Cold, but Warmer

The source and strength of the British national character, as everyone knows, lie in keeping things cold and damp. Sangfroid has been bred into generations of Britons by keeping toast in racks cleverly devised to cool it fast and, above all, by not heating their houses. Limited areas of the living room may be heated by small gas or electric heaters, or by cheerful-looking coal fires against which a man can warm his legs while his breath smokes in the air. Until recently, refrigerators were considered unnecessary, and the traditional British bedroom is a cave of the winds for which it is wise to bundle up in winter. Britons are the only people, as the saying goes, who dress instead of undress for bed.

Today, for the first time since the heat-loving Romans pulled out some 1.500 years ago, the British are turning on the heat. Shell-Mex started this un-English trend with an ad campaign for oil burners featuring bare-bottomed children romping happily indoors and ladies tossing off the covers of a morning in sheer nighties. Burbled one woman's page columnist: "For the 70-degree girl, it's glamour first. She can carry honeymoon glamour to the everyday breakfast table in a thin, filmy negligee. She can potter around the bathroom dressed only in a towel.'' The National Coal Board quickly joined in with the slogan: "Central Heating for all! Today central heating is not just for rich people." Electricity and gas authorities helped put on the pressure, and the public threw tradition to the wolves. In 1955 there were only 9,000 oil burners in priate houses; today there are 150,000. Sales of electric heaters jumped from 2,000,000 in 1958 to 3,000,000 last year, and the cryptic symbol "ch" (for central heating) is appearing more and more often in the classified ads.

And those who already have heat are shamelessly turning up the thermostat. Average room temperatures have inched up from an ascetic 60 to 65--only five points short of the decadent American average of 70. The days are fast disappearing, editorialized the London Daily Mail, when "British breakfasters step gratefully down from their bedrooms to swap details of the night's torture, like survivors of some physical disaster," and when the hearty British breakfast (oatmeal, eggs, two rashers of bacon, and kippers, toast and marmalade) was designed "to replace the energy expended in the struggle for mere survival during the night."

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