by Paul Feeney
These terrorist activities left us shaken and insecure and they added chaos and fear to our country’s already turbulent problems; our everyday lives were becoming increasingly stressful and difficult because of unrest whilst at work. The workplace had become an unstable pressure pot that regularly erupted. There was definitely a much more confrontational attitude than there had been in the 1960s. We were now witnessing constant battles of will between management and workers; there was a clear ‘them and us’ approach to everything and, all at once, there was an abundance of militant shop stewards and union leaders shouting from the rooftops and ready to call their members out on strike on a whim. The unions made it impossible for businesses to implement any new ideas they might have had to increase productivity, and they fought tooth and nail to stop any form of rationalisation. More employers than ever were falling victim to the ‘closed shop’, which meant that a worker could not be employed in certain jobs unless he or she was a member of the relevant union. The practice of ‘demarcation’, when one category of worker was not allowed to do the work of another, became intolerable and soon hundreds of ‘how many men does it take to…?’ jokes were doing the rounds. Shop stewards were unrealistic in their demands and totally inflexible when interpreting the rules of demarcation, and they seemed to delight in the power they had to bring businesses to a halt. The idea of protecting skilled jobs seemed quite reasonable in practical situations (for example, not letting a cleaner change a light bulb when there was an electrician on site), but the lines of demarcation became ridiculous and there were silly situations arising, like a factory worker being unable to move a small box out of the way and an office worker unable to shift a desk a few inches. The slightest infringement of the rules could lead to a walkout (instant strike action). The unions were tougher than ever, professing that they would to do anything to uphold the rights of the downtrodden workers and protect their jobs. Many people still had to work in unsafe conditions and many more had stories of being exploited by their employers, and so it seemed sensible for workers to back the stance that the unions were taking. The unions, however, made one demand after another: more pay, fewer hours, extra holidays and better conditions. The demands were endless and it was just a matter of what action they had to take to get what they wanted.
Arthur Scargill, then leader of the Yorkshire region of the National Union of Mineworkers, said, ‘You get as much as you are prepared to go out and take.’ The unions were prepared to call strike after strike to bring the employers to their knees, but they were also bringing the country to its knees and putting their workers’ jobs in jeopardy. The 1973 industrial action by the coal miners coincided with the OAPEC oil embargo and subsequent oil price rise. The combined effect was to cause a British energy crisis over the winter of 1973–74. The energy crisis led to the prime minister, Edward Heath, limiting the use of electricity in most commercial and industrial premises to three specific days each week from 31 December 1973. This became known as the ‘three-day week’: a period of short pay, power cuts and television closing down at 10.30 p.m. every night. Petrol ration books were also issued in anticipation of the government having to ration the amount of petrol motorists could use and Ted Heath asked the British people to heat only one room in their houses over the winter to save energy. The prime minister and his Cabinet had seriously considered banning people from heating more than one room in their homes as part of an emergency energy-saving package, but an all-out ban never happened. Other restrictions that the government had secretly planned but never implemented included a compulsory 50mph speed limit, banning Sunday motoring, shortening the school week to four days and banning Christmas package tours abroad. They also drew up a list of one hundred mains-operated domestic appliances that they proposed should be either taxed or withdrawn from used during the emergency and possibly after. These included such things as electric food mixers, heated hostess trolleys, electric toothbrushes, coffee percolators and desk fans, as well as labour-saving equipment such as electric hedge trimmers.
The 1970s was an awful period of unrest with strike after strike, resulting in the average number of working days lost each year through industrial disputes being 12.9 million, compared to 7.2 million in the 1980s, 660,000 in the 1990s and 692,000 in the 2000s. The number of working days lost in the 1970s peaked at 29.4 million during the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979. There were 4,500 disputes in the 1978–79 period alone. Managers spent most of their time negotiating with the unions instead of running their businesses and for some time it did seem like the lunatics were running the asylum. The unions appeared to be in control and were not afraid to wield their newfound power. Unfortunately, some union leaders seemed to lose sight of their main objectives and appeared more interested in breaking businesses rather than protecting members’ jobs and increasing benefits for them. Some militant union leaders showed no sympathy or understanding of a company’s need to maintain profitability in order to stay in business and provide jobs. There was no mercy, and any sign of weakness in management resulted in a further tightening of the screw. Union-organised marches were a common sight in every town and city throughout the UK. Many ‘closed-shop’ businesses were known to be over staffed but employers were unable to do anything about it for fear of strike action. With so much over staffing, absenteeism was rife. The wartime spirit of everyone pulling together for the good of the country was nowhere to be seen, and skiving and poor workmanship became general topics of conversation. There was talk that night workers in the print industry, which was mainly based in London’s Fleet Street at the time, were regularly sleeping through their shifts. Disgruntled workers in the motor industry lacked the motivation to produce good-quality goods. The sense of pride in workmanship wore thin through the week and by the time Friday arrived it had manifested itself into a less-than-caring attitude and an increase in absenteeism. In fact, a brand-new car that was found to be faulty was often referred to as a ‘Friday car’; the inference being that it was made on a Friday when nobody much cared. Our entire daily lives seemed to be consumed with matters concerning industrial action, even if we were non-union and not directly involved at all in any kind of dispute.
