State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  This book takes the story of Heath’s Britain from a warm June morning in 1970 to a gloomy February evening in 1974. As in my previous books, I have not felt constrained by the chronology: where it makes sense to look back to the 1960s, I have done so, while broader chapters – on the rise of feminism, say, or the new suburban lifestyles – look forward to the end of the decade. Of course no book can be entirely comprehensive, and there is always bound to be an element of picking and choosing. There is naturally a lot about politics and economics in State of Emergency, and there is also a lot about sex, television, enviromentalism, race relations, feminism and football. Some topics, however, such as education or rock music, will be covered more fully in this book’s sequel, Seasons in the Sun, which will take the story from 1974 to 1979. Perhaps the most notable omission is coverage of the growing nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland. In the preface to White Heat I promised that I would write about them in my next book, but in the end I rather shamefacedly decided that it would make more sense to discuss them in the build-up to the devolution votes of 1979. I am also conscious that my books betray a marked bias towards England, particularly its more populous areas. There is a lot here about London, but Birmingham, Belfast, Leeds, Nottingham, St Helens and even Milton Keynes get a look-in, too, as do the miners of the Rhondda and the shipbuilders of the Upper Clyde. Still, even in quite a long book like this, I am painfully aware of everything – and everybody – I have had to leave out.

  As before, politics drives the narrative, which is hardly surprising given that this was an intensely politicized period. We see Edward Heath banging away at his piano after securing British entry into the EEC, and Harold Wilson knocking back the whisky as his political career apparently slipped away; we follow the Yorkshire miners onto the picket lines, and the British army into the killing grounds of Belfast. But as I argued in both Never Had It So Good and White Heat, there is more to contemporary history than politics and government. And so State of Emergency, too, tries to capture the experience of millions of people who spent the early 1970s drinking Watney’s Red Barrel and Blue Nun, listening to Elton John and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, laughing at Morecambe and Wise and Bless This House, and cheering on Kevin Keegan, Jackie Stewart and Red Rum; the kind of people who spent their evenings glued to Crossroads and Upstairs, Downstairs, their weekends in the supermarket and the garden centre, and their holidays in Malta and Majorca; the kind of people, indeed, who lined the streets with their flags and banners at the wedding of Princess Anne.

  Their lives and experiences, their anxieties and expectations, are just as much part of this story as any of the major events of the day. They began the decade full of hope, looking forward to the technological innovations that would surely transform their daily lives, to the new possibilities of an orderly, peaceful world, to the new prosperity that their leaders promised them. And when they went to bed on the balmy summer’s evening of 17 June 1970, most of them expected that Harold Wilson would comfortably beat Ted Heath in the next day’s election. In this, as in so much else, they were in for a shock.

  1

  A Better Tomorrow

  This is an exhilarating moment. Britain is alive again. The people have chosen a new Government and a new direction.

  – Daily Mail, 20 June 1970

  As the first voters gathered outside the polling stations, it was already obvious that it was going to be a beautiful day. There seemed almost a party atmosphere, a mood of rare communal good humour as Britain’s 39 million eligible voters queued in the June sunshine. For the first time in history, 18-year-olds were eligible to vote, and outside almost every polling station photographers competed for pictures of the youngest and most attractive teenage voters. In Edinburgh, they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Janis Weir, a typist, who arrived to vote at exactly 8.09 a.m., eighteen years to the minute after she had been born. In Lowestoft, they wished good luck to Robert Farman, another birthday boy, who was facing a Maths A-level exam that afternoon. In Surbiton, officials had to turn away 4-year-old Nicholas Old, who had been sent voting papers by mistake. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Old,’ one official said, chuckling at his own joke, ‘but you’re not old enough to vote.’ But at Westcliffe-on-Sea, there was a warm welcome for Britain’s oldest voter, William Chapman, aged 107, who arrived at the polls with his Boer War medals clinking on his chest. The only voter who could vividly remember the days of William Gladstone and Joe Chamberlain, Mr Chapman remained a man of firm opinions. ‘I’ve been a working man all my life,’ he said, ‘and there is only one party to vote for.’1

