by Andy Beckett
The next day, Heath made a special prime-ministerial broadcast. Wearing a dark blue suit and a tie almost fit for a funeral, he looked less healthy than usual: pale pink rather than brown. He had a bag under one eye. He was increasingly suffering from an underactive thyroid – common symptoms include weight gain and a general sluggishness – that would not be diagnosed until 1975. With a long drawing in of breath that caused his heavy chest and shoulders to rise visibly, he began.
The country, he said, was facing a ‘grave emergency’. In a formal, rather resigned tone, he listed the oil crisis, the miners’ dispute, the problems with the economy – but without clearly explaining the relationship between them or how they had led to the broader emergency. Instead, he gave a summary of how the three-day week would work. ‘I know’, he went on, ‘that the new restrictions will make life very much harder for all of us … We shall have a harder Christmas than we have had since the war … We shall have to postpone some of the hopes and aims we have set ourselves for expansion and for our standard of living.’ Then a more defiant note entered his voice: ‘The government is determined to ensure the survival of this nation at a reasonable level of life and industrial production … but in the end our ability to survive depends on our willingness as a nation to act together and to act responsibly. During the last three years, I have spent many hours, indeed days, [in] discussions with trade union leaders. I have got to know them well. I believe that most of them want this country to succeed …’
The great denunciation of the miners never came. Instead, Heath concluded like some dutiful, slightly reticent Victorian patriarch, with a passage of heavily veiled criticism and patriotic wishful thinking: ‘I have spoken to you plainly tonight, and I will do so again when the time seems right … At times like these, there is deep in all of us an instinct which tells us that we must abandon disputes amongst ourselves. We must close our ranks, so that we can deal together with the difficulties which come to us, whether from within or from beyond our own shores. That has been our way in the past, and it is a good way … Our future and the character of our country depend on it.’
In practice, the three-day week’s political effectiveness was dulled by the same lack of clarity that marred Heath’s broadcast. For one thing, the drama of the measures’ introduction on New Year’s Eve was spoiled by the fact that more minor restrictions on energy use had been already been imposed, starting in the autumn. Some were voluntary, some compulsory, and they already covered everything from street lighting (dimmed to half its normal brightness on main roads) to television (evening closedown brought forward to 10.30 p. m.) to the appropriate temperature for offices (a slightly chilly 65 Fahrenheit). And then there was the sheer complexity of the three-day week itself: when its rules were published in late December, the government newspaper advertisements were almost indecipherable patchworks of small print, acronyms, legalese and statistical tables.
The prospect of living in a country with a speed limit of 50 miles per hour, with petrol rationing widely considered imminent, with no floodlighting for football matches or other outdoor events, with home heating and lighting kept to a minimum, and breaches of some of these and many other restrictions ‘punishable’, as a government ad in the London Evening Standard put it, ‘by imprisonment or a fine or both’, was not to everyone’s taste. During the first two weeks of January, the New Zealand High Commission in London experienced three times its normal level of inquiries about emigration. On 4 January, the Sun reported that ‘a blonde who drove a sleek blue Rolls-Royce’ had been found guilty of ‘keeping petrol without a licence’. Detectives, the paper went on, ‘found a tank containing 540 gallons of petrol 30 yards from her luxury home at Holme Island Estate, Grange-Over-Sands, Lancashire … Police were told that the blue Rolls-Royce was making frequent calls at garages and drawing excessive amounts of petrol.’
The same month, a member of the Heath government was caught exhibiting a more embarrassing lack of patriotism. Patrick Jenkin, the confident young minister for energy, a new post created to deal with the oil crisis and the three-day week, suggested that people clean their teeth in the dark to save electricity. Even more injudiciously, he boasted to the Evening Standard that, ‘Except for a glance at the papers, I can manage my whole morning routine without putting on a light.’ The press needed no more encouragement to start spying on him. A photographer from the Observer found Jenkin’s large house in north London with its porch light blazing and, it was widely reported, ‘lights on in five windows’. Jenkin’s wife told journalists that the pictures were deceptive, and he said that his toothbrushing advice had been a joke, but together they only dug a deeper hole. When I met him thirty-one years later, despite a subsequent ministerial career under both Heath and Thatcher, it was still capable of opening up under him.
As we got into the lift at the House of Lords – Jenkin was now a busy Tory peer – another peer squeezed in beside us. Jenkin, garrulous as ever, made introductions. ‘We’re going to talk about the three-day week,’ he said cheerily.
‘Oh, brushing your teeth in the dark,’ said the other peer.
Jenkin gave a small cough of a laugh. ‘Not too long on that, I hope.’
