Back to the future: 1979-1989
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Splitting Image: 1984 and all that

The events of this pivotal year are considered beside Orwell's predictions

Essay

The year 1984 saw the arrival on UK television screens of the programme 'Spitting Image', which featured puppets created by Peter Fluck and Roger Law relentlessly lampooning politicians and public figures in all camps.

'Spitting Image' was clever, technically masterful and very funny. In the same year there was, inevitably, a film version of George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', directed by Michael Radford with John Hurt as Winston Smith. If the world Orwell had warned of in 1948 had indeed come to pass there would have been no film and no 'Spitting Image'. Satire, for centuries a vivid presence on the British political and cultural scene, and laughter had no place in Orwell's dystopia.

While thousands had a regular TV date with 'Spitting Image', and no doubt felt better for viewing the skewering of the political establishment, a much smaller number attended various events and conferences which marked Orwell's last message to the world. Much of his novel was written in Scotland, on the island of Jura, and the writing of it very possibly contributed to his death in 1950, the year after 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published.

I took part in two such events in the USA, at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and at Ohio State University. In Columbus, Ohio, I spoke about Orwell's glass paperweight, the object Winston Smith finds in a junk shop during a risky foray into prole territory, which becomes an emblem of a lost and barely remembered past. Memory, Orwell tells us, is a crucial part of our sense of self. Destroy memory and identity disappears. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is about the destruction of identity and one man's failed attempt to recapture an independent self. 'Does the past matter?' I asked in my Columbus talk. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' tells us that not only does it matter, it is vital to our understanding of who, what and where we are. We distort the past, manipulate it, censor it, forget it, at our peril. Yet we do these things all the time, and today, in the 21st century, we have unprecedented means to mess with the present as well as interfere with the past.

There was a lot of manipulation going on in the 1980s, and a lot of independence under threat. There is some irony in the fact that 'Spitting Image' was puppetry, latex figures ingeniously fashioned and manipulated. Were Fluck and Law suggesting that we, the public, were also being manipulated, by government, by advertising, by popular culture, by the press, by 'Spitting Image'? We were, of course, and are now to a greater degree than ever.

The very title 'Spitting Image' was tongue-in-cheek, as the puppets, though stunningly suggestive in their depictions of public figures, were not spitting images at all: they were caricatures. It is all too easy to see the past in terms of caricature, good guys and bad guys, symbols of success and failure, winners and losers, and even the most nuanced history can be crude, inevitably perhaps as evidence and the landscape of evidence are amplified and perspectives shift. But those caricatures launched on the world in 1984, looked back on now as artefacts of their time, can tell us a lot about power, duplicity, double standards. They are themselves evidence.

The significance of a museum for Scotland

During the 1980s I was employed by the institution that became in 1985 the National Museums of Scotland (NMS). The amalgamation of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Museum was the antithesis of splitting. It was an effort to create a synthesis of Scottish and international material, an effort that required an intensive scrutiny of the collections in both museums and lengthy debate on how best to bring them together. It led to the articulation of an absence. Most nations, however small, sustained a space dedicated to telling that nation's story. Scotland did not. So a proposal emerged, to build a new museum to present the story of Scotland from pre-history to the present. In 1989, a campaign was initiated to bring that about. It needed funds, and what Magnus Magnusson, an NMS trustee at the time, called 'a concerted act of will'.

Bringing institutions together isn't easy. It involves compromise. It challenges identities. In 1984 the preparations for coming together involved heated debate and the often reluctant acceptance of changing roles and structures. Was it even possible to create a coherent narrative out of such disparate material? Would the new institution remain divided, whatever new identity was devised? Would the proposed new building bring people together or exacerbate disconnections? Museum staff are no less prone than any others to intransigence and protectionism. And in the meantime, what was happening around them?

