Sad news indeed that
BHS appears to be going down the pan with the potential loss of many
jobs.
There is a
reason for this. Back then when I was a callow youth, student
actually, there was a current affairs programme on the television
called World In Action. It was a good programme, won awards and was
highly rated. It was made by Yorkshire Television, a reminder that
ITV did used to do quality.
One week in early
1976 they did a programme about homosexuals, presented as we always
were back then as some sort of problem. In it a man was seen to kiss
his boyfriend, a big deal at the time. The newspapers talked about it,
the establishment was shocked. The man in question worked for BHS,
went into work the next day and was sacked. There was practically no
employment protection legislation about in those days so he was out
of a job, with no avenue of appeal.
My very first bit of gay
activism was to join a picket and leafleting that was mounted the
next Saturday to protest about this at the town centre branch of BHS in the city where I was a student. To protect identities, let's call it Birmingham.
I don't think we did any good
for the poor bloke who'd lost his job, but it did me a power of good. As a consequence of
this I have never been able to bring myself to spend money in BHS. I
have as a consequence missed out on cardigans from the years before
fleabay when BHS and M&S were among the few retail outlets that
had them.
That said, I do have
a BHS card, bought on fleabay and very nice it is too.
While it is rather
mean of me to keep up a boycott for forty years, I suspect the money
that Philip Green has wrung out of the business has done more damage
than the money I haven't put in.
