A Look Round. (1908)

From the January 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to “Bradstreet’s” there were 964 business failures in America in October, with assets 124 million dollars and liabilities 139 million dollars. In October, 1893, the failures were 1,753 with assets 36 million dollars and liabilities 55 million dollars. Thus in 1893 the average liabilities per failure were 31,375 dollars and in 1907 they were 144,200 dollars. But of the latter twenty failures account for 114 million dollars, leaving only 25 million dollars for the remaining 944.

* * *

The S.D.F., I.L.P., and the Labour Party were well represented in the signatures to the Memorial, relating to the employment of barmaids, submitted to the Chancellor of the Exchequer last month. They included Miss Margaret Bondfield, Rev. R. J. Campbell, A. H. Gill, M.P., A. Henderson, M.P., J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., and D. J. Shackleton, M.P. The memorialists claim that from the advertisements in the trade papers it is evident that the great majority of barmaids are engaged on account of their attractiveness to men customers, whilst the record of the magistrates and other courts gives convincing statistical proof that the career of the disproportionate number of barmaids ends in drunkenness, immorality, misery and frequently suicide.

* * *

Now, if public houses are such demoralising and terrible places as these people would have us believe, why do not they take up a logical position and advocate their immediate suppression ? And why do they suggest that the wives and daughters of publicans should be permitted to continue to work in “surroundings which carry with them special dangers and temptations” ? Do they consider the publican has a right of private property in his wife and daughters so inviolable that he is to be permitted to employ them in a career that “ends in drunkenness, immorality, misery, and frequently suicide” ?

* * *

But the memorialists would even permit barmaids now employed to continue in what they consider such vile surroundings provided they have a licence from the Government. They would “protect the young girls of the nation” but those who have already entered upon this horrible career are to be permitted to go down to their end “in drunkenness, immorality, misery, and frequently suicide” if they have taken out a licence !

* * *

The Government is to place it on record that public houses are places where no decent woman should work. The publican’s wife and daughters are not to count. I suppose the worst surroundings are too good for them, according to the ideas of the memorialists. Licences are therefore to be granted to other men’s wives and daughters, and no doubt the fortunate holder of such a badge of slavery will be regarded as one who has either proved herself able to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, or is so low and depraved that it does not matter what happens to her.

* * *

No one denies that the barmaid’s lot could be improved, particularly in regard to her hours of labour, but in many respects it is vastly superior to that of other women workers. As a rule, she gets plenty of food and good food, which is more than can be said of the girls employed in such highly respectable occupations as millinery and dressmaking, often working for nothing and usually for only a few shillings a week. If they live at home the financial effort required for clothing prevents them from being otherwise than semi-starved all the time, and many of them exist in a condition of chronic anaemia which in due course has its effect upon their offspring. If they “live in”—well, Miss Bondfield, who wishes to abolish the barmaids, being an official of the Shop Assistants Union, has time after time denounced the system. And it is said that there are large establishments in the shopping centres of London where the girls who live in are allowed to stay out all night, provided they pay a fine of ten shillings in the morning. Such a system cannot be charged against the publicans. And as to the alleged immorality, it must be admitted that there is nothing drives women on the streets so much as inability to obtain food and clothing for themselves and their dependents. The barmaid, at any rate, is secured against this.

* * *

Again, the atmosphere of thousands of coffee shops is much more immoral than the bar of a public house is ever likely to be, and the girls employed have no protection. Customers may use vile language concerning the food (as it is called) supplied in these places, and this language the waitress has to listen to. A remonstrance on her part to her employer would probably result in her getting “the sack,” as the competition is too keen, and the profits too small, particularly in the poorer districts, for the “guvner” to be able to afford to quarrel with his customers. But if a customer in a wicked public house uses vile language to a barmaid and the manager or proprietor overhears or it is reported to him, the culprit is either warned, or put out and sometimes forbidden the house altogether. And the conditions of the girls in these coffee shops, as to hours, wages, and food, are certainly much inferior to those of the majority of barmaids.

* * *

Of course the S.D.F. and the I.L.P., through their members who signed the memorial, are being made the tools of the most bigoted section of that nonconformist conscience which they have so often denounced. These pharasaical humbugs really wish to prohibit the sale of alcoholic liquors, but lack the courage to openly declare themselves.

* * *

According to the Daily Chronicle’s Rome correspondent between 50,000 and 60,000 Neapolitans have formed a passive resistance movement, and for six months have refused to pay rent or quit their tenements. The Government are taking the usual course. Controlling, as they do, the armed forces of the nation, which armed forces they will continue to control so long as they are politically dominant, they are using those forces against the workers. In the early part of December ten thousand troops from various cities had been despatched to reinforce the Naples Garrison preparatory to evicting the working-class families concerned.

* * *

Once more “the impracticability of the Socialist schemes” has been demonstrated, this time by a Mr. Moreton Frewen. He says that the total accumulated capital in the country is estimated at £9,000,000,000, which invested at 3½ per cent. would bring in about 5d. a day per person. The total income from all sources Mr. Frewen estimates at £1,500,000,000 annually, equal to about 14s. per head per week. “Thus,” says our oracle, “the Socialist ideal of happiness would result in every individual in the country being possessed of a revenue of 16s. 11d. per week.” And Mr. Frewen adds that this would not be “a very prosperous state of affairs.”

