‘I sometimes think of what future historians will say of
us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he
fornicated and read the papers’
Albert Camus 1
In his classic history of manners, The Civilizing Process (1939), Norbert Elias shows how the routine of going to bed began to be hidden from social life from the Renaissance period onwards. The bedroom became an intimate space, with sleep almost as embarrassing to polite society as other bodily functions like burping and breaking wind. The whole-body nightgown came into use in the late sixteenth century, making it roughly contemporaneous with innovations like handkerchiefs and the modern arrangement of table cutlery, which also sought to civilise our bodily functions. The Victorian period, when ladies and gentlemen did not go to bed but ‘retired’, was the high point of this awkwardness about bedtime habits.2
Although things loosened up a little after the First World War, it was the Second World War that really synchronised our national bedroom routines and turned them once more into social habits. The nightly blackout necessitated the tedious collective ritual of putting up blankets and brown paper screens to obscure every last bit of window light. There was no particular reason to stay up late in the blackout, one MP even suggesting that going to bed early to save resources was a patriotic duty.3 With the offshore commercial stations closed during wartime, BBC radio emerged as the voice of the nation and became the choreographer of bedtime habits, as listeners put themselves to sleep to its background noise. The threat of bombing made sleeping a difficult and sometimes public affair, as families went out each night to their Anderson shelters, public shelters or London Underground platforms. In 1943, Mass-Observation noted that people still slept in Underground stations long after the serious threat of bombing had passed, and commuters were having to pick their way through the ‘tube dwellers’ on the ground. It concluded that these people stayed there not through fear but out of social habit, and the search for companionship and community.4
If you had to go to bed early, or were stuck in a shelter, or could not sleep, one of the few things you could do was read, an activity which grew in popularity in wartime.5 There was much discussion, both during and after the war, about how to read in bed without getting cold in freezing winter bedrooms. One man patented a device that projected microfilm photographs of a book on to the ceiling, the pages being turned by a camera shutter cable, operated from under the bedclothes, so that you could read while completely tucked in.6 Other suggestions included choosing a book that was slim enough to hold lightly, and engrossing enough to take your mind off the cold; tucking yourself in with the sheets close to your neck, using your thumb and two fingers to turn the pages; and wearing a ski cap, mittens and a thick cardigan put on the wrong way round and pulled up under the chin.7
In the years after the war, the bedroom lagged behind other areas of the house in its embracing of social change. The wartime Utility Furniture Scheme, which ran until 1949, made it against the law to manufacture beds without a government licence. Only priority groups like newly-weds and ‘bombees’ (those whose houses had been bombed out) could buy the government-sponsored ‘utility furniture’. This furniture could not use the design materials pioneered between the wars – aluminium, chrome and plastics – because they were needed for the war effort. For many on the Utility committee, like the designer Gordon Russell, this was an opportunity to educate the public about the beauty of simple, unshowy functionalism. Utility beds were austerely simple items using no nails, no decorative carving or other embellishments, as little wood and other materials as possible, and straight, clean lines. Since utility beds were thin on the ground, however, a side effect of the scheme was to turn the ricketiest old second-hand beds into prized possessions.
