Further than the nearest Bingo hall

By Editor | September 13, 2023

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Marc Robertson

We used to wear jackets and ties on airplanes.
I don’t mean just a select few people in some sort of weird club for eccentrics; I mean that people in general wore quite formal clothing while traveling by air.
This includes children.
Watch any of those great but frankly awful films from the 1970s involving air travel and you’ll see people dressed in the sort of clothes you’d expect at important events, like First Communion, a shopping trip to Sears or dinner in a seafood restaurant.
As late as the age of 20, I was still wearing a button shirt, tie and sport coat when traveling. I discarded the necktie that year when I came to this country, not because I thought Americans would dress sloppily but because by that time nearly everyone preferred comfort over formality.
I blame Freddie Laker.
The energetic entrepreneur from my hometown of Canterbury involved himself in the Berlin Airlift after World War II, ferrying supplies into the blockaded city, and later managed to secure several of those aircraft for himself. Although his business acumen sometimes came across as a little sketchy, Laker successfully cajoled others into supporting his endeavors, and his eponymous airline was born. He scrapped the old airplanes and bought far better ones, painted his name on the side and flew people to happy holiday destinations all over the place.
People flying with Laker didn’t generally wear ties.
Laker was one of the pioneers of the low-cost “no frills” air travel businesses, a forerunner of today’s Ryanair and Southwest Airlines. He offered flights for the masses, many of whom had to bring their own food. He recognized changes in the travel industry, saw that ocean liners were being replaced by jetliners, took note of the working and middle classes’ yearning to go a bit further than the nearest Bingo hall on the sea front on their hard-earned holidays, and made it possible for everyone to enjoy the sort of vacation that had previously been reserved almost exclusively for the well-to-do.
By the end of the 1970s, everyone was jetting hither and thither in t-shirts and shorts, and by the time old Freddie shut up shop in 1982, people were even taking their shoes off for long-distance flights.
We’ve always yearned to travel. We have always looked beyond the horizon to greener pastures and bigger oceans. We’ve done it barefoot and in furs, in helmets or hats, bumping along in wagons or lurching about in boats, hurtling across prairies in shaky trains, or taking our jalopies out on the open road, and we’ve done it out of both necessity and curiosity, out of survival instinct or some pledge to tan darker than last week’s banana. We’ve done it to reconnect and to disconnect, and every time we’ve done it there has been something learned, something gained, something eaten and something burned.
Freddie Laker was just one of many who made it possible for everyone to fulfill that human desire with equality. It wasn’t just about stuffing a 727 full of coal miners and their sticky children or laughing all the way to the bank. Sure, Freddie made a lot of money and lost a lot of money in his time, but he did it by making millions happy, and that’s something we can’t begrudge him.
Last month, I stuffed my trusty backpack with the bare essentials for a journey back to my home country, boarded a rather creaky jetliner and was launched into the Texas twilight in the company of farmers and fortune makers, businessmen and buskers, children and pensioners for the ten-hour flight to London.
A great many of us slipped our shoes off and watched television through the night, as comfortable as though we were at home.
A lot of things have changed since first I flew, not least of which are the costs of jetting to places around the globe. It wasn’t so long ago that a trip like this would have been unthinkable to the average working family, but thanks to Freddie and his ilk, so many more of us can cross the friendly skies and set foot in the places we’ve only known from postcards.
No one wore a tie.