Roads to Ruin (1951)

Book Review from the July 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Progress," by E. S. Turner.  (Published by Michael Joseph, Ltd., 256 pages indexed with 11 illustrations. Price 12s. 6d.)

Nowhere in the book does the author claim to be a Socialist. Written entertainingly, without indignation, but sympathetically for the exploited, he deals with some of the lesser known social legislation which caused much controversy—and is now almost forgotten. Forgotten because we accept and can hardly conceive of modern society without such legislation.

Among others he writes of the Bills for the abolition of spring guns (1825-1827); the struggle to stop the employment of climbing boy chimney sweeps (1780 approx-1875);: the acts to legalise the Saturday half holiday (1825-1911) and the agitation for the Plimsoll Line (1850-1906). These are the chapters that will have most interest for Socialists, although the accounts of other minor political disturbances are not without their value in exposing the depths of hypocrisy, cant, humbug and self interest to which the defenders of the existing social system descended in order to safeguard their position, profits and pleasure.

A justifiable criticism against the work is that it tends to foster the discredited idea that the main participants in these movements were the original innovators of the reform. The fact is that the general rising discontent of the working class against their oppressive conditions, both rural and urban, first posed the question. Only then did certain individuals or groups see the need and voice the demand for the particular reform. A modern parallel could be drawn if one overemphasized the importance of A. P. Herbert and his small group of supporters, who so successfully steered marriage and divorce reforms through the House of Commons in the nineteen-thirties, and underemphasized the hardships that impelled him to do so. Mainly they were the changing relationships between the sexes, consequent upon more and more women becoming wage earners and participating in activities outside the home. Since the Married Women’s Property Bill (1856-1882), described in this book, women have striven for more equal status and more control over their own property and earnings. It was some of these difficulties showing themselves in the marriage relationship that A. P. Herbert tried to resolve with his Bill.

It is not difficult for Socialists to believe that squires and owners of game preserves claimed the right to kill by hidden guns attached to trip wires any poacher of their fattened birds or indeed any unsuspecting stranger accidentally trespassing. Not difficult, that is, after the experience of two world wars which were the defence of private property raised to national level.

An established phenomenon in 1776 and not abolished until 1827 their retention was upheld by some of the most inhumane arguments. On page 17.

  "If the market gardener can use spring guns to protect his cabbages why not squires to protect their game?"

Guns were cheaper than keepers and on page 26 we read that the Duke of Wellington supported this view point. Further on page 29.

  “The object of setting spring guns was not personal injury to anyone but to deter from the commission of theft and that object was as completely attained by hitting an innocent man as a guilty man.”

Throughout the shocking history of the exploitation of children, in mines, factories, mills and workshops, in the early nineteenth century, there also runs the brutal story of the climbing boy chimney sweep. The detailed description of the horrifying experiences of these boys (and not only boys, for the author states on page 51 that the flues of Windsor Castle were at one time swept by two girls) form a chapter which will not be lightly forgotten. The gruesome accounts of tragedies, wherein children died of asphyxiation or brutal treatment from vicious master sweeps, stirred the country from time to time reviving the agitation, which lasted for 100 years, for the abolition of the practice. Death was not the only horror. Quoted on page 38:

  ". . . they suffered from inflamed eyes and throats and all manner of skin irritation, the worst of which took the form of a scrotal infection known as chimney boys cancer. .. . There was no cure but the knife and the less fortunate chimney boy might find himself in his teens, not only a bandy-legged hunch back, but a eunuch."

Self-interest defended this employment and the Church was no better. On page 46:

  “. . . this witness had twice been stuck in chimneys in his youth—once at the Bishop of Lincoln’s and once at Lord Melbourne’s . . .”

The Religious Tract Society published a booklet entitled “The Young Chimney Sweepers" (C.1830) in which the following paragraph is deservedly quoted on page 51.

  "This little book will show you that little boys like you have gone to Sunday School and have learned to read and become good. Mind that you go also. Get yourself well washed on Saturday and mind that you are in time on Sunday morning. Your teachers will be glad to see you with a smiling face.. . . learn your lessons and try to read the blessed Bible and to think about the gracious Saviour of whom it tells you.. . . Thus you will be happy little sweeps and you will learn to praise the gracious God, who can make our situation in life comfortable whatever be the circumstances in which Providence has placed us.”