Even after these restrictions ended, the bed never became a symbol of the affluent society in the way that the furniture of the kitchen and living room did. In the early 1960s, the president of the National Bedding Federation registered his paternalistic dismay:
Although we place luxurious sleeping equipment at everybody’s disposal, many people are still today sleeping, or trying to sleep, on beds and mattresses in the last stages of senile decay. Why people continue to defy sleep on lumpy, bumpy mattresses is a mystery to me. The same people probably have fine television sets and wonderful refrigerators.8
The problem was that the cold British bedroom was unfit for much more than sleeping. In his 1962 history of the bed, Warm and Snug, the British historian Lawrence Wright manages to fill more than 350 pages of closely typed text while barely mentioning a rather important secondary function of the bed: sex. Although there is no evidence that Britons have had any less sex than other nationalities, the British bedroom has traditionally been seen as a passionless place where sitcom couples – he in winceyette striped pyjamas, she in a frilly pink nightgown – bicker with each other and imagine hearing strange noises coming from downstairs. ‘Continental people have sex life [sic],’ wrote George Mikes in 1946. ‘The English have hot water bottles.’9 As late as 1963, only 3.5 per cent of British households had central heating, compared to 60 per cent of American homes and 90 per cent of Swedish homes.10 The delicious habit of warming your feet directly on a hot water bottle was a major cause of chilblains, almost unknown in North America, but still afflicting half the UK population in the 1950s.11
One of the key signs of the changing status of the bedroom after the war was the gradual decline of twin beds. Twin beds for married couples had begun to replace double beds in both Britain and the US in the inter-war era and, for a brief period, became more popular after the war, as a symbol of growing affluence. Groucho Marx referred to the warring tribes of ‘monobedders’ and ‘polybedders’: the couples who slept in separate, single beds or shared a double.12 The romantic author Barbara Cartland was a confirmed polybedder:
I suspect the woman who says that she has chosen twin beds for reasons of decorative effect, sleeping comfort, or hygiene. She is, in fact, excusing the coldness that exists in her marriage … How much easier is it to make up a row if one is close together in a double bed? … As the old adage has it, ‘No difference is wide, that the sheets will not decide.’13
Meanwhile, the Director of the Family Relations Institute argued that twin beds were a conspiracy by furniture manufacturers to make more money, and warned that the movement to twin beds by middle-aged couples was ‘often the prelude to a divorce’.14 The birth-control campaigner and sex expert Marie Stopes was a monobedder, but she also excoriated the twin bed set as ‘an invention of the Devil, jealous of married bliss’. For her, the ‘truly civilised standard’ – an increasingly unrealistic one in cramped post-war houses – was for husband and wife to each have a double-bedded room of their own to ‘keep the fresh intensity of their love’.15
By the late 1950s the double bed was dominant again and the twin bed in final retreat – and not because of the propagandistic efforts of any of these critics. The double bed came to symbolise the more relaxed, companionate marriage (and other forms of coupling) in this period, consigning the twin bed to a reputation for suburban tweeness which turned out to be terminal. A complicating factor was the scientific evidence now emerging that sleepers changed position twenty to forty-five times a night and needed at least thirty-nine inches of bed-width to do it comfortably16 – a difficult prospect in a standard double bed. So the double bed also became bigger, expanding to ‘king’ and ‘queen’ sizes.17 The old, four-foot-wide ‘three-quarter’ bed, nicknamed the ‘landlady’s double’ because it could cram two people into a space fit only for one, became extinct. The polybedders had won, by a length. For no doubt unrelated reasons, the divorce rate carried on rising.
Another activity ripe for change was bedmaking. This ritual involved layering the different elements in strict order – an under-blanket round the mattress, then an under-sheet, a top sheet, pillows, blankets, counterpane, and an eiderdown in winter – distributing them evenly without any rucks, and tucking them into mitred folds at the end of the bed, or ‘hospital corners’. In cold British bedrooms, a properly made bed certainly had its comforts. Robert Louis Stevenson eulogised about ‘the pleasant land of counterpane’ and Rupert Brooke about ‘the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon / Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss / Of blankets’.18 But bedmaking was a potential tyranny for the housewife, the unshakeable order of the different layers a way of valuing hierarchy and order in themselves. In the 1960s, as many press articles and consumer surveys began to measure how hard the housewife actually worked, traditional bedmaking was beginning to seem like a chore too many.19