* * *

16s. 11d. per head per week, says Mr. Frewen, will be the income under Socialism. It is computed that the average family consists of five persons, so that each family would receive £4 4s. 7d. per week. But it is known that the working class have larger families than the well-to-do section of the population, and the amount would therefore be increased for working-class families. And this “would not be a very prosperous state of affairs” !

* * *

Well, if Socialism really meant dividing up what is known as the National Income, it would mean the trebling, at least, of the income of the mass of the working class. Chas. Booth has shown that 1,250,000 of the population of London are in receipt of a wage of one guinea or less per week per family, and in commenting on the Railway dispute the Daily Telegraph pointed out that, in the event of a strike, an enormous number of men would be willing to blackleg at £1 per week. “Twenty shillings a week is no luxurious wage we admit,” said the Daily Telegraph, “but it is better, alas, than many thousands of workmen in both, town and country can secure.” So that the “prosperity” of the working class under capitalism is represented by one-sixth or less of what, according to Mr, Frewen, they would receive under Socialism, And this proves “the impracticability of the Socialist schemes ” !

* * *

It is not surprising that opponents get the idea that Socialism merely means the equalisation of income or wages when those professing: to be Socialists endeavour to popularise the same idea. Recently I heard a Mr. Dean, on the I.L.P. platform in East Ham, inform a questioner that “of course, it would be quite possible for anyone to save up his money under Socialism, if he preferred not to spend the wages paid to him each week by the State. But he would not be able to employ anyone else with the money so saved. He would be a capitalist, but unable to use his capital.” And after delivering himself of this he read the titles of pamphlets which he advised the audience to buy and study, some of which explained that the wages system would be abolished with the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of Socialism.

* * *

This misconception of Socialism arises largely out of the advocacy of palliatives by both the I.L.P. and the S.D.F. So obscured is the issue, even to members of these bodies, by their talk of the “right to work,” “better wages for the working class,” “free maintenance for children” etc., that they appear unable to conceive of any system where the hooter shall not sound the time for commencing and leaving work, and where the people shall not be the wage-receiving slaves of the machine industry that they are to-day. They would merely “humanise” the conditions of employment.

J. Kay

Clubbable (2024)

Book Review from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain. By Pete Brown. Harper North £10.99.

The author describes working men’s clubs as ‘the biggest ever working-class social movement’. He provides an entertaining description of their history, enlivened by accounts of visits to specific clubs. One of these is the Red Shed in Wakefield, where the Wakefield Socialist History Group has hosted talks by Socialist Party speakers.

Clubs originated under paternalistic attitudes of people who wanted to provide male workers (industrial workers, originally) with an alternative to the pub. The Club and Institute Union (CIU) was established in 1862, and had a number of rich and often aristocratic patrons. Gradually, though, clubs became more democratic, run by committees of their own members, and in many cases it was the members who maintained and refurbished the buildings, without being paid for this work.

Clubs benefited from the licensing laws that applied to pubs but not to private clubs. They were not just about serving beer, as they also provided facilities such as snooker tables, reading rooms, concerts and lectures by invited speakers. In 1887 William Morris spoke on ‘Monopoly’ at the Borough of Hackney Club, but was taken aback at all the coming and going in the audience, waiters serving food and so on. Brown describes the Bloody Sunday demonstration that year, which was attacked by the police, as being held by ‘the London radical clubs’ (though some accounts mention others that contributed to organising it). Political activity gradually shifted to other locations, however. Many well-known names began their careers performing in clubs, such as singer Tom Jones, racist ‘comedian’ Bernard Manning and snooker-player Steve Davis.

An obvious question is the status of and attitudes to women in these working men’s clubs. Women were originally not allowed to join, but gradually things began to change and by the 1950s most clubs had ‘lady members’. The clubs could hardly survive without the income from and practical contributions by women, but it was only in 2007 that women achieved equal rights in clubs, after various campaigns and shortly before the 2010 Equalities Act. Bingo made clubs even more appealing to women.

The clubs have of course had their ups and downs over the years. The breathalyser and the smoking ban hit attendance and bar takings. Musical styles such as glam rock and punk were hardly suitable for them. In 1922 there were 1,150,000 members in over two thousand clubs. Nowadays 1500 clubs are affiliated to the CIU, with around a million members, though there are also clubs which are unaffiliated. The north-east of England is ‘the undisputed heart of clubland’.

An informative account of an institution that figures little in most social histories.

Paul Bennett

Finance and Industry: The end of the publican (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The end of the publican

Reference was made in these columns recently to the concentration of the brewing industry in a smaller number of large firms. According lo the Evening Standard (6/8/63) the process is continuing and taking new forms. One of these is that as the big firms find they can make more profit by having the public- houses run by their own paid managers, they are more and more getting rid of the houses run by tenants, as leases fall in. Some experts are forecasting a big fall in the number of publicans who run their own business, and those who remain are finding their freedom of action more restricted. Having been tied in respect of the brands of beer they could sell, they are now finding themselves limited in their choice of wines and spirits, and even cigarettes and mineral waters. The Evening Standard City Editor thinks that the big brewers, who launched their own brand of gin in opposition to the existing brands, will follow this up by producing their own brand of whisky.

