Washing machines and fridges were becoming cheaper. Like toys and clothes, they were being made on a far larger scale than ever before, as investment at one end and sustained high demand at the other brought prices down: even in France, where mass production always lagged a little behind, turnover in the toy industry increased 350 percent in the early baby-boom years 1948-1955. But the virtuous circle of millions of newly employed commodity-consumers had its most significant impact not in the home but outside. The greatest single measure of European prosperity was the revolution wrought by the family car.
Until the 1950s, the motor car was a luxury for most Europeans and in many parts was scarcely to be seen. Even in major cities its arrival had been very recent. Most people did not travel great distances for pleasure, and when travelling to work or school they used public transport: trains, trams and buses. At the beginning of the 1950s there were just 89,000 private cars (not counting taxis) in Spain: one for every 314,000 persons. In 1951, just one French household in twelve possessed a car. Only in Great Britain was car ownership a mass phenomenon: there were 2,258,000 private cars there in 1950. But the geographical distribution was uneven: nearly a quarter of all cars were registered in London—much of rural Britain was as empty of cars as France or Italy. And even so, many Londoners didn’t own a car and there were thousands of market traders, costermongers and others who still depended in their work upon a horse and cart.
Car ownership was to increase spectacularly in the next two decades. In Britain, where an initial take-off in the 1930s had been stalled by war and post-war shortages, it doubled in each decade from 1950 to 1980. From two and a quarter million vehicles in 1950, British car ownership had risen to 8 million by 1964, and reached 11.5 million by the end of the Sixties. Italians, who owned just 270,000 private cars at the outbreak of the war and 342,000 in 1950 (less than the number of cars in Greater London alone), had two million vehicles by 1960, five and a half million by 1965, over ten million in 1970 and an estimated 15 million five years later—two cars for every seven residents of the country.[132] In France, car ownership rose from less than two million to nearly six million vehicles in the course of the 1950s, then doubled again in the next ten years. Symptomatically, parking meters were introduced at the end of the 1950s—beginning in Britain, then spreading through France and elsewhere in the course of the Sixties.[133]
If Europeans could buy cars for their personal use in such unprecedented numbers it was not merely because they had more money to spend. There were many more cars available to meet the pent-up demand of decades of Depression and war. Well before 1939, a number of European car manufacturers (Porsche in Germany, Renault and Citroen in France, Morris in Britain), anticipating a post-Depression lift in demand for private automobiles, had begun to think about a new kind of family car—analogous in function to Henry Ford’s Model T of twenty years before: reliable, mass-produced and affordable. The war delayed the appearance of these models, but by the early 1950s they were rolling off newly installed production lines in ever-increasing number.
In each Western European country there was a dominant local make and model of car, but in essence they were all remarkably alike. The Volkswagen Beetle, the Renault 4cv, the FIAT 500 and 600, the Austin A30 and the Morris Minor were tiny, two-door units of family transport: cheap to buy, cheap to run and easy to fix. They had thin, tinny frames; small, under-powered engines (designed to consume as little fuel as possible); and were equipped with the minimum of accessories and fixtures. The Volkswagens, Renaults and Fiats were rear-engined and had rear-wheel drive, leaving the compartment in front of the driver to accommodate a small amount of luggage, as well as the battery, spare wheel, crank handle and tools.
The front-engined Morris, like its contemporary and competitor the Ford Popular (American-owned but made at Ford’s UK plant in Dagenham, near London, for the domestic market), aspired to a slightly higher level of comfort—and would later spawn a four-door model, as befitted the rather greater prosperity of Britain in the years of its first appearance. Citroen of France introduced its utterly distinctive 2CV (initially marketed to farmers seeking to upgrade or replace their ox wagon), complete with four doors, removable roof and seats, and the engine of a medium-sized motorbike. Despite these cultural variations the little cars of the fifties had a common purpose: to render automobile ownership accessible and affordable for almost every west European family.
For some years after the start of Europe’s post-war transport revolution, the supply of cars could not keep up with demand (a situation that remained the case in Eastern Europe right up to 1989). Thus bikes, motorcycles and motorcycle-sidecar combinations flourished for a while—the latter as a makeshift family vehicle for those who could not afford a car or could not yet get hold of one. Motor scooters appeared on the scene—in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated—the Vespa model in particular—in every contemporary film from or about Italy.
But by the beginning of the sixties the car was firmly in command in Western Europe, displacing traffic from rails to roads and from public to private means of transport. Railway networks had peaked in length and user- volume in the years following World War One; now, unprofitable services were cut back and thousands of miles of track pulled up. In the UK the railways carried 901 million passengers in 1946, close to their historic peak. But thereafter the numbers declined each year. Elsewhere in Western Europe, train traffic held up rather better; in small, crowded countries with efficient networks—like Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark—it actually grew; but far slower than road traffic.
The number of people using buses also began to decline for the first time ever, as more and more people went to work by car. Between 1948 and 1962, in Britain’s congested capital, the overall passenger traffic on London Transport’s buses, trams, trolleys and underground network fell from 3,955 million people a year to 2,485, as commuters took to their cars instead. Despite the distinctly inadequate condition of Europe’s roads—outside of Germany there had been no significant upgrading of any national road network since the late 1920s—individuals and especially families used cars increasingly for discretionary travel: for shopping trips to hypermarkets newly situated at the edge of cities, and above all for weekend excursions and on annual holidays.[134]
Recreational travel in Europe was not new, though it had hitherto been confined first to the aristocracy and latterly to the better-heeled and more culturally ambitious middle classes. But like every other economic sector, ‘tourism’ had suffered through war and economic recession. The Swiss tourist industry in 1913 boasted 21.9 million nights of lodging; it would not recover such numbers until the mid-1950s. And when it came, the tourist boom of the 1950s was different. It was facilitated and encouraged by the availability of private transport and above all by the growing number of people enjoying paid vacations: by 1960 most employees in continental Europe were legally entitled to two weeks of paid holiday (three in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and France) and increasingly they took that holiday away from home.
Leisure travel was becoming mass tourism. Coach companies blossomed, extending the tradition of factory and farm workers’ annual char-a-banc seaside trips into commercial services within and between countries. Fledgling airline entrepreneurs like Britain’s Freddie Laker, who had bought up surplus Bristol Brittania turbo-prop planes, developed charter services to newly opened summer vacation resorts in Italy, France and Spain. Camping—already popular before the war among less affluent vacationers and outdoor enthusiasts—became a major industry in the later Fifties, spawning coastal and pastoral camp-sites, camping equipment emporia, printed guides and specialized clothing outlets. Older holiday resorts—along the coasts and in the countryside of northern and western Europe—thrived. Freshly discovered (or re-discovered) locations emerged, gaining prominence in glossy brochures and popular mythology. The French Riviera, once a sedate wintering escape for Edwardian gentry, was given a seductive and youthful makeover in a new genre of ‘fun-in-the-sun’ movie: in 1956 Roger Vadim ‘invented’ St Tropez as a showcase for his new starlet Brigitte Bardot in
Not everyone could afford St Tropez or Switzerland—though the French and Italian coasts and mountains were still inexpensive for travelers from Britain or Germany, exchanging sterling and Deutschmarks for the undervalued francs and lire of the day. But
