I come to the ironing, I've my Robin Starch…' the caption runs on for quite a while; Reckitt's seem to have been in the forefront of early twentieth-century product advertising (indeed, a film was made featuring Mrs Rawlins, played by the comedy actress May Brough) but had not arrived at the snappy soundbite.
Robin Starch was the descendant of the firm's original product, first produced back in the 1840s. On the wall of my London study today hang small reproduction portraits of my great-great-grandparents, Isaac and Ann Reckitt. Born in the 1790s, they had a foot in the eighteenth century, took advantage of the industrial boom of the high Victorian period, and laid the foundations of a twentieth-century industry. They were Quakers; Ann Reckitt, in her portrait, wears the white mob cap favoured by Quaker women. Isaac started life in Lincolnshire and operated initially as a flour miller; poor harvests and tumbling grain prices forced diversification and, in 1840, the family moved to Hull, where the starch manufactory was set up. The early years were hard going and the business survived only because Isaac was equipped with that vital asset of the private entrepreneur – sons. George, Francis and James, three of the boys, did gruelling stints as travelling salesmen while still in their teens, pressing samples of Soluble Starch into the hands of the innumerable small grocers upon whose favour the business would depend. The fourth son, Frederick, worked on site. Gradually, the business went into profit. New lines were added; by 1854 the list of products, though still dominated by the various starches, included Reckitt's Power Blue and Reckitt's Azure Ball Blue, along with several lines in Black Lead. After the 1914–18 war, Reckitt and Sons' main products were still starch and blue, along with grate and metal polishes. Isaac's astute enterprise had paved the way for the firm's invasion of the nation's kitchens and sculleries by way of Robin Starch, Reckitt's Blue, Brasso, Silvo, Zebra polish and, eventually, Dettol.
Starch. The very word conjures up for me a tactile pleasure unknown to today's children. Bone-white powder that you mixed with a little water to make a smooth and glistening paste with a squeaky texture, which stiffened to a fascinating chalky solidity. I remember being allowed to mess about with it on washing days. I remember too the crackle of a pristine starched sheet, and the crisp cotton frocks of my childhood. Laundry was taken seriously, back then.
Reckitt & Sons took it extremely seriously, to good effect. Washday products were the core of the business; an early excursion into biscuits generated little profit and thereafter cleaning products were the mainstay, with the expedient acquisition of competitors a prime concern as the business prospered. In the decade before the 1914–18 war, Reckitt & Sons gobbled up the Bluebell and Shinio companies – rivals in the brass-polish trade – along with a handful of other competitors, thus sweeping in some useful household-name products such as Cherry Blossom and Mansion. Major employers on Humberside, and now expanding overseas, they were a significant force in early twentieth-century industry; Isaac Reckitt's bold little business half a century earlier seems suddenly very far away. The stern-faced men in Board photographs are still predominantly Reckitts – there was always a convenient supply of sons – but the firm became more impersonal as it joined the mainstream of national industrial history.
Isaac and his sons seem the very essence of mid nineteenth-century commercial determination. Their energy – the boys trekking the north-east by rail (third class) and coach, dossing down in cheap boarding-houses. Their enterprise – experimenting with new products. Not always successfully, as when a dietetic arrowroot made from farina and intended to act as a substitute for real arrowroot (used as an invalid drink) was confidently offered to a potential middleman but failed to cool into a jelly, as required, exposing George to considerable embarrassment. They were quick to spot the importance of brand promotion: ‘Hast thou seen to the large placard being printed yet in London and hast thou prepared the wording for it?’ writes Francis to George. ‘How would this do: “Try the newly discovered Starch called Reckitt's Imperial Wheaten Starch, which for its great strength, for the brilliance of its colour, the splendid glaze which it imparts to the linen and the ease with which it is used surpasses any other”?’ And there is the streak of creativity that could prompt moves such as the dispatch of a quantity of starch to the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in 1850. The idea behind this was to in
There was a late flare of this creative thinking in 1927 (by which time Isaac's grandsons were directors of the company). A general decline in demand for the main Reckitt products was necessitating diversification – eventually into pharmaceuticals, and the ubiquitous disinfectant, Dettol. But the significantly reduced call for Brasso was giving particular pause for thought. The reason for this fall was that modern houses had fewer fittings which required polishing – door-handles and so forth. In an attempt to distract attention from this basic problem, the company set about a campaign to popularize the use of ornamental brassware, including the sale of specially commisioned goods by their own reps through the traditional channel of the small local grocery store. A neat idea, if something of a last-ditch stand.
Isaac Reckitt was in most respects a stereotypical nineteenth-century entrepreneur. Conditions in his Hull works would have been similar to those up and down the country: long hours and minimal wages. Indeed, the twelve-hour day worked by the female employees during the latter half of the century would seem to be in contravention of the 1847 Ten Hour Act. But he was also a Quaker. The benevolent paternalism of the Quaker industrialist was a feature of the firm from an early stage. There were education classes for girls during working hours (maybe that accounts for the twelve-hour day) and, in the 1900s, a Social Hall had been provided, along with a Girls' Rest Room, and a works' doctor and dentist.
These provisions arrived during the reign of Isaac's youngest son James. But his most enlightened contribution was the building of the Garden Village – 600 houses to be reserved mainly for employees of Reckitt's. Here he was operating very much according to the lights of the other leading Quaker industries – Rowntree's, Fry's and especially Cadbury's, whose Bournville Village Trust on the (then) outskirts of Birmingham must surely have been the inspiration – along with the whole garden-city movement of the time.