He thinks the disappearance of the “free” publican a matter for regret and a positive danger, but does not explain how the all-round powerful drive concentration in industry and trade is to be halted. Governments may promise to turn back the clock by legislation, but capitalism has a habit of largely ignoring it. It was not only the Conservatives who said they were opposed to any form of monopoly, but there was a time when the Labour Party, too, wanted a large number of small capitalists in preference to a small number of large ones.

In any event it seems that the British worker to whom the Conservatives promised “full personal freedom and power of initiative” isn't going to be allowed to exercise it in his choice of pubs, beers, whisky, etc., quite apart from the limiting factor of his ability to pay.

Down with money

As a small by-product of the £2½ million train robbery the Daily Mail in its issue of August 10 had a full-length leader with the caption “Down with Money.” How bold and refreshing? Nothing of the kind: just the usual inanities of the newspaper editorial mind. The theme was that the robbers of the mail train would find it very exhausting trying to spend so much money and would soon discover that “ money is a nuisance and a bother.” So why not abolish it altogether!

After that daring promise of an idea came the flat triviality of the actual scheme: “Why do we not become a credit card nation, and free everyone from the necessity of carrying bulky pockets full of paper? ”

This, according to the leader writer, would save us all a lot of trouble. No money changing hands and being transported about or locked up in safes. Just Bank of England Computers giving everyone a statement each week of what they had spent and what they had left. All accounts would be settled by cheque. The writer conceded that we might still need a few metal discs for slot machines. “But for the rest let us just sign our names and give our numbers for everything from bus tickets to bingo games. ’ 

We may pause for a moment to contemplate the spectacle of millions of busy shoppers, and travellers signing their names and giving their numbers at shop counters, in buses, ticket offices, etc., and may well wonder whether they would consider it any less tedious than handing out notes and coin.

But there is a catch that the writer overlooked. His brain child all began with the £2½ million train haul and he closed on the note that “there would never again be another train robbery.” But if he thinks that as credit cards come in the opportunity for theft goes out he has overlooked not only the possibility of signing someone else's name and number but also of stealing or forging credit cards.

But let us invite the writer in the Mail to give his mind to a really bold and constructive idea. Let him ask himself why bullion, coins, notes, cheques and credit cards are in use at all; whose interest they serve; and whether they are really necessary?

The theoretical justification for the continuance of a monetary system is that it enables those who lawfully possess goods to sell them, and use the money to buy whatever they choose, when and where they choose. Seemingly a very admirable and convenient arrangement (even if it does get upset much and often by robberies). But it serves to mask the realities of production and distribution which from the point of view of the majority of the population are far from admirable. How do the lawful possessors of (the products of the factories, workshops, farms, and so on, come to be in that position? Because they have laboured to produce what they own and sell? Not at all. Just the opposite in fact. The one undeniable feature of the world we live in is that wage and salary earners who are employed to produce the goods are never the owners of them after production. The owners and the non-producers, simply by virtue of the fact that they are already the owners of the factories, either directly or as shareholders.

So the money arrangements are merely the cover for the legalised exploitation of the mass of the. population, serving primarily the interests of the owning class.

Of course, it needs boldness of thought to consider the fruitful possibility of all the people of the world simply producing what all need, and distributing it directly, without any monetary arrangements (and newspaper leader writers are notoriously timid, and fearful of thought) but having made a small start could not the leader writer of the Mail be induced persevere?

Wage restraint

Mr. Harold Wilson has shown candour in saying again, as he has said before, that any future Labour Government will count on the trade unions accepting wage restraint as part of a policy of restraint of profits, rents, etc. Amid some mild expressions of approval or disapproval, Mr. Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers Society, got into the headlines by declaring his emphatic opposition to any form of wage restraint. So the battle commences: Hill versus Wilson. And how will the issue be settled? Shall we end with wage restraint or without wage restraint? The answer is that, so long as we have wages, the efforts by workers to push them up and by employers (backed by governments) to push them down will continue: nothing will be settled.

The trouble is that those who argue for and those who argue against wage restraint are not really arguing about whether it should exist or not, but only whether its existence should be admitted in words.

Take Mr. Hill, for example. If, correctly reported, he does not want any form of wage restraint and presumably thinks that if a declaration of “ no restraint” is made, the situation will be different. But, of course, it will be altered hardly at all. For years, indeed for generations, and long before a Labour Government invented the term “wage restraint” to describe its policy, there have been workers and trade unions which have demanded higher wages, and fought bitterly by strikes to get them: and have never got the wages they demanded and thought they ought to have. They have not been restrained by the words “ wage restraint,” but by the resistance of the employers and the power of the government—in the last resort, military power.

What has Mr. Hill to say about his own Union. He has never accepted wage restraint, but he has repeatedly had to accept the fact that his Union members could not get the wages they were asking for. What has Mr. Hill done about it? He has done what he could, but that did not include getting rid of the fact of wage restraint.

As remarked earlier, this is bound to last as long as the wages system lasts, and most people, including apparently Mr. Hill, unfortunately will not get round to recognising that the wages system could and should be got rid of along with the rest of capitalism.