  Young and old, rich and poor, north and south, almost everyone agreed that William Chapman’s party was going to win. In Huyton, where the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, ate a hearty lunch of steak and chips before visiting his local polling stations, there was a mood of calm, of confidence, even of complacency. And hundreds of miles to the south, where his Tory rival Edward Heath toured the polls in his shirtsleeves, his tanned, heavy features fixed in a rictus grin, reporters were already preparing their obituaries. The Times thought that Heath had shown ‘great strength of character’ and inspired ‘real affection’ in his brave but futile fight against the odds, but few doubted that after two defeats under his brusque, awkward leadership, the Conservative Party would call for a fresh start. In secret, his senior colleagues had already made arrangements for his predecessor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to take over as interim leader after the election. And as Heath was snatching a quick lunch, his friend Peter Carrington arrived with the equivalent of the loaded revolver. Once the result was certain, he said gently, it would be time to go.2

  At six, as the sun was beginning to dip, Heath arrived at Bexley’s Conservative headquarters, sipped a cup of tea, and began making the ritual calls to Tory election agents around the country. If he was nervous, he did not show it, and Carrington felt a surge of admiration for his chief’s bravery in the face of defeat. Heath had already lost one election in 1966, outsmarted by the wily Wilson, and this time, too, he had struggled to catch the attention of an electorate distracted by the World Cup and the gorgeous weather. While Wilson, buoyed by polls showing him 7 or 8 per cent ahead, had laughed and joked with the crowds in the sunshine, Heath had never been able to relax. ‘Do you want a better tomorrow?’ he had kept asking, but it was clear that nobody was listening. Ted Heath was yesterday’s man; tomorrow belonged to Wilson.

  Heath was sitting in the bar of the Crook Log Hotel, quietly nursing a drink, when everything changed. The first result was in from Guildford, a swing of more than 5 per cent to the Conservatives, and at that moment, just after eleven on the night of Thursday, 18 June, he knew he had done it. Quite suddenly, all the predictions were turned on their heads. The undecided voters, the housewives whom everybody had said would decide the election, had lost patience with Wilson’s endless twisting and turning, his broken promises, his excuses for devaluing the pound, his failure to keep prices down, and at the last moment they had changed their minds. In Huyton, where Wilson’s entourage were gathered around the screen, the room fell silent. In London, the Downing Street secretaries started packing. And in Bexley, Heath’s election agent gleefully dug out a bottle of Glenlivet, and the mood turned from inevitable disappointment to incredulous delight. At two, as the Labour seats were still falling, Heath phoned his 81-year-old father. ‘Things seem to be going well,’ he said, almost as though he could not believe it himself.3

  Heath did not make it back to his flat in the elegant London enclave of the Albany, off Piccadilly, until almost three in the morning, his ears still ringing with the congratulations of his supporters. When one of his closest colleagues, Willie Whitelaw, called a few moments later, the emotion that Heath usually kept in such tight check finally rose to the surface: as Whitelaw offered his congratulations, he said nothing, choked with feeling. He did not fall asleep until five, and by the time he awoke, at midday, a large and boisterous crowd was waiting outside on Piccadilly. The Queen was at Ascot, enjoying a day’s racing, so
he had to wait until seven for the long-anticipated call to the Palace. But at last it came, and as the Queen smiled encouragingly (‘in the most delightful way’, he remembered), the Broadstairs boy accepted her invitation to form a government.*

  ‘There were wild scenes as Mr Heath arrived at Downing Street,’ reported The Times the next day. With no security barriers to keep back the crowds, the narrow Georgian street was packed with more than a thousand well-wishers, and as Heath’s blue Rover limousine eased to a stop they pushed through the thin line of policemen to serenade their new leader with ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. But as Heath began to speak, the singing subsided a little, and the tones that had become so familiar to voters across the country rang round the little street. ‘To govern is to serve,’ Heath said, his voice straining above the noise of the crowd. ‘This government will be at the service of all the people – the whole nation. Our purpose is not to divide but to unite, and where there are difficulties, to bring about reconciliation. To create one nation.’ And then he turned, and the black door closed behind him.4