In these days when the claims are all for a five day week, the arguments for a Saturday half-holiday may seem outmoded but when it is realised that shop assistants worked a fourteen and sometimes a sixteen hour day it is easy to understand the growth of the Early Closing Association formed in 1842. Not wishing to be associated with the radical movements of that day the Association attempted to effect a limitation of hours by voluntary negotiation and met with the failure one would expect. Eventually after a welter of moralizing on both sides the struggle entered the political field and an effective Shops Act reached the Statute Book—but not until 1911.

Early Closing Bills had been rejected as “un-English" and “grandmotherly” and Charles Bradlaugh supported these views in 1888. He further argued that a Bill to reduce hours to twelve on five days and to fourteen on Saturdays was “opening the door to legislation which might be of the most terrible character.” He regarded the Bill as “immoral” because it struck a blow at the self-reliance of the individual. Evidently the advocacy of atheism did not extend to the granting of leisure to workers to further study and propagate its cause.

Finally to the fight to save the lives of seamen sent afloat in “coffin ships” from which unscrupulous owners gained greater financial advantage if the vessel foundered and the insurance company paid without demur, than if the rotten hulk reached port safely. It had been shown (page 179) that “. . . I seaman in 60 met a violent death as against 1 in 315 in the mines.” On page 143 a ship owner, Sir Walter Runciman is quoted when he describes those times as:

  ’’days of aboriginal stupidity and sordid bloodsucking” when ships were . . . “scandalously unseaworthy, rotten, leaky, badly found, badly manned, abominably fed and always overloaded.”

It was against those prevailing conditions that seamen organised themselves. They were aided in no small measure by the vociferous agitation of Samuel Plimsoll and his supporters, for a load line on all seagoing vessels. On Samuel Plimsoll there is quoted (but not supported by the author) on page 144 the following:

  ”. . . But he (Plimsoll) was not a reformer, he was a propagandist and the famous 'Plimsoll Mark' indicating the maximum safe draught of a ship remained a valueless safeguard for no less than sixteen years after he secured it, for the simple reason that the selection of its position on the ships side was left to the ’murderers’ (i.e. the shipowners) themselves.”

As confirmation of this there was one “ whimsical Cardiff captain who inscribed the device on his funnel ” (page 170).

The scandal of coffin ships had exercised the deliberations of a committee of fifteen set up as far back as the eighteen thirties—over thirty years before Plimsoll was elected Liberal member for Derby in 1868. Nevertheless it was not until 1890 that the owners load line gave way to the Government load line, based upon scientific tables issued by Lloyds. Chambers of Commerce, Lloyds, shipowners, miners and engineers’ unions and not least of them, the Seamen’s Unions all played their part in the establishment of this and other regulations for sea-going vessels. The tragedy of it all is shown when we are informed that a thousand years before, Venetian and Sardinian sailors had a load mark, a disk similar to the Plimsoll Line. The Hanseatic League also used a mark, and, a glaring mockery to British sailors, so did the British Navy, based on fighting efficiency.

Who can doubt the accuracy of the Socialist case, with regard to reforms, in view of the length of time and enormous efforts which went into the establishment of even these minor reforms? Stated simply it is that whilst we accept all and every reform, grudgingly granted or strenuously wrenched from the capitalist class we do not advocate organising nor working for them. Our work is to organise for Socialism, knowing that when large numbers of Socialists exist the capitalists will be most lavish in the distribution of reforms in an attempt to retain their privileged position.

We recommend this book for reading by Socialists, and for all social reformers we suggest it as an “awful warning” to them for their future activities.

B.

The Great White Elephant (1958)

From the January 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Advertising In Modern Life

When they talk of the marvels of modern times and the loftier race that welfare reforms have brought to being, it is interesting to browse through the ads. in the papers and the television channel. Here, dress-suited prigs sit amid fake period furniture eulogizing cheap tinned soup; pasty youths sip their tonics and slick their hair in hopes of catching the boss's eye; fagged-out, rushed and noise-ridden people by the score swallow pellets and powders by the ton for the noise and rush to continue. Here, in fact, is as great an indictment as could be made of civilization in the mid-twentieth century.

