Passporting

The first time I visited London I was underwhelmed.  Backpacking around Europe and having just come from grand belle époque capitals such as Vienna and Paris, I found London a bit dull and provincial.  Only years later, when I became a regular visitor, did I begin to understand that London is a city of villages, one grafted to the next, each with its center and each with its own character:  Camden, Hampstead, Fulham and sounding like it’s straight from a Disney movie, Primrose Hill.   London is also a city of layers—pre historic, Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman. During the decades following my first trip there, I began to appreciate this richness of history.   Like many Americans I was also looking to be charmed by the smoke discolored Victorian London of Dickens.

Today, what the bombings of World War II did not topple of that 19^th century London, the gleaming towers of the Thatcher and Blair booms are threatening to overshadow and erase.  London now resembles any other global center.  But not all has been lost yet, and so with each return visit I seek out a different part of the old city of villages to savor and study.

This year it was Pimlico.  I went there in honor of one of my favorite movies, Passport to Pimlico.  I rank that film as among my top ten of films not on anyone’s top ten film list.  If you’ve never seen it, let me summarize.  It’s just after the war and the modest neighborhood of Pimlico is recovering and rebuilding along with the rest of England.  Rubble and scars are still visible everywhere—bomb craters, bombed out building and unexploded bombs.  Although not a dockland or manufacturing site as in the far more devastated East End of London, Pimlico sits very near the Thames and thus was hit fairly hard by German planes even when they were looking for more strategic targets.  It is the course of the recovery that sets the plot in motion.  Authorities dealing with an unexploded bomb in a shop cellar stumble upon a hidden crevice and in it some old parchment documents.  These, it is soon discovered, date from the reign of Edward IV, and they unambiguously cede the area of Pimlico to the Duke of Burgundy.  Further investigations reveal that the grant was never revoked or superseded.  Legally, it seems, Pimlico is actually part of France.

Once consequence is that technically Pimlico no longer comes under the strict post war rationing and price control laws governing the weakened British economy.  In contrast to the United States, war time rationing did not end in Britain until well into the 1950s, and in some cases even later.  Basic supplies and stables, particularly desirable foods like meat and dairy, as well as new clothes and other luxury items are in short supply.  And the sellers themselves find their profits severely curtailed by ceilings on prices.

Now unencumbered by government regulations, Pimlico soon turns into a free trade zone, feeding a hungry London and earning the local merchants high profits.  This trading, of course, threatens the entire edifice of economic controls seen as vital and necessary to British recovery.  But shutting it down proves elusive.  The pinstripe and bowler sporting bureaucrats from the home and the foreign office cannot decide between them whose responsibility it is.  They spend much of the movie passing the buck back and forth—indeed the film takes sardonic delight in showing that ministers are mostly chosen for their skills at buck passing.

Now, having seen the film a number of times, I thought I understood what genre it fit into.  It was one of a number of British films from this period showing plucky working class citizens or East Enders getting the better of an officious and ineffectual state.  You know, dodging the tax man, fiddling on the job, running some sort of scam to keep body and soul together.  The sort of movie that would star Michael Caine at his cockney best.  But once I actually set foot in Pimlico I realized that I had it all wrong.  For one, Pimlico is decidedly in the west end not the east end.  Nor is it particularly working class.  In fact, it is a rather attractive middle class (i.e. American upper middle class) neighborhood.  And while you can find whole streets that were bombed out from the war and replaced with new buildings after, the housing stock that survived the war is impressive.  It is far more Belgravia than Bermondsey, an impression reinforced when I learned that the same person who had developed Belgravia also developed Pimlico.

Some of the housing is more modest in scale and design, suited to the lower middle (American middle) class.  That’s because like in all cities at this time, those who actually did the work of keeping the neighborhood going—the butchers, bakers, green grocers, news agents—actually lived there.  Think of Jane Jacobs Greenwich Village, for example.  In the movie, we are still far from the modern supermarket or strip shopping center, and in England would be for many decades to come.  Even the well-to-do (or before WWII probably their servants) did their shopping for necessities close by every day.  They did not have the space nor the refrigeration to keep large quantities of perishables at hand.

Once I saw and understood Pimlico as a place my understanding of the film changed radically.  This was the story of a shopkeepers rebellion, not a working class uprising.  The restrictions on goods, sales, prices and imports all grated on the middling retailer and the household consumer, who are at the center of the movie.  There is little about work or workplaces except for the stores and shops.  Average, meaning middle or lower middle class Britain struggling to return to normalcy at the end of a long hard war.

The film embeds a critique of government bureaucracy.  But it’s not exactly a class critique, though the ministers are shown as upper class.  But mostly it’s a dig at inefficiency not oppression:  the declaiming of responsibly, the elaborate rituals and protocols.  For a nation that administered the largest empire in history, the British can be surprisingly disdainful of their own bureaucratic systems.  Of course you can argue that every culture gets the bureaucracy it deserves and then disdains it in its own special way.  The French, Italians, Spanish and other might see government bureaucracy as something to formally accept and informally subvert, a game that only the most naïve could think is anything else.  Weber’s model of bureaucracy was drawn from his native Germany, a ruthless and efficient Prussian model, at least as an ideal type.  For Weber the issue was legitimacy—the state administration had to operate objectively, transparently and professionally.  The British never seem to have followed this idealized view. Instead, they value the unexceptional, amateurish, educated man on the spot who could run a bureaucracy that did not need, or should not need, elaborate rules and ceremonies (rules are the thing that stops the Pimlico problem from reaching an early resolution).  Government administration should follow what every can see as obvious common sense.  And when it doesn’t, it is subject to ridicule, as in the movie.

In the end Pimlico is brought back into the bosom of the nation.  Looking back at the film from today, we might  ask, are there lessons here for a Brexit divided Britain?   On the on hand, the split could be interpreted as pro-Brexit:  a plucky little spot that has to go its own free trade way to escape the onerous rules of the bureaucrats.  Except that Pimlico actually joins Europe, so maybe it’s a pro-EU story of escaping the stifling culture of Little England for continental sophistication.  In the movie a descendant of the Duke of Burgundy shows up to claim his birthright.  He’s charming, suave and poor as a church mouse.

The pro-EU fantasy comes to an end when Pimlico, with some relief to its residents, reunites with the mother country.  Still, some seventy years on it may well contain at least one hidden message from the past to the future, like those uncovered old documents.  When the ministries finally work out a settlement, the people of Pimlico, including their temporary duke, all turn out in the street to celebrate.  They set up tables amidst the rubble and sit down to an enormous open air meal—which does not sound like a very English thing to do.  Tables are laden with food and wine in the sun, indeed the weather has been unusually sunny and warm the whole time of Pimlico’s departure.  At the stoke of the hour when the reconciliation goes into effect, cut to the image of a thermometer.  Its mercury immediately starts to plunge, skies darken, clouds move in and the heavens open up, rain pouring down to wash out the festivities.  Welcome back to England.