If you had to pick one significant date in the history of British bedmaking, it would be 11 May 1964, when Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store in South Kensington. Habitat soon became the most fashionable London shop of the 1960s, spreading to the provinces in the 1970s. The expansion of universities, and generally rising affluence, created a new generation of middle-class baby-boomers who were setting up home earlier. This vanguard of bedsit-ters and flatsharers did not have time for hospital corners. Conran recognised that this new middle class wanted elegant but low-maintenance housewares: cutlery that did not need endless polishing; tables that looked good without tablecloths; earthenware dishes that went straight from the oven to the dinner table; and beds that could be easily made. Habitat’s bestselling item throughout the 1960s was the duvet, which had been used in Alpine and Scandinavian bedrooms for centuries and which the British were now encountering on foreign holidays. Some Habitat shoppers were so fascinated by the duvets that they climbed into the display beds in the stores to see what they felt like.20 Conran later said it was the best product he ever sold because it was ‘symbolic of social change’.21
According to one advert, making the bed with a duvet only took eighteen seconds: ‘Eight to smooth out the bed, six to plump up the pillows, and four more to s-w-i-s-h over your Slumberdown.’22 In a photo from a Habitat catalogue of the time, a man is arranging the duvet in the background while a woman is looking straight at the camera, doing her nails at a dressing table.23 The duvet, this image suggested, was encouraging men to make the bed at last. Perhaps, but one suspects it was still women who had to put the quilt back into the washed duvet cover once a week, a delicate manoeuvre which was a bit like trying to stuff a giant marshmallow into a small envelope. Another new boon for bedmakers was the no-iron, nylon fitted sheet. ‘These are the sheets a few years ago only millionaires and film stars could enjoy,’ went an advert for Brentford’s (‘the king of nylon sheets’) in 1966. ‘So, if they are good enough for them, they are good enough for us all!’24
When adverts for duvets promised an ‘uninhibited’ lifestyle, they meant more than simply that they were light, comfy and convenient. Duvets were the ‘luxurious Swedish sleeping sensation’25 at a time when Scandinavia was synonymous with a liberated sex life. A 1970 advert for Slumberdown duvets showed a pretty blonde woman in bed, the duvet covering her naked front. ‘Sleep Swedish – and be free of that blankety-blank bedmaking,’ it said. ‘The Scandinavian way of sleeping is free, uninhibited.’26 ‘The English have been doing it all wrong for years,’ went another advert. ‘It’s the bedclothes they use. They’re so restricting, they’re more of a hindrance than a help.’ The duvet ‘will do wonders for your nightlife – and our reputation. Rule Britannia.’27 All this nudging and winking went nicely with Habitat’s image as unstuffy and anti-suburban. Habitat opened in France in 1973, with a special promotion on duvets (‘vingt secondes pour faire un lit!’) and Conran later claimed, with enviable chutzpah, that this ‘undoubtedly changed the sex life of Europe’.28 Duvets entered the British mainstream in the early 1970s, when they no longer needed to be known as ‘continental quilts’ to hint at their exotic origins. They soon lost their sexy connotations, but once people had been weaned off blankets they never wanted to return to them.
The central heating boom of the 1960s – by the end of that decade, a quarter of British homes had it installed29 – should also have encouraged bedroom design to become more playful. There was indeed a brief fashion for novelty, such as PVC water beds with ripple-control and mirrored headboards; Murphy beds that descended from holes in the wall; and ‘sleeping centres’ with gadgets like undulating massagers, inbuilt alarms, fridges, hi-fis, electric razors and remote controls for curtains and lights. On the whole, though, outside of swanky bachelor pads and James Bond movies the bedroom was never a place of technological invention. Instead it became part of what Nicholas Tomalin, in a prophetic article in Town magazine in 1963, identified as a new middle-class aesthetic of ‘conspicuous thrift’, which was supposedly a reaction against chintzy bourgeois taste. But as Tomalin recognised, the thrifters were also ‘distinguishing themselves, distastefully, from the real proletariat’, which in an age of consumer affluence now ‘guiltlessly enjoys the excesses of conspicuous waste’.30
Stripped pine, pioneered by Habitat in the 1960s, was the classic example of this middle-class preference for understatement. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the preserve of poor families who could not afford to paint or stain their furniture. But with the working classes now buying furniture made of modern fabrics and plastics on hire purchase, stripped pine was in no danger of being seen as vulgarly proletarian. The prime site for this manufactured nostalgia, the new bourgeois-bohemian fondness for retro styles, was the bedroom. Here the middle classes adopted a comfortable version of the below-stairs life of the servants they might have employed in a previous era: Victorian maids’ cast-iron beds, simple pine bedsteads, bare floorboards, sanded-down old dressers. This was the mass-market, middle-class version of Gordon Russell’s Utility aesthetic, which had been born out of wartime privations. It combined the pleasures of mass consumption with older ideals of homeliness, naturalness and simplicity.
