by Paul Feeney
Earlier that year, we found ourselves immersed in a conflict with Argentina over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands and its surroundings. This followed the invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia by Argentine forces on Friday 2 April 1982. Neither side officially declared war but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher immediately responded to the invasion of the British-dependent territory by sending a taskforce of 127 ships and a nuclear-powered submarine to take back the islands. At the time, the Falkland Islands were a place on the other side of the world that many of us knew little or nothing about. It was 8,000 miles from mainland Britain with a land area about the same size as Yorkshire and a population of around 3,140, similar to that of a small village in middle England. The conflict lasted seventy-four days and a total of 255 British servicemen and three female Falkland Island civilians were killed. The Argentine losses were considerably larger with 649 killed, including sixteen civilian sailors. The successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina showed we had strong leadership and this helped to increase Thatcher and her government’s popularity with the British public.
Meanwhile, back at home we remained in fear of imminent terrorist attacks and we did not have to wait long for the next major attack to happen. On the 17 December 1983, the IRA planted a car bomb outside the side entrance of Harrods on Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge. The bomb exploded killing six people and leaving ninety injured on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. For those of us who were not directly touched by any of the terrorists’ bombings during the eighties, the one that probably remains most firmly in our minds is the bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton on 12 October 1984 when the IRA attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and members of her Cabinet who were attending the Conservative Party conference there. Five people were killed and 34 were injured, including some who were left permanently disabled. The final IRA bombing of the 1980s happened on the 22 September 1989 at the Royal Marines’ barracks in Deal, Kent when eleven marines were killed and twenty-one were left injured. The horrible carnage and destruction caused by these and all of the other terrorist atrocities carried out by the IRA during their campaigns of mass murder left permanent stains in our minds, but the most appalling single terrorist action of the 1980s was not carried out by the IRA. This atrocity was the work of an entirely different terrorist group, thought to be of Libyan origin. On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew members. Eleven people in the town of Lockerbie were also killed when they were hit by pieces of wreckage falling to the ground. Several terrorist groups claimed responsibility for the bombing but it was alleged to be the work of Libyan terrorists and on 31 January 2001 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and alleged Libyan intelligence officer, was convicted of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was a really scary time in our lives; we were constantly reminded of the threat from all sorts of terrorist assassins and crackpot killers.
In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest outside a hotel in Washington DC, and in the same year Pope John Paul II was shot in St Peter’s Square, Vatican City; both were seriously injured and nearly died. Inspired by the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 and these two high-profile assassination attempts in the spring of 1981, in June that year a 17-year-old unemployed youth from Folkestone in Kent fired six blank shots at the Queen as she rode her horse down the mall during a Trooping the Colour ceremony. Fortunately, the Queen managed to bring her horse under control and she escaped unharmed. The youth said that he did it to become famous: ‘I will become the most famous teenager in the world.’ I won’t fuel his ambitions by naming him but he went on to serve three years of a five-year sentence and was soon forgotten. There are a lot of crazy people in the world but they seemed to be especially active in the 1980s.
The decade was far from being all doom and gloom but there was an awful lot going on and once again we had to cope with a great many changes affecting all aspects of life. It was a very exciting period but for many it was also a nerve-racking time. Memories of events surrounding the untimely death of John Lennon on 8 December 1980 take our minds straight back to the start of the decade and act as an aide-memoire to what was going on in our lives around that time. John Lennon and The Beatles had been a major part of our adolescent lives and his shocking murder was a wake-up call to remind us of how dangerous a place the world can be for innocent people going about their everyday lives. His death was also a milestone in our own personal lives because we now knew without doubt that The Beatles could never get back together again.