Pure and simple, advertizing is salesmanship: convince the man and he buys your goods. In 1788, toothpaste makers were claiming that their stuff would "faften fuch as are loofe, keep fuch as are already decayed from becoming worfe, prevent the Tooth ach, perfectly cure the Scurvy in the Gums . . .  likewife render the Breath delicately fweet, and remedy all thofe diforders that are the confequence of fcorbutic Gums and bad Teeth." Sixty years ago the most popular soap powder was boosted as "possessing high detergent properties in a concentrated and effective form. Cleanses without injury to skin, fabric or texture."

It has long ceased to be as simple as that Then—years ago, a hundred and seventy years ago—you take it or leave it. Now, to leave it is impossible (except for the blind and the recluse). The advertizing man is no longer a huckster seeking new additions, one by one, to the satisfied buyers of Bloop. His aim is whole social groups, even whole generations, for whom life without Bloop would hurt or be shameful He is sociologist, psychologist, con-man, poet and maker of dreams, with nowhere private and nothing inviolate to him—not the innermost thought nor the smallest room.

There are a hundred means to this assault on social consciousness. Appealing to snobbery and prestige: it is smart to drink this, superior to smoke those. Linking prestige with pride in home or person: clean your home the modern way—and surely you don't still shave with the old soap-and-brush method? Evoking authority with tit-bits of pseudo-science, or vague references to clinical knowledge: the hair is a tube with roots, the intestines are twenty-six feet long, doctors and nurses know all about Blobbo.

The cornerstones of most advertising, however, are Fantasy and Fear. The strip-drawn advertisements for cosmetics, beauty soaps, beverages, and the rest, are explicit, deliberate fantasies of romance or success. In the best-known of them all the strips are peopled by an entire mythology of seemingly real characters: masterful executives, paragon wives and paternal fathers and, of course, the family doctor, benign and wise, sitting back recommending the hot drink that will send Henry bounding up the ladder of success. Or there is the fantasy in prose and a single picture, setting forth a desirable world with which buying some product will somehow put one in touch. Drink Crossbread's, and you commune with Old England, oak beams and dray horses; or Washington's, to be in spirit among the big-thighed footballers and six-hitting batsmen; open an account at the Lowland and enter the semi-detached realm of bowler hats and deference, chequebooks and U-conversations with the Manager.

And there are the sexual fantasies, the dreams of allure, enticement and capture. First shy glances drawn by white soap, first embraces made inoffensive by pink soap; erotic spells cast by shampoos, face creams and cheap perfumes with expensive names (Nuit dans l'Ecurie, one-and-three). Dreamiest, most voluptuous of all are the corset and underwear advertisements, with their Vie Parisienne pictures and their lyrical lore

“The line forms . . . in at your waist,
With a gentle lift of pride up there.
Dance Time, new summer guile . . .
With padded undercups,
And low-hugging Lastex round your back. . . ."

It is wrong to suppose, however, that the sales depend only on those who can share these fantasies. Equally, they set standards for the rest. For every girl who daydreams enslaving Fred by Gluggo, another girl fears the consequences of not using it The advertisements, in fact, make the consequences clear; before the happy ending to the strip a wise friend takes Jean aside and tells her why Fred avoids her.

This is one kind of fear played up by the ads.; fear of social or matrimonial failure. It hardly needs building- up, in a world of perpetual insecurity where most people know only too web that jobs and sweethearts are easily lost. There is fear of disgrace (someone isn’t using Pungo —see the offending noses wrinkle); fear of general inadequacy, of being talked about for remediable failings. This is the secret of the great soap-powder campaigns of recent years. In terms of competition, one may wonder how much is achieved by persuading housewives to change from Diz to Duz, particularly when both are produced by the same firm; but that isn't the real point The effect of seven years' competitive insistence that each soap powder washes whiter, adds brightness, is whitest of all, is whiter and brighter than white itself, has been to make whiteness a social value, something which no woman dare neglect for fear of censure and shame.

The strongest theme of all is fear of harm or deprivation to loved ones. Somebody's mum isn't using Gippo; somebody's baby girl has to ask if the jakes has been made safe for her with Fizz. The wake-up beverages play heavily on this, too; tiredness threatens a man's income just when his daughter has won her scholarship or his widowed mother looks to him for help. It is wrong to sneer at this kind of fear and say people shouldn’t be taken in by it. Nobody wants to be lonely or unpopular, still less to have his children deprived of companionship or opportunity. The advertisers find their material in natural, sensible feelings which are whipped into fears because our world is an insecure and frustrating place.

