[275] Nationalized Industries

[275] `If you see Sid … Tell him! ‘

First issued September 2015. Revised and updated March 2020.

I have about twelve half-written posts in various states of readiness, so I have decided to start something completely different! They can all wait.

I want to look at how much of our life was managed by the government before what we now call privatisation. It’s about politics but I want to be non-political. As always, I want to just state how things were, without saying why things have changed and without giving my views about whether the changes were right or wrong. (You may pick up some of my views, especially from the earlier blog about Choice. I can’t help it if I’m a Grumpy Old Man!)

I will unashamedly repeat things from earlier blog posts and anticipate things in blogs to come (just in case anyone hasn’t been following assiduously!)

Privatization

I don’t think this word existed until governments began the process of taking out control of various organizations and handing them over to private companies, usually by floating them on the Stock Market. Whatever else may have motivated such changes, the share issue has been a major source of government income. To me and many of my age, privatization was new and dramatic but people today accept it without question.

Before the word was used we would have called it denationalization. One of the aims of privatization is to introduce competition, which means introducing choice where there used to be a monopoly.

As you read on, you may like to imagine the reverse process – What would happen now if the government tried to take back these functions and make them monopolies?

Gas and Electricity

These two are so similar. Both were state-owned utilities. See [205] Winter and [206] Heating

Somehow I assumed that these two had always been national institutions but both came after the War. Gas was actually nationalized in 1948 by merging 1,064 privately owned and municipal gas companies into twelve area gas boards each a separate body with its own management structure. In Ilford our gas came from the North Thames Gas Board, shown as ‘9’ on the map above.

The gas used was coal gas (derived by the process that manufactured coke.) In the late Sixties British domestic coal gas supplies were replaced by natural gas.

These boards simply became known as the “Gas Board“, a term people still use when referring to British Gas, the private corporation that replaced the boards in 1972. Even in the Seventies the Gas Board had High Street shops that you visited for everything to do with your gas supply. These shops were the only place to buy gas cookers.

Because it was still a monopoly, there was no choice of supplier and effectively only one domestic gas tariff.

British Gas was privatized in the mid-eighties with a Stock Market flotation at the end of 1986. To encourage individuals to become shareholders, the offer was intensely advertised with the “If you see Sid…Tell him!” campaign.

(Before then ordinary people were not generally shareholders. Buying and selling shares used to be an esoteric process, unknown to most people, with expensive fees using stockbrokers.)

[It’s probably worth saying now that under the quirks of the United Kingdom, everything I say about England won’t necessarily apply to Scotland in exactly the same way, and it’s unlikely to be the same in Northern Ireland. Sometimes England and Wales can be considered together but not always, especially in more recent times.]

Electricity supply was nationalized in 1947 with area Electricity Boards being formed from 505 small organisations. The Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) managed the generation of power while twelve boards transmitted and sold it in England and Wales. (Scotland had a different system.) As for gas, there was a local Electricity Board shop. (We paid by a prepayment meter under the stairs taking shilling coins. Our cooker was gas so at first electricity was for lighting, electric fires, the immersion heater and occasionally an iron.)

As for gas there was effectively just one electricity tariff for domestic supply. I remember a special tariff for storage heaters which used cheaper night-time power to heat homes in the day.

In 1990 the area Electricity Boards were changed to electricity companies, privatized later that year. The CEGB became three separate companies for generation and the National Grid for distribution.

Both Gas and Electricity supply and distribution have now become complicated and incomprehensible (at least to me.) The various companies are no longer limited geographically and some companies supply both gas and electricity. Payment tariffs are varied and complex, sometimes encouraging users to change suppliers.

[Many people, like me, have stuck to their original suppliers through various changes of organization and changes of name.]

Coal

Coal is so insignificant now that many readers will wonder why I even mention it. Of course in the Fifties most people used coal fires to heat their houses. (As shown in the picture, it was delivered in sacks of about 50 kg.) There was no central heating. Also most electric power used to come from coal then.

