The strong dollar and Lindsay Wellington - 18 January 1985

In the long ago, when the first tidal wave of American holidaymakers fell on Britain – it was a small tidal wave but it was an invasion quite new in the long history of Anglo-American relations – there was a cartoon in Punch, this must have been some time in the mid- to late-1920s, anyway at the height of what was known here as the Coolidge prosperity.

An American was standing in a shop pondering some purchase a hat, a tie, whatever. An American could be recognised instantly in English cartoons of the time by his bow tie, trousers hitched high up his calf and held up by – imagine! – a belt. He always wore what were then considered in England very comical appendages, horn-rimmed glasses.

He was gazing at his likely purchase and saying to a shop assistant, fainting with disgust, "How much is this in real money?" In case you didn’t feel the emotional force of this appallingly tasteless remark, the caption was followed by a phrase in brackets, "Collapse of shop assistant".

Well, we all have that problem in any foreign country. I have to say that while I have watched the slow and sure change in value of a really superior restaurant hamburger from 25c to three dollars, I am myself, totally unable to guess at the likely price of practically any object in a British shop, or on a London menu. We are all chained, I think, to our childhood scale of values.

To me, a three-course dinner in London, is say, six shillings, and if it isn’t, something has gone wrong. My headmaster earned the lordly salary of £600 a year, and comfortably sent two sons to Oxford on it. I am told that's no longer possible. Well, it was no more than four years ago, that an English friends of ours who comes over on an annual visit discovered a handy formula to save British visitors here, and American visitors to Britain, from having to work out prices on a calculator.

It’s very simple he’d say, if a sports shirt costs $24 in New York it will cost £24 in London. I remember around that time I bought a raincoat here, lined from the earlobes to the ankles with Australian opossum calculated to keep you cosy outdoors, even in the arctic New England winter. It cost, just over $100. A few months later I was in London and priced something similar but with a scantier fur lining that stopped just below the shoulder blades. It was, to my horror, £240. Those were the glory days for British visitors to America, who, as the man said, didn’t need to do any sums in arithmetic just assume everything in Britain cost twice or more what it would cost here.

Well, as you may have heard, there have been some changes made. At this moment, as I talk, the pound is teetering around $1.10, and the investment economists here doubt that even an emergency rise in the basic lending rate will arrest what they call a freefall.

By the way, I gather that Britons trying to buy dollars here at their hotel cashier's desk have been shocked to be offered no more than say, 98c. They must be very new to the game; this is standard practice everywhere in the world. I learned long ago never to cash dollars, at a hotel. After all, they have to service and sell the dollars too. And when the pound stood at $2.50, one grand London hotelier I recall, quite blandly, would give you $2.19.

What Mr Churchill would have called this sombre news has, of course, been on our nightly news, but briefly. Such lofty commentators as the New York Times and the news magazines have cheered anglophiles by pointing out that while the drop in the pound is rough on British imports, British exports are now cheaper than anyone can remember, and that every 10% in the pound's value should create another 40,000 jobs.

But the follow-up stories in the popular papers and on many telecasts report Americans flocking to the travel bureau and signing up for a spring or summer, or late winter holiday, or even a quick weekend shopping trip. Last year, two and a half million Americans, visited Britain; a record, which if things go on, or go on going down, will be easy to beat.

If Americans are exalting in the cheapness of the pound, I doubt that many of them are deeply worried at the dearness of the dollar. Yet there are powerful voices in America that are very disturbed and keep on saying, that the dollar is way overvalued. The most vocal protestors of all are, of course, the exporters and the people in the domestic textile industries.

The latest figure shows 52% of all manufactured textiles that are worn here come from abroad, the shirts, the suits, the slacks, the blouses, and, that about 45% come from somewhere in the Pacific from Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan. They cost half the price of the same things made in America, for the simple, irresistible reason that they are the products of labour so cheap that no American manufacture can possibly compete with them. This means that Americans are losing as many jobs to their strong dollar as Britain is gaining by its weak pound.

There has not been, so far as I know, any suggestion from on high, I mean from the White House or from the treasury, that the dollar ought to be devalued. But if this country’s trade imbalance goes on getting worse, there are knowledgeable people who think it could happen.

Well, of all the engines of government that get going again every January, none works up more steam than the United States Supreme Court. Of course the justices don’t, during the rest of the year, just stand there dozing, but January usually sees them unload a raft of judgments they have been working on for a long time. And one of them this week has, I think, more than local interest.

Four years ago, in a small town in New Jersey, a school teacher heard that a girl student had been smoking in the lavatory, against the school rules. The teacher reported this suspicion to a higher up, who asked to see the girl's purse. He found cigarettes there, but also evidence that she had been dealing in marijuana. Well, she was turned over to the police, was labelled a delinquent in juvenile court but took the case onwards and upwards, to the Supreme Court of the state of New Jersey, which dismissed the case, saying that the girl had been subjected to unreasonable search and seizure, which the American Constitution prohibits in its fourth amendment, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated".

The school pressed on and, since this was a constitutional question of citizens rights, it eventually went up to the US Supreme Court, which ruled this week that the search was not unreasonable, that's to say that teacher had reasonable grounds for thinking that there had been a violation of the law, or the school rules. The school's lawyers maintained that the fourth amendment didn’t apply to the school's code of discipline. The girl's lawyer said that on the contrary they applied to the letter of her rights, as a citizen with a person's papers and effects that the constitution protected. The supreme court said they were both wrong, the girl was protected by the Constitution, but only from unreasonable search.

This may seem a small matter to air abroad, but it will set off a mighty echo through every school in the land. It is no secret that in this country, as in many other western countries which prefer to keep the knowledge secret, in schools – all the way from elementary schools in the slums to very respectable high schools in the suburbs – drugs, and drug dealing are rampant.

After talking to a former addict who for the past year has been working in New England high schools warning children about drugs, my hunch is that at least half the parents of steady addicts not only of pot or speed, but of cocaine, haven’t the remotest suspicion that their son their daughter is hooked.

To these parents, whether they know the worst or barely suspect it, the supreme court ruling will come as a vast relief. To legions of students, especially those who have something to hide, the ruling will seem like the first edict of a police state. The difference between reasonable and unreasonable search and seizure is, to them, a fiddle, and will not give them pause, any more than the students rampaging around the campuses in the sixties. Care to notice that the constitution protects only their right peaceably to assemble.

Before I end, I must say a word about a great friend of yours, as well as mine, who has just died. He was Lindsay Wellington, once head of the BBC in North America, and then director of sound radio. For the last three years of the second war, I was doing for the BBC more or less regularly a Sunday night commentary on America, its politics and the war, which was in fact, called American Commentary.

When the war was over, it became clear to Lindsay Wellington that people in Britain were aching to have an end of war talk and politics. "Let us," he said, "abolish American Commentary. And why don’t you broadcast what you talk to me about , everyday things the history of ice cream, colonial Williamsburg, life out west, American children, bits about all the places you have seen and visited, and let’s call it just a Letter."

He warned me that, since in the spring of 1946, Britain was even more strapped for dollars than she is now, the series, however successful, would probably go on for not much more than 13 weeks, 26 weeks at most. "Still," he said, "you never know, it could open up a wide field for you to be yourself."

Well, 39 years or 1,875 weeks later, he appears to have been right. So I’d like to pay a farewell tribute to my old friend, Lindsay Wellington. He, more than anybody, is the reason I am here now, doing what I am doing.

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