Mr Hearst, Mr Bennack, Mr Mansfield, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen—First may I say how delighted your guests are to be here to celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Good Keeping House Institute and also the longer anniversary of your magazine ‘Good Housekeeping’, of which I am a great fan.
Now you have given me the task of almost replying to three speakers in a few minutes. Mr Mansfield, you very kindly said at the beginning, you're very relieved that I got here after being in Moscow earlier. I must tell you that on my way to Moscow I landed in Siberia to refuel. I must have been the first British Prime Minister to get into Siberia and at least the first British Prime Minister to get out of Siberia again!
Then we went on to Moscow and had as you know a very good and interesting visit.
May I say to you Mr Hearst and Mr Bennack we rejoice in our relationship with the United States. I hope you think that the partnership has been kept well during my Prime Ministership and I hope it will continue to be kept well for a long time in the future.
It's very fitting that we should celebrate this anniversary in the City of London, in Guildhall. Mr Hearst, the City of London is eight hundred years old this year when it was given its charter, eight hundred years old. That means it is part of the American heritage as much as it is of ours. And so it is a great joy that we should meet here.
When I have American guests round number 10 Downing Street I point out to them that that's not nearly as old as the City of London. Believe you me, when I come to Guildhall in November for the City of London Banquet, I am the guest of a Lord Mayor who is about the six hundred and seventieth Lord Mayor, and I am only the forty-ninth Prime Minister.
Now of course it is true that Lord Mayors change more quickly than Prime Ministers these days, but also the reason is that [end p1] there was not a Prime Minister until 1732 and when our American guests come round this house, which is the taxpayer's house in which I'm not quite the life tenant but a sort periodic tenant. I do say to them, “Look, most of the decisions taken in this house in which you are, in Number Ten Downing Street, were correct, they were very good, they were very wise, they've furthered the interests of peoples the world over but there were one or two in which we made a mistake, around about 1776, you know” . And I then go on to say “And it would never have happened had they had women Prime Ministers in those days” .
Well now, of course, it did eventually come about, but it is fascinating to me that your Good Housekeeping Institute started in 1924, the Journal of course before that, a little bit before that. A very significant time, because it was not until 1918 that we had the first woman member of Parliament. She was a lady called Lady Astor, whom many of you, whose name you will know, a lady of great style and great debating qualities and it was as well when she went in to that chamber of wholly male members of Parliament and she stood up to them superbly. Today we have nothing like enough women members of Parliament but we owe a very great deal to Lady Astor.
1924, ladies, we were only allowed a vote. We weren't here fortunately, but had we been here in 1924 we would only have been allowed a vote if we were thirty years of age. It is the only time in history when thirty had been of significance in statute law as well as in the columns of ‘Good Housekeeping’. That was remedied in 1928 when we got it on the same basis as men. You see, we've come such a long way, things have changed so enormously since the times when this Good Housekeeping Institute was formed. You've always been so excellent in carrying out your duties of giving advice to women of this country, very well indeed, and you were of course, the very first to have the seal of approval of the Good Housekeeping Institute and very valuable it was.
Now may I really make just three points of how the times have changed since 1924 and the times we are in now? It spans [end p2] sixty-five years. Those—and my first point is this, those sixty-five years, in those sixty-five years you have written a chapter of social history. The differences between the—I know because I haven't come up to my sixty-fifth birthday yet, I will one day but I'm going to delay it a bit longer, but I remember quite a bit of it. Some of you who have been born much later don't quite know the differences between the lifestyles now and then. I don't remember 1924 but I remember it a good deal later, I remember it very, very vividly. We had so very few of the modern things in our kitchens that were available then. We had no radio until later. I remember the first day in my house, my Alfred Robertsfather's house, when we had a radio. We had no television. We had a big washday on Monday. There were no such things as washing machines, we had a big tub and something called a dolly and you hung the things out on a line and you read the ‘Good Housekeeping’ paper to tell you how to get rid of soot on your sheets. Yes, I'm not telling you any stories, you'll find it all written down because it was then a time of coal before the Clean Air Act and you got soot on your sheets.
On Tuesday, you had an ironing day. I'm never quite certain what you did on Wednesday but on Thursday you had a great cook-in and you looked at ‘Good Housekeeping’ to get your recipes.
It was, in a strange way, a week of great stability and certainty. No, you didn't have television, and television has given us wonderful things but also it has stopped a lot of things. And one of the things that it has stopped is the great discussion and the way that you made your entertainment in the family. And I think that that is one of the great things that we've missed because you know, we used to talk across generations, used to discuss the matters of the day and I, at a very young age in the ‘thirties knew everything that was going on in Germany, knew the difficulties that were going on in unemployment because these were the ordinary things we discussed because we weren't sitting in front of television, we [end p3] were talking about the things that were happening and the events of the day.