Most of us were touched by the early 1980s recession, high inflation, high taxes, redundancies and high unemployment. Some fared better than others, but we all suffered in one way or another. We had seen unemployment rise steadily in the early to mid-1970s and then surge in numbers during the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were 1 million people unemployed in Britain in 1972 when the population was 56 million. By 1982, the population had risen to 56.5 million and the number of people unemployed had shot up to an astonishing figure of 3.07 million, the highest number since the 1930s. One in eight people of working age were now unemployed, 12.5% of the workforce. Northern Ireland was worst hit with unemployment reaching almost 20%. Scotland and most parts of England experienced 15% unemployment, while the south-east fared better with levels of around 10%. More than 750,000 people were now classed as long-term unemployed. The then Labour Party leader, Michael Foot, said that whereas in 1979 there were five people chasing each job, there were now thirty-two people chasing every vacancy, and in some parts of the country the figure was double that. Unemployment levels in Britain were almost the highest in Europe, only second to Belgium. The levels of increase were mainly due to businesses closing down and British industry being forced to sharpen up its act and restructure organisations to survive the economic recession. The heavy industries, like car manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding and steel, were the hardest hit. Unlike previous governments, the Thatcher government was not prepared to bail out these industries every time they got themselves into trouble. Despite strike action, significant job losses were now inevitable across all of these industries. This was a great shock to those who had buried their heads in the sand throughout the industrial strife of 1970s and refused to accept that the long-standing ‘jobs for life’ culture had to end. Traditional manufacturing industries such as British Leyland had to shut factories and make large-scale redundancies, and many well-known brand names like Biba, Laker Airways and Triumph Motorcycles went out of business. Any kind of work was hard to come by and many industrial workers found that the skills they had acquired over a number of years were no longer in demand. For many, their only chance of finding work was to retrain and possibly move to another part of the country. Some tradesmen had to find work in other European countries, often living in dingy digs or worksite cabins, sometimes having to share a bed with another shift worker, one on days and the other on nights – the practice was called ‘hotbedding’.
With so many men being put out of work and traditional jobs becoming harder to find, more and more families were turning to the woman of the house to become the main breadwinner. During the period from 1980 to 1985, more than 1 million women joined the workforce. Whether the men could have done any of these jobs is questionable because different types of jobs were now being created. The country was moving away from manufacturing and instead developing service industries. There was a large-scale movement of jobs away from cities and into outlying areas where new business parks were being built. This was often done by firms looking to revitalise themselves while making the most of new technology and cutting costs. We were producing fewer British goods and importing more foreign-made products. Employers were looking for people with good presentation skills and brainpower to fill the new jobs in banking, retailing and telemarketing. There was also an increase in profession
al recruitment jobs and in market research companies. Often, women were found to be better suited to these types of jobs, especially jobs that required direct communication with customers. In the main, women were still being paid less than men for doing the same job but these newly created jobs gave women the opportunity to close the gap and in some cases they were paid the same as there was a fixed pay scale for the job. Women were at last getting into occupations that would provide them with long-term careers. These new jobs enabled them to gain the knowledge and experience they needed to qualify for promotion into managerial positions. Women with ambition were now beginning to be taken seriously in the workplace.
An ever-increasing number of businesses were also using what were called mainframe computers to maintain records and process work. These machines were still very large and they needed to be housed in special environmentally controlled rooms and managed by trained computer operators. Computer workstations began to appear on individual desks during the 1980s but most of these were only capable of drawing down information from the central mainframe computer. The information was transferred onto the mainframe by staff trained in data processing. At this time, many firms were also still using the old-style, punch-card system, which involved specially trained keypunch operators, invariably women, inputting information onto small thin cards using card-punch machines. Big firms had huge rooms specially designed to accommodate large numbers of card-punch machines. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, key punch operating jobs were plentiful and they were considered to be good and secure. Despite the widespread use of business computers and the increasing amount of modern office equipment like the fax machine, large numbers of people were still employed for clerical work and open-plan offices filled with typists and accounts clerks were still the norm for much of the 1980s. As we moved through the decade, however, more and more typists and punch operators were ditching their old IBM Golfball typewriters and card-punch machines to retrain as word processor operators, and more and more office correspondence was being dealt with by these word processors. In 1986 we saw the first Microsoft Windows operating system being used in Britain. This was considered a marvel at the time but it was slow to catch on here. The introduction of word processors into offices was a major problem for women returning to work after a career break to bring up a family or whatever, because they were not familiar with modern office equipment and procedures. Many had left office work a few years earlier when manual typewriters and clipboards were still the norm. Although a great number of these job seekers were still only in their 20s and 30s, in the modern-day office of the late 1980s they were regarded as dinosaurs and a lot of them found it very difficult to get back into office work. Many had to sign-up for night school courses to get retrained at their own expense.
The stereotypical workplace image of yesteryear when women were cast as typists, Girl Fridays and tea ladies was slowly disappearing and we were seeing increasing numbers of female bosses sitting behind the executive desks. We were becoming used to seeing women in powerful positions and more and more workers were having to adjust to working for a woman for the first time, something that the older generations in the 1980s must have found difficult after years of male dominance at their place of work. Some workers did have difficulty adjusting to women giving the orders, and this was not just the male workers. Some women struggled to adapt and confrontations were not uncommon, with accusations of women bosses being tougher and more demanding than their male counterparts. Perhaps there was some truth in the old adage that women had to be tough to succeed in business.