The National Coal Board was another nationalized utility created just after the War. It had 958 collieries, the property of about 800 companies. It also took over 55 coke ovens, 85 brickworks, 20 smokeless fuel plants and power stations at some collieries and railway sidings. It managed more than 140,000 houses and more than 200,000 acres of farmland. At its inception the NCB employed nearly 800,000 workers which was four percent of Britain’s total workforce.

But competition in the form of cheap oil imports came from the late 1950s and the industry began to contract and collieries were closed. The government stopped subsidizing the industry in the mid-1960s and pits closed as uneconomic. The industry contracted continuously through the Sixties and Seventies.

In 1984 it was alleged that the NCB was looking to reduce output further and the 1984-1985 miners’ strike was one of the longest and most bitter in history and cost more than £7 billion of tax-payer’s money.

A further 23 collieries closed before the end of 1985. In 1987 the NCB became the British Coal Corporation. The industry was run down further after the privatization of the electricity suppliers and an increase in imports of foreign coal.

In 1994, the industry-wide administrative functions of British Coal were transferred to a new Coal Authority and its economic assets were privatized, the English mining operations being merged with RJB Mining to form UK Coal plc. By the time of privatization, only fifteen pits remained in production.

[Since then coal production in the UK has declined steadily and has now ceased altogether. The production of electricity has also changed and no longer uses any coal!]

Telephones

Historically all (landline) telephone networks and telephone services became part of the Post Office (with the rather strange exception of a small area around Kingston-upon-Hull.) This meant that we only had one telephone tariff for calls – but anything beyond a local call was pretty difficult anyway! Of course in the Fifties we had no choice of handset and the heavy, black Bakelite phones remained fixed by cables to the wall.

The telecoms side of the Post Office was renamed as British Telecommunications (trading as British Telecom) in 1980, and then became a separate company. A gradual process to introduce competition into British telecommunications industry continued through the Eighties and beyond. In the mid-eighties more than 50 per cent of British Telecommunications shares were sold to the public. At the time, this was the largest share issue in the world. The monopoly of British Telecommunications (later BT) was eventually ended and the rest of it has been sold on the Stock Exchange.

There have been changes since then and now landlines are an almost insignificant part of the broadband, Internet and mobile phone industry.]

Television

As you know (if you’ve been paying attention,) television was much more basic then – very primitive, poor quality terrestrial BBC. It was part of the Post Office so that was where you bought your television licence.

The BBC is now independent but retains links with the government, especially in its income from television licences. All other aspects of television are now commercial.

[I have missed out mobile phones, the Internet, satellite cable and Freeview television and lots more, which just did not exist then.]

Mail

Now we have many ways to deliver things but it used to be just the Royal Mail, part of the Post Office, delivering letters, packets and parcels everywhere. Parcelforce as a brand did not exist until 1986 and letters and parcels were delivered together. Although branded separately as Royal Mail, this was not floated on the Stock Exchange until 2013. Royal Mail continues by law with the universal service, which means that items of a specific size can be sent to any location within the United Kingdom for a fixed price, not affected by distance. The Postal Services Act 2011 guaranteed that Royal Mail would continue to provide the universal service until at least 2021.

National Savings

The Post Office Savings Bank, together with other forms of National Savings including Premium Bonds, was part of the Post Office. In 1969 it transferred to a separate department, the National Savings Bank and became independent in 1971. It is now branded as NS&I.

(There used to be Trustee Savings Banks, similar to Post Office Savings. It was never quite clear who owned them but in the Seventies and Eighties they merged and were floated on the Stock Exchange by the government. TSB has now merged with Lloyds Bank.)

Post Office

You have seen how parts of the Post Office have separated and been privatised. What is left of it covers remaining shops and their counter services. It is now still owned by the Government.

(National Giro was a public sector bank initially run by the Post Office in the late sixties. It became National Girobank then Girobank and was demerged from the Post Office. It is now part of Santander.)

Water

Water used to be something controlled by local government and somehow included in Rates, the earlier local government taxation system, almost without people being aware that they paid for it.

Rates were abolished in 1990 and replaced with the so-called “poll tax“, a fixed tax per head that produced strong public opinion against it. It was soon replaced with Council Tax, a system based on the estimated market value of property assessed in bands of value, with a discount for people living alone.