Very, very different times. I only knew of one person in our town who had a refrigerator. We didn't have a hoover, we had a dustpan and brush. We didn't have anything such as the modern convenience foods, but my goodness me we did go out and go to market every single day and bought it all fresh and I must say it tasted superb. So, in some ways, we had things even more wholesome than now. And I'm just very glad that you called your magazine ‘Good Housekeeping’, not ‘Home Management’, not ‘The Housewife’, but ‘Good Housekeeping’ because that has a great sense of wholesomeness and a feeling of well-being, and a feeling of stability and a feeling that those things, as you said Mr Mansfield, ‘Good Housekeeping’ goes far wider than just things connected with the home.
Very, very different days they were. It was quite a shock when I was told this evening that Lord Woolton 's pie, which I remembered we made faithfully in wartime, which I was convinced was Lord Woolton 's recipe in fact was made up in the Good Housekeeping Institute. And when I went to the Imperial War Museum and bought a pie-dish called Lord Woolton 's pie just recently with the recipe, I thought it was Lord Woolton 's. Well it's even better because it was the Good Housekeeping Institute and I shall make it again.
So you span in those years a whole chapter of social history which is different now. You also span a chapter of scientific advance. I had recently to lunch in Number Ten all of the Nobel Prize winners. It was a great joy because we've got rather a lot in our country, more in proportion to our population than almost any other country. And sitting next to me was one of the most remarkable scientists called Max Perutz, who came over from Germany during the dark days, became a Nobel Prize winner and has done so much for us. And I was quite startled when he said, “Do you know women's liberation could not have succeeded if science had not provided women with household technology and many other scientific advances” . [end p4]
And so if you look back to those days the astonishing thing has been the enormous scientific advance. The scientific advance in communications. Of course by that time we had the telephone, previously we had not, these days you have a fax and it's very much quicker to communicate with one another.
I have a great theory about history that the British Empire would never have grown up if we'd had the telephone. It grew up because we didn't have the telephone and people had to make their own decisions on the spot and not refer them to headquarters. But of course we had this enormous scientific advance from 1924—penicillin, I remember I was involved in trying to find its structure in Oxford in the post-war period. Shortly after that in my generation I went out to do scientific research, we were very, very alarmed at something called a computer. And someone called Leon Bagrit wrote ‘The Age of Automation’ and we were fearful, as we had been about the Age of Mechanisation, and we thought it would take jobs away. These days I go round and everyone has a computer in front of them and it has in fact created so very many jobs and a lot of jobs for women as well. Because the choice of careers for women now is infinitely greater than ever it was.
But we have new problems developing. I looked recently when I had to make a speech to the Royal Society, of which I am a member, of Science but it was—it was a very formidable occasion. And I was looking at some of the things connected with our environmental problems now. And it seems that even during the lifetime which we are celebrating tonight, the sixty-five years, the population of the world has doubled in those sixty-five years—doubled, and is rapidly rising. And it's explained by the enormous scientific advance; that we're able to keep people alive; by the enormous agricultural advance, that with fertilizers and with pesticides we were able to provide the food, and with the enormous industrial advance we have been able to provide the jobs.
But then I remember, as a scientist, a very great discovery in the mid-‘thirties; discovery of things called CFC's. You hear [end p5] a lot about them now in connection with aerosols and the ozone layer. They were new substances, they were a great advance because they were stable, they allowed us to do more in dry cleaning, more in electronics, they allowed us to have aerosols, they allowed us to have better refrigeration, they were stable, they were excellent for people to work with, they were the new thing of the time. And isn't it fascinating that within sixty-five years they have turned out to be the very thing which because they were so stable on earth found their way up to the ozone layer where they did immense damage and caused the problems in it? It is fascinating to see that sometimes one scientific advance can years later cause problems, and we now have them with the environment.
You have indeed spanned a whole age of scientific advance and in some ways enormously to our advantage and in some ways giving us problems.
And the third thing I wish to say briefly. After the chapter of social history, chapter of scientific advance, is we now have a chapter of new problems. For years when I was young and in politics with all hopes and dreams and ambitions, it seemed to me and to many of my contemporaries that if we got an age where we had good housing, good education, a reasonable standard of living, then everything would be set and we should have a fair and much easier future. We know now, that that isn't so. We're up against the real problems of human nature. All of these things you deal with in your most excellent magazine.
Why is it that we have child cruelty in this age? Why is it that we have animal cruelty? Why is it that we have violence? Why is it that only a month after Hillsborough, which was a terrible football occasion we had so many arrests and problems on the football field? Why is it that people take to terrorism? Why is it that people take to drugs?
These are much, much more difficult problems to deal with. And I see in some of the awards you'll be giving tonight, you're [end p6] giving them to people who are attempting to tackle these problems. Why, when you have got everything do some people turn to those fundamental things which undermine the whole of civilisation? Our job is to try to find constraints so that great civilisation can go on.
But what I want to say to you is that all of these things have been discussed regularly in your magazine ‘Good Housekeeping’. The Institute, whose anniversary we celebrate tonight, has been so meticulous and so careful in testing everything that we at home and way beyond the home use and was the first consumer test that we could really rely upon.
It is we, Mr. Chairman, who should be giving you the accolade this evening, for your sixty-five years' marvellous service to our country and the consumer. And we do indeed honour you for it and thank you for the most wonderful occasion in this historic hall and our wonderful country and our great friendship with the United States.