The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

for a points system, which he thought would be fair, though frugal. Everyone would be entitled to something.

      That was characteristic of the opinionated zeal that Sainsbury brought to his business. There was no contradiction between producing good balance sheets for the firm and providing what he considered to be a kind of public service: decent provisions at a good price. There was always an idea around the corner that could make it happen, which is why he was so excited when he came back from the United States with his vision of aisles of deep freezers.

      In 1950 the change hadn’t started. Marks & Spencer had done a trial of self-service a couple of years earlier, but was still very cautious. Shoppers, constrained by the surviving bits of the rationing regime, still preferred a butcher’s shop with sawdust and gleaming tiles, grocers who smelt of rennet and built pyramids of home-made butter on a wooden counter. Sainsbury, however, had seen the future and within a year he knew he was right.

      There were about fifty self-service shops in business by the end of that year, and they spread like mushrooms – nearly 600 by the end of the decade, when Sainsbury’s had started to use the new medium of television advertising, choosing as its star product that strange new beast, the frozen chicken.

      The transition had involved some risks. It was expensive to build new premises, and there was some resistance among shoppers who already started to fret about the loss of the special atmosphere in old-style stores, which they could see threatened. Perhaps there was an element of regret for the withering away of a deferential relationship between shop staff and customers, at a time when the growth in personal consumption – of greater choice – was equated with modernization and the new. Washing machines were in most homes, fridges in many kitchens, and habits had changed. In the late forties The Grocer magazine had said portentously: ‘The people of this country have long been accustomed to counter service and it is doubtful whether they would be content to wander a store hunting for goods.’ Well, now they were. Indeed, it seemed rather smart – a new way of doing things.

      Looking back from a time when the wheel has turned, and supermarkets are often painted as the villains who despoil landscapes and homogenize the high street, it’s intriguing to remember how fresh and exciting the supermarket revolution once seemed. Fruit and vegetables began to appear all the year round, you could fill a freezer and live off it for weeks, like a camel and its hump. And for the supermarkets there was a bonus: not only shoppers with more money to spend, and a higher turnover in shops that could eventually sell anything, but fewer staff. They could make more money.

      Alan Sainsbury was at the heart of one of the changes that made this even easier for the supermarkets. In the last of the Conservatives’ thirteen years in power, 1964, Edward Heath, as Lord Privy Seal in the government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, pushed through a measure that split his party and had caused almost as much trouble for Douglas-Home’s predecessor, Harold Macmillan, as the Profumo scandal which is so closely associated with his departure from Downing Street on health grounds in autumn 1963. That issue was the abolition of resale price maintenance, or RPM. Many Conservatives hated this decision.

      RPM was a form of price fixing which meant that producers could set a price with the shops that couldn’t be undercut. Their income was guaranteed and small shopkeepers, without any of the advantages of economies of scale, could compete on level terms with the supermarkets that were now opening in every town. Ted Heath argued that competition was better and eventually got his way, in spite of the biggest backbench rebellion a Tory government had seen since the last days of Neville Chamberlain’s government in 1940. The wounds were raw, and didn’t help the party in trying to prevent the election of Labour under Harold Wilson, who squeaked in with a majority of four in October 1964.

      For the supermarkets it was a godsend. They had the strength to sell more cheaply, introduce the era of the ‘special offer’, and watch the long, slow decline of the small family business that had to rely on the loyalty of customers who were willing to pay more for the privilege or convenience of walking round the corner, holding a conversation with a shop assistant and never having to join a queue of trolleys.

      Within five years of the abolition of RPM, the number of supermarkets in Britain had reached 3,700 and the age of the battle between giants had begun. When Sainsbury retired as chairman in 1967, his business was established as the market leader. Tesco opened its first superstore in 1968 in Sussex, a harbinger of the future. It was nearly thirty years before it overtook its old rival, in 1995, and went on to claim a market share of more than 31 per cent. By 2006 it was able to use the extraordinary statistic that in that year Tesco’s tills swallowed up fully an eighth of all consumer spending in the whole country.

      The supermarkets’ dominance had come about by the exploitation in the seventies and eighties of relaxed planning laws, which gave birth to the retail parks, and marketing techniques that allowed supermarkets to be sure that the bigger they got the more vigorously they could apply their power to keep producers’ prices down, give shoppers ever-better offers, and fill their stores with anything and everything. By the end of the century that power became controversial because it sometimes seemed to be untrammelled, sweeping away everything in its path, even infiltrating high streets with their own versions of ‘local’ stores to make life even more difficult, or impossible, for little shops without their power to sell in bulk, and cheaply. Planners, local authorities, family businesses, farmers all struggled with a balance that seemed to tilt decisively towards the big battalions. The story of the fightback on the high street would be another chapter, but the world that Sainsbury left behind when he died in 1998 aged 92 was one in which the supermarket was king.

      He remembered a family firm started with capital of £100 that became the first of the giant supermarkets in Britain, and had seen a way of life transformed. He was proud of saying that part of him remained an outsider – he was the businessman who joined the Labour Party in 1945 and was never a Conservative – and he retained a strong belief that social responsibility should come with wealth. His family has continued that tradition with a notable commitment to arts and charities of all kinds. He always wanted to run a certain kind of shop. That often showed through. At the same time as he was campaigning for an end to RPM, knowing how much power it would give the supermarkets, he was fighting the introduction of trading stamps to lure customers into stores. In the early sixties he told a newspaper interviewer that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t use them. He told her, ‘You must go elsewhere for your temptation.’

      Yet temptation had always been his business. More food, better quality, lower prices, and supermarkets everywhere – on every high street and in every open space that Sainsbury’s and its rivals could find, where they’d continue their endless battle for supremacy: a battle in which Mr Alan had been the first general on the field. He relished the fight, and, in his time, he won.

Alfred Hitchcock

      Alfred Hitchcock was the fat man who wanted to make our flesh creep. Like Dickens’s fat boy, he could think of nothing better to do. Indeed, he devoted a lifetime to it and seemed never happier than when he was managing disturbance and alarm. That happiness, however, was never revealed: the bulbous, jowly, black-suited master of suspense never let the mask slip, and didn’t smile. The compact had to be secure: I scare you, because you want to be scared. And when I look for fear, I promise you that I will find it.

      Whereas the Hammer horror films of the fifties and sixties camped up the gore and the cobwebbed coffin lids, and gave us a keyboard of vampire incisors, they hardly bothered with genuine terror. That was Hitchcock’s business, and obsession: a prairie cornfield with no hiding place from the buzzing aeroplane, a window that couldn’t keep out the prying spy, a murderer’s eyes that never blinked, the shower stall that promised relief behind the curtain.

      Digging away at his past, people have found a solitary East London boy, born in the last year of the nineteenth century, who often felt alone, had an awestruck relationship with his mother, a father who once sent him to be locked up in the local police cell so that he would realize what it would be like if he strayed, and lots of Catholic guilt filtered through a Jesuit education. That is tempting material, of course. But remember the power of the early cinema, the