In 1955, the Daily Mirror had noted that in London only one bedstead was sold for every seven divans, while in the Midlands and North they still clung to the ‘traditional’ bedstead.31 But this trend soon reversed and more people began to buy bedsteads than divans, a movement which is only now showing signs of levelling out. ‘A bed like grand-mama’s. Suddenly it’s news. They’ve taken the aspidistra-antimacassar gloom out of Victoriana and turned what is left into the brightest trend in bedroom décor for years,’ claimed the Mirror in 1959. ‘Brass bedsteads are back.’32 Influenced by eastern traditions and the hippy movement, there was a fashion in the 1960s and 1970s for sleeping on lower, even sparser beds without footboards or headboards, or simply a mattress on the floor. In the 1980s and 1990s, this minimalist tradition continued in the fibre-filled Japanese futon and the unadorned IKEA bed on which, if you believed the adverts, one out of every ten European babies was conceived.
But the bedroom could not entirely escape the acquisitive culture of consumerism. It also became more of a social space, meant not just for sleeping but for relaxation and entertainment. As more people bought multiple TV sets, they usually put the spare ones in their bedrooms. A 1983 survey found that at least a quarter of all households watched television in bed. (In the days when most TVs did not have remote controls, it was the man’s job to get up and change channels or switch off – for which he was rewarded with control of the remote when it eventually came.33) Bedrooms acquired exercise bikes (used and unused), telephones, bookcases, desks and computers. This newly social dimension of the bedroom created a market for ‘relax-at-home’ loungewear like kimonos and dressing gowns, which could be worn for longer and in front of more people. It was a reversion to the historical pattern in place before the eighteenth century, when bedrooms were semipublic spaces, which the poor used as multi-occupancy rooms and the rich as reception areas.34 The bedroom now brought together two countervailing trends: the search for simplicity and the desire for modern comforts. No wonder that one of the new obsessions of makeover programmes and furniture stores was storage and hanging space, to hide all the stuff we had absent-mindedly acquired and to turn the bedroom into a retreat once again.
The bedroom was partly changing because our attitude to sleep was changing. In his 1905 essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber noted that it had long been common in protestant, capitalist Europe to view sleeping too much as an immoral waste of one’s time on God’s earth: ‘The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.’35 In some ways, the longer-hours culture of the last few decades has institutionalised this idea of sleep as non-productive time. One of this culture’s architects, Margaret Thatcher, let it be known that she slept for only four hours a night, in a manner that suggested that going to bed at a normal hour was the unnecessary indulgence of shiftless layabouts.
In a book published in 1987, the American sociologist Murray Melbin claimed that night was ‘the last frontier’. Since the birth of gas lighting, he argued, night-time had been colonised in the same way that white Americans had gradually settled the western frontier, and in both cases it had been accompanied by a relaxation of social codes and hierarchies. The first people to lay claim to night-time were misfits and criminals, just like the hunters and outlaws of the wild west. Then, as in the west, came the entrepreneurs, who invented shift work so that the expensive machinery in their factories could be used at night. Finally there came a whole ‘afterhours community’ of pleasure seekers. Busy roads and flight paths made night-time noisier, and people kept themselves awake with alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. Once shops and broadcasters adopted a 24-hour schedule, Melbin argued, the distinction between night and day would disappear.36
But if sleep is a waste of time in this 24/7 culture, it is still rather difficult to avoid. If we are rich enough, many of the most tedious routines of daily life, like cooking, childcare or housework, can be farmed out to minions or purchased in more convenient forms. But sleeping, the most time-consuming routine of all, cannot be outsourced in this way – at least, not yet. Some experts predict that Modafinil and other ‘clock-shifting’ compounds, used to treat disorders like narcolepsy, will soon become lifestyle drugs that will pharmacologically eliminate the need for sleep. They will not simply knock us out like sleeping pills, but change our ‘sleep architecture’ so that we enter deep sleep quicker. Two hours’ sleep will feel like eight, freeing up more time to check our emails or book cheap flights on the internet. Bedtime will be cancelled. For now, though, most of us seem reluctant to do our civic duty and become 24-hour workers and consumers. Quite unreasonably, we insist on going to bed at a reasonable time every night. The normal time for retiring – between 11 p.m. and midnight, with men going slightly later than women – has remained remarkably consistent since the war.
