Book Club: Reading thread The Brief by Simon Michael

[midnightcatprowl]

Please use this thread for any comments/discussion while reading The Brief. Please be aware some comments might contain 'spoilers'. If you feel your post might contain a 'spoiler' it would be helpful if you could indicate that at the start.

[MistyMeena]

I'm looking forward to reading this as my copy arrived today but I will probably finish The Leopard first. I'm only slightly put off by the dedication to Michael Gove...

[MistyMeena]

I just fancied reading this after a hectic week! About third of the way through. It’s set in 1960 but I keep having little moments where I think that some things are too modern to be in there. I could be wrong but it’s made me stop a few times in what is otherwise a smooth read.

Was "joyriding" a term used back then? Referring to a street with congested parking and saying it was because of two-car families (and houses being split into flats), maybe car ownership was higher in London then than I think? Milk in cartons?

I’m nitpicking, I’m sure, but these are interruptions for me.

MM

[MistyMeena]

I think I've noticed a continuity error at a crucial point.

I'm eager to find out what's going to happen though.

[midnightcatprowl]

Was "joyriding" a term used back then? Referring to a street with congested parking and saying it was because of two-car families (and houses being split into flats), maybe car ownership was higher in London then than I think? Milk in cartons?

I go a bit further back than you as I was born in 1950 so I can say definitely that, despite much lower car ownership, "joyriding" was already a well established term by the mid-fifties and often used in newspaper reports, news on the radio and TV (we got a TV in 1958 so can only comment on TV news from that point onwards). I was so intrigued by your comment (and wondering if I was having false memories) that I did a bit of searching and discovered that the term joyriding was coming into use - in the US at least - as early 1900(ish).

Milk in cartons? Yes they were around by then though the glass bottle of milk was still the standard (on the Newcastle Council Estate where I lived the bottles of milk were usually delivered and the empties collected by The Co-operative Society milk delivery lorry, you bought milk tokens and left them out to pay for the new milk along with the empties). I don't know how commonly cartons were in use especially in other social settings, the setting of The Brief is as far from my Council estate upbringing as are the settings for Agatha Christie whodunits!

Congested streets and two car families? I don't know. As you say it's London, also there is the difference in social setting. In about 1959 one of our neighbours swapped his motorbike and sidecar for a second hand Reliant Three Wheeler (maintained by himself as he was a motor mechanic) and all the nearby neighbours said people had no right to live in Council houses if they could afford a car!

[MistyMeena]

I looked up "joyriding" after posting and nearly came back to say that the term originated in the US 1900-05.

Milk though I'm sure, as you say, was mostly delivered to the door and mostly came in bottles well into the 1970's. This article might be slightly skewed towards the history of Dairy Crest but I think that it shows how and why milk bottles would be more strongly associated with the 1960's than milk cartons. I've actually been rather phobic of milk bottles since starting school in the early 1970's.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29327881

Car ownership in this RAC report shows that about 15-17% of households had a car in 1960 and (guessing from the graph) about 1% had two cars. The actual distribution of those households throughout the UK is likely to vary in different regions and might be significantly biased towards London.
http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac ... report.pdf

While I'm already frustrating myself , I'll add that I was also concerned in the book when Charles obtained some £50 notes and had no trouble spending them when they represented about an average month's wage. I still get tutted at for breaking a twenty in many shops! I've skimmed through some of the Amazon reviews for this book and have now alighted on the fact that £50 notes ceased to be legal tender in 1945 and weren't reintroduced until 1981, which is interesting but actually bothers me less than my original gut feeling about spending large notes.

OK, I'll admit it I'm procrastinating here to avoid dealing with some proper stress. Better get back to the emails

[midnightcatprowl]

Car ownership in this RAC report shows that about 15-17% of households had a car in 1960 and (guessing from the graph) about 1% had two cars. The actual distribution of those households throughout the UK is likely to vary in different regions and might be significantly biased towards London.