The role of gold

In an address to the Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg recently, the President, Mr. P. H. Anderson, reviewed the prospects of gold mining in South Africa. He stated that in the last 15 years output has more than doubled. It reached a record of 25 million ounces in 1962, and the first five months of 1963 showed a further 10 per cent. increase, but with the exhaustion of mines and in spite of the development of new areas it may now have reached its peak. Employment in the mines has begun to fail from the 1961 peak of 40,000 Europeans and 400,000 Bantu.

The working profit from the gold mines in 1962 was £123 million with a further £21 million from uranium, and dividends of £55 million.

One of the factors stimulating gold production and profits was the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1949, and the South African gold interests have for years kept up incessant propaganda for a general devaluation of world currencies, including, above all, the American dollar. In spite of repeated assurances by the American government that they have no intention of doing this, Mr. Anderson states that a number of South African mines are continuing in operation, though making losses, in the hope that devaluation will sooner or later come to their aid.

As is the way with all vested interests looking for means to increase their own profits, the South African gold interests, backed by a number of economists, argue that it is in the interest of world trade in general, and in particular that it would help the “West” against “Communism,” meaning by the latter the Russian government.

One of the counter arguments from the United States has always been that revaluing the dollar from its present rate of 35 dollars to an ounce of gold to some higher figure (50 dollars is often mentioned in the propaganda) would help the Russian Government since Russian gold stocks would automatically be worth more dollars in the world market.

It has often been claimed that Russian gold production is only second to that of South Africa and rising rapidly (a figure of over 17 million ounces was claimed in 1958). But some of the gold experts outside Russia have been sceptical about Russian output and the size of its gold reserves.

“Lombard” in the Financial Times has recently mentioned various estimates of Russian output, but dismisses them all as no more than “ intelligent guesswork.” But, he claims, if total output and stocks of gold in Russia are not known, what is known is that since the early nineteen fifties Russian gold has been coming into the world market at the rate of something under 7 million ounces a year.

His conclusion is that this figure probably represents something approaching total output and that the supposed enormous gold reserves of the Russian government are mythical—unless the Russian government, like the South Africans, is also waiting for the day when the American government devalues the dollar in terms of gold.

For Socialists it has its own lessons. In spite of the nonsensical forecasts of some alleged experts that the devaluation of the Pound in 1932 would be the end of gold, it still plays its old role in capitalist international transactions, just as much for capitalist Russia as for the rest of the capitalist world.

Edgar Hardcastle

Old Time Music Hall (1963)

From the March 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

A gulf of time separates the original working class entertainer who amused his fellows with rough song and dance, from the plushy, awed restraint of the present- day Command Performance. The Music Hall of yesteryear is gone, never to return. Its roots were in the unsettled, lucre-mad savagery of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. All that then remained of the abundant regional folk song and music of the English countryside went into the melting pots of the industrial towns to emerge in a uniform pattern of urban culture.

The rural culture, smothered in the slums of the towns, managed to find an outlet for fragmented skills and techniques in the drink-sodden atmosphere of the “pub.” In those days, the public house was new and quite distinct from the ancient inn. It had cut glass, fine woodwork and gas lighting, and offered more comfort and social contact than the home. It was to the early Victorian worker what the coffee bar is now to the Earls Court bed-sitter.

As industrialisation increased, the skilled worker obtained some change in living standards. Some of his wages remained after his basic needs had been met and the brewing trade had a fairly free field in mopping up this surplus. In time, the larger public houses had halls where beer, food and tobacco were helped down by the mixed talents of the entertainers, with the very necessary chairman in control.

It should be remembered that prior to the Theatre Emancipation Act of 1843, straight dramas were allowed only in Crown-chartered theatres of which there were but two in London. This law was evaded by wedging musical comic and acrobatic turns between drama and sketches—“Variety,” in other words. By the time the theatre was freed of restriction, the prolonged effects of State control had already funnelled variety into some form of theatre or hall, and here its ultimate flowering took place. The halls, along with the theatres, were the principal suppliers of performers in growing numbers. In the very poor areas a much lower standard existed in the form of the gin shops, where the “penny gaff” provided crude doggerel, larded with a hefty helping of bad language.

In the early days, the main halls charged admission, which was repaid in food and drink (wet money). This was an encouragement to spend more as the evening wore on. The entertainers were often employed on the premises in some other capacity and received a supplement for their extra efforts. Hence the development of such people as singing waiters. Many publicans were themselves capable performers, such as Collins of Collins Music Hall fame.

But it was Charles Morton who took a big step in the establishment of the music hall. In the 1850’s he enlarged his hall at The Canterbury by demolishing an American skittle alley and created what was for those days a super-modern theatre. Women were eventually allowed in—a good box office draw—and “wet money” was abolished in favour of set admission prices. This meant that artists could now be paid salaries and become specialised—an important change.

Morton himself was very conscious of the need to improve working class taste. Capitalism, after all, needed something more than just a mass of degenerate proletarians. So The Canterbury even sported a picture gallery and selections of opera and ballet were included in the programme; in fact, the first performance in Britain of Gounod’s Faust was performed at The Canterbury. Nor should we forget that in the I860's such halls as Turnham’s White Lion and the famous ’’Met” in Edgware Road, London, had their full-time ballets. Workers who frequented these places did not regard such art form as being above them or effeminate, and although one must allow that standards then were much lower than those of modern choreography, working class acceptance of ballet in its introductory form doubtless played a fair part in its subsequent development.

