Speech marks: single or double?

[Fizzytea]

Just arguing/chatting with DH, who is an academic. He says in British English we use single inverted commas for direct speech.

He says, 'we use single inverted commas!'

I say, "at school we were taught to use double!"

(DC10 says actually we should use a capital letter after the inverted comma/s also, but that's another discussion.)

I looked it up in my 1980s copy of Fowler's Modern English and it says to use single inverted commas. So why are we taught to use double at school?

Yes this is correct, but many use the American way of doing it.

I read a novel years ago (not by either of those two) that used dashes instead of quotation marks and it drove me up the wall looking at it.