  While few people later remembered what Edward Heath said to the nation during those first moments of his turbulent premiership, few would ever forget his curiously strangulated way of saying it. He had an accent all his own, the vowels oddly stretched, as though his voice had been very slightly slowed down by some technical trickery: ‘Heath As It Is Spoken’, as the Monty Python comedian Eric Idle mockingly called it. And yet Heath’s accent not only reflected his social insecurity, it also marked how far he had come. The artificial vowel sounds were the sign of unstinting self-improvement, the mark of a man who had remade himself from the son of a Kentish craftsman into an organ scholar at Balliol, Oxford’s most prestigious college, a rising star in the party of the rich and powerful, and ultimately the leader of his country. For the new Prime Minister was the embodiment of what Anthony Sampson called the ‘cult of the self-made meritocrats’, the bright grammar school boys who had come to dominate British life in the 1950s and 1960s, the pioneers of the affluent society.5

  On the surface, with his bachelor lifestyle, his fondness for classical music and ocean racing, his total lack of interest in sex and his old-fashioned emotional awkwardness, Heath made a supremely inappropriate representative of British society at the beginning of the 1970s. And yet the Tories had elected him their leader in 1965 precisely because he seemed a breath of fresh air, a man of the age who had risen from a humble background through brains and hard work. His paternal grandfather, back in Britain’s late Victorian imperial heyday, had been a Kentish dairyman, railway porter and greengrocer; his father began work at 13 as a carpenter’s apprentice and eventually became a successful builder. Yet Heath never exploited his background for political purposes, as later politicians tried to do; instead, he seems to have been very sensitive about it. His strange accent, for example, dated from his Oxford days, when his original provincial intonation must have made him stand out among his upper-class contemporaries, while his hobbies were those of someone anxiously imitating the tastes of the rich. Yet despite his sensitivity, Heath was indelibly a son of the Kentish coast and a symbol of Britain’s increasingly fluid society. He was ‘a new kind of Tory leader – a classless professional politician who has fought his way to the top by guts, ability and political skill’, said the Mirror. ‘Do you appreciate’, one interviewer once asked him, ‘that you are the first Tory leader with wall-to-wall carpeting?’6

  Heath’s constituency, Bexley, itself embodied the changes that had come over Britain in little over half a century since his birth. In his grandfather’s day, even his father’s, it had been a quiet rural backwater. Now it was a typical section of the south London commuter belt, a world of identical semi-detached houses and brick council estates, inhabited by skilled workers, clerks and technicians. In 1945 it had been a safe Labour seat; now it was classic aspirational upper-working-class and middle-class Conservative. It was a place transformed by light industry, rising wages and full employment, a place where farms had been replaced by shopping centres and labourers had given way to pharmacists. It seemed a long way from the sensationalist high jinks that later dominated popular memories of the post-war years – the Profumo scandal, Swinging London, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – and yet, better than any of those things, it symbolized the subterranean economic and social trends that had changed the lives of Britain’s 55 million people. And as Heath tramped the streets of Bexley, shaking hands and exchanging banter with his familiar shoulder-shaking laugh, the signs of change were everywhere, from the cars on the roads to the short skirts of the teenagers in the parks. Even to knock on a random front door was to be reminded of the new opportunities that affluence had brought.7

  By the early 1970s, just over half the population owned their own homes, almost twice the proportion two decades before. But these were not just places to eat and sleep. They were markers of affluence, status, identity and independence, decorated in styles – garish patterned wallpaper, thick carpets, Formica surfaces, synthetic tiles – that were supposed to denote luxury and elegance. They were places to relax and socialize, perhaps by watching the new colour television, or by mulling over the collection of faux-leather encyclopedias or Reader’s Digest abridgements, or by sharing a bottle of wine from the streamlined drinks cabinet. And of course Bexley’s little semi-detached homes were temples to consumerism, typified by the electric appliances that had dominated people’s daydreams in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1971, 64 per cent of families owned their own washing machine, 69 per cent had a fridge, and more than 90 per cent had a television. Even in poor working-class areas, affluence had left a deep imprint, thanks to the availability of hire purchase: researchers visiting Nottingham’s deprived St Ann’s district in the late 1960s found that four out of five people owned a television, while two out of five had a washing machine or vacuum cleaner. ‘The domestic servants of the twentieth century’, a middle-class character calls them in Piers Paul Read’s novel A Married Man (1979). Totting them up, he puts his staff at two dozen, including a washing machine, a tumble drier, a dishwasher, two lawnmowers, a chainsaw, a vacuum cleaner, a liquidizer, an egg-beater, a coffee-grinder and a lemon-squeezer, not to mention televisions, record players and tape decks. Of course not many Bexley families could afford all of these things, especially at the beginning of the decade. But almost every household had at least one or two of them, and almost everybody could reasonably expect to buy more.8