In fact, one consequence of the so-called ‘24-hour society’ has been a growing interest in sleep. Ever since the scientific study of sleep began with the discovery of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep in the 1950s, our increasing knowledge has produced accompanying anxieties. The specialist language for talking about sleep – some of which has now filtered into general use – borrows the vocabulary of a time-, money- and health-conscious culture. When we do not sleep we are said to be suffering from ‘sleep-debt’, which we will need to make up by depositing more sleep in our ‘account’. Western society itself is ‘sleep-sick’, suffering from chronic sleep deficiency. To cure our sleep-sickness, we need to practise ‘sleep hygiene’, which means keeping the bedroom dark with light-proof curtains, cool and free from TVs and other electrical equipment. In a neat mirroring of the Thatcherite work ethic, we are urged to be more ‘sleep efficient’. This means maximising the usefulness of our time in bed, making sure we drift into deeper REM sleep more quickly and do not keep waking ourselves up by snagging our clothes or rolling around on bumpy mattresses.
Insomnia has also been pathologised. Science has finally confirmed what most of us suspected, that the time-honoured tricks for falling asleep, such as imagining ourselves building brick walls or counting sheep, are worse than useless, because they do not use up enough brain capacity. Getting people to sleep has become an industry, particularly in the case of over-the-counter remedies like herbal pills, aromatherapies and dilator strips designed to keep our nasal passages open. Insomnia is one of the most common complaints in doctors’ surgeries. It is often viewed as a particularly contemporary condition, a product of lifestyles that are supposedly more stressful and hectic than they have ever been. But there is actually little agreement among sleep experts about whether we are sleeping less than we used to, and even whether this is a problem. The western tradition of getting seven or eight hours’ continuous sleep is, after all, a recent development, a product of the arrival of sophisticated forms of artificial lighting in the eighteenth century which encouraged people to stay up late into the evening.37
Whether our anxieties about sleep are justified or not, manufacturers and advertisers have cottoned on to them. The bedroom has become a glorious escape from the stresses of the day, a promise of ‘sweet and restful slumber’ and ‘night after night of bedtime bliss’. We can buy different types of bedside light to cast a soft, restful glow on the bed, creating the right mood for sleep. We can ditch our sweaty polyester duvets and nylon fitted sheets, and luxuriate in duck feather or goosedown pillows and duvets, and brushed Egyptian cotton sheets with a lavish ‘thread count’, which enclose us in their loving folds and creases. We can buy mattresses with individually pocketed springs and delicately responsive fillings which accommodate the uniqueness of our body shapes and our favourite sleeping positions. We can even buy mattresses divided into two halves of contrasting firmness for couples, or ones that adapt to the changing seasons – summer silk on one side, winter cashmere on the other. Falling asleep, and inducing the right kind of sleep, has become a market-driven lifestyle choice.
Right up until the moment we drift off each night, in other words, we are creatures of collective habit. This natural phenomenon of the single day, which we fill up with our quotidian routines, marks out our limits as social animals. If we are lucky, this day will be separated from the next one by a good few hours of lost consciousness – and here, since we are all narcissists in our dreams, the study of our shared daily life has to end. So now I’m just going to creep out, close the door quietly, and leave you to it.