I've been mulling over this car and congestion issue and, thinking about it, so much depended on not just where you lived e.g. Big City v smaller towns and villages but whether you were dealing with 'main' roads or residential roads. In my Council Estate childhood the streets had minimal traffic compared with today because of the lack of car ownership particularly in such areas, though of course this was compensated for by much more public transport. On my road double decker buses ran into the early small hours and then started up again well before 6am catering for the miners from the pit opposite to our house (and the pit worked 24 hours a day with shifts of miners coming off and on duty) and the needs of other workers on the estate travelling to work in factories, warehouses, cinemas, dance halls, shops, etc, and that was just a residential road, walk four or five minutes to the nearest 'main' road and you could queue for a variety of bus services, with certainly on week days, one bus or another pulling up every few minutes. Today the internet means that we live in another great 'delivery' age but in the fifties and at least into the early sixties all sorts of things were routinely delivered. There was the 'milkman' obviously (a milk lorry not a 'float' on the estate where I lived where probably two houses in three got their milk from the Co-op milkman) and many other shops delivered at least to those able to pay for slightly upmarket goods. I remember the oddity of the Co-op lorry which delivered soft drinks (or 'Pop' in North East parlance), this was not pre-ordered stuff, the lorry went round the estate on a set day offering large bottles of 'pop', I suppose given that women had to carry heavy loads from the shops (it was mostly women and their children - my own father would go for and carry shopping by himself and went with my mother on the weekly big shop which was then the custom to carry the heavy stuff for her but he was the exception rather than the rule) that the Co-op would have sold much less pop in heavy glass bottles without the lorry doing its weekly round of the estate. Then apart from the vans of tradespeople there were all the ice cream vans - and quite honestly if people are driven mad by the ice cream vans today I honestly think there were more vans on the roads then when, as few people had fridges or freezers, ice cream was a big treat. Added to this interesting mix there were still 'Rag and Bone' men going around in horse drawn carts. Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now was that on side streets at least pedestrians in general and children out playing in particular were regarded as having precedence over vehicle traffic, vans and lorries slowed or stopped and waited (with a polite hoot or two) while children on skates or scooters or bikes, or with long skipping ropes extended across the road cleared out of the way to let the vehicle through.

But certainly in the fifties just go to the nearest 'main' road (in my case it was what was then called The Great North Road and maybe it still is?) and you suddenly hit serious traffic. I had to cross that road on the way to Infant and then Primary School each day and it is intriguing to now remember that with no crossing lights and before the invention of 'lollipop' ladies a Police Constable was on duty on the central reservation to stop traffic to let pedestrians cross before school, during the lunch hour (so many children including me still went home for lunch) and at 'going home' time from school. Wow what would we think today of a Police Constable being used in that way on a routine basis rather than say directing traffic in an emergency after an accident?

I don't know how to relate this to London which I didn't visit until 1962 or thereabouts but I do remember the intensity of the traffic even then (including so many taxis) compared even to Newcastle upon Tyne city centre which was by then busy enough but we were poor people on a short holiday of a few days (my parents were trying to recapture the London of the war years when my mother was stationed there as a member of the ATS and my father, also in the Army, had visited her before he was sent to fight in a tank regiment in Burma) so we travelled entirely by 'tube' and foot so I didn't experience the traffic first hand except when trying to cross the roads rather than trying to drive on them.

Putting this altogether I am assuming that in the capital city in the 60s there could have been areas where so many residents had cars including two cars per family that navigating streets could even by then have been very difficult but it is just a guess.

I'll add that I was also concerned in the book when Charles obtained some £50 notes and had no trouble spending them when they represented about an average month's wage. I still get tutted at for breaking a twenty in many shops! I've skimmed through some of the Amazon reviews for this book and have now alighted on the fact that £50 notes ceased to be legal tender in 1945 and weren't reintroduced until 1981, which is interesting but actually bothers me less than my original gut feeling about spending large notes.

Obviously the book is wrong in that, as you've established, £50 notes were not legal tender at the time which is interesting as I'd never realised there was a gap - probably because £50 notes were not in the habit of coming my way so the issue did not arise. I seem to remember that the very first cash machines - such exciting things when they first came on the scene in the 70s (?) - only dispensed £5 notes, in fact I seem to remember that they only dispensed one £5 note at a time so that was the maximum you could withdraw via the machine? I would say however having run a retail business between 1995 and 2016 that shops have become increasingly nervous about high value notes because of the increasing sophistication and quantity of forgeries. There have always been forgeries but the quantity and sophistication seems to go ever up (applies to £1 coins too which is why they are about to be replaced with a 'sided' coin with different ingredients which is expected to be more difficult to forge and the same reasoning is behind the new 'plastic' £5 notes). When I was first in business I accepted £50 notes without hesitation on the rare occasion they were offered and looked at £20 notes without doubt, later having had my fingers burned I stopped accepting £50 notes altogether (the loss to a small business is too great if they are forged and the bank or PO won't take them). £20 notes we had to take but no matter how carefully you examine them some forgeries get through to be stored in the till and later rejected by the bank/PO. Also, of course, small shops have the problem of running out of change if they are offered too many notes. Customers tend to wonder why small shops don't just get more change from the bank but banks charge business customers a percentage fee for providing change which can be pretty much the last straw for a small retail business trying to keep its head above water. I've no idea if the fee has always been the case but certainly banks no longer want to handle cash if they can possibly avoid it as it involves personpower to receive and check and the personpower has to be paid for this labour. I feel sure that in the 60s some very small shops in certain areas would not have enough change in their till to give change for a £50 note but in what was still a largely cash based economy probably even small shops in better off areas would be able to do so.