In a buying-and-selling society, the realm of advertising is unlimited. It goes far beyond the hoardings, the advertisement pages and the television commercials. Thus, in any woman's magazine, where half the space is taken up by advertisements, much of the remainder goes the same way:  fashion pages, beauty articles, stories grounded in the same dream-world as the adverts. The same applies for most magazines and papers. Holiday guides, technical pieces, the Christmas spirit; even the chit-chat about a personality may be, indirectly, advertisement of what he sells.

What are the effects of all this ? There is, of course, the known influence of advertisers on the Press. Large-circulation papers draw about half their revenue from advertisements, the smaller-circulation ones about two-thirds; half a page in the Daily Express costs £3,000. It would be surprising if newspapers did not defer to their advertisers' interests. Mainly the influence is indirect, a standing deterrent to certain kinds of criticism: "A newspaper that receives a large revenue from company prospectuses may have an unconscious bias in favour of our present financial system; and the paper carrying frequent advertisements of patent medicines may, without any conscious deviation from rectitude, give too little weight to the medical profession's views on such goods. A famous editor has, indeed, written unashamedly of 'such needless folly as putting the report of a fatal motor smash alongside of a motor advertisement'.” (“The Newspapers," Oxford Pamphlets on Home Affairs, 1944.)

Occasionally, more direct pressure has been brought to bear. An ex-editor of the Daily Herald stated that his paper’s policy during the Munich crisis was modified on account of the advertisers. In 1938, a British Medical Association advertisement, headed “Is All Milk Safe?” had to be modified to avoid prejudice to the milk industry’s campaign. In his American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard gives several instances of coercion by advertisers in the U.SA Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think (as some people seem to do) that newspapers would be substantially different without this influence; after all, the newspapers support capitalism and the advertisers are the capitalists.

The social effects of advertising go much further. Implicit in all of it is the commercialising of every human relationship: people are valued in terms of their possessions and buying habits, the dentifrice they use, the gleam of their shirts. In this world, as E. S. Turner remarks in his amusing Shocking History of Advertising, “loyalty means always buying the same hair oil. . . . A bride is not a young woman on the edge of a great adventure; she is a conditioned consumer, who, by buying the right cosmetics and the right brassiere has captured her man.'' A generation ago, How to Win Friends and Influence People was the salesman's obsession; now, it is the customer's.

Half-a-dozen minor revolutions in social consciousness—none of them making anyone better off—have been effected or assisted by advertising. The whiteness-phobia, the speed-craze, the conception of beauty and, newest of these, the odour-phobia. In recent times the deodorant business has extended its target from bad breath and strong perspiration to skin smells, cooking smells, “sudden smells" and vegetable smells. It seems on the cards, in fact, that in a few years all natural smells will have been outlawed and abolished, and nothing will be left except the scents of disinfectant and furniture polish. What is worth mentioning about the odour-ads. is that they are easily the lowest, nastiest and most objectionable of all advertisements at the moment (and that, by the way, is really saying something): where, one wonders, are the good taste and culture of which the capitalist class—and, no doubt, the artists and copywriters, too—has always claimed so much ?

The supreme social myth to-day, and the one which runs through all advertising of the last ten years is that of "standards of living.” Most symbolic of it, currently, is the cigarette advertisement which says "I'm raising my living standard" — by changing to a slightly dearer brand; though this writer's favourite is the television commercial where the woman spreads a margarine-and-paste tea for her family, standing in a five-hundred-pound kitchen. Perhaps the most explicit of all is the American advertisement (quoted by Colin McIver in The Anatomy of Advertising), which says

"I know my husband loves me.
"As surely as I know the sky is blue, that dreams come true, that to-day is my birthday . . .  that surely do I know my husband loves me.
"The soft gleam of our very own Gorham Sterling tells me he is thinking of me at wife, mother, hostess—dreaming and planning for our future together."

