For most people, however, the prospect of crippling inflation, millions out of work and a fight to the death between the government and the unions was no laughing matter. What was more, thanks to the IRA’s bombing offensive against central London, the conflict in Northern Ireland now seemed likely to engulf the mainland. In conservative circles, there were genuine fears of total political and social breakdown. In December, one of the art critic Sacheverell Sitwell’s City friends told him that they had ‘only three months to clear out of England’; another advised him ‘to hoard his cartridges, for there will be shooting within that time’. Even more moderate observers shared their fears. In December, Peter Hall recorded his fears that ‘out of the chaos we are going into, some simple and extremist group of the far right or the far left may very well break up our society and take over,’ while the NEDC’s new ‘sociological adviser’, Professor Oliver McGregor, told Ronald McIntosh that there was ‘now a real risk that political democracy will not survive in Britain’. And in February 1974, James Lees-Milne’s stockbroker friend Lord Roger Manners told him that the City expected ‘a complete economic collapse any day, when we shall be in the same condition as Germany in 1923. We must expect chaos, the £ to be worth 1 penny, if we are lucky, and the oil sheiks buying up our industries. A jolly prospect.’30
At one level, the popularity of the Weimar parallel was a classic illustration of the contemporary obsession with the Second World War, which dominated the British imagination like no other historical event. By the end of 1973, indeed, it seemed that almost no economic setback went by without observers reaching for their textbooks on the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, the collapse of Weimar democracy and the rise of National Socialism. As Sir Alec Guinness, who wore the dictator’s uniform for the wildly sensationalist film Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), told Time magazine, ‘the situation in England strikes every month a decadent, yes decadent note. All these depressing things. People say, why not get someone else to sort it all out for them … a strong man.’ Some even welcomed the prospect: David Bowie, then at the height of his fame, told the NME that Britain needed ‘an extreme right front [to] come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up’. In 1976, he was even photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute at Victoria station, although he insisted he was only waving to his fans.31
Most people, however, shuddered at the very notion – but that did not mean they did not take it seriously. Even the Secretary of State for the Environment, Geoffrey Rippon, reportedly told friends at a dinner party in December 1973 that Britain was ‘on the same course as the Weimar government, with runaway inflation and ultra-high unemployment at the end’. That a Cabinet minister could seriously liken the situation to the last days of Weimar democracy spoke volumes about the mood of barely suppressed hysteria. And when the government sent tanks and armed police to Heathrow on 6 January for an exercise in protecting planes from terrorist attack – not such an outlandish idea, given that Palestinian terrorists had killed thirty people in Rome airport two weeks before – some observers on the left were convinced that this was actually a dry run for a military coup. ‘My suspicious mind led me to the possibility that Carrington wanted to get people used to tanks and armed patrols in the streets of London,’ wrote Tony Benn excitably. He almost seemed disappointed when Labour’s defence spokesman Fred Peart wearily told him that it was indeed just an exercise, ‘and anyway it will get the troops off their bottoms’. ‘A most cynical view,’ recorded an outraged Benn.32
It was against this background that at midnight on New Year’s Eve the three-day week finally came into operation. Factories and businesses were limited to just three days of electricity – either Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday and Saturday – while shops, unless they were considered essential, were limited to either mornings or afternoons. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in Britain in peacetime, and life during the last days of 1973 had a faint, domesticated whiff of the last days of Pompeii about it, with reports of people queuing outside shops for bread, candles, paraffin, toilet paper and cans of soup. In many towns there had already been minor petrol panics as motorists, terrified by reports that petrol coupons had been printed and sent to post offices across the country, besieged the pumps to fill their tanks. Some garages closed down entirely; others tried to limit the demand, such as the Colchester garage that served only ‘regular clients’ and turned away ‘casuals’. With rail services disrupted by the ASLEF dispute, commuters shivered on platforms for trains that never arrived, and with more people shopping locally for Christmas presents, some shops even ran out of toys. And nobody liked the prospect of a three-day week: in Essex, a rural vicar earned brief notoriety by telling his local paper that thanks to the unions’ selfishness, the old and infirm might be ‘dying of starvation within the next year or two’. The union militants, he suggested, might have to be gaoled or even shot if they ‘persist in fomenting strikes’, a rather unchristian view that earned him a spot on Radio Four’s The World at One.33
In general, however, blame was fairly evenly divided. On Christmas Eve, a Marplan poll found that 54 per cent blamed the unions and 40 per cent the government. And although most of the press sided with the government, dissenting voices were not hard to find. The three-day week was ‘the peacetime equivalent of a scorched-earth policy’, insisted the New Statesman, which predicted that ‘many firms soon will go out of business, unemployment will soar, and the critical balance of payments situation will become a nightmare’. Even a few business leaders came out against the government. ‘I’ve been down three coal mines in my life, and each time I’ve said, “If I had to work there, I’d want paying to go to work and paying again when I’d done it,” ’ said Sir Raymond Brooke, chairman of the engineering firm GKN. And all the time, letters poured in to newspapers heaping abuse on Heath’s supposed stubbornness and cruelty. ‘Dictator Heath and his £10,000-plus a year henchmen have imposed a three-day working week. Why? Because this yacht owner claims the miners/electricians are causing such severe damage to the nation that it is essential,’ a self-described ‘working class engineering employee’ called Roderick Colyer wrote to The Times. He was a ‘floating voter’, he added, but his loathing for Heath, his outrage at the effects of inflation and his sheer class-consciousness smouldered from every line:
If I sound bitter, it is because I am. I am bitter because I have to work continuous nights to earn a gross wage of £35 and a take home pay of £29. I am bitter because I can no longer meet mortgage payments and other financial expenses. I am bitter because my marriage has broken under financial strain. I am bitter because of the fortunes being made and lost by the upper and middle classes over the backs of the workers. I am bitter because the same people – the so-called industrialists and ruling classes – stop a worker having a couple of pounds extra whilst they line their pockets with rises of £315 a week plus, or the Government give them salaries of £10,000 to £20,000 a year. What on earth do they do with that type of money? I am bitter because pensioners, like my Mum and Dad, cannot get £480 a year, yet it was they that brought us through the last two world wars that the Government and others keep referring to. Unite us, Heath? Not me.34
On the left, scorn for the three-day week was almost universal. The radical artist Jamie Reid, later notorious as the designer of the Sex Pistols’ record covers, designed a poster to be put on shop windows with the legend: ‘Last Days: Buy Now While Stocks Last: This store will be closing soon owing to the pending collapse of monopoly capitalism.’ Other stickers advised motorists to ‘Save Petrol: Burn Cars’, or to ‘Keep Warm: Make Trouble’. Another told shoppers: ‘Special offer … this store welcomes shoplifters.’ For young radicals, it became a point of pride to waste power by leaving lights on, and the Labour councillors of Clay Cross, Derbyshire deliberately left their street lights on full power to show their support for ‘men who deserve a better deal’. And in the Till Death Us Do Part episodes ