Time off from work
“Is there any place to which the children of the humbler classes may resort for any game or exercise, any of those games they have been used to on holidays?
None whatever.”
(From the testimony of William Fielden, M.P. for Blackburn, to the Committee on Public Works, 1833.)
It is indeed a long time ago, in more senses than one, that recreation was considered a risky luxury for what were generally known as the humbler classes. Many of the masters who waxed fat during the Industrial Revolution were only too anxious that their employees should suffer no distraction from the serious business of turning out more and ever more profit for them. Recreation? What more could a workman want than sixteen or eighteen hours in the mill or the mine, followed by stupified sleep in a crumbling hovel or a rat infested cellar? Were not these people meant to work? And did not the clergy agree with this?
If this was a narrow, shortsighted view, it was the best that could be expected in the exigencies of an emergent capitalist economic and social system. The Frenchman Bruet, among others, saw the inevitable consequence:
“The observance of the Sunday in England is rigorously enforced by church and state. There is only one exception : the dram shops. All shops must be closed, all places of innocent amusement or instruction, such as Botanical Gardens or Museums, must be rigorously shut, but the folding doors of the gin palace may be open to any man who pushes his foot against them.”
These things are managed much more skilfully today. For the most part modern industry recognises that its workers’ recreation is as important as their work, because one cannot exist without the other and better recreation usually means better work. Typically, one internationally famous company plasters its lavatory walls with posters showing off duty employees robustly playing hockey, or swimming, or working in a sort of garden which, in fact, few of them can afford. The posters adjure all who pass by to “Enjoy Your Leisure In The Open Air.” This advice is not universally acceptable, as anyone who has spent a Saturday evening at the local Palais, searching for a pocket of fresh air, will agree.
What, then, are the facts—at any rate some of them—on working class leisure today? The first fact is that, whatever form it takes, modern recreative activity is usually something out of which a number of companies are making a considerable profit. Leisure is now important not only as a way of replacing working energy; it is also, more than ever, a lucrative market for the companies who are in on it and who are working it for all they are worth.
Perhaps an exception to this is sport, which is something of an odd man out in capitalism’s economy, operating with its own rules and often with an employment system which would not work in industry at large. On an average Saturday afternoon last winter, something like six hundred thousand people were watching some sort of League football game, paying anything up from three shillings a head to do so. (Some of these seem to pay their entrance money for reasons other than to watch the play. What the club programme often delicately terms the “popular” side of the ground is the place where a spectator can broaden his vocabulary from the abuse which is thrown at the players along with the orange peel and the apple cores. It is also the place where a fist fight can develop after a difference of opinion over whether that last trip up actually happened in the penalty area. All of this, presumably, comes under the heading of leisure time activity.)
It is in one of the off-shoots of sport that some really big money is spent and some big profits are made. Gambling is an almost obsessional time-off interest of a great many members of the working class. A government survey which came out at the end of 1962 estimated the total turnover on all types of gambling during 1961 at £762 million—nearly £14 for every person in the country. Year by year, the Churches’ Council on Gambling reports, scandalised, on how the money is split between the various types of gambling. The Council’s latest report states that £540 million was laid out on horses alone during 1962—over £100 million more than the year before. At the same time the football pools took a drop of £16 million in their turnover, caused mainly by the increasing popularity of fixed odds betting on the results of football games and—no prizes for guessing this one—by the rise of Bingo. The government reckoned that over £25 million was spent on Bingo during 1961 and expected that this amount would increase in the future.
To the clergy, this is a scandalously immoral situation, which is the sort of pious reaction we can expect from them. Nevertheless, it is depressing that so much money should go on gambling, if only for the light it sheds upon the attitude of mind of so many workers. The best that can be said for the Pools is that they offer a chance, no matter how cosmically remote, of climbing out of economic servitude—and that for a stake of a few shillings a week. Most other forms of gambling do not even have this to be said for them. Yet this does not decrease their hypnotic power. Just watch the faces, contorted with anxiety, at a seaside Bingo session where the best prize may be something like a plastic bird bath. Or try to appreciate the thrill which the office gambler gets out of winning a few bob on the Derby. Or study the vacuous expression on the face of the hour-long operator of the one-armed bandit. It is all rather depressing. Because these are members of a class who carry a desperate burden on their backs; they are the people who suffer the problem of capitalist society. But they realise nothing of this amid the clatter of the fruit machine and the fatuous cracks of the Bingo caller.