In the next few years, the halls separated from their public house origin and only the names continued to bear trace of the site of their birth. Laws were passed in 1870 ordering the closing of places of entertainment by midnight and prohibiting the sale of food and drink in the auditorium. This put paid to the Chairman, and correct theatre procedure took his place. But by then capital was flowing into this expanding business and a whole army of song writers, costumiers and small timers were earning their living at it. The audiences still sung, cried and thrilled with the performer, and the personal contact was still a factor, even though it was getting more remote.

By the I930’s, the music halls were in decline. A devastating world war and generally changing conditions saw to that, and it was not to be long before memories were all that remained.

It is interesting now to look back over the years of their heyday and compare them with the present. The most outstanding change is in the type of popular songs) Almost exclusively modern lyrics lean on a theme of sexual love and centre on the young, whereas the old music halls produced songs about almost every human emotion and experience. Love, bravery, misfortune, poverty, snobbishness, death and patriotism they were all there. Workers were still closely knit, even in the large towns, and the isolation behind the lace curtains of suburbia had yet to come. Personal misfortune was eased by the direct mutual aid of one’s neighbours. Today, the state has moved into this field.

As industry develops, every aspect of our lives becomes affected by it, and no field of human activity is left unscrutinised in the search for profit. So the trend in modern songs is not surprising. Who is much bothered if the fervour of young love is aroused by pop singers who, even by general standards, are poor, so long as the money keeps rolling in? Anyway, the ruling class are probably thankful that their young workers spend so much of their spare time shuffling and mooning about broken hearts and frustrated passions. Their minds will not then so readily turn to more awkward aspects of the system.

But modern capitalism has produced something else the quite untenable assumption on the part of many teenagers that we have moved into an era of slickness and high-toned quality in song production. A comparison of the pop songs of today with those of the old music halls will show the falsity of this. There is a difference between the two, yes, but a subtle, one; both are reflections of poverty not only in wealth itself but in the understanding of the capitalist world.

Private property society has divorced its workers from the means of wealthy production and has reduced many of our tasks to simple manipulation. It has also brought about a uniformity of taste, ideas and general behaviour which social reformers may wail about but which none of them can alter. We hope we have said enough by now to show that only a classless, property-less society will make any radical change in this state of affairs. It will be then that we can express ourselves fully and encourage variety in the truest sense of the word. But it is only the working class who can ring up the curtain on this new world.

Jack Law

The Passing Show: Radio Rot (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radio Rot

I have to make an admission that I do like listening to the radio—and watching the TV, too, when I get the chance, which, as I don't have a TV set, is not very often. Of course, you have to use discrimination in choice of programmes and learn to resist the mesmeric effect of the box. There is, after all, a little switch on one side and this must be firmly turned off if you are not to sit through programmes such as "Take Your Pick" with Michael Miles or “Juke Box Jury" with David Jacobs. This was a cruel lesson I learned when I did have a set, but maybe there was some value in watching them once or twice—a sort of immunisation process.

Of course, not all the radio and telly programmes are “light,” at least not intentionally so. There are some pretty good documentary features which are useful as far as they go, and the B.B.C. does encourage some controversial discussions in programmes like “Any Questions.” And they can be quite enjoyable providing you don’t get too het up at the puerile questions which they deal with in all solemnity. If you are a Socialist, you will naturally feel it just that much more acutely.

For a Socialist is so very aware of the really big problems of the world and how to solve them, that it must be like twisting the knife in a wound to hear the questions panel heatedly discussing whether Bernard Levin should be more polite or whether gambling winnings should be taxed. The piffling, inconsequential drivel that some of the “personalities" talk at a time when millions are starving and the world is dangerously close to a third big war, has to be heard to be believed. Even the “serious" commentators rarely get anywhere near a fundamental consideration of the way we live today.

But after all is said and done, it should be no more than we expect. The BBC, ITV, Pirate Pops as well, can only in the main reflect public interest and as we are all too painfully aware, this does not include a serious consideration of the Socialist case. Which is the real reason behind the consistent refusal of the powers-that-be to grant time on the air to our Party. When Socialist ideas are much more widely accepted and discussed we will not have to pester the authorities for a measly five minutes. They will be asking us instead.

Goodbye to the Afternoon Nap 

It is just another of the many nasty tendencies of capitalism that it is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to abolish or whittle down those of our leisurely customs which interfere with production and profits. In our December issue, we recalled how the 12 days of Christmas was very quickly reduced to one when the industrial revolution got under way, and although we get more than one day nowadays, it is nowhere near the original number. But even then, we were wrong to take it. according to some newspapers who seem to place the national productivity drive before all else.

Then again, some of our older readers may recall the circumstances under which pub licensing hours in this country were restricted. When my father was a boy, the public houses were usually open all day. some from 6am till midnight, but the First World War stopped all that. It was found that there was a tendency for munitions workers to spend their overtime earnings over the bar and to miss some of their shifts, so the licensing hours were severely curtailed and remained essentially so until fairly recently when there were minor revisions. Nothing really to do with any concern for our health—this time it was munitions production which caused the axe to be wielded.

