When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  Clark was not a Shetlander. He was an unbending evangelical from ‘the mainland’, as the strongly independent islanders called Scotland. He was also a fearsome negotiator. Unlike Benn, he managed to persuade the oil industry that it needed his cooperation more than vice versa. Then Clark set his terms: only certain oil companies would be allowed to use the proposed oil terminal at Sullom Voe, and they would pay a fee to the council for every barrel that passed through, and another large sum to the council for the ‘disturbance’ which the construction and operation of the terminal would cause. The companies agreed.

  For a local council to make such a deal, and to keep the proceeds, was probably unprecedented. In the House of Commons, where legislation had to be passed to allow the arrangement, the sharp-eyed Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell raised objections. ‘It seemed to me far more than a fair deal,’ he told me in 2002. ‘I thought, “If Shetland can do this, then any part of the UK that finds itself suddenly favoured with natural resources can up and out.”’ But Dalyell was an isolated critic. The British government needed North Sea oil, and North Sea oil, inescapably, gave a new political leverage to the Shetland Islands Council, as it did to the SNP. In 1973, Jo Grimond, Shetland’s shrewd MP and the former leader of the Liberal Party, introduced a private member’s bill giving the council the powers it needed to make financial arrangements with the oil companies. The bill, despite being strikingly vague in its wording, became law with barely an alteration. In 1975, Richard Funkhouser summarized the saga for his State Department superiors in Washington, with a mixture of incomprehension, exasperation and admiration:

  The irony of the North Sea … was that the tyrant which bestrode it was the Shetland County Council, a tiny group of home-spun farmers led by ‘Fuehrer’ Ian Clark who had reputedly hornswoggled some of the biggest multinationals and most sophisticated leaders in Britain out of terms which would make the Scottish Nationalists pale with envy.

  Sullom Voe began receiving oil in 1978, after half a decade of construction work that outdid even the dockyard at Nigg in scale and extravagance. Over 7,000 people were employed on the building site at its busiest, sleeping in whole hillsides of mobile homes and, sometimes, inside sections of unused pipeline. When the terminal was completed, it is still said locally, scores of expensive imported diggers and dumper trucks were simply buried in the ground, because the local economy had no use for them and it was too complicated to ship them out. By the early eighties, the Shetland Islands Council was receiving enough income from Sullom Voe to fund over 80 per cent of its spending.

  Two decades later, I visited the islands to see what use had been made of their North Sea millions. The road from Sumburgh airport to Lerwick was swerving and almost deserted, but as smooth and well-maintained as a road in a royal park. On the rocky windswept grass to either side were scattered bungalows. Many of them were large and looked recently built. In their driveways stood equally oversized and new-looking cars. In Lerwick, the buildings were prim Victorian stone, but along the main shopping street almost every second premises was a big branch of a bank.

  At the council offices, the chief executive, a cheerful man without a tie called Morgan Goodlad, told me with characteristic Shetland directness that his was the wealthiest local authority in Britain after the City of London. When the oil money had started to come in during the seventies, he explained, the council had set up its own version of the Norwegian national deposit account and Benn’s notional Oil Fund: the Shetland Islands Council Charitable Trust. The trust’s aims – ‘to improve the quality of life for Shetlanders, especially in the areas of social need, leisure, environment and education; to support traditional industries’ – were so broadly drawn that they had implications for almost every aspect of the islands’ existence. And so it had proved. Since the late seventies, the trust had paid for exemplary school buildings, generous subsidies to Shetland businesses, superbly equipped leisure centres and care centres for the elderly with five beds and six times as many staff – a whole self-contained world, barely known about in the rest of Britain, of lavish public provision and public expectation. ‘The pressure comes up through our councillors for a new marina, a new village hall,’ said Goodlad, trying to sound put-upon but not quite managing it. ‘People think, “The council has so much money …”’ Over the previous two years, a falling London stock market had devalued the trust’s investments in shares by over a third, but it could still afford to give every Shetland pensioner a £262 Christmas bonus.