In 1979 a referendum in Scotland delivered a vote in favour of devolution by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. But the percentage of the electorate that voted in favour, 32.9 per cent, was not sufficient to carry the day for devolution. That would have to wait another 18 years. Recession, the decline in manufacturing and in public spending, intensified division. The bringing together of Scotland's two main national museums may not have seemed political at the time, but the context in which it was taken was clearly significant. And the discontent that followed the 1979 vote, intensified by the poll tax debacle at the end of the decade that followed, fuelled the campaign for a new Museum of Scotland, however indirectly. Let the Scots have a museum, something solid, permanent and iconic. So much better than cake. Perhaps embracing the past would distract from the discord of the present. The past is a place where safe havens can be created. If Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' demonstrates how people can be manipulated into forgetfulness, museums can be spaces where memory is reinforced or even created. Here is the evidence, the custodians can say of the material that survives, and this is what we think it means.

Miners' strike and Ethiopia famine

But in the meantime, in 1984 there was the miners' strike, an arena not just of division but of violent confrontation. Ian MacGregor, a Scot who cut his business teeth in the USA with great success, was brought in by Margaret Thatcher as chairman of the National Coal Board. His determination to close around 20 pits with the loss of over 40,000 jobs provoked the strike. 'He brought a breath of fresh air to British industry and had such a genial personality,' Mrs Thatcher said.

Images of the battle of Orgreave do not fade, indeed have become emblematic of the decade, a stark reminder of a vision of Britain that disregarded traditional working lives. Some of us dropped notes and coins to support the strikers into the collection buckets offered by men and women at street corners and outside cinemas, knowing that a way of life and work that was an emblem of British working-class values was ending. The enactment of state-sponsored brutality would have come as no surprise to Orwell, nor the desperate anger of the miners. He knew a bit about mining communities. On 18 June, the day of the worst Orgreave clashes, the Queen was at Royal Ascot. Orwell would have relished that disjunction.

Meanwhile, on another continent, there was famine in Ethiopia, a spur to some kind of cohesion as British hearts were stirred by the Live Aid concert the following year. I and my children listened to it on the car radio as we drove north for a holiday in Sutherland. We stopped to watch salmon leaping the falls at Rogart. A week of walking mountain paths and empty beaches seemed to take us a long way from the politics of confrontation, a long way from drought and starving children.

Photographs portraying social trends

In 1982 the BBC buried a time capsule at Castle Howard, not to be opened for 2,000 years. A committee had been formed, chaired by Lord Swan, then Chancellor of the University of York, previously Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Its members represented a range of expertise, technical, cultural, social, educational, political. I was asked to make a selection of 200 photographs portraying British 'social trends and the environment' for inclusion in the capsule. The earliest photographs dated from the 1850s, the most recent from 1979 and 1980. The latter included, among other images, the Notting Hill Carnival, riots in Bristol, Oxford Street, Brixton market, central Dundee in 1966, Cardiff Castle, tourists on the Antrim coast, children learning the violin. To make a selection of images that adequately reflected over 100 years of life in the UK was impossible. The resulting 200 form an incomplete tapestry, suggesting the continuity not just of contrast but of division. Early 20th-century women workers in a hatting factory and a 1911 suffragette demonstration. The General Strike of 1926 and dancing to the Palm Court Orchestra in the same year. A Northumberland miner's home in the 1950s and a new town housing estate. Making butter on Uist in 1961 and a 1960s Glyndebourne audience.

Looking at the list in 2019, with hundreds of years yet to go before the capsule can be opened, I wonder how an exhibition of these photographs might be curated and presented. What would its message be? What, in 1982, did we want to convey to the future? How, in 2019, would we assess the 1982 choice? What, nearly 40 years later, would we now consider representative of our understanding of the past 100 years? And what about the other contents of the capsule? Thousands of frames of microfilm of books, documents, newspapers, magazines, catalogues. Audio recordings of concerts, radio programmes, the top 40 on 10 October 1982. Video recordings of TV programmes. And the objects: they had to be small and were 'what we could lay hands on quickly amongst the many suggestions'. The 128 selected included jewellery, tools, games, small items of clothing, a microchip, an IUD coil, domestic items, paper clips, a scalpel … What objects would we now choose to represent who, what and where we are? A time capsule today would almost certainly be virtual. The experience of three-dimensional objects in our lives is changing, though I am reassured when my visiting grandchildren get out the Monopoly and the Scrabble boards.

A book was published to coincide with the time capsule burial, 'Messages to the Future' edited by Anthony Moncrieff, chief producer in the BBC's talks and documentaries department and initiator of the project. It included messages to 3982 from several members of the committee. Running through them is the hope that there will be a future, by no means confidently expressed as the possibility of nuclear war suggested there might be no one around to uncover and decipher the capsule's contents. The messages include one from Paul Sieghart, a human rights lawyer. 'We think ourselves clever,' he wrote, 'but we are in fact both ignorant and foolish.' He pointed out that although a few 'enjoy peace, comfort, freedom, good health, abundance, high culture and long life' hundreds of millions were living 'in dire poverty, amidst hunger, disease and squalor, deprived, exploited, oppressed and persecuted'. Those of us making the time capsule selection were of course in the former category. What would the deprived and the oppressed have chosen?

When I opened my copy of 'Messages to the Future' to remind myself of that 1982 project, a letter fell out. It was from the publishers, Futura, and is signed Robert Maxwell, himself an emblem of 1980s success and failure. Maxwell, a refugee from the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, built up in the UK a hugely successful publishing business, eventually owning the Mirror Group newspapers and Macmillan Publishers as well as other businesses, only for his empire to come crashing in 1989, when he had to sell it all off. Two years later his body was retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean, lost overboard from his luxury yacht. After his death it was discovered that he had stolen millions from his companies' pension funds. Another image cracked — image and fracture a 1980s fable.

Maxwell's lifestyle was lavish. A luxury home, a luxury yacht. He was proof, it seemed, that a difficult start in life was no impediment to success, at least the kind of success measured in material ostentation. He flourished in an environment that encouraged individual ambition and the flaunting of wealth. But at the same time as this unleashing of avidity was being enabled and celebrated, Margaret Thatcher bemoaned permissiveness and the fading of the 'old virtues of discipline and self-restraint', old virtues threatened by the environment of flamboyant materialism she helped to create. 'Greed is good' wasn't Orwell's phrase (it was spoken by the character Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film 'Wall Street') but it can take its place alongside 'war is peace', 'freedom is slavery' and 'ignorance is strength', the slogans of the regime that dominates 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

'We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,' announced Prime Minister Thatcher at the end of the Falklands War, July 1982. Soon, the miners would be in retreat, but North Sea oil was booming, with around 20 platforms operating. There was work on the rigs for those up for big risks and big rewards; with some irony, North Sea oil revenues helped to fund benefits for those that industrial decline had deprived of jobs. Bill Forsyth's film 'Local Hero' was released in 1983, a gentle story of an American oil magnate who attempts to purchase an entire Scottish coastal village to clear the way for an oil refinery. The life of the village is precarious, traditional sources of livelihood fading. Suddenly there is the prospect of something entirely different. The 2019 musical version, with lyrics and music by Mark Knopfler, comes energetically to life when the cast sing 'we're gonna be rich … filthy dirty rich'.

'Local Hero's village of Ferness doesn't get its refinery, but honour is satisfied all round when the oil magnate's enthusiasm for the stars and northern Scotland's stunning night skies leads to the promise of an observatory. But the story of North Sea oil in the 1980s was not such a happy one. In 1986 the price of oil dropped dramatically. Production was halved. Then, in November of that year came the devastating explosion of a gas pipe on the Piper Alpha rig 110 miles off Aberdeen which killed 167 men. The Cullen Inquiry that followed found that there had been 'general systemic failings in a culture of lax rig safety procedures'. The oil, which many wanted to claim for Scotland, was mired in greed, appropriation, disaster.