Union leaders were high profile and famous. Ordinary people in the street who struggled to remember the names of leading politicians of the day found it easy to recite union leaders’ names and industrial action was regularly used as a theme for television sitcoms and comedy shows. There were, however, certainly workplace issues that needed addressing during the 1970s. Some things had not advanced very much since the war, especially sex discrimination in the workplace. Considering that the majority of women were in some kind of employment, there were still very few women managers because men were usually promoted ahead of them. Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1970, it was also still common practice for women to be paid less than men for doing the same job and there were still a number of jobs that were, in a derogatory way, considered to be women’s jobs. It was hard for women to be taken seriously at work when glamour calendars and pin-up pictures of topless women were still displayed on office and factory walls throughout the land. Yes, there were a great many issues for union leaders to get their teeth into – not least greater equality for women and sex discrimination in general, racial discrimination and matters of health and safety – but they seemed to be consumed with wage and benefit demands that were crippling the country.
Ultimately, whatever the unions achieved for their members came at a high cost to us all, with high inflation, high taxes, spending cuts, public money ploughed into troubled industries, businesses closing down and rising unemployment. Industrial unrest was worse than it had been since the British General Strike of 1926. In the period from 1965 to 1980, 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost and by the end of the 1970s, many workers were getting fed up with all the strikes. More and more were rejecting strike action and crossing the picket lines to get on with their work. They began to see that change was inevitable; British industry had to modernise
to compete in world markets. Like it or not, we had to make way for new ideas and find better ways of running our industries. There was a need to organise workforces to work in different and more effective ways and this would mean that some of the old jobs would have to go. Jobs for life were becoming a thing of the past.
From 1970 to 1974 we had a Conservative government, and in1973 the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, took the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (Common Market). We then had a Labour government from 1974 to 1979, and in accordance with their general election manifesto of October 1974, they allowed the British people to have a referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the Common Market on renegotiated terms or leave it entirely. The Labour government recommended a ‘Yes’ vote, even though it later emerged that seven out of the twenty-three Cabinet members wanted us to withdraw. The Conservative Party, under the leaderships of Edward Heath (1970–75) and Margaret Thatcher (1975–90), also campaigned for a ‘Yes’ vote. Just over 67% of the British voting public believed all the rhetoric and supported the ‘Yes’ campaign to stay in the EEC. After all, surely it would be good for us to be part of the Common Market – we were told that it was just a way for us to improve trading with other members of the European Community; just think of all those British manufacturing jobs it would create; there was no possibility that it could ever lead to the erosion of our national sovereignty and a transferral of powers to Europe. It was just what it said on the tin – a Common Market, that’s all. And 67% of us fell for it.
For many of us baby boomers, the negative events of the 1970s will score highly on our list of lifetime memories, albeit ones that we would perhaps rather forget. These may well have been days of trouble and strife and the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict, but it would be wrong to paint a picture of complete misery throughout the UK. There was indeed a lot of good stuff packed into those ten years, and many of us have very fond, personal memories of happy times and events that touched our lives back then. The 1970s weren’t just about power cuts and the dead being left unburied. Okay, so it was the decade in which the dumbing down of educational standards first began in England and Wales, when the Labour government abolished grammar schools for virtually all but the wealthy, softened all forms of discipline in schools and removed spelling and handwriting from the marking criteria, but perhaps they were right; with all of the electronic communications and abbreviated text messaging of today, does anyone really need to be able to spell or write legibly?
Very often, silly and unimportant things crop up in our daily lives to stir light-hearted memories of days gone by, and we are reminded of so many things through radio and television and in books and newspapers. Simple things transport us straight back to the 1970s, like the old Polaroid instant cameras that we all wanted to get our hands on back then, the sounds of Demis Roussos’ songs on the radio, K-tel records and the products they regularly promoted in their television adverts, such as the K-tel Brush-O-Matic. Our way of life has altered so much since then. Unfussy pleasures, like going down the local pub, have been diminished because our changing British lifestyle and new laws have forced many of the local pubs that were once packed full of regulars to close down. In the 1970s, it was still common practice for workers to go to the pub at lunchtime to enjoy a liquid lunch. This was before many of the big old pubs were turned into gastropubs to attract families with young children. It was a time when a pub was still a sanctuary for adults, one of the few places in which adults could take refuge from the delightful sounds and activities of their darling little children. It was a time when you had to search hard to find a pub that sold food any more substantial than a cheese roll. A local pub was a place in which old boys played dominoes at a table in the corner while the true athletes played darts and drank pints of Watney’s Red Barrel and other keg beers. Women’s favourite drinks included port and lemon, vodka and orange, lager and lime, and perhaps a Babycham at Christmas. And, of course, everyone’s favourite cocktail drink at Christmas was the Snowball, a mixture of Advocaat and lemonade. If you were very grand you would serve it with a glacé cherry on top. If you lived in a very posh house then you might well have had one of those luxuriously padded, bow-fronted cocktail cabinets fitted into the corner of your front room with your very own spirit-dispensing optics attached to the back wall – very tasteful.