Up in his office, Jenkin avoided the issue for a while with a good anecdote about his department’s struggles to enforce the three-day week. ‘We got phone calls from members of the public,’ he started. ‘Plenty of people telling on somebody …’ Amusement crinkled his full lips, and his rich voice turned mocking: ‘There was a great deal of complaint that saunas were operating for a full five or six days, and of course they’re quite heavy users of electricity … We asked [our civil servants] what we could do … and they said, “Well, there are really three categories of saunas. There are saunas which are part of hotels, and one can ask the hotels to observe the three-day week. Secondly, there are saunas attached to health clubs, and the clubs are all supposed to be on a three-day week. But there is a third category, dubious saunas … and they operate independently and are rather outside any of the normal rules and regulations, and people may not always know where they are …”’
Leaning back behind his desk, Jenkin laughed loudly and relished the phrase ‘dubious saunas’ for a few moments. ‘Marvellous!’ he said. ‘Typical civil service!’ Together we pictured nervous Whitehall functionaries peering through overlit doorways in the sex-trade citadel of seventies Soho. Then Jenkin lowered his voice to a near murmur and raised the subject of toothbrushing in the dark. ‘What’s never been reported’, he said, ‘is that I was cleaning my teeth by lamplight. The street lamp outside my house. It was a bright orange sodium lamp, on our side of the road. Street lamps were still on much of the time – well, urban street lamps. There were a lot of problems with dark rural roads …’
He began to explain why he felt the newspaper photographs of his house had been misleading. But then he stopped. ‘The whole thing was very damaging,’ he said. ‘I have always described myself as the lightning conductor for the anger of the public. The anger turned from being anger against the miners … to being anger with the government in general. I have never had a correspondence anything like it. Five hundred letters a day. Particularly from small businessmen – they were hit especially badly by the three-day week. And lots of them writing as loyal Conservatives: “What do you think you are doing? With your stupid remarks, you make it impossible for us to support the government.”’
Less publicly, the strains of the three-day week were also felt deep in the machinery of the Heath government. One of the worst-affected ministries was the Department of the Environment. It had been a conspicuous symbol of the administration’s early confidence, a new bureaucracy created by Heath overseeing a new area of state activity, with its headquarters in three clean-lined tower blocks that were completed in 1971 and rose among the dusty old spires and offices of Whitehall like great glass billboards advertising a more modern kind of government. But soon after the new ministry was occupied, the drawbacks of its design began to manifes
t themselves. The concrete corridors of the Marsham Street towers – or ‘the three ugly sisters’, as they became known – were windowless and dark. Meanwhile, the glassy offices were cold: in winter, the oil-fired boilers took forty-eight hours to warm up the complex. In an era of strikes and power cuts, these design flaws made some people in the ministry nervous. In May 1973, months before the onset of the oil crisis and the three-day week, an internal memo was circulated asking how many ‘essential staff’ would need emergency heating and lighting in the event of ‘a severe electricity crisis’.
In November, with the oil crisis starting to bite, half the lifts in each tower were switched off to save power. The work of the ministry slowed accordingly. ‘We now have to allow a full 10 minutes to be sure of getting to a meeting on the top floors of the North Tower from here in the South,’ wrote an irritated civil servant in early February. In December 1973, a few days before the announcement of the three-day week, personal kettles and electric heaters were banned from the premises. In the corridors, five out of every six lights were removed; civil servants spent the long midwinter evenings stumbling back and forth in near darkness. And from mid-January there were more of them: extra staff were moved into unused rooms to deal with the coupons that had been printed for petrol rationing.
Yet, in other ways, a strange entropy settled over the ministry. On 7 February, DOE representatives attended a general civil-service meeting about a government-wide shortage of paper. ‘If the miners’ strike continued for more than a month,’ the meeting heard, according to the minutes, ‘then paper mills might have to close. This would mean reliance on current stocks alone, which, at present, amounted to under one month’s supply.’ A vigorous discussion followed about the appropriateness or otherwise of civil servants using both sides of each piece of paper.
By mid-January, Marsham Street had reduced its electricity consumption by almost half. Candles and butane lamps had been distributed to staff, but the visibility of the towers with all their glass meant that, even when less than half-lit, they seemed to many outsiders to be setting a bad example. There were repeated complaints from members of the public and other ministries. The DOE had to enter into protracted correspondence about the lighting requirements for staircases and night-time cleaners. Yet the most persistent problem of all was the cold. The worst offices had no carpets or were in the towers’ most exposed corners. Despite the extra jumpers, dressing gowns and bedroom slippers people were wearing at their desks – during the three-day week, the Whitehall dress code was relaxed, even at starchier ministries such as Defence – their feet were suffering. Then, on 1 February, a DOE civil servant announced that a suitably frugal solution had been found: ‘The people in these rooms have now been given small pieces of carpeting for their feet, which have been of some help.’
In fact, the Heath government was lucky with the weather. After a typically cold December, temperatures in January and February were almost twice the average. On 17 January, the Cabinet was informed that fuel stocks at power stations were being used up at less than half the rate that had been anticipated. The trade and industry secretary Peter Walker, perhaps the sole remaining repository of the administration’s early optimism, argued that there was ‘room for cautious relaxation of the three-day week’. During the second half of January, there was talk in the Cabinet of a four-day week, even a five-day week for the most important industries. The more apocalyptic predictions about the oil crisis had proved unfounded: while the price remained damagingly high, the government refused to aid Israel militarily and saw Britain’s Middle Eastern oil supply cut by a comparatively mild 15 per cent, before being fully restored in February. Petrol rationing did not have to be imposed. ‘We are not in a state of continual crisis,’ Heath defiantly told the New York Times on 6 January. He would not be the last British prime minister in the seventies to make that unavoidable but risky assertion. ‘All they [American journalists] do is describe Britain as being in a state of decay … which does not bear any relationship to the facts. Most countries have their problems. We certainly have ours. But we have a good many blessings to count as well.’