The Water Act of 1973 reorganized the water, sewage management and river management of England and Wales Water, removing it from local authority control, and ten larger regional water authorities were set up, under state control based on Regional Water Authorities.

Water utilities have now been privatized and Thames Water Utilities is now listed on the Stock Exchange.

Railways

From 1948 Railways in Britain were managed by British Railways, which from 1965 traded as British Rail. It had monopoly control of the train services so there was virtually just one option when you bought a ticket! (Actually you could buy a single or a return – which was valid on any returning train for three months. There was an off-peak return, valid for one day outside rush hours, and a few others that would give unlimited travel for a week or more. You could buy season tickets.)

I will look at the dramatic changes in railways in another blog but like the other utilities considered here, rail transport has now been privatized and split up. We now have different train operators and a highly complex pricing system. If you want to go from A to B, the cost will depend on the exact date and time, when and how you book, and which of many options you pick. It may be cheaper to buy a ticket from A to C, beyond B; or to buy a return; or go First Class; or buy two separate tickets from A to Z and Z to B! (You won’t be told any of this when you book.)

(The Rail logo shown above was at times the logo of British Rail, but not in the fiftiest and sixtiest. It is now used in general for railways)

Ministry of Defence

Of course this is still part of the government but large chunks of it have been privatized.

When I left university there where MoD establishments all over the country, probably left over from the War, for example the Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE); the Admiralty Research Establishment (ARE); the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE); and the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE). Gradually their work changed. Those listed and a few others were merged to form the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) still part of MoD until July 2, 2001. It was the UK’s largest science and technology organization. Some, but not all of DERA was privatized to a commercial firm Qinetiq.

Other Government Departments

All I can say about these is that they used to be part of government and they are no longer so. There are many and I take as examples the National Physical Laboratory, (NPL) the Meteorological Office, the Bank of England and London Regent’s Park Zoo (now ZSL) I could list many more.

Education

As a final example of things that are being taken out of government (and local government) control I want to consider schools. All schools in the public sector (which were more or less Grammar, Comprehensive or Primary) came under the Local Education Authority (LEA), part of local government. There are now many more types with the emphasis moving towards Academies, independently funded and without LEA control.

As for many blog posts I am indebted to Wikipedia for details, particularly dates. The facts are theirs, the mistakes are probably mine!

[247] Standards

[247] ‘The Past is a Foreign Country: They do Things Differently There.’

Issued May 2015, revised and reissued November 2019.

‘The Go-between,’ by L. P Hartley, was published in 1953. Wikipedia describes it as the reminiscences of a man in his sixties looking back on his childhood with nostalgia. (Sound familiar?) It opens with the line, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

So much of what I see in my nostalgic reminiscences seems to be associated with changes in culture, beliefs and attitudes. What I want to illustrate here is that we cannot judge how people behaved in the past by the standards of today (just as we cannot judge other countries by the standards we have today in our economically advanced and stable society.)

It was going to be a short blog with just four examples – but I have expanded it a bit more.

Animals in General

When I grew up, apart from a few pet dogs and cats, we hardly ever saw any animals. (I have a vague memory that the house next door to our first house had chickens kept for their eggs.) We didn’t think much about them. There were some anthropomorphic idealisations in many children’s books such as those by Beatrix Potter.

We knew nothing about wild animals and nothing about how farm animals were treated. I think people at the time had little concern for the welfare of animals anywhere. The expression, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ covered much.

It was long before the current ban on whaling (which came in the mid-80s); and far before the fairly recent UK ban on fox-hunting. Big game hunting in Africa was then much more widely practised and more accepted.

It was also well before most of the ‘green’ political issues and the awareness of endangered species. The WWF was not founded until 1961. (The WWT was started as the Severn Wildfowl Trust in 1946. My local birding ‘patch’ was created in the year I was born!)

Farm Animals

This is going to be a bit of a ‘there and back’ comment. We were not worried about battery hens or factory farming methods. And we were not concerned about ‘organic’ food. But then factory farming methods had not started and food production was more or less organic anyway.

We have to remember that, without the Internet, we were not aware of farming methods at all – except for those in the country who could see cattle, sheep and other animals in open fields. See [211] Newspapers and [213] Secrecy

[I may look at farming in more detail in another post.]