Modern advertising is the folklore (nursery rhymes and all—hear the children sing the ad.-men's jingles) of the "standards of living” age. It would be funny if it were not so tragic. While the success of a marriage is judged in Gorham-Sterling terms, the collapse of marriage is a major social problem; while people in to-day's hire-purchase paradise see themselves as far, far better off than ever before there are far, far more social difficulties than ever before. For all that has to be said about advertisements, the real criticism is of the society whose values and failures they reflect. Is there any substantial difference between the German general who said "Guns before butter ” and the rest of the world which puts commercial before human needs?

The only sensible way to organise society is for the satisfaction of human needs—that is, on the basis of ownership by everybody of the means of life and access for everybody to everything there is. No advertisements, of course, in such a world; only then, in fact, would the fine, rich wood of humanity flourish free from the dark, parasitic trees of commercialism.

Robert Barltrop

Trial and Error (1959)

Book Review from the June 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Call The Doctor. By E. S. Turner, (Michael Joseph, 21s.)

In an age of X-rays and artificial kidneys, there is no excuse for anybody thinking that the stomach is an oven where food is cooked by heat from the liver. No doctor now prescribes the gall of a bull mixed with vinegar, or wine made from six live vipers. Yet this, apparently, once passed for medical science. At this distance, it seems incredible that the patients stood for it; we can only hope that we are less gullible today.

Quacks

The book starts as it intends to go on, shocking us with the Salerno rules for the mediaeval physicians; (“When feeling the patient’s pulse, allow for the fact that he may be disturbed by your arrival and by the thought of the fee you are going to charge him"). It tells of the vogue for revolting medicines and antidotes, one of which—the bezoar stone—was discredited by trying it on a criminal after giving him a large dose of corrosive. The wretched man was found crawling like an animal around his cell, with blood streaming from every orifice of his body. There is the story of the quacks, (“The cheapest and safest Way of bringing forth ye Venom of ye Secret Disease .. . Sold by J. Sherwood, Bookseller") and the bodysnatchers, who supplied the doctors of the 18th and 19th centuries with their subjects for dissection. For hundreds of years, the physicians fought the over-indulgence of the well-to-do by drawing off rivers of their blood and administering tons of violent purgatives, and probably committing vast slaughter in the process.

Mr. Turner has a lot of surprises for us. Who knew that The Lancet was founded as a truculent rebel journal, which earned the disapproval of the Royal College of Surgeons by revealing the substance of medical lectures and reporting horribly bungled operations? Or that, before the day of anaesthetics, surgeons worked so fast that some could amputate a leg in the time taken to sprint a hundred yards? The operations were particularly gruesome—as late as the 1890's, the surgeon wore a frock coat which he kept behind his theatre door and which was sometimes so stiff with blood and filth that it could have stood up on its own. Equally sickening is to read about the ignorance of the sources of infection. About the doctor who carried in his pocket some remains from the abdomen of a woman lately dead of childbirth fever—and wore the same clothes when attending later confinements. Sometimes the doctors were reluctant to change their ideas. Here is plenty of ammunition for those who think the medical profession has always been an obstinate, unprogressive lot.

Disappointment

Yet when we have recovered from our disgust and surprise, what is there in this book? A little disappointment; the subtitle—A Social History of Medical Men—is hardly justified. There is no suggestion that the medical and surgical advances of the 18th and 19th centuries were related to the achievements of the Industrial Revolution. The 1914-18 war, one of the great disruptive social influences of the 20th century, gets a couple of paragraphs. Could it be that too much—over 500 years—is crammed into too little—just over 300 pages?

To satisfy Socialists, Call The Doctor must have pointed out that medical science cannot be excepted from the principle that our knowledge expands with the development of society's wealth-producing capabilities. That modern medical research and techniques reflect —and are made feasible by—the advance of modern industry. Anaesthetics could not have happened without the Industrial Revolution and it is hardly necessary to say that machines like the iron lung can only be made in a factory. The introduction says that the book is limited to an examination of the doctor as a member of society. Yet it ignores the influences which make society what it is.

Doctors and Patients

What position does the doctor hold in society? Although most of them would not concede it, they are members of the working class, compelled at times to defend their material interests. Twice during the past 50 years—in the National Insurance Bill of 1911 and the National Health Bill of 1948—the government has imposed changes on the doctors' working conditions. On each occasion, amongst the clouds of nonsense which they talked, the medical men could be descried resisting anything which they thought would lower their standards. Mr. Turner recalls the words of one doctor who opposed the 1911 Bill: “. . . we have a commodity . . . and we are practically monopolists of that commodity . . . are we going to demand a fair price for our services?” No shop steward could have put it better.

