Business as usual | 3 December 2011

I feel a jarring sensation to hear business as usual employed in a strange sense. It is frequently used at the moment to suggest that bankers and other wicked people have gone back to their greedy ways. The dog has returned to his vomit.

Although I am not old enough to remember the war, I appreciate something of the associations of the phrase in that period. Looking through some old photographs from the Getty collection from the war years, I can see how business as usual became a powerful, often moving, declaration of defiance, when posted up as a notice or chalked on the front of a bombed shop. ‘Business as Usual, In Spite of Hitler’, read a sign on a shop in Watford, as early as October 1939.

Before the war it was less of a slogan, more a conventional phrase. I have also found a photo of a notice ‘Chartered Bank Business as usual’ on a wall of sandbags in a doorway in Shanghai in 1937, during the Sino-Japanese war. Churchill, to whom all quotations are attributed, does come into its adoption as a slogan, for in a speech delivered at Guildhall on 9 November 1914, he said: ‘The British people have taken for themselves this motto: “Business carried on as usual during alterations on the map of Europe”.’

The Oxford English Dictionary only records the phrase in the sense of ‘things proceeding normally in spite of disturbing circumstances’. Its earliest example is taken from Punch for 12 April 1884. I looked it up and found it was from a comment on whether the courts should close for the day of the Duke of Albany’s funeral: ‘The true way she [Justice] could show respect to Her Majesty was by letting her shopmen carry on “business as usual”.