This discursion into industrial history seems a far cry from the domestic intimacies of a house in the most rural reaches of the West Country. Concealed resonances, once again. The contents of the Golsoncott silver cupboard are peculiarly eloquent in conjuring up a way of life and its accompanying ideologies. Many of these are completely mysterious to me – I wasn't around when all this was going on. But some were the backdrop to my own beginnings. Then I was there myself, in the thick of these practices, too young to do much but accept and record. And what was recorded is now blurred by subsequent understanding.
Our early assumptions and beliefs are archaeological debris and their retrieval is almost as difficult, and quite as haphazard, as the recovery of the vision of childhood. What did I think before I learned how to think? How did I receive ideas before I discovered scepticism? Within any of us there is a host of strangers – the people we no longer are but with whom we feel an eerie affinity. Sometimes they wave a hand in greeting; we recognize them with surprise, unease, distaste or kindly patronage.
The society of the late forties and early fifties in which I was young seems cut and dried in a way that today's is not, and that perhaps none could ever be again. It seems thus both through the prism of subsequent analysis and comment, and by way of my own uneven recollection. Here and there, things come into sharp focus; I know what I saw and felt and I know that it is not what I see and feel today. That world was one in which people were much clearer about who they were, and who others were. The definitions of occupation, speech and dress were a straitjacket on attitudes and assumptions. For a novelist, the most valuable rule when observing other people is to tell yourself that nothing is ever what it seems. Back then, things were all too often just what they seemed. At nineteen or twenty, I, too, wore a uniform that placed me (within what was, admittedly, a pretty broad constituency): female, respectable, reasonably well-heeled. Skirt with blouse, sweater or cardigan; raincoat on top, or tweed coat in winter; suit or frock for best. It was a uniform that made no concessions to youth, being a mirror image of that worn by a woman of forty, fifty or sixty. I certainly didn't look like the student that I was. At Oxford, some of us occasionally wore prototype jeans (not denim, which was not yet much around, but limp blue affairs) and felt rather dashing, but we wouldn't have dreamed of wearing them to a lecture or tutorial. The men were uniformed in brown duffel coats and grey flannels; girls wore skirts and sweaters by day, and got done up in strapless frocks for parties. I remember one contemporary who always put on hat and gloves to go to the Bodleian; however, we free spirits thought that a touch formal. But I had been plagued by gloves, as an adolescent. They had to be worn or carried on all but the most informal outings; without them, it seemed, my station in life would not be apparent. Puzzled but biddable, I spent several years losing slimy nylon objects until eventually liberated by student life and common sense.
Social and occupational uniforms are still around, but those wearing them may no longer conform to expectations. My father worked in the City. I remember going to meet him there one evening, when I was about sixteen. Emerging from Bank tube station, I found myself amid a throng of father-clones – droves of men wearing his suit, his bowler hat, carrying his furled umbrella, indistinguishable. I arrived at our rendezvous in a fit of giggles, and was soundly ticked off. My father was a man with a robust sense of humour, but the insignia of office were no laughing matter, in 1949. Looking back, it seems as though there was some unease and insecurity beneath the surface, forcing a need for identifying paraphernalia, in all classes. In a society that is given to classification, you need to establish your credentials, lest you become displaced. My grandmother would occasionally say of some acquaintance, in perplexity: ‘I find her rather hard to place.’ Today, a whole swathe of the population is unplaceable, and would prefer to remain so.
Post-war social reform focused upon opportunity – educational above all. How far this has come about is a matter of statistics, but is also essentially a question of climate. Social mobility can be quantified, to a degree: you establish a definition of class structure, investigate who springs from where, and thus discover how many people move up and down from the class into which they were born. By the late 1970s, 44 per cent of the post-war generation could be shown to have been socially mobile; an expanding middle class was absorbing those from ‘below’, and occasionally from ‘above’. Behind the bald figures lies the social metamorphosis – the emergence of a revised set of assumptions and expectations. And the expression of such change is that shifting vision experienced by any of us who have lived through these times.
My father's bowler hat would be an anachronism today. And I could not pick out an individual from a tube-station crowd – at Bank or anywhere else – and arrive with absolute certainty at their occupation or background. Distinctions in dress seem to be cultural now, rather than social; I can analyse the tourists in a London street by their clothes, as often as not – the cut of a continental jacket or raincoat, the transatlantic style. Home-grown uniforms nowadays are largely those imposed upon us by the rag trade and chain stores.
I cannot recover the certainties of the mid century and in any case they were not certainties for me, because when you are young your natural inclination is to question the status quo – bowler hats inspire laughter rather than recognition. But I can recover the format of that time – its structures and its preconceptions. I would not
The glass-fronted bookcase in the Golsoncott study housed a set of bound volumes of Punch, reaching back to the 1880s. The ultimate in languid contentment was a summer afternoon spent lounging on the veranda swing seat with a volume from around 1926 that I had not revisited lately, so that it had become somewhat unfamiliar. The text was so arcane as to defeat me entirely; the cartoons I devoured, but found them more and more baffling the further back in time I went. It was the in-built social comment that was impenetrable to my fourteen- or fifteen-year-old alter ego, I now realize. Not to mention the turn-of-the-century style, whereby a sequence of exchanges pile ponderously to a climax. By the twenties and thirties the jokes were somewhat more slimline, but still gave pause for thought – Mistress: ‘Can you let us have dinner rather earlier?’; New Cook: ‘Lor, yes. I'll just turn the gas a bit higher!’ Why was that funny?
Such cartoons remain distinctly unfunny today, considered in the detachment of the British Library's Reading Room. A far cry from the Golsoncott veranda, but the red-gold tomes are eerily familiar. And, now, the culture there presented is a revelation rather than a perplexity. The sociology of Punch requires wisdoms of interpretation. That said, I see now also that one of its fascinations, backthen, was precisely my confused awareness that something odd was going on here. A dim perception of processes of change – that 1890 was a long way from 1920 and even further from 1940. A visitation of other times and places where things were seen and done differently.