And if we widen our field, we can find no relief from our depression. The average evening on the telly is one of unrelieved drool; only occasionally does the screen, erupt with something vital, real— or even something merely entertaining. Popular songs, year after year, plumb undreamt depths of banality. No more do they reflect any other aspect of life than sex—and an unreal, distorted, idealised sex at that. Elvis Presley gibbers incessantly about “lerv” and Cliff Richard pines and sighs on the same theme—and this is what finds popular favour, this is what sells the records. It is a purgative experience to listen to the average session of Two Way Family Favourites. Here is the soldier who professes from abroad his undying devotion to his girl friend by asking the studio to play the latest pop favourite—a song which, perhaps like his affection, will be dead and forgotten all too soon.
The point is that, for the soldier and his girl, marriage on a tight budget, perhaps living with mother-in-law, can be nothing more than a cruel struggle. None of this reality—none, for example, of the high divorce rate for those who marry in their teens—is hinted at in the pap song. Yet, to judge by the sales figures, it is records of precisely these songs which are in the greatest demand today. Nearly seventeen and a half million pounds were spent on records last year, covering a production of seventy-seven and a half million units. Although the production and sales figures have been climbing steadily over the past few years, they are something of a come down from the fabulous days when rock and skiffle first hit the scene. In 1956 seventy-eight million discs were sold, bringing in forty-four million pounds. At any one time, the great majority of records are the small “forty-fives,” on which the ephemeral pop hits are largely cut.
These records take about three minutes to play. Is it too harsh to say that, for this short time, the pop fan can forget his job, the Bomb, the mountainous problems of his personal life, in the hypnotism of the Mersey Sound? In its way, it is bitterly amusing that this deception keeps the tills of Tin Pan Alley merrily tinkling. But for anyone who cares about the future of human society it is profoundly disturbing.
If the working class turn their backs on the pops, the telly and the Palais and take to the open air in their time off, they often do so in what is politely called a motor car. There are about six and a half million of these on Britain’s roads at the moment and on any decent Sunday in the summer you can see a few miles of them stuck in traffic jams. Sitting in jams promises to become a more common way of recreation—by 1980, eighteen million private cars are expected to be running. There seems to be no end to this problem, so insidiously has the motor car imposed itself upon a transport system which was not designed to take such a strain and which is restricted by the usual capitalist priorities. The fast roads, flyovers, and so on, which are now being built serve only to speed the traffic from one blockage to another. It is forecast that in a few years’ time the jam caused by traffic coming into London in the morning will not be cleared in time for the start of the jam caused by the traffic leaving in the evening.
These are hardly ideal conditions for enjoying the ownership of a car, which not so long ago was a favourite working class dream. There was never, in any case, much substance to this dream. The car which an average wage earner can afford is, like everything else which he buys, necessarily a shoddy, unfinished job, not to be compared with the craftsman’s perfection which his employer can command. For the same reason—lack of cash—many workers are compelled to do their own maintenance on their car. Walk down any garageless street on a Sunday morning and count the oily legs sticking out from under unstable looking vehicles in all stages of depreciation. Listen to the muffled curses. Working class living is dominated and restricted by the size of the wage packet and this applies to the cars they worship so fervently as well as to their houses, clothes and the rest.
It is easy enough to poke fun at, and perhaps to be bitter about, the ways in which the modern equivalent of Fielden’s humbler classes use up their leisure time. But there is more to it than that. After making every allowance, the fact is that generally the worker does not make the most of his free time. In many ways, the best in recreation is available to him; there is little reason why he should not enjoy some of the finest scenery in the country, nor see the best plays, nor hear the most satisfying music. Yet rambling clubs have died thickly since the war, the short sloppy serial is the kind of play to push up the viewing figures, it is the pop crooning about “luv” which sells the records.
And the reason? Capitalism requires us to be able to do our job and for the most part it educates us to that standard. After that, our cultural welfare is our own concern. In a world whose heroes are manly soldiers and the get-rich-quick tycoon, where every other ad. tells us that it is smart to be a smooth salesman, or a racing car driver, or a hell of a lad with the girls, what place, what time, what sympathy, is there for him who wants to stand and stare? What factory worker dare tell his mates on the assembly line that he is fond of poetry? Safer to discuss last night’s episode of Z Cars.
Thus does capitalism make idiots of us all. Property society is a futile, vicious, ugly way of running the world and this is reflected in many ways. Until society changes so that, almost paradoxically, work and leisure are indistinguishable, the ugliness will go on. And as it continues, who dare say what horrors are in store for us in the traffic jams, and in the Top Twenties, of the future?
IVAN