Heath was at least partly right. Beyond the blighted towers of Marsham Street and the besieged home of the minister for energy, the impact of the three-day week on everyday life was destabilizing rather than disastrous.
In 1974, Colchester in Essex was representative of a lot of mid-seventies Britain and where it was going. A hilltop of old streets in faded orangey brick ringed by newer flat suburbs of neat lawns and passing cars, it had been a Roman town, a market town and an industrial town. Now it was turning into a town for office workers. Its population, like that of many places in southern England and close to London, had grown rapidly since the Second World War as the capital’s had fallen. The University of Essex, with its tower blocks among trees like a Led Zeppelin album cover, had been built on the edge of town in the sixties. The railway line to London had been electrified. Commuting to work in the City was on its way to becoming the dominant local working pattern. The old docks and engineering works along the river had done well until the early seventies; now their fortunes were on the slide. But Colchester, unlike solely blue-collar places like Saltley, had prospects.
Politically, the town was calm on the surface. The council had been Conservative since 1950, while the parliamentary seat was comfortably Tory. Heath attended the Colchester Oyster Feast, the town’s annual civic centrepiece, in October 1973, after the start of the oil crisis but before its implications had fully sunk in. Still looking tanned and quite slim, he performed one of his last smiling, vigorous walkabouts before the winter’s emergencies confined him to London. He made a well-received speech about the value of Britain’s armed forces, with reference to the long-established Colchester garrison and its soldiers’ current service in Ulster. But away from such occasions other political currents were welling up in the town. Six weeks after Heath’s speech, the local army recruitment centre was mobbed by demonstrators who plastered it in posters – ‘Troops Out of Northern Ireland’, ‘Make Love Not War’ – and forced it to lock its doors for the afternoon. At the university, which had been notoriously restive since the sixties, a substantial minority of students were seasoned practitioners of the rent strike and the sit-in, of the sudden barricade and picket, of the solidarity action. As a miners’ strike loomed during the last weeks of 1973, the NUM was informed that, as in 1972, it would find eager allies on campus.
The build-up to the three-day week in Colchester was full of dark portents. Over the autumn, local shops had started buying in oil and gas lamps, both for their own use and for sale. The town’s fire service issued a public warning that a cheap paraffin model from Hong Kong, which was selling for 50p, was leaky and too easy to knock over. By early November, the Colchester Evening Gazette reported, ‘thousands’ had been bought locally regardless. In mid-month came the first petrol panic. With petrol-rationing coupons printed and about to be distributed to post offices, drivers began to queue at garages, buying as little as half a gallon to keep their tanks full. Garages ran out of fuel and closed, or else imposed their own rules. On 5 December, the notice on one forecourt read, in twice-underlined capitals: ‘Regular clients only served. No casuals served at all. Regular clients are those people who have drawn regular weekly or daily over the past 12 months.’
With hard times coming, people were circling their wagons. In mid-December, unscheduled power cuts – the miners’ overtime ban was already hampering power stations – began to darken nearby parts of Essex. Industrial action by train drivers began to cut off the line to London. Colchester commuters got up hours earlier and queued on unlit platforms for trains that never came. In the town’s shops, in the lamplight, with many locals too anxious to travel further afield for their Christmas shopping, there were intermittent shortages of everything from eggs – a hoarders’ favourite – to toys (the oil crisis was reducing the production of many plastics). On 17 December, the vicar of a nearby village, a supporter of
generally liberal causes called Andrew Hallidie-Smith, told the Gazette that thanks to Britain’s political situation, the elderly and infirm ‘could well be dying of starvation within the next year or two’. Union ‘militants’, he said, might have to be imprisoned or even shot if they ‘persist in fomenting strikes’. He concluded: ‘Sometimes there is a question of collective security and national survival.’ His views secured him an interview on The World at One. A fortnight afterwards, with the three-day week finally beginning, an anonymous columnist in the Essex County Standard summed up the atmosphere in Colchester and its hinterland by quoting Shakespeare, and in particular part of a line from Richard III that would be much more widely cited later in the decade, during another national crisis and under another prime minister: ‘This being the winter of our discontent …’
Yet in the event most people coped. Across Britain there was something of the besieged calm that Heath had commented on during his visit during the Spanish Civil War to a blacked-out Barcelona. In Colchester, some people even wrote to the Standard and the Gazette saying they preferred the darkness and the lack of traffic, the sense of life slowing down. On 18 January, the Standard talked to commuters at Colchester station. ‘Everyone appeared resigned,’ the paper found. ‘One man even had a small Primus and heated up a tin of tomato soup on it.’
