Europe: worth a few straight bananas

Awaiting European election results, Lucy and I popped over for a look at the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, now open to the public. For 20 years up to 1992 it was a regional government centre; a hidey hole from which a commissioner and 600 Civil Servants would have run a great chunk of Britain after the Bomb went off. Authentic Public Information films from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s play as you go round.

Stentorian government announcers explain how to protect and survive with bin liners, 35 milk bottles of water each, a sand tray and a central core or refuge under the kitchen table. They all assume one bomb somewhere with two weeks to recover, and we can only wonder at how we’d have died, the lot of us, if these devices had gone off in any number. They’re also rather coy about what you do when the fallout from your own nukes blows back across the channel and kills you anyway.
Yet for much of my lifetime that was the plan — hold the Russians on Lüneborg Heath for up to a fortnight, then go nuclear.


Some of us well remember the Cuban missile crisis — thinking war could happen, with some childish notion it would be a bit like the blitz. These films make it plain it would be like nothing of the sort.
A small amount of imagination makes it obvious this whole nuclear survival thing was and is a bunch of crap. Even with a backyard the size of Siberia (or Alaska) it's a complete hiding to nowhere.

When I was a nipper in 1962 a teacher told me there would probably be a third world war by 1970, as there had been one every 25 years of that century so far. That’s what she had experienced, anyway. The European Union may not have acheved straight bananas, but it has broken a sequnce of bloody European wars which ran for 300 years like sick clockwork, (1700+/ 1750+/ 1790+/ 1848/ 1870/ 1914/ 1939). NATO has provided a defence umbrella, but positively speaking, the EU has built a continent where a war between its historic nations is now, for the first time in 300 years, unthinkable. Its processees could doubtless be reformed in sensible ways, but the central achievement is that for the first time in 300 years, two generations, mine and my children’s, didn’t have to march off to a major war.

I’m less than impressed by anyone who is prepared to risk dismantling Europe, or reducing it to a mere trading arrangement.

The great failure of the League of Nations in the 1930’s was its inability to construct union at a deep enough level to prevent war between nation states in 1939.
It broke under stress precisely because it could develop no substantial common institutions.

To be a Little Englander you have to be too stupid, ignorant or unimaginative to understand the most basic fact of our contemporary history. In a world of globalised superpowers, Victorian nation states are ultimately roadkill; and if anyone were to let off a nuke the other side of the channel, we’d be killed by the fallout anyway within hours. Why wouldn’t we want to play a positive role in the mechanism for preventing that ever happening?

Banking: The Way We Were (1964)

Financial Intercourse began
in Nineteen Seventy Nine,
Between the end of Callaghan
and the Flying Lizards’ Line:
I want money, that’s what I want...
What was life like before we entered Mrs Thatcher’s brave new world? Did they have money? And if they did, did most people keep it under the bed?

Well in 1964, bank managers were slightly stuffy people working for low wages in what were often family businesses, some of whom, according to the TV advertising of the day, lurked in people's wardrobes offering financial advice to the family. O tempora! O mores! Rooting in the attic the other day I found a copy of the Twentieth Century for Spring 1964, featuring an interview with the chief cashier of a high street bank on the subject of his career in Banking and its temptations. Read, mark and learn from this delightful vignette of Banking, and the kind of people who did it, 45 years ago, before Fred the Shred and his chums got their grimy hands on our cash:

Today, on £1,240 a year, plus a London allowance, I have reached, at the age of 57, a moderately comfortable level. I rose to be number two man in a five-man branch, and took my present post as chief cashier in a busy commercial branch when I discovered that I was not going to become manager where I was. I have succeeded in making a home, and paying off the house. We have no crying need for any major item of domestic equipment. We were able to buy a washing machine before the war, and five years ago I was able to afford a refrigerator, We have no television, and no desire for one.

I allow my wife £8 a week for housekeeping and £2 a week for herself. My lunches average 5 shillings (25p) a day, and I spend 10s (50p) a week on tobacco, We do not live to a budget - there are no boxes on the mantelpiece. But we do put 5s, a week by for Christmas presents. Our only extravagance is a theatre once every two months, when we have dinner in town. We always have sherry in the house, and a bottle of whisky for medicinal purposes. We do not deny ourselves, But I feel this is a point we should have reached ten years ago. It is only recently that I have been able to gather any savings, and only recently that I have been able to ride out the surprise bill, say, £30 for repairing the chimney, that comes along. Ten years ago we would never have been able to go into a shop and buy there and then something that took our fancy, in the way that we bought a nest of coffee tables last year for £20, and a gas fire to replace a coal grate. As it is, a large part of my salary is set aside for routine bills. I have two life assurances that I took out early in life. They come to £49 a year. My gas bill is £25, my electricity £10, and my coke £12 a year. I have a new suit every year. In the bank you must maintain a certain amount of tidiness. They still say that bank men are the tidiest of office workers, and I know that I have never gone to the office in a scruffy suit. Nowadays we spend £80 on our annual holiday (we never go abroad) and I take a week each year with my mother in Scotland that costs me £25 ...

The way things have turned out has not embittered me, I am just not of an envious nature. I look on that not as a virtue but as just a kind of kink in me. If I had been a bit more envious, a bit more covetous, I would have been more ambitious in life and taken chances with my career; been the kind of man who makes up his mind exactly where he is going, and plans out step by step how to get there - as my son-in-law has. But I do not believe that money is conducive to happiness. That doesn't mean I believe that one should be contented with one's lot in life. But surely happiness to a large extent devolves upon oneself, and on one's immediate friends and relatives, on one's wife and family.

Of course I would have been happier with more money - I would have been able to run a car, to take more expensive holidays, for example - but the lack of money has never tempted me to gamble or be dishonest. I believe a person who would be tempted to embezzlement would be tempted not because of his circumstances but because of his character and failings. I have never gambled, but I spend 5s (25p) a week on the pools, I don't daydream about getting a large win. If I did win a big sum it would make no difference to my way of living at all. I would invest it. It would simply enable me to live a little more comfortably than now - and of course, a man with £50,000 in his pocket can afford to risk expressing his opinions a little more forcibly to his employers.

...A young chap who joins the bank nowadays and finds the work boring after a year or two is not afraid of giving it up. He hasn't the loyalty, the fantastic loyalty,that the older bank officials have. A loyalty bred by their personal upbringing, by living through the depression, by handling a trustworthy job. A loyalty that for so many bank men now reaching their sixties has gone unrewarded.