  The affluent society had always had its critics. It was ‘an ugly society still’, the socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan had thundered in 1960, calling it ‘a vulgar society … a meretricious society … a society in which priorities have gone all wrong’. The cultural critic Richard Hoggart even thought it had produced a mass culture of ‘corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions’: slick, shallow, materialistic, empty. A decade on, however, the people of Bexley, like their counterparts elsewhere, showed no sign of having taken any notice. For all but the poorest, the oldest and the unluckiest, the 1960s had been a decade of abundance and comfort on a level unimaginable a few years previously. ‘The golden age had come at last,’ reflects a character looking back on the 1960s in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age (1977). After toiling through ‘years of austerity … suddenly here it all was, the world of Penthouse and the Beatles, the world of large steaks and double cream on real gateaux, the world of girls and nightclubs and expense account champagne’.9

  And even though millions of people never went to nightclubs or quaffed champagne, they still enjoyed their slice of the ever-expanding cake. By 1973, one in three people told researchers they had gone out for a meal in the previous month, a luxury few of their parents could have imagined. And despite all the economic turmoil of the early 1970s, the strikes and inflation, the oil shock and the power cuts, most of Bexley’s voters remained far more prosperous than they could have expected twenty years before. Three years after Edward Heath had walked into 10 Downing Street, there w
ere more cars on the roads than ever, more products on the supermarket shelves, more colour televisions in suburban homes, more planes taking off for the beaches of Spain.10

  As a relatively affluent, Conservative-voting slice of London suburbia, Bexley was not exactly representative of the national experience at the dawn of the 1970s. Yet very different social landscapes, hundreds of miles away, reflected similar trends. During his Balliol days, Heath had become friends with an ebullient, bushy-browed, highly intelligent young man from the West Riding of Yorkshire. Like Heath, Denis Healey was an ambitious grammar school boy; his politics, though, were rather different, and as Defence Secretary he had been one of the few real stars of the Wilson government in the 1960s. His constituency, on the east side of Leeds, had been solid Labour territory for sixty years, a classic Northern working-class landscape of long red-brick terraces, neighbourhood pubs and Methodist churches. When Healey became the area’s MP in 1952, it had changed little since the Industrial Revolution. His party members were garment workers, engineers, railwaymen and miners, men of firm principles and distinctly traditional attitudes. They lived as their parents had done: ‘the housing was appalling,’ he wrote later, ‘the dirt indescribable.’ Smoke hung over the city’s rooftops; soot stained its great Victorian town hall. Healey’s very first campaign headquarters was ‘a condemned terraced house of unimaginable squalor, with a lavatory outside which was full of filth and would not flush’. The contrast with Bexley’s neat, upwardly mobile suburban estates was stark indeed.11

  By 1970, however, Leeds bore the imprint of the affluent society just as deeply as the suburbs of the South. The clothing and engineering industries responsible for so many local jobs were already suffering from inadequate investment and global competition, their travails symptomatic of the growing problems of the British economy. Montague Burton’s, once the world’s biggest tailor, was struggling to adapt to the more casual look that had taken over in the early 1960s: as Healey recalled, Burton’s ‘went on making three-piece suits long after people stopped wearing waistcoats’. But while the old industries were dying, others were expanding. By 1970, more people worked in new offices – in insurance, banking, accountancy, law, health, education, hotels, retailing – than in the clothing industry for which Leeds had been famous. Once synonymous with the muck and brass of industry, the city was slowly becoming a richer, more white-collar place: as early as the beginning of the 1960s, three out of four households owned a television. The city fathers dreamed of turning the centre into a ‘Shoppers’ Paradise’. By the mid-1970s, it even had a theme pub: the Hofbrauhaus in the Merrion Centre, selling German beer for 32p a pint.