  After the interview, I started off for Sullom Voe. On the outskirts of Lerwick, I spotted a modern-looking leisure centre. Inside, under the glass roof, the relentless Shetland wind was banished. The air was like a still, warm bath. A couple of people were bobbing in the pool; otherwise, on a weekday lunchtime, there was no one to enjoy the water slides and the well-fed palms and the expanses of spotless tiling. To my mainlander’s eye, which had become accustomed to worn and crowded public amenities during the eighties and nineties, it all seemed disturbingly extravagant and deliciously utopian. I drove on. Again the road was immaculately surfaced and nearly empty. Every time I passed a cluster of bungalows big enough to be called a hamlet, there towered over them a school or a village hall or another leisure centre in a recent architectural style. Quite often builders were at work erecting more.

  It was not until I reached Sullom Voe that there was any sign that all this might be vulnerable – that Shetland’s alternative, more benign version of the British seventies might not continue for ever. On one of the terminal’s endless quaysides, a line of council-owned tugboats stood idle. Offshore, the tankers were still queueing, but not as they used to: the annual number visiting Sullom Voe had halved since the peak years of North Sea oil production in the mid-eighties. In the terminal car park, letters were missing from the Sullom Voe sign and no one had bothered to replace them.

  A few miles from the terminal, on the side of a steep headland overlooking where one of the North Sea pipelines came ashore, I found several neat rows of abandoned houses. They had been built by the council in the seventies, I learned later from the council’s official history of the period, and were ‘100% oil-related’. The history went on: ‘In view of the urgency with which these houses were required, lack of contractors on the islands, and difficult site and working conditions, the completed cost of the houses was … 50% over the cost limit of comparable housing types on the mainland.’ Three decades on, their thick walls and chalet-style roofs and skylights with sea views had aged well. But their interiors had been stripped and their occupants were long gone.

  I left their overgrown gardens waving in the wind and followed the road further uphill. After a few minutes, the road, which was no longer smooth but uneven and crumbling, veered sharply and ended in a bleak little plateau of tarmac. Facing the tarmac, flanked by nothing but miles of cold grass, was a great boarded-up hulk like a derelict supermarket. It was an old council leisure centre. In the seventies, Rod Stewart, that grainy-voiced cheerleader for boozy good times, had played a legendary concert in it for the Sullom Voe workers. Now, a local farmer used it to shelter his animals. I tried to find a way in, but all I found was boarded-up doorways and frightened sheep.

  When I got back to Lerwick that evening, I thought about North Sea oil, about how its golden era was generally considered to be coming to an end, and about how Shetland might be affected. Then something Morgan Goodlad had said came back to me. I had asked him whether it had been wise for the council, given the volatility of its stock-exchange investments and the finiteness of the oil, to keep on spending quite so generously. ‘The money’, Goodlad had replied with a twinkle, nodding at the miniature Scandinavia outside his office windows, ‘may have been well spent while it lasted.’

  Elsewhere in Britain during the seventies, North Sea oil set in motion less gentle social and political experiments. Aberdeen, an old trading city of shipyards, paper mills and universities, famous for its plain granite streets and care with money, became a brash new oil tow
n of overpriced taxis and binges by off-duty rig workers. Oil-company headquarters, like concrete and glass castles, occupied the hilltops in the richest suburbs. Those suburbs quickly got richer: in the seventies, house prices in Aberdeen rose by 50 per cent more than the national average, and the city created more jobs than any comparable place in Britain.

  Oil fuelled a striking local appetite for electric gates and indoor shopping centres, for all-you-can-eat buffets and double garages, for a touch of Texas. Actual American oilmen – by 1976 there were 5,000 Americans in a city of 185,000 – bought or rented big Victorian villas in the villages along the River Dee west of Aberdeen. In 1973, they established the North Sea Petroleum Club in a white hillside lodge with a beech-lined drive. ‘It was stetsons and cowboy boots at first,’ the manager told me when I visited. The private dining club became a country club, with tennis courts and a car park full of Range Rovers and Porsches. The city became infamous for its traffic and impatient drivers.