Whether by choice or otherwise, some baby boomers started their own families in the mid-1960s when they were still teenagers. In the early 1980s, many of these 1960s babies were leaving school and looking for work in the most difficult job market for fifty years. Of the 3 million unemployed, 1 million were school leavers. The poorer areas of the inner cities were particularly hit by the early 1980s recession and the spiralling levels of unemployment. In some areas there was already long-standing local unrest, sometimes due to racial tension between residents and police. In April 1981, things got out of hand and boiled over in the streets of Brixton, south London when rioting broke out and large numbers of vehicles were burned and shops damaged and looted over a three-day period. At least 364 people were injured in the riots, including 299 police officers, and eighty-two people were arrested. Following on from the Brixton riots, in July 1981 there was a ten-day period of rioting in various towns and cities around the country. Many of these riots were also sparked by local racial tensions and the disturbances were mostly in areas that had been hit hard by unemployment and recession. The worst of the riots was in Toxteth, Liverpool in which 468 police officers were injured and 500 people arrested; shops were looted, at least seventy buildings were burned out and about 100 cars were destroyed. July rioting also took place at Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Southall in London, Hyson Green in Nottingham and Moss Side in Manchester. There were also some smaller incidences of trouble in Bedford, Bristol, Coventry, Edinburgh, Gloucester, Halifax, Leeds, Leicester, Southampton and Wolverhampton. There was a lot of racial tension and social discord but many observers believe that unemployment, boredom and imitation of events elsewhere led to much of the copycat rioting, and for some it was just an excuse to go out looting other people’s property.
There were other noticeable tensions starting to fester on our streets in the 1980s as we began to observe a new and more sinister street scene developing in our major cities. We witnessed a growth in what was called the ‘cardboard jungle’, with a huge increase in the number of homeless people on our streets, especially in London, a large thriving capital city that was seen as a prosperous haven for discontented people from every corner of the world. Gone was the pleasure of taking an early evening stroll along the high street to do some window shopping. All of a sudden, a multi-ethnic mix of vagrants began to commandeer shop doorways for use as their sleeping quarters and the rancid smell of urine wafting up from pavements became a common airborne odour to passers-by. Shopkeepers were faced with having to wash down and disinfect their shop entrances before they could open for business each morning. Crime-related drug taking involving traditional street drugs was an ever-growing problem but there was also an increasing trend of glue sniffing among young kids. They were now sniffing all kinds of solvents including aerosols and household cleaning products, even nail varnish remover and cigarette lighter fuel. It was an extremely dangerous trend and young kids were accidentally dying through solvent abuse. We had always been used to seeing the occasional tramp or beggar walking the streets in our towns and cities, but immigrant beggars, often clutching a young child, were now accosting us in the street and there was also a new breed of home-grown professional beggar who could afford to dress in designer clothes. Some of these so-called professional beggars were said to live in the suburbs and commute into the city each day as if they were going to work. Some were even seen getting into good quality cars at the end of the day and driving themselves home. Ruthless foreign nationals were known to be using gangs of Fagin-like children to pick pockets in busy public areas. Gangs of extortionists were using a new style of threatening behaviour to extract money from motorists in the form of ‘squeegee men’ who would approach cars at traffic lights and smear the windscreens with dirty water then demand money from the driver. Major road junctions were littered with intimidating flower sellers weaving their way through slow-moving traffic carrying armfuls of flowers and trying to sell small bunches to anxious and gullible motorists. The British public were already fearful of possible terrorist attacks and bombings, and we were now beginning to feel threatened and unsafe going about our everyday lives, even just walking the streets.
By the turn of 1982, we were beginning to emerge from the two-year recession; inflation was coming down and was now below 10%, compared to its peak level of 22% in 1980. It continued to fall and by spring 1983 it was down to 4%, a fifteen-year low. Despite the pain of recessi
on and the on-going high levels of unemployment, Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government were re-elected in the 1983 UK general election. It was the most decisive general election victory any political party had enjoyed since Labour’s landslide win in 1945. She was now able to confidently proceed with what was called ‘Thatcherism’ and implement her ‘Thatcherite’ policies, including the curbing of trade unions’ powers and the privatisation of major utilities. British Telecom was the first in a series of big state-owned utilities to be privatised when it was floated in November 1984, with 50.2% of the shares of the new company being offered for sale to the public and BT employees. There followed a large number of floatations in the later part of the 1980s including British Gas (1986) with the ‘Tell Sid’ advertising campaign, British Airways (1987), British Airports Authority (1987), British Steel (1988) and the Regional Water Companies in England and Wales (1989). Such privatisations continued throughout the 1990s and beyond, and they included the Regional Electricity Companies (1990), British Coal (1994) and British Rail (1995–97).