Vegetarianism

I would like to say that less people were vegetarian, especially those who chose to be vegetarian for animal welfare reasons. Again, this is difficult because it was less relevant. People did not eat out much, nor did we buy pre-packed microwave meals where the list of contents might have shown whether it was suitable for vegetarians.

When restaurants (and pubs converted to restaurants) did start becoming more popular and more widespread, there was at first no effort to satisfy the small minority of those not eating meat products. It is only recently that menus almost always have a vegetarian option – and every item on a restaurant or café menu is now marked with its suitability.

The same is true of food available in supermarkets and food labelling. Catering for vegetarians is significant everywhere – a relatively recent trend.

Zoos

I come now to the first of my four points! Zoos.

With only very primitive television, before the Internet, without significant foreign travel, the only way we ever saw the wild animals of Africa was to visit zoos. (OK, there were some pictures in books.)

I remember Regents Park Zoo in London. (Still there but now called ZSL London) I went there shortly after the aviary designed by Lord Snowdon (shown below) was opened in 1964.

In those days, you expected most of the large wild mammals to be on view in zoos. You would see African elephants, giraffe, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, gnus, lions, tigers, polar bears and many more.

You can still go to a zoo but we now know more about the how the animals are affected by their conditions. There is a much wider popular view that wild animals should not be kept in restrictive conditions. Zoos are less popular and do not normally include the larger mammals – especially elephants and polar bears. To many people nowadays, zoos are not acceptable in any form.

[The elephant and giraffes above were not photographed in zoos.]

After reading about David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest in [231] TV Heroes you will be wondering about Komodo dragons. You can still see them at ZSL London.

Wildlife Parks

I have to put in a little diversion here. The twelfth Duke of Bedford died in 1953, leaving his son, the next Duke, with a responsibility for paying heavy death duties. [US: Inheritance tax] To raise the money, Woburn Abbey was opened to the public, starting a trend followed my many other stately homes.

In 1970, they added to this Woburn Safari Park, a large enclosed park with many large African animals. This is open to the public who can drive through it, enclosed in the safety of their vehicles. Many other stately homes have copied this.

Unlike zoos, they can provide space for wild animals to roam freely without the restrictive condition of zoos. They include elephants, giraffes, rhinoceros, camels, tigers and lions, and many others. In some ways, for the general public, these have replaced the functions of zoos – they provide a more acceptable environment.

Circuses

I don’t remember actually going to a circus as a child but Billy Smart’s Circus appeared several time on television. They were some of the programmes I enjoyed watching. Circuses used to include acrobats, trapeze artists and clowns but they also included many acts based on trained wild animals. There were always performing horses, sometimes combined with acrobats on horseback, and they also always included elephants and lion tamers.

As for zoos, most people were not then concerned about the welfare of the animals and, as for almost everything, we had no idea how they were treated. We did not know how they were kept or how they were trained. I don’t claim to have any better knowledge now, but it is not generally considered acceptable now for circuses to have trained wild animals – except for horses.

[I hope that readers can understand that the picture of performing elephants is for illustration only. I decided not to show any circus lions.]

Chimpanzees

[This section relates is some ways to [243] Cigarettes, Tea, Minstrels – and Marmalade, a post that was also about different standards in the past.]

Brooke Bond PG Tips tea (now just sold as PG Tips) has been a long established, popular brand of tea. From 1956, they had an extended series of television adverts using chimpanzees dressed in human clothes in comic situations relating to tea drinking. They used the voices of celebrities such as Peter Sellers and Bob Monkhouse. (The chimpanzees were from Twycross Zoo.) The adverts may have helped PG Tips to rise to the most popular British tea by 1958.

After complaints from animal rights organisations, the adverts were stopped, but they came back 18 months later when sales figures fell, continuing until 2002. (A bit like The Black and White Minstrel Show.) As for the Robertson’s Golly, PG Tips chimps had associated memorabilia for sale.

[It was also fashionable for zoos to provide a Chimpanzee Tea Time, where the animals were dressed up and given afternoon tea on a daily basis. I can find several references for this abroad but not in Britain. I am sure it was done at a zoo in England, probably London Zoo. With changing attitudes, it is not done now.]