  This more jostling, more brazen Aberdeen gave a taste of how the more productive parts of Britain might turn out when, or if, the national economy turned around. But it was beyond the city’s eastern horizon, far out to sea on the oil rigs themselves, that the starkest vision of a new competitive Britain was laid out.

  Life on a rig is about work. Even when I visited one in 2007, thirty years after the North Sea’s seventies gold rush, the routine was still all-encompassing and driven. Employees are aboard for between a week and a month at a time, and cannot leave, barring serious injury or illness, until their stint is done. They work twelve-hour shifts, starting at dawn or at dusk. There are no holidays on board, not even Christmas, and no days off. Between shifts, workers eat double portions of fat and starch in the mess hall. They try to sleep in tiny shared cabins. They watch television in the recreation room as the rig tannoys blast. But mostly they think about the job in hand. ‘They finish their twelve hours,’ a mess-hall steward on the rig told me, ‘and all they do is talk about what they’ve done in their twelve hours.’

  Drilling at sea is always expensive. People back onshore – politicians, consumers, oil company executives and shareholders – are always impatient for oil. And a rig is its own world. Even in 2007, the drilling platform I visited, a heaving, clanking maze of soaked decks and narrow corridors, had only one public telephone for a hundred crewmen and no reception for mobiles. Helicopters arrived at best once a day or, if the fog came down, not at all. When the weather lifted, another rig was just visible in the far distance. Otherwise, the outside world was nothing but the dark waves. ‘People only really talk about the rig,’ the steward told me. ‘Not what’s beyond.’

  In the British sector of the North Sea during the seventies, a radically different balance of power between bosses and workers was established to what existed onshore. ‘Industrial troubles have been rare,’ wrote Leith McGrandle in his slightly rose-tinted 1975 book The Story of North Sea Oil. ‘Casual signings-on [of workers] … have made union organization difficult… The Americans in the past have occasionally sacked a whole crew if they sniffed trouble ahead. This is one reason why there has only been one strike in the last four years.’ A large proportion of oil-rig workers did relentlessly physical, relatively unskilled work for wages that were substantially better than on dry land. They were hired on short-term, insecure contracts. Often, they had been unemployed or in the armed services, or had left jobs as mechanics or farm labourers. They came from all over Britain, but particularly from depressed areas. Just as, in the following decade, Norman Tebbit would suggest the jobless should, they had ‘got on their bikes’ to find work.

  Sometimes potential rig workers were scrutinized for their political views before being taken on. ‘We are interested in identifying overt opponents of the system,’ admitted Shell’s personnel director Peter Linklater in 1978. ‘The last thing we would want to do is to have political subversives on our payroll.’ The screening was not always perfect. ‘Before I went offshore I was on the executive committee of the Young Communist League,’ remembered Chris Ramsey, a former oil man I met in 2004 who had first worked in the North Sea in 1977.

  But on the rigs, where there were no daily newspapers and at first not even any television, he had had to accept he was in a different world: ‘I used to keep my mouth shut. I covered stuff for the Morning Star using a false name. Everyone was working too hard, because of the American management. Safety was really bad – there was a diver killed every month then – but you wouldn’t try a union offshore. Everyone was looking after themselves.’

  In the Norwegian sector, the shop-floor culture was different. Oil platforms were unionized from the beginning. Some workers on British rigs have cast envious glances there ever since. ‘The Norwegians have got it sussed,’ said the engineer I shared a cabin with on my rig visit, as he sat hollow-eyed on his bunk after his night shift. ‘Strong unions. Two weeks on, four weeks off, for everyone – not two weeks on, two weeks off, like us.’ He shook his head and managed a weak, admiring smile: ‘And now their unions are pushing for the next week off.’