No doubt you can think of other examples such as the shifting of May Day to the first Sunday in the month, and thus you might be inclined to think that it's a good job workers have struggled over the years to increase the paid holidays allowed by their individual employers.

Britain is not, of course, the only country where the cry is for more work and less leisure. You would never have thought that the afternoon siesta, such a part of life for those in hotter countries, would go: yet this is what looks like happening in Chile. The government there has decreed that the four hour lunch period be reduced to 30 minutes, and that all bars close between mid-day and 7pm each day.

Perhaps, as the Evening Standard editorial of January 8th pointed out, somewhat slyly, the indigestion pill manufacturers will do a roaring trade and the ruling class will get some increased production and profits. But for the Chilean workers it is the same sad story of the reduction of their leisure time and per- haps an increase in stomach ulcers. For as the Evening Standard also points out: "A half-hour hastily snatched lunch breeds ulcers faster than almost anything else in the world.”

More New Year Hypocrisy

It was perhaps in the nature of capitalist polities that the late premier of India, Mr. Shastri, should receive praises and tributes following his death on January 11th. With China breathing hotly down their necks, there had been strenuous efforts by USSR to patch up the India-Pakistani quarrel and Mr. Shastri's death occurred only a few hours after he had signed a peace agreement with the Pakistan president Ayub Khan.

Doubtless it came as a shock to various statesmen, not least the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr. Kosygin, but Shastri's demise is not likely to have any great or lasting effect on the world situation, despite the sloppy tributes of Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. The U.S. President was true to his usual hypocritical form when he spoke of the news as “a tragic blow to the hopes of mankind for peace and progress.”

Indeed, the history of Shastri's short term as Premier (a mere 18 months or so) has been anything but peaceful. In that time he had been involved in clashes with China and Pakistan and had openly stated that his government were considering the production of a nuclear bomb. Previously he served under Nehru, whose government went to war originally with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, and not so long ago annexed Portuguese Goa. In dealing with striking workers, Shastri’s government was just as brutal and repressive as its predecessors.

But all this you are not supposed to remember as canting politicians heap praise on the dead man’s shoulders. And the tragedy of it is that many workers will indeed not remember, even though the events were all so very recent. It is the Socialist who will bear it all in mind and point out that despite his apparent gentleness as a person, Shastri was one of Capitalism's politicians, and in that role, he was as much an enemy of the working class as Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler.

Gaspers

  “In 1960 nearly seven and a half million people in the United Kingdom were living in poverty, defined as below the National Assistance standard." (Report by Professors Smith and Townsend 23-12.65.)

  "Mr. Jack Stone, who has resigned as managing director of Lloyds Packaging Warehouses, is reported to be in line for a Golden handshake 'well in excess of £50,000'." (Guardian 10.1.66.)

  "Protecting this (copper) trade is not merely a matter of charily towards Zambia since about 45 per cent. of Britain's copper comes from the Zambian mines." (Guardian report 7.1.66.)

   ". . . Only by accepting a less ambitious full employment target will employment be brought under control." (Daily Telegraph editorial 10.1.66.)

  "Aspro-Nicholas Ltd. said last night that it was prepared to send Oxfam and War on Want £250,000 worth of tablets which were being withdrawn from the market . . .” (Guardian 11.1.66.)

   “The Duchess of Norfolk is planning a banquet for 300 dogs in the grounds of Arundel Castle, to raise funds for a stray dog Sanctuary." (Guardian 10.1.66.)

  

   ". . . Labour won the last election, and is proving a visibly non-Socialist party." (The Economist 8.1.66.)

  "Christmas, for me, is out of this world” (The Bishop of Guildford in his Christmas Day broadcast.)

Eddie Critchfield

Some publications. (1906)

Book Review from the April 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Women as Barmaids (P. S. King & Sons,) l/- nett. 

An essay in legislative tinkering, endorsed by the Rt. Rev. the Lord Bishop of Southwark. Of a total of 4,171,751 women engaged in various occupations, 27,707 are barmaids. The argument is that the moral atmosphere of a public house is highly reprehensible and results in a larger proportion of assaults, suicides and murders in the barmaid business than in any other. Because of this reprehensible atmosphere and its effects "The Joint Committee on the Employment of Barmaids" (of whose existence we hear for the first time) recommends a bill for the abolition of women in public houses, except when they are the wives or daughters of licence holders when the relationship may, presumably, be expected to counteract the evils of the environment—although if it is the atmosphere which is at fault, relationships with the publican could not greatly affect the results complained of. Wives and daughters would still be exposed to the dangers referred to, as for example, assault for refusing to serve a customer alleged to be drunk. (It is a quite common we understand in such cases, for the irate customer to demonstrate his or her sobriety by flinging a glass at the barmaid.)

The Joint Committee will not endeavour to ascertain why the atmosphere of a public house is as bad as they have concluded it to be. They will not attempt to lay bare the roots of the disease. They will simply turn 27,707 women out on to an already over-crowded female labour market and then congratulate themselves that these women at any rate, will no longer be affected by the lewd and alcoholically stimulated sensuality of places of call within the meaning of the Act. And the women will, if they are lucky, get other employment where, as in the Potteries, sexual inebriation is stated to be as bad as it can be anywhere, or failing that, may go to recruit the ranks of prostitution or increase the general proportion of suicides. Which is as perfect an example of an endeavour to kill time by putting the hands of the clock forward as it is possible to meet.