Of course, our attitudes to other people have also changed. I cannot cover everything here – this post will not consider political correctness, feminism, racism or sexuality but I have two specific area I will consider to illustrate how our standards have changed.

Capital Punishment

In the UK, we used to execute people routinely as a punishment for murder. In Britain the method used was hanging. It was generally accepted. Many people thought that it was necessary to act as a deterrent. (There were no Human Rights considerations to prevent it.)

In 1957, after some controversial cases, the Homicide Act restricted it to six categories of murder: in the course of theft; by shooting or explosion; while resisting arrest or escaping; killing a police officer; a prisoner killing a prison officer; or a second offence.

The main political parties were not in favour of abolition but in 1965, they allowed a free vote on a private member’s bill, which was successful. Capital punishment for murder was suspended for five years. In 1969, the Home Secretary James Callaghan made the effect permanent. (Legislation for Northern Ireland was separate.)

Subsequent parliaments debated restoration until 1997, and the penalty remained for some other obscure crimes: treason; piracy with violence; espionage; and causing a fire in a naval dockyard – these were all eventually abolished.

[Worldwide, few countries retain the death penalty. Some others have not used it for many years, or retain it for special circumstances such as wars. In the USA, it operates on a State by State basis]

Corporal Punishment

The picture above shows Jimmy Edwards in a television programme, Whack-O! from the late Fifties, set in a Public School and heavily featuring corporal punishment – caning. (Non-UK readers should understand that what used to be called Public Schools were private, fee-paying schools. They now call themselves Independent Schools.)

[Whack-O! will be included in some more TV reminiscences in due course.]

We had corporal punishment in schools, usually a cane similar to the one shown. I imagine that its use was very varied, perhaps being heavier in the old-style Public Schools. It was certainly much less used than it had been in the past. At our school (which I will come to in a later blog) it would be one or two strokes – on the hand – and it was rarely used. (You will have to read the later blogs for my experiences.)

Primary Schools generally used the threat of a slipper instead of a cane. Its use was much, much rarer.

Like nuclear weapons, it was seen as a deterrent rather than a punishment. We feared its use as the ultimate punishment, a fear which was associated with the punishment book that went with it.

(Of course I didn’t live in Western Australia. Pictures are just for illustration.)

We knew that a caning would have an entry in this book and the assumption was that this might lead to a bad school reference when we left. References were essential to get employment or for University.

With changes in attitudes and public opinion, corporal punishment in schools has gradually reduced and individual schools stopped it. In 1987 it became illegal in all state-run schools in the UK. Similar legislation for Independent Schools came about ten years later, with separate laws for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. (As for capital punishment, rules worldwide, and in States of the US vary, but the trend is towards its abolition.)

The same trend has been followed with any form of corporal punishment of children at home. It is now illegal to hit a child in many countries, mostly in Europe and South America. In the UK, the law is more complex. Its criminal law generally prohibited common assault and battery, but as a defence, parents were assumed to be able to strike their children as reasonable punishment. The Children Act of 2004 removed this defence for anything that produces wounding or actual bodily harm or would be considered cruelty to persons under sixteen.

(Where so much of what goes on in families is invisible to the outside world, I cannot comment on the extent of parents smacking their children, either then or now. I don’t remember any form of physical punishments in our family but just occasionally Dad could tell us off in a way that implied it might be coming. I think this threat of potential physical admonishments gave us a respect for our parents and for teachers and policemen.)

To me, this post has been more about the Eighties and Nineties than the Fifties and Sixties. So, back then, we kept animals in zoos and trained them in circuses: we executed criminals for murder: we caned pupils in schools and smacked naughty children at home.

But don’t judge us by today’s standards. In earlier centuries we practised bear-baiting and cockfighting; we beheaded criminals and burned people at the stake; and you could be hanged or deported to Australia for stealing a sheep!

On a lighter note, I will end on the film of the Go-Between, even though it was released in 1971. It starred Alan Bates and Julie Christie. She was one of my favourites! I saw her earlier as Lara in Doctor Zhivago.