And the patients? Mr. Turner says, on the old Poor Law days,

  Among these were consumptives in crowded dwellings or sunless valleys, and workmen discarded by the industrial machine with their inner economy wrecked. What they needed was what no doctor could supply: food, fresh air, decent houses. All the practitioners could do was palliate their lot or give them illusory hope with bottles of cheap medicine.

Nowadays we are all on the National Health and some of the diseases which took their toll in the Poor Law times have been suppressed. But others have taken their place and always the effort to cure them is complicated by the fact that the majority of patients are compelled to work for their living.

Overwhelming Question

If, after the centuries of trials and spectacular errors which this book relates, the medical men are at last getting to grips witth their problems, we are leftivith one overwhelming question. How much more effective would they be, in a world free from social disease? ,

Ivan

Subject Normal (1958)

From the November 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pan Books have recently republished E. S. Turner’s History of Courting in pocket form at 3s. 6d. Mr. Turner has achieved a considerable reputation for the writing of light, informative books on subjects that lend themselves to a humorous, somewhat ironical approach. This, first published in 1954, is his most recent one; earlier successes were Boys Will be Boys, a study of blood-and-thunder literature, The Shocking History of Advertising and Roads to Ruin.

The book succeeds in what appears to be the chief object in all Mr. Turner’s writing—it is highly entertaining. It contains many very funny quotations, the style is without any of the pomposity associated with many books on history, and the points are made very neatly. Many of Mr. Turner’s own comments are shrewd, and he has made a very good selection of other authors’ comments as well.

There is so much enjoyment to be got from reading this book that any criticism may appear unkind. However, the jokes being told and appreciated, some reflections on the real nature of the subject are not out of place; for though no subject gives rise to so much mirth, perhaps no subject is taken so seriously by so many people. Courting has played an increasingly important part in people’s lives from the 12th century onwards. Any analysis of courting should also be an analysis of the development of society. This is not to suggest that a history of courting should attempt to be a history of social development; but the background should be sketched in and be implicit in what is written.

Mr. Turner does not attempt a comprehensive survey, but this, of course, is not a criticism; what can be said is that the book does not make any important generalizations about the subject. Mr. Turner’s conclusions, where he arrives at any, are somewhat commonplace. There is a continual shifting of the survey in time and place in order to take in those countries and times providing the most entertaining material.

One important point seems to have escaped him completely. The history of courting is not simply the history of techniques whereby men have sought to gain wives and mistresses; it is also the history of woman’s subordination to man. The ideals prevailing in any society, about courting, are those of societies dominated by men. All societies, at least since the rise of civilization, have created certain standards in the methods of obtaining wives, and women are expected to conform to those standards. Further, there have always been different techniques among different sections of society. Courting among the lower classes is always simpler and cheaper than among their superiors. Mr. Turner has made the latter point but does not give it the importance it deserves.

The book does contain a wealth of information; particularly effective are the sections dealing with romantic love in mediaeval Europe. As Mr. Turner has pointed out, the poetry, songs, fantastic dresses and gaudy battles between rival suitors in twelfth-century Europe were attempts by knights and nobles to render life in castle and manor house more interesting. An important factor here perhaps was the tedious length of a northern winter, with poor lighting and meals made dull by lack of fresh food; there was nothing for a man to do on a dull day except make love, sing songs or listen to the ardent troubadours. Although the courting of the 12th century appears to us to be filled with hypocrisy and vain, useless elaboration, human experience in what is a very important activity was permanently enriched.

The rise of modem society led to a further development of the ideals of romantic love. Courting, in mediaeval Europe the pastime of bored nobles seeking interesting experiences in seducing other men’s wives, became under Capitalism the most usual method of obtaining a wife. The idea of marrying for love is the product of a society that proclaims loudly the freedom of the individual. From this individuality there grew also the idea that women were the equals of men. socially and economically, though this freeing of woman from man’s domination is still not complete even in the limited context of Capitalist freedom.

In the 20th century the breakdown of the prudish moral standards of the 19th, together with the increasing conviction of the importance of sex, has led to new freedom in courting habits. Alongside this has gone some decline in courting. Courting has frequently been limited by economic factors; people are usually limited to their own class and even their particular group in their choice of mates.

At the present time the nature of our society is tending to disintegrate social life, and thereby people's individual lives as well. Everyone watches his own TV, minds his own business, makes his own way in the world, drives his own car, has—or wants to have—his own little suburban castle. There is little getting-together: the modern slick pub and dance halls seem poor substitutes for the communal gatherings of earlier times. Parties today often degenerate into that most unsocial of activities, watching the television. Entertainment is secondhand, and much of modern courting technique seems secondhand, too. Courting is declining into something altogether more flippant, casual—and unrewarding.

Mr. Turner sheds light on these and many other points. It is a pity that he does not adopt a more serious approach; as it is, this book could perhaps best be described as a humorous anthology of facts, opinions and quotations. It hardly achieves the purpose professed in the introduction; "to trace the progress of courting in the western world from the day of the troubadour to the day of the crooner.” Perhaps, too, a little less quotation and a little more generalization would have made a more interesting book. Not to be ungrateful; Mr. Turner has provided a gold-mine of interesting and amusing stories.

F. R. Ivimey

Two Shocking Books (1953)

Book Reviews from the March 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Your attention, Gentlemen, please. Are any of you interested in a pair of ball-bearing sock suspenders? No? Perhaps some of you would like a chest wig or a combined tooth brush and tongue scraper. No? Well, is anyone suffering from constipation or conjunctivitis; from corns, baldness, body odour, fallen arches, bad breath, night starvation or dandruff? Maybe you have diarrhoea, pyorrhoea or gonorrhoea. Whatever your needs, requirements or fancies, real or imagined, you can bet your last shilling that there is someone prepared to invest a little capital, not primarily for the purpose of satisfying your desires, but in order to collect some profit in the process of satisfying them.

If you have no needs, requirements or fancies, you can still be sure that there is someone ready to kid you or convince you that you do have some. Again with the motive of profit lurking in the rear.

That is the main job of advertising; to so present someones wares to you that you will feel that you must acquire them at all costs. You will be flattered, cajoled, threatened and have the wind put up you. All because it is necessary to sell goods before profit can be realised.

Advertising, although its history may go back well before the advent of the capitalist system, really embarked on its career with the birth of capital. Prior to that, advertisements were little more than announcements of entertainments. Capital, with its ever increasing need to find wider and wider markets, took to advertising like a duck takes to water.

Mr. E. S. Turner has written a book which he calls "The Shocking History of Advertising,” published by Michael Joseph, 15s. This book is a study of commercial advertising in newspapers and magazines, on hoardings, on the landscape, on the sky and in the ether. The field is limited to Britain and America and opens in the early years of the 17th century.

Mr. Turner is not a Socialist, but he has obviously spent much time in research and has unearthed a multitude of facts, information and anecdotes. Mr. Turner bubbles over with humour which makes his book very enjoyable. His object appears to be to make advertising more honest and less nauseous. In the process be has presented us with an interesting and amusing book on one of the sidelights of capitalism.

In a world where profit making is the motive force to production all sorts of rubbish, shoddy and inferior goods are produced. The purpose which such goods will serve is secondary. Whether they serve any purpose at all does not really matter so long as a market can be found for them and a profit realised. The chest wigs and tongue scrapers, etc., mentioned by Mr. Turner are an illustration.

Inferior goods must be presented as equal to superior ones, substitutes must be heralded as of the same, if not greater usefulness than the goods which they replace. The health, wealth and general well-being of the people who buy does not come into the picture from the capitalists’ point of view. Patent medicines, for instance, even if not dangerous in themselves, can cause a delay in the time before proper treatment is applied, and thus be a danger. Advertisers can bamboozle workers into collecting all sorts of goods and create the impression that such collections indicate an improved standard of living. With their collections around them, workers can look back on previous generations and imagine themselves better off than their forefathers, losing sight of the fact that their forefathers had things which they have not, and were without things which workers today might have missed with advantage.

Mr. Turner’s illustration of an advertising man is interesting. He presents him as a

" . . . new Jesuit; ‘Give me your children before they are five and they are mine forever.' To him all values are different. Fog is not something which delays trains; it is something which prevents people seeing posters. Words have different meaning; loyalty means always buying the same hair oil. To him a bride is not a young woman on the edge of a great adventure; she is a conditioned consumer, who, by buying the right cosmetics and the right brassière has captured her man, and who, when she returns from her honeymoon will go into the grocer's and automatically recite those branded names which have been the most loudly dinned into her ears for the last twenty-one years. To him all problems can be solved in terms of advertising. The remedy for absenteeism in the mines is to make miners want more luxuries. He has made women adopt men’s habits (smoking, wearing trousers) and now he wants to make men adopt women's habits (using perfume). . . . ”

On a previous page he says :

". . . the prime object of the advertisers was not to produce these gratifying results (improve the habits of nations); it was to sell more silk, more toothpaste, more disinfectant"

We can add, "with a view to more and more profits.”

We can recommend Mr. Turner's book for its well, nay, its fountain of information and for the fun to be obtained from reading it. He explodes many myths and superstitions and lays bare the “fear” type of advertising which makes people suspect all kind of ills, misfortunes and misadventures, and fly, terrified, to the purveyor of some quack cure or solution. He shows the attempts that have been made to make advertising more respectable and reveals how it has now, itself, become a lucrative field for capitalist investment. He rounds it all off with such anecdotes as the one about the American broadcast announcer who, whilst speaking on a sponsored programme, was supposed to say, “Always demand the best in bread,” but who spoonerised the phrase.

Wisdom without wit is like polish without spit. Mr. E. S. Turner certainly has wit. In an earlier book of his, “Roads to Ruin, the shocking history of social reform,” again published by Michael Joseph, 12s. 6d., he leavens his subject with a superabundance of wit.

The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which deals with the history of a reform that has been enacted during or since the 19th century. Special emphasis is laid upon the opposition to these reforms. Amongst the ten are the stories of the suppression of the use of small boys to climb and sweep chimneys; the struggles of Samuel Plimsoll to achieve what is now known as the Plimsoll line on ships; William Willett’s efforts to secure the passing of the Daylight Saving Bill and early attempts to reduce working hours and secure a weekly half-day respite for workers.

The securing of these reforms has called for much courage and sacrifice on the part of those who fought for them. None of them have in the least affected the position of the workers in the capitalist system, but they have removed some of the worst ills and abuses of the system. We raise our hats to most of the men who strived for them. The Socialist Party of Great Britain aims at the abolition of the system that gave rise to the need for these reforms and, in consequence cannot admit into its ranks anyone whose political objective falls short of that aim. It does not advocate reforms because it is a revolutionary and not a reformist party. That does not prevent us from recognising the merit of many reformers and the value of their work in easing the sufferings of millions of workers.

 

The attitude of the church, the aristocracy and the vested capitalist interests in their opposition to almost every reform that has been proposed is illuminating. Again, as in his other book, Mr. Turner has delved into numerous archives and sources of information and has collected for us much useful and interesting material.

When the Ten Hours Bill was under discussion, Nassau Senior made the most painstaking calculations to show that the whole of a capitalist’s net profit was derived from the last hour of work of his employees. If their working hours were reduced, he claimed, all that profit would go. Peel and Cobden thought likewise. Malthus said that the workers were lucky to be employed at all and doubly lucky to be employed for such long hours.

Samuel Plimsoll spent most of his life and a lot of his fortune in an endeavour to prevent shipowners from sending over-loaded, unseaworthy, over-insured ships to sea. The story of Plimsoll’s campaign, as unfolded by Mr. Turner, reveals some appalling instances of wanton waste of working class life in the interests of capitalist shipowners’ profits.

In some instances there were men who, whilst advocating the reform of one particular abuse, defended to the utmost other evil aspects of capitalism. Sometimes they were activated by their own profit making interests and at other times by a desire to embarrass or overthrow political rivals. The church dignitaries in the House of Lords are shown in a very foul light by Mr. Turner’s researches.

The author brings into play the same talent for wit, satire, sarcasm and humour that makes his book on advertising so enjoyable. Opposite the title page of his book appears a drawing by David Low of the character, Colonel Blimp, in a fighting attitude with a bath brush, with the caption, “Gad, sir, reforms are all right as long as they don’t change anything.” '

W. Waters