The Joint Committee seem to have missed the fact that they are merely pottering with an effect without reference to its cause, and that the only purpose that can be served by prohibiting the sale of drink by women is to shift the problem, not to deal with it. If alcoholic and sexual excitement is the cause of the trouble (of course such excitement is itself merely an effect) it will not be allayed by the absence of barmaids to any notable extent. Failing gratification in the bars, it will go outside. Then we presume the Joint Committee on Barmaids will become the Joint Committee on something else and promote another bill. It is very tiring.

Proper Gander: Fancy a Pint? (2012)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

How many of us unwind after yet another unfulfilling day of wage-slavery with a glass or two of temporary escape? Alcohol is one of our coping strategies, but it’s also, of course, a great social lubricant. Pubs, bars and clubs just wouldn’t be the same without “the magic liquid that unlocks the door to the human heart”. And our drinking takes place in a context of the “unwritten codes and rituals” which govern what, when and how we drink. BBC4’s documentary The Rules of Drinking took us on a pub-crawl through Britain’s boozing habits. Along the way it showed how the etiquette around alcohol has changed over the last seventy-odd years.

For example, our place in society has often been reflected in what we drink. Programmes like this rely on generalisations. So, if you’re a miner wanting to wash your throat of grime from t’pit, then you’d choose beer. If you’re a demure debutante, then you’d sip cocktails until you got terribly squiffy. And if you’re a twenty-first century teenager, then it’s nine pints of lager, two flaming sambucas and enough vodka to drown an elephant.

The programme also showed how alcohol’s etiquette extends to how we drink. In working men’s clubs, beer and whisky was the usual tipple for everyone, so your status within the club was reflected in where you drank it. Apparently, the younger members would stand on the lino until they were invited to stand on the carpeted section by one of the older clientele, a sign that they had been accepted. Women usually only stood behind the bar.

Nowadays, we’ve gone back to drinking the same amounts as before the First World War, albeit in different ways. Keeping up with other social changes, the rules around drinking have became less rigid over the decades – cue inevitable footage of plastered twentysomethings vomiting up alcopops in the gutter and picking fights with double-decker buses.

Even when alcohol is used to try and blot out the pressures of capitalism, the ways we drink it still reveal something of our class position. Documentaries like this can get away with glossing over the details as long as they distract us with enough archive footage of garish 70s dinner parties or men in flat caps. And The Rules of Drinking served up enough enjoyable old shots to get you drunk on nostalgia.

Mike Foster

The Changing Public House (1954)

From the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom drank twelve and a half gallons of beer, statistically speaking. In addition, we disposed of a pint and a half of spirits and a quart of wine each. The only thing to be said in our favour is that our fathers, 60 years ago, drank nearly three times as much on paper and, the child population being larger then, probably four times as much in practice.

Figures are hardly needed to show that people drink less nowadays. A drunk in the street or a man with a grog-blossom is a rare sight; the pubs are empty—not literally, of course, but certainly by comparison with other, quite recent times. The local that was once the Pantheon of the neighbourhood, with knees-up in the bar, a Saturday night overflow on the pavement and a fight now and again, is now a comparatively quiet place where people drop in for a glass and not much more. And in the more newly built suburban areas, pubs generally are few and far between. Today in Britain there is roughly one public house to every 600 people: 50 years ago it was one to 350, and a century ago one to every 100-odd.

It might look as if the two centuries campaign against the horrors of drink has worn resistance down. In fact, there is probably less “temperance’’—the word should mean moderation, but has come to stand for a dogmatic extreme—less temperance today than there was in the 19th century, when its disciples wore blue ribbons and had every child sign the pledge whom they could lay their hands on. Most men and women drink, but not so much and not so often, and they do quite a lot of it at home. Those who visit pubs daily—ask for “the usual” and call the barmaid by her first name—are mainly older men. People under 40 go to pubs, but not as a habit. Their lives have different rhythms. That is what really has happened. Public houses and peoples’ drinking habits have changed: the real change has been in the pattern of social life, to which institutions and attitudes are shaped and fused.

The true significance of the public house is a communal one. Every well-knit community has its centres, places where people of all sorts go to do business, hear news, form opinions and enjoy one another’s company: the market place, the church and, since the Middle Ages in Britain, the inn. There have been and are others, like the coffee-house in the 18th century and the caff in our own generation, but each of them limited to particular social groups (the cafes in fact have a stratification of their own from arty haunts to good pull-ups for carmen). The pub accommodates many groups. Public bar, saloon, private bar and lounge, separate only by wooden partitions, are distinct milieus under the same roof.

The fact of modern counter-attractions to public houses is obvious. Fifty years ago there were no pictures, no radio, no speedways and so on; a good many people nowadays drink bottled beer at home while they watch the television. Something more than mere counter-attraction has caused the decline in public house life, however. It is worth remembering that music halls, the great entertainment at the beginning of the centuty, were also places for drinking. Their successors, the cinemas, have no facilities for it.

