TELEVISION It all makes work Made in Britain


BBC2


think it was a German politician who mocked Britain’s economy, saying it was entirely based on “people cutting each other’s hair”. Certainly the service sector dominates, but is it true that we as a nation no longer make anything? In the first of a new series, Made In Britain


I A McLaren sports car, produced in Surrey


(20 June), Evan Davis set out to examine the state of British manufacturing. He found it surprisingly healthy. We are still the seventh biggest manufacturer in the world, but our firms increasingly employ small numbers of people producing low quantities of highly profitable items, from folding bicycles to supercars. Weapons, sad to say, are a British speciality.


RADIO Trail of a best-seller


The Day of the Jackal BBC RADIO 4


L


ike many an internationally best-selling novel (10 million copies and rising),


Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal very nearly wasn’t published at all. Written in a month on a portable typewriter, it was turned down by four potential sponsors and only accepted by the fifth after its out-of-work journalist author had finessed his way into an editor’s office at the firm of Hutchinson and persuaded its incumbent to read the 10- page synopsis. Bought for an advance of £500, and with an initial print run of 5,000 copies, the novel’s success rested almost entirely on word-of-mouth buzz. The American rights were eventually disposed of for what in those days was an astronomical $365,000. Patrick Humphries’ celebration of the


Jackal’s fortieth anniversary (14 June) made much of the occupations Forsyth had pursued before he took up novel-writing. A former RAF fighter pilot and bullfighter (no details vouchsafed, alas), he had also covered the Biafra War for the BBC and, before that, worked on Reuters’ Paris desk. Here he spent his leisure hours hanging out in bars fre- quented by the French President Charles de Gaulle’s right-wing opponents, while simul- taneously operating on the fringes of the presidential entourage, picking up gossip from de Gaulle’s bodyguards. Both these experi ences convinced him that if anyone were to have succeeded in assassinating de Gaulle at the peak of his early 1960s unpop- ularity, he would have to have been a complete stranger, unknown to French intelligence.


26 | THE TABLET | 25 June 2011


Davis started off looking at Mantis, described as “the world’s first autonomous aircraft”, a military craft built by BAE that could one day lead to pilotless airliners. Then he went to see the Typhoon, a snip at £75 million each, and “arguably the best military jet in the world”. BAE supplies many of the major components for the aeroplane and is assembling 200 of them in the UK. It is the second biggest arms company in the world, and Britain’s biggest


Programmes of this kind are always pro-


fessional talking shops, and any number of Forsyth’s fellow thriller writers were brought on to talk up his merits. Interestingly, his admirers included the critical titan Professor John Sutherland, who remarked on the authenticity of the French background. As to the novel’s technical achievements, those pres- ent noted both the attention to detail and the sheen of expertise. Forsyth dryly remarked that his account of the Jackal (never named) procuring his new identity did not involve the “forging” of a passport, merely the issuing of one to someone who had already died. There were similar how-to guides on the design of an assassin’s rifle and the manufac- ture of dumdum bullets. Above all, it was argued, Forsyth had changed the face of thriller writing: first by providing the template for the “secret history” fiction where the actual and the fantastical are plausibly intertwined; secondly by focusing not on whodunnit but how. If he had left a legacy, it was that his heirs tended to strew their texts with too much detail. It was politely suggested that the great innovator himself had eventually fallen into this trap. Keen on the wider context, Humphries was also good on minutiae. An historian of French right-wing terrorist movements confirmed the existence of at least two historical inac- curacies. Edward Fox, who starred in the 1973 film, supplied louche reminiscences of meeting the author in a Paris bar, together with several prostitutes. These ladies were invited to stroke Fox’s arms and legs “to see what the Jackal feels like”. From whichever angle you choose to view it – the narrowly literary or the broadly sociological – this was fascinating stuff. A sec- ond programme examining how Forsyth researched the background to The Odessa File (1972), his Nazi spy-hunter follow-up, is a must. D.J. Taylor


manufacturer, directly employing 33,000 people in this country and keeping thousands of British suppliers in business. No sign of any swords being beaten into ploughshares there. Manufacturing may be dwarfed by services, but it is still bigger than the financial sector. And it needs to grow, because imports are far outrunning exports. Sadly – although Davis insisted there is nothing to be sad about – many manufacturers have turned into importers. He told the story of Berwin & Berwin, a maker of men’s suits. When it closed its factory, some 10 years ago, it brought to the end the manufacture of clothing in Leeds, a city where 30,000 people used to work in the rag trade. Now it manufactures in China, where pay is a quarter of Britain’s minimum wage, and it has become a success: its turnover has increased tenfold and it is one of the biggest suit-makers in Europe. Davis went to Berwin & Berwin’s factory


in China, and painstakingly explained why Chinese manufacturing is good for us all. Like all manufacturers since the industrial revo- lution, China is using its biggest natural resource – cheap labour – and doing the high- est value work it can find. But only 20 per cent of the price of those suits goes back to China: the rest stays in Britain. Not only that, but the deflationary effect of cheap Chinese manufacture has given everyone in the West a kind of “invisible pay rise”. “We won’t regret sending low-value production to China,” Davis insisted. “We will do much better to concen- trate on the high-value work we’ve kept for ourselves.” For an example of that he went to the


McLaren factory in Surrey, where they are building a £167,000 supercar in a new factory. It expects to sell 1,000 in the first year of pro- duction, most of them abroad. Then he looked at Brompton, the maker of folding bicycles. These are largely handmade, start at £700 each, and are selling well around the world. The company’s managing director expects them to do well in China, but only if they con- tinue to have the cachet of being made in London. This struck me as a sentimental view, verging on the complacent. We shall see. This was an Open University co-production and there was a touch of the lecture room about Davis’ presentation, but not in a bad way. He outlined the principles of success in manufacturing early on in the programme and referred back to them frequently. It gave a degree of rigour to what might otherwise have been a muddle of factory visits and interviews. Davis admitted at the end that manufac- turing needs to grow to fill the export gap. But otherwise this was a remarkably optimistic overview. Too optimistic, in my view. Our suc- cess at the moment is because we invent things the world wants: the ingenious folding mech- anism of the Brompton being one example. But the Chinese have a formidable record of invention: it is, surely, only a matter of time before they start originating the world’s gadg- ets, as opposed to merely assembling them, and where will we be then? John Morrish


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