It was in the 1970s, after having spent several years since leaving school slumbering in armchairs, that we suddenly decided we wanted to get fit. Following a keep-fit trend in America, we British began joining newly opened gyms, playing squash and even going out jogging in the street, in public! This was a new and unusual sight on our streets back then and the pioneers of British jogging were very brave, attracting strange looks wherever they went. At the same time, we were all trying desperately to give up smoking after being shown horrible pictures of damaged human lungs on our television screens. A growing group of environmentalists were also hell bent on making us feel guilty about the damage we were doing to our environment and we were becoming more conscious of the world around us. The government was interfering more and more in matters relating to the state of our health and the way we lived our lives. For the first time, cholesterol and blood pressure became part of the ordinary person’s vocabulary. When we weren’t jogging to keep fit, we occupied our spare time making homemade wine and beer, another fad of the seventies, as was renting all those poor-quality VHS films from the high street video shops. However, our newfound fitness regime was subjected to competition from increasing amounts of takeaway fish-and-chip suppers, McDonald’s burgers and all of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that we ate to stifle the hunger pangs brought on after we gave up smoking.
We baby boomers were a bit disgruntled in 1971 when the United Kingdom changed to the decimal system for currency. Employers had to organise training sessions to teach their employees how to calculate the new currency and handle the new coins. Ironically, the specially formed Decimal Currency Board filmed a promotional video for the new decimal currency, featuring its chairman, Lord Fiske, at a Woolworths store in London. Woolworths was thought to typify the British high street because most people regularly shopped at their local Woolworths store. Who would ever have thought that the day would come when they would completely disappear from the high street, as they did over a two-week period following Christmas 2008 (807 stores closed and 27,000 job losses following a period in administration) – no more Woolies’ pick ’n’ mix sweets.
We witnessed a lot of landmark events in the 1970s and there are many for us to be proud of: these include the ending of the Vietnam War in 1975, the first turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner Concorde coming into service (retired from service in 2003), the street parties of 1977 to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Margaret Thatcher becoming our first female prime minister in 1979, teenagers of 18 and over being able to vote in a UK election for the first time (the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969), the first pocket calculators and home video game consoles going on sale (remember that primitive tennis game we played through our television sets), the first domestic microwave ovens and video cassette recorders appearing in UK shops, the arrivals of the Raleigh Chopper bicycles and the Sony Walkman personal stereos, and it was also the decade in which colour television broadcasting became the norm in British homes.
The 1970s has certainly had its fair share of bad press over the years, and it is true that the decade is somewhat overshadowed by the excitement surrounding the 1960s and the glamorous Sloane Ranger lifestyle and yuppie dynamism of the 1980s, but we learned much and gained plenty from the 1970s and anyone who has trouble remembering anything good about the decade should start by reflecting on the long hot summer of 1976. Happy days!
30-somethings in Leg Warmers
A deep recession, crippling inflation, high unemployment, strikes and widespread rioting marred events of the 1980s. The National Health Service was also failing as more and more health authorities across the country were going
into the red and, despite higher spending levels and increases in staff numbers, waiting lists were growing longer and hospital wards were being closed to patients. Britain fought a war in the far-distant Falkland Islands while at home we endured the continuing threat of terrorism. We were just four months into the new decade when a six-man terrorist team seized control of the Iranian Embassy building in South Kensington, London and took twenty-six people hostage. This came to be known as the Iranian Embassy Siege and it lasted from 30 April to 5 May 1980. We watched the television news coverage as events unfolded over the six days and on the final day the terrorists killed one of the hostages and threw his body out of the embassy. This prompted the British Special Air Services (SAS) to make an assault on the building. Having abseiled from the roof, a team of SAS soldiers broke in through the embassy windows and killed five of the six terrorists. The entire SAS operation took just seventeen minutes. The sixth terrorist was captured and went on to serve a twenty-seven-year prison sentence. As in the 1970s, the IRA were at the forefront of terrorist bombing activities in mainland Britain and three years after they killed Airey Neave with a car bomb as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster car park, they returned to London to cause more carnage. On 20 July 1982, they carried out two bombings. The first of these targeted members of the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park and two hours later they bombed the bandstand in Regent’s Park, killing members of the Royal Green Jackets. In all, the IRA killed eleven soldiers and injured fifty people including civilians on that ill-fated summer’s day.
