State of Emergency: the Way We Were
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PENGUIN BOOKS
STATE OF EMERGENCY
‘A hugely entertaining, compelling portrait’
Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
‘Makes an effective case for the decade of discontent as the cradle of contemporary Britain. Five states of emergency may have been called in three years, yet the 1970s produced much which we now take for granted, from feminism to chicken tikka’
Lisa Hilton, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year
‘Vividly portrayed … a sweeping, subtle portrait of the most tumultuous period in Britain’s postwar history’
Brian Groom, Financial Times, Books of the Year
‘An evocative portrait of the Heath premiership … What most impressed me, however, was Sandbrook’s ability to move seamlessly from intricate political and economic analysis to sweeping social analysis … Above all, in its portrait of Edward Heath as a cussed, blinkered, and stiffly upright tragic hero, it provides a study of flawed dignity as rich and ambiguous as anything to be found in a novel’
Tom Holland, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year
‘In State of Emergency, this pre-eminent historian of recent Britain delivers a hugely entertaining, always compelling, often hilarious portrait of the Seventies. It is based on the broadest research, from the white papers of Heath’s government and the Bloody Sunday inquiry to NME interviews with David Bowie and the pornographic magazines of Paul Raymond … I have to say it is rare to read a book that covers the miners’ strike and the Irish Troubles, and yet often find oneself laughing out loud’
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph
‘Superb … Sandbrook writes as though he were there, yet he was only born in 1974. This suggests a phenomenal attention to detail and an intrinsic understanding of the period, its culture and its people’
Simon Heffer, Literary Review
‘Reading Sandbrook is always an enjoyable experience, partly because of the unforgettable vignettes that are to be found on practically every page … In State of Emergency, the latest volume in what promises to be an ongoing series, Sandbrook moves on to the early Seventies. Ranging across popular culture, literature and social mores, he re-creates that lost world with a flair all the more impressive when you realise he was born in 1974 … No one who reads State of Emergency will think of the decade in quite the same way again’ John Gray, New Statesman
‘Magisterial … for me a Proustian experience’
Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
‘As he proved in his earlier works, Sandbrook is a masterly magpie. Nothing escapes his gaze, from the silk lavender dressing-gowns sported by Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King, through the sexual politics of Doctor Who, to John “never one to miss a bandwagon” Lennon sending a cheque to support the striking Clyde shipworkers. Throw in deft précis of the rise in football hooliganism and birth of the mugger, the introduction of the Pill and boom in pornography, and the depressing side-effects of brutalist council blocks, and you have as eclectic a historical grab-bag as you could wish for’ Christopher Bray, Independent on Sunday
‘Meticulously fair … The paradoxes of the Seventies are brilliantly dissected and analysed’ Simon Griffith, Mail on Sunday
‘Detailed and authoritative … sophisticated and nuanced … Sandbrook is both knowledgeable and entertaining … this is a fine addition to what is becoming a monumental series on the history of modern Britain’ Adrian Bingham, BBC History Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominic Sandbrook was born in Shropshire in 1974, an indirect result of the Heath government’s three-day week giving couples more leisure time. He is now a prolific reviewer and commentator, writing regularly for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Sunday Times. He is the author of two hugely acclaimed books on Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, Never Had It So Good and White Heat.
DOMINIC SANDBROOK
State of Emergency
The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Allen Lane 2010
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Dominic Sandbrook, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-24-195691-5
For my great-aunt Muriel Wilcox
and my wife Catherine Morley, with love
All over the nation, families who had listened to the news looked at one another and said ‘Goodness me’ or ‘Whatever next’ or ‘I give up’ or ‘Well, fuck that’, before embarking on an evening’s viewing of colour television, or a large hot meal, or a trip to the pub, or a choral society evening. All over the country people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong – the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody: only a few were stunned into honourable silence.
Margaret Drabble, The Ice Age (1977)
We look back on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we’re only an after-glow of them?
