If you come to Sweden in summer rather than winter, then not only have you given irrefutable proof that you are in your right mind. You might also be treated to a sight that you hadn’t entirely expected. Unless you’d read this blog first, of course.
My sister and her husband did this a few years ago. We were out driving one day en route to one of the few historical monuments in the area that hadn’t been demolished to make way for tenements, when suddenly we came across a convoy travelling in the opposite direction.
At this point, I have to point out that my brother-in-law is not only a fine upstanding citizen and generally very good chap. He is also a motorcar enthusiast and an Americanophile. Well, no-one’s perfect. But now what follows will make a little more sense, allowing you to bask in the knowledge of this otherwise perfectly useless piece of information.
For the convoy in question consisted of an endless cortege of classic American ‘automobiles’, as they insist on calling them. (Why? I wonder. The word ‘car’ is quite understandable and much shorter. But perhaps it doesn’t sound quite grand enough for such over-the-top mechanical juggernauts.)
Since we were driving down a pretty narrow road, we were obliged to pull into the side to let them all pass. This left me plenty of time to kill. So I checked my rearview mirror to make sure that I hadn’t unduly annoyed any following motorists by obstructing the road. I needn’t have bothered. There was nothing behind me except my brother-in-law, who was writhing round on the back-seat apparently discovering that even males could experience multiple orgasms.
‘You like?’ I asked rather pointlessly.
He gurgled something that sounded distinctly un-American. Eventually his words became more intelligible. The fact that he kept repeating them in a kind of delirious trance helped.
‘So what were they?’ you will be asking with a barely detectable touch of impatience.
He was murmuring ‘1970 Ford Torino King Cobra’ in much the same fashion as Mr Toad uttered ‘Poop-poop’ when he was knocked over by a motor car.
So there we had it.
He’d never seen one. And, as he explained at what I judged harshly to be unnecessary length, neither had most other people. It is one of the rarest bits of American automobilia around.
Frankly, who cares? Well, quite clearly he did.
Well, actually, it wasn’t that clear. In point of fact, I’ve made up most of the above with a view to ensuring you are awake and finding an elegant point of entry into the topic of this lesson in all things Swedish. For a start my brother-in-law is a masterclass in stolidity, even by Cumbrian standards. He is about as excitable as a tortoise on Xanax. If we were still analysing characters by humours rather than neuroses, he would be in bondage to phlegm’s dominance, so to speak.
But now I’ve got your attention…. Yes, we really did see a motorcade of vintage American cars that looked like a motorcade escorting the remains of the last 10 US presidents to their final resting place. In fact, this is not such an unusual sight in Sweden during the summer, especially in the vicinity of one of the many rallies where enthusiasts measure the length of their vehicles against each other.
It’s much more usual, however, to come across a single item, trundling along a backroad just about big enough to allow two normal vehicles to pass each other, preferably top down thus allowing owner to have his remaining hair or hairpiece waft gently in the breeze, and cruising at a max speed of 40 knots. Said car is normally followed by a train of more state-of-the-art conveyances, owners attempting desperately to maintain their traditional Swedish sangfroid as they wait for an opportunity to pass.
And if any oncoming car is unfortunate enough to encounter the cortege, its only choice is to head for the nearside ditch to allow the procession to proceed, as processions do. Meanwhile the King of the Caddy will, if feeling gracious, incline his head slightly and make a vaguely regal gesture with his hand, to acknowledge the fealty of his subjects. Noblesse, after all, oblige.
At this point, the faithful follower of these blogs may detect a point of resemblance to one of my earlier efforts. After all, you could regard the stately cruising of an oversized limousine as an adult version of the adolescent desire to ströga round town with an over-sized but under-powered car in an effort to impress the brudar (broads). Perhaps ownership of an EPA-tractor is a rite of passage that must be completed before graduation to something with six cylinders.
To uphold the pride tradition of fairness that we strive for in these blogs, it should be pointed out that it is not only these American behemoths that the summer brings out of hibernation. You will, if you keep your wits about you, be able to catch sight of a classic Swedish motor tootling along at an even more sedate pace – a Volvo PV or Amazon perhaps, or if you are really lucky, a Saab 96. But then again, these are the kinds of car you would expect to find in Sweden. That is to say, Swedish cars in the country of their conception and birth.
It’s another question entirely as to why such a great number of Swedes should own a gas-guzzling import from the heyday of US automotive manufacture.
It’s difficult to come by stats for this. But in 2019 there were about 20,000 US cars of the 1950-59 vintage registered in the country. By one estimate this is more models of this vintage than you can find in the United States. I’m not sure whether you’d call that recycling or dumping. But given the environmental-unfriendliness of the vehicles, I suspect it counts as the latter.