1984 and 'The Wasp Factory'

In 1984, Iain Banks published 'The Wasp Factory', his first novel. It is a chilling portrayal not of a dystopian world, not of a political environment and social fabric that control individuals' minds and actions, but of the internal dystopia of the novel's central character. Frankie officially has no identity — there is no paperwork to confirm his existence. He has created his own reality, his own belief system, on the edge of normality yet detached from it. He is obsessive and sadistic yet at the same time is recognisable as an 'ordinary' teenager: a divided personality.

Banks creates an environment where there is no dissonance in Frankie's behaviour. He lives with his father on an island off the Scottish coast. He doesn't go to school. His world view is shaped by sea and tides and sand dunes and the creatures he preys on. But Frankie is not what he seems. He is the product of a grotesque experiment, a kind of Frankenstein's monster (the name is clearly a deliberate echo). But Banks owes as much to R L Stevenson as to Mary Shelley, to Stevenson's creation of the archetypal dual personality lodged in Dr Henry Jekyll. 'We are not truly one but truly two.' 'The Wasp Factory's island location is also an echo of Stevenson, who repeatedly used islands and confined spaces as scenes of intense and concentrated action. (And Orwell wrote much of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' on an island.) When Frankie discovers the truth of his childhood he reflects 'my father's truth has murdered what I was'. Like Winston Smith, his identity is destroyed. But he himself has been a destroyer, and that can't change. His own story of his own life has been shattered but his terrible acts cannot be undone.

Did Banks intend Frankie as a reflection of society? Was he warning us of the potential disaster that could be unleashed by uncontrolled experiment, of how vulnerable the self is when disconnected from community and shared values? Was it mere happenstance that his novel was published in 1984, the year Orwell had projected as a time when community values were deliberately destroyed? Was he suggesting that the narratives we create, of individual lives, of movements and events, of defeats and victories, are brittle, perhaps even meaningless constructs? Like Winston Smith, Frankie is a puppet, but he also sees himself as a puppeteer.

Three years after 'The Wasp Factory', Ian Rankin's Detective Inspector John Rebus appeared on the scene. A flawed character struggles to maintain the law in a city whose divided personality was at the heart of much of what Stevenson wrote — Rankin acknowledges his debt. Rebus's investigations explore many aspects of Edinburgh's divided personality. A conflicted individual tries to deal with greed and frailty and brutality. Crimes are solved, but along the way many images are tarnished including that of the city itself. Its stone-built past and its façade of morality are not so solid after all.

In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' Winston Smith purchases in the junk shop a beautiful notebook with 'smooth creamy paper', his first act of rebellion. The notebook is of a quality that belongs to an almost forgotten time and he writes in it with an anachronistic implement, a pen. The junk shop has a magnetic pull which he can't resist. It is an island of the past, full of decayed and defunct objects but nevertheless a link with a past reality that is dimly perceived as an environment totally different from the drab, repressed present. But amongst the decay Winston spots 'a lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other … There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone'. The pink object is a piece of coral.

To Winston the lump of glass has a kind of perfection, a kind of purity, and suggests 'an age quite different from the present one'. It is a reassurance that all connection with the past has not been lost. He himself has a role in re-writing history, but the glass paperweight endures. Except it doesn't. Winston has not escaped the eyes of Big Brother, the paperweight is smashed, the fragment of coral, 'like a sugar rosebud from a cake' (another anachronism), rolls across the floor. 'How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!' The image is not just split, it is shattered. The past is fragile. It needs to be protected.

See also:

 

Reading list

  • 'Nineteen eighty-four' by George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949) [National Library shelfmark: H4.89.141].
  • 'The wasp factory' by Iain Banks (London: Macmillan, 1984) [National Library of Scotland: N3.84.403].

 

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