A great deal of everyday social activity has taken place in pubs. Workmen ate and were paid in them— farther back, trade unions and friendly societies met in them. Shopkeepers and small businessmen went to private bars for transactions. Less obvious things, too: not so many years ago, housewives took bowls of vegetables into the locals and sat shelling peas or peeling potatoes with glasses of stout beside them. Public houses had their own football teams, with a pitch behind the premises and several hundred habituees to give support (the writer played for one, and a very good team it was). There are not many such teams now, simply because few pubs can raise them from the regulars.

Industrial and political developments have eliminated much of this activity. There usually is a canteen wherever more than a few people are employed, and a wages office as well. The late 19th-century war between the Conservative brewers and the temperance Liberals linked anti-Conservatism with disapproval of drink; the growing Labour movement set up Trades Halls and Committee Rooms, taking the meetings out of the pubs. The small tradesmen, forced into political participation by the near omnipotence of combines and multiple shops, met in Conservative Clubs instead of public houses. Both ways, political parties helped to clear the bars. It is true also that the quality and amenities of everyday life have altered since those days when the pub exuded, to quote Trevelyan, “ its promise of warmth and welcome on to the wet inhospitable street.”

More than anything, however, there has been a falling-off in communal living and thinking. In modern industrial society, any sort of local community is exceptional. Apart from the family, which has disintegrated visibly in this century, and such exceptional cases as racial and political minorities, the only coherent groups are occupational and technical ones; possibly that is why the cafe, the small-group meeting place, flourishes now instead of the pub. The division of labour and the growth of cities where functions must largely be delegated and depersonalized have taken away much of the basis for communal activity. Law and order, education, charitableness, recreation, all are in the hands of professional specialists. The variety of experience that urban civilization apparently offers is too often variety only of vicarious experience. A man who says he is keen on sport nowadays is quite likely to mean that he does the pools or watches all the Arsenal’s home matches.

One of the best literary pictures of the status of the pub in pre-urban communities is contained in George Eliot’s “Silas Marner.” Marner’s appearance in the “Rainbow” is dramatic because he has never been there before, and so—nothing else is needed—lived in isolation. Discovering the theft of his gold, there is nowhere else to announce it but in the inn. The incident is the real climax of the story, the point where the recluse enters and is accepted by the community, and the inn is its symbol. Nowadays, of course, he would go to the police station.

Certainly some unpleasant things have largely disappeared from social life with the decrease in drinking. Sottishness has not much charm; nor has the sight of children dawdling for hours on public-house doorsteps while their parents are inside. The fading of these unedifying spectacles is usually put down to a change in peoples’ outlook, as if outlook meant a kind of communal revelation. It is true that social attitudes about drinking have changed, but the change is effect, not cause. Given the growth of town life, the diminished need for community centres, and a hundred and one facilities for solving the “problem’’ of leisure, there is less drinking in public houses: consequently there are fewer drunkards and waiting children and, in time, a feeling that there is actually something disgraceful about both. Go to a village where life is still centred in the pub, and you will find the same attitude in reverse—i.e., that the amenities of town life are not just frivolous but wicked too. In this connection, it is worth mentioning that much of the anti-drink propaganda of a century or two ago was directed not against public houses but against gin shops. Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” and “Beer Alley” series, commonly supposed to depict the horrors of drink, in fact aimed to show that beer was better in every way than gin.

The modern public house is more and more a shop where beer is sold, with perhaps some provision for amusement. The only places, apart from rural areas, where it retains something of its former character, are where there is a single industry and so a community is formed by an occupational group—docklands, shipbuilding, mill and mining towns and so on. In those areas the pub has not changed very much, even in its architecture, fittings and compartments—figured glass, rococo partitions, horsehair settees and sporting prints, in contrast with the aseptic, tiles-and-chromium, one- or two-room buildings of the modern metropolis and its suburbs.

Our society is less and less a community, more and more an agglomeration of individuals. Reference has already been made to the handing-over of former communal functions to trained, authority-bearing specialists: the more important point is that responsibility has been handed over too. It is not only that impersonal powers manage, instruct, entertain and generally provide for people—the more vital aspect is that people no longer have much to do in any of those matters. That is why a happening like a flood or a railway disaster makes news by bringing out men and women spontaneously to help, nurse and clothe the victims: ordinarily those are services provided by institutions. The war produced a good deal of such communality and showed that, far from being dead, it is always ready to come through the surface of urban civilization.

The public house is what its name implies—a house for the publicum, the community; and a community is no more to be found in it than a fifty-shilling suit in the Fifty Shilling Tailors’. Is that a bad thing? It is nice to feel superior and think that people nowadays have better things to do than go to pubs; balance the rise of aspirin-taking against the fall of beer-drinking, and you may wonder what the better things are. The pub in itself does not matter very much, but the social circumstances which have changed its character do. Historians of the future will record ours as an era of amenity and progress. Perhaps, too, they will record it as the age of insecurity, personal as well as economic: an age of crowded but lonely people, knowing little communal obligation or sanction for behaviour. Advice bureaux, help pages, marriage guidance councils, huge unseen audiences for the opinions on everything of petty oracles . . .  all these—and the aspirin-bottles—are the true monuments to today.

Robert Barltrop