Then we can assume at least a similar (if not greater figure) for more recent classics, up to and superseding the 1970 Torino we mentioned earlier. So add another couple of decades to the figures already cited and you have a minimum of 60,000 vehicles in a population of just over ten million. Very odd, given the cost of importing the vehicles over the pond, the expenses involved in maintaining them over the years, and the amount of gas the brutes consume. Add to that the fact that all of these cars will spend probably 10 months of the year in the privacy of a garage or lock-up, and in the other two months be exhibited and with a bit of luck taken for an outing only on sunny weekends. So it is but reasonable to ask ‘what the hell is going on here?’
Well, I’m not sure it explains very much, but the phenomenon goes by the name here of ‘raggarkultur’. Under which heading you find a few similar, direct or lost-in-translation manifestations of this mania for all things American in otherwise immoderately sane people.
We’ll get to these other transatlantic imports in a moment.
Let’s try to solve the Mystery of the Superannuated Swedish Petrolhead first.
To be fair and give some kind of context, it wasn’t only Sweden that was swept with the Grand Obsession in the fifties. Even the French found a place for Johnny Halliday in their pantheon of torch-singers and chanteuses.
And in Britain, of course, it caught on big-time. I can just about recall the splendid Brylcreem quiffs and crimson drape jackets of the British Teddy Boys in the late fifties. The tailoring was modelled on that of Edwardian dandies. But the hairstyles were wholly inspired by the Rockabilly end of the musical spectrum, which was where the musical tastes of the Teds gravitated.
But there the resemblance with the raggare ends.
For the British incarnation was 100% more likely to drive a 50s Ford, than anything American. True, Ford is an American company. But these mini-behemoths were manufactured in Dagenham and toned-down (ie miniaturised) for use on narrow British roads. They bore little resemblance to anything anyone was driving in the States at the time.
This is not to say that your average Ted-about-town would not have felt quite at home in a Lincoln Cosmo convertible.
It was simply that the state of the post-War British economy meant that the only ones that could afford to import and buy one were those that wouldn’t have been seen dead in anything less than a Roller.
The same can’t be said for Sweden. For unlike the rest of Europe, which had been devastated by the Second World War, Sweden had remained neutral – or non-aligned, as they like to call it here. This meant that the country was one of the very few (along with the States) to emerge with its industry intact, and more than happy to take competitive advantage of that fact.
So full employment and relatively high wages were the norm rather than the exception. The young working-class had a higher disposable income than the previous generation in Sweden and the present generation pretty much anywhere else. So unlike, say, their British counterparts, they were in an ideal position to express their love of the American Zeitgeist by investing in an Automobile. I assume that their disposable income would have gone quite a lot farther if they had chosen a Saab or Volvo. But then again, if your parents were also driving one, you would be making a pretty fogeyish kind of statement.
To be honest though, I’d like to think there was more to it than money and prestige. Between 1820 and 1920, almost one and a half million Swedes migrated to the USA. They were looking for a better life and, I guess, most of them found it – although given the abject poverty of the Swedish peasant in the nineteenth century, that is not saying a great deal. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to make a further assumption – that America came to be regarded as something of a Shangri-La for those left behind.
So perhaps buying into American culture could be regarded as a kind of homage to the American Dream – a token of gratitude and admiration. Or at least a token domestic substitute for the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
Which our raggare are perfectly entitled to do, of course. And if you are not in a hurry and stuck behind a cavalcade of Cadillacs on a country lane, you have to admit they are a charming accessory to a balmy summer’s afternoon.
Alas, the same cannot be said of some of the other elements of the Raggare Package. I’m all for Bruce Springsteen and ‘Racing in the Street’ on vinyl. I’m a little more wary of gang culture. These days we tend to speak of this a by-product of immigration. But the raggar-boys didn’t do so shabbily with an ethnically undiluted population to draw upon. Through the fifties into the seventies, the lads managed on a fairly regular basis to clash with hippies, punks and the Police (the Plod rather than the white-reggae band). And if there had been any clearly-labelled immigrants around at the time, they would, I’m sure, have vented their exuberance on them too – as the Teddy Boys did in Britain.
For it wasn’t just the rock and roll trappings of the US of A – the limos, the Brylcreemed quiffs and the music – the raggar-boys bought into. It was also some of the less benign features of American sub-culture.
To put this into context, it’s worth pointing out that the Swedish trend was and remains mainly rural and largely working-class. Now translate that context into an American one and you end up deep in Alabaman red-neck territory.
Hence the popularity of the Dixie flag, aka the Dixie Swastika as an appendage to the radio aerial, along with matching attitudes towards the alien and the nubile. (Along with hippies, punks and figures of authority, it goes without saying.) Indeed, as I suggested above, the very term ‘to ragga’ suggests cruising in your car on the qui vive for available totty.
Nowadays, happily, there is little of that cachet that survives. Partly, I suspect because a large number of those that perpetuate the culture have grown too old to brawl and to cruise without the help of Viagra and Zimmer frames. For me at least, this estival manifestation of Americana on the backroads of Sweden is welcome as a quaint and nostalgic throwback, and a splash of colour in a country that has traditionally prized drab conformity. So more power to your V6! It might at least help you speed up a little.
Letters from Sweden 