  But in the seventies, the British sector of the North Sea had no time for such old-fashioned industrial relations. The oil still did not flow quickly enough to save the decade’s governments. Instead, the rigs acted as a kind of Trojan horse for a new, more right-wing version of workplace politics. Chris Ramsey, for one, detected an irony. ‘It all happened when Tony Benn was energy minister!’ he said with a bitter laugh. We were walking along the sand at Cruden Bay, north of Aberdeen, where the first oil pipeline of the seventies had reached land. A few hundred feet above our heads, helicopters still rushing to the rigs passed in a near-continuous, throbbing roar. When the next brief pause came, I asked Ramsey how long he had worked in the North Sea. Young Communist or not, he had stuck it out, he said, for thirteen years.

  9

  The Real Sixties

  It is one of the conventional wisdoms about the seventies that the decade was a time when the rebellious energies of the sixties cooled and dissipated. In Britain and across the West, there is evidence for this view: in the shrinking, fragmenting underground press of the early seventies; in the frustration of the radical hopes expressed by the student uprisings of 1968; in the election victories of conservatives like Edward Heath and Richard Nixon; in the institutionalization of rock music and other sixties youth cultures; and in the retreat of many of those who would not be co-opted into introspection, or self-defeating factionalism, or the political and moral cul-de-sacs of terrorism. ‘The time for play had passed,’ writes Elizabeth Nelson about the early seventies in her book The British Counter-Culture 1966–73. Many other observers, both during the seventies and since, have competed to identify similar watersheds: phases or precise moments in the decade when, to take the most commonly used metaphor, the great party of the sixties ended and the hangover set in.

  This liberal or left-wing melancholy about the seventies has, in many ways, been the mirror image of the doomy right-wing view of the same period. These different visions of national decline have complemented and given credibility to each other. They have helped ensure that the British seventies have not been widely mourned since their passing. And yet, both perspectives on the decade have always been dimmed by blind spots. The anti-seventies left, as you could call it, has a particularly large one. It fails to acknowledge that for many politicized Britons, the decade was not the hangover after the sixties; it was when the great sixties party actually got started.

  Near the foot of Highbury Fields in north London, where the handsome terraces facing trees and bushes begin to give way to office blocks and traffic, there is a small bronze commemorative plaque. Unlike those nearby for the eminent Victorians Joseph Chamberlain and Walter Sickert, it is not blue or green but matt black. It does not hang on a tall Georgian townhouse but on a low ungainly building, blank-looking and detached – a small set of offices, sometimes vacant with unopened post on the doormat – that was once a public toilet. And the plaque does not
celebrate a long historical association but a single, relatively recent evening. In gold capital letters its inscription reads:

  The first gay rights demonstration

  in Britain took place here,

  in Highbury Fields, on

  27th November 1970

  when 150 members of the

  Gay Liberation Front

  held a torchlight rally

  against police

  harassment

  Above the inscription there is a political logo: a raised fist and, as if tattooed across it, the words ‘Gay Liberation Front’, a flower, and a pair of intertwined masculinity and femininity symbols. The plaque went up in 2000. Its manufacture and unveiling, funded by private donations, was recorded by the right-wing tabloids without complaint. Its significance is even explained in the house-buyer’s guide to Highbury provided by the website findaproperty. co. uk. The buffed-up borough of Islington, of which Highbury is part, has for years been a popular area for prosperous gay men.

  Yet there are things about the plaque – the actual phrase ‘Gay Liberation Front’, the logo’s mixture of stridency and hippy dreaminess – that hint at a political world quite different from the present, and quite different from the seventies as experienced in Whitehall or Downing Street. For those active in this world, in its new politics of identity, individual experience and cultural allegiance rather than class, patriotism and economics, the decade was not a dead end but a maze of possibilities.