J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
Michael Cummings in the Daily Express, 9 February 1972
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Cartoons
Preface: A State of Emergency
1. A Better Tomorrow
2. Heathco
3. Ghosts of 1926
4. Fanfare for Europe
5. The Green Death
6. A Bloody Awful Country
7. Love Thy Neighbour
8. The Limits to Growth
9. Metro-Land
10. Who Needs Men?
11. The Ravages of Permissiveness
12. No Surrender
13. The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism
14. We Hate Humans
15. The Last Days of Pompeii
16. The Crisis Election
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
1. Edward
Heath with women MPs (Getty Hulton Archive)
2. Rubbish in the streets (Getty Hulton)
3. Boys playing football (Getty Hulton)
4. Boys smoking (Getty Hulton)
5. Old lady awaiting eviction (Getty Hulton)
6. Women at the Highbury Quadrant (Getty Hulton)
7. Jack Jones (Getty Hulton)
8. Postal workers (Getty Hulton)
9. Tony Benn (Getty Hulton)
10. A pit accident (Getty Hulton)
11. Announcement of three-day week (Getty Hulton)
12. Saltley Gate (Press Association)
13. Power cut breakfast (Getty Hulton)
14. Power cut homework (Rex Features)
15. Mrs Thatcher as Secretary of State (Press Association)
16. Protesting Harwood Primary School children (Corbis Hulton)
17. Squatters (Getty Hulton)
18. Slade (Rex Features)
19. Women in Brixton (Rex Features)
20. ‘Yes’ to Europe!! (Corbis Hulton)
21. Carry On at Your Convenience (Rex Features)
22. Coronation Street (Rex Features)
23. Enoch Powell (Getty Popperfoto)
24. Smithfield meat porters (Getty Hulton)
25. Croydon schoolboys (Getty Hulton)
26. Rising Damp (Rex Features)
27. Miss World (Corbis Hulton)
28. Chiswick Women’s Aid (Corbis Hulton)
29. Germaine Greer (Getty Time and Life)
30. Jason King (Rex Features)
31. David Bowie (Getty Redferns)
32. ‘Pregnant men’ (Corbis Hulton)
33. Lord Longford (Corbis Hulton)
34. Budget Day, 1972 (Getty Popperfoto)
35. Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan (Getty Hulton)
36. Children in east Belfast (Getty Hulton)
37. Soldier on patrol (Getty Hulton)
38. UDA march (Getty Hulton)
39. Old Bailey car-bomb attack (Getty Hulton)
40. England out of the World Cup (Press Association)
41. Football violence (Getty Popperfoto)
42. Brian Clough (Press Association)
43. Don Revie (Press Association)
44. Miners’ strike, February 1974 (Getty Hulton)
45. NUM rally (Rex Features)
46. Slumberdown workers (Getty Hulton)
47. Cancelled trains (Rex Features)
48. Edward Heath’s final broadcast (Getty Hulton)
49. Harold Wilson back as Prime Minister (Rex Features)
List of Cartoons
1. ‘State of emergency’ by Cummings, Daily Express, 9 February 1972 (Express Syndication)
2. ‘Electrical worker’ by Jak, Evening Standard, 9 December 1970 (Solo Syndication)
3. ‘Holidays’ by Cummings, Sunday Express, 9 August 1970 (Express Syndication)
4. ‘Irish in hut’ by Cummings, Daily Express, 27 October 1971 (Express Syndication)
5. ‘Enoch Powell’ by Cummings, Daily Express, 10 April 1972 (Express Syndication)
6. ‘Men’s Lib’ by Giles, Daily Express, 2 May 1972 (Express Syndication)
7. ‘Unacceptable Face’ by Cummings, Daily Express, 15 June 1973 (Express Syndication)
8. ‘Colditz’ by Emmwood, Daily Mail, 7 January 1974 (Solo Syndication)
All cartoons supplied by the British Cartoon Archive.
Preface: A State of Emergency
But now here it is, the day of beginning again, the day that is written down in so many diaries, and it is raining, and dreary, and bleak.
– Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (1975)
It was, everyone agreed, a lovely morning for a wedding. After days of rain, the clouds had cleared and London’s newly scrubbed streets sparkled in the unseasonal November sunlight. Along the route from the Palace to the Abbey, the roads had been closed to traffic, making room for tens of thousands of onlookers, many groggily shaking themselves awake after a cold night under the stars. Even as the early spectators brewed their cups of tea, the coachmen in the Royal Mews were finishing their exercises and the troops were marching smartly into position along the processional route. Hundreds of little flags fluttered in the brisk morning breeze, testament to the hard work of the staff of the Department of the Environment, who had spent the last few days decorating the streets with Union Jacks, monograms of ‘A’ and ‘M’, and decorations in what one official described as ‘coral pink and what used to be called nigger brown’. Everywhere there was a palpable sense of anticipation, ‘an atmosphere of festivity and expectation’. And as the sun climbed in the sky and the crowds swelled from hundreds to thousands, as the Boy Scouts in their green uniforms trudged down the lines with their souvenir programmes, as the hawkers moved in with their hot dogs and drinks and their ‘Mark and Anne’ souvenir T-shirts, the first guests began to arrive at the Abbey, filing solemnly in beneath the bright television lights, the grand chandeliers and the softer, dimmer glow of the candles in the flower-decked sacrarium.1
The wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on 14 November 1973 was the first major royal event in London since the Coronation, twenty years previously. And in some ways, whether watching from among the crowds or listening to the BBC’s reverential commentary, it was possible to imagine that nothing had changed since that rainy June day two decades before – except that this time the weather was better. As the Blues and Royals escorted the Queen’s carriage through the central arch of Buckingham Palace and along the Mall, their horses’ hooves clattering on the tarmac and their finery glittering in the sunlight, the spectators seemed just as respectful and enthusiastic as their predecessors had been back in 1953. It was ‘one of those stately pageants that the British remain best in the world at producing’, said The Times the next day, lovingly describing the shining silver of the Abbey plate, the sapphire blue of the Queen’s outfit, the lobster, the partridge and the peppermint ice cream of the wedding breakfast. It was a celebration of history and tradition, in which the Princess and her Captain used ‘the same old vows and blessings and the same old beautifully simple language of the sixteenth-century Prayer Book that is used at all Church of England weddings’. And it was a glamorous fairy-tale wedding, an old-fashioned romantic fable with a dashing bridegroom in the scarlet and blue of the Dragoon Guards and a 23-year-old bride in virginal white, who ‘smiled so gaily’, one reporter wrote, ‘that the adjective radiant trembled even on hard-bitten lips’.2
Like the Coronation, the wedding was a genuinely national event. In the Wiltshire village of Great Somerford, where Captain Phillips’s parents lived, all the residents over 60 were invited to the village school so that they could follow the occasion live on colour television, followed by a buffet lunch with a replica of the wedding cake. There was a tea party for local children, a fireworks display and a barbecue of suckling pig. Across the country, schools had devoted hours to telling their pupils about the significance of the day, while retailers had slashed their prices to induce viewers to invest in new televisions so that they could appreciate the spectacle in glorious colour. And when the BBC collated its viewing figures afterwards, it emerged that a staggering 28 million people had tuned in to watch the wedding live, the third biggest television audience of the decade after the Apollo 13 splashdown and the FA Cup Final replay between Chelsea and Leeds three years before. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of technology, it was not merely a national event but an international one. In the Republic of Ireland, bitterness at recent events in Belfast and Londonderry did not stop so many people tuning in that Dublin’s electricity board struggled to cope with the demand. In France, an estimated 10 million people gathered around their televisions; in West Germany, many British servicemen were given time off to watch the wedding, and army wives held parties around their glowing sets. And in the United States and Canada, where live coverage began at five in the morning on the East Coast, the wedding dominated the breakfast bulletins. So many Americans were glued to their televisions, re
ports said later, that they ended up being late for work.3
Yet although American viewers loved the royal wedding for its patina of tradition, the very fact of the television coverage reflected the extraordinary changes that had overtaken British life since London’s last major royal occasion. In 1953, when the Coronation had been the first such event shown live on television, most people had not owned a set. Even though ownership doubled to 3 million in the run-up to the big day, the vast majority of Britons had watched the ceremony with family, friends and neighbours, gathered in awe around a popping, crackling black-and-white box. By 1973, however, almost every family in the country had a set of their own. Watching television, once a relative luxury, was now by far the most popular form of entertainment in the country, so deeply embedded in national cultural life that the Dean of Westminster agreed to share his viewing recommendations for the week with the readers of the Radio Times. (He would be watching Dad’s Army the night before the wedding, he admitted, but not Match of the Day, which was on a bit late.) And although some people held parties or invited relatives for lunch, most watched in the privacy of their own homes. The collective solidarity exemplified by the Coronation street parties was now an increasingly distant memory; by 1973, even working-class families were used to spending their evenings, weekends and holidays on their own, basking in the benefits of the affluent society.4
If a Londoner from the cheering Coronation crowds had been catapulted forward twenty years to the wedding of the Queen’s daughter, what would he have made of Britain in 1973? No doubt he would have been amused by the new fashions: the jeans and sweaters that many spectators wore that cool November morning, the flares and high heels, the parka anoraks and flowing maxi-dresses, the sheepskin coats and corduroy jackets, the mini-skirts left over from the late 1960s, the long sideburns and shaggy beards, the long-haired men and the women in trousers. But he would surely have been more struck by the general air of prosperity and comfort, by the fact that so many people had cars of their own, by the central heating, the indoor toilets, the gleaming new kitchens and bathrooms, by the appliances – telephones, fridges, washing machines – that families now took for granted. Casting his eyes across the skyline, he would have been startled by the slim cylindrical intrusion of the Post Office Tower, that supreme symbol of the technological modernity of the 1960s, but he would have been even more stunned by the vast concrete monoliths along the horizon, the glowering council tower blocks and faceless office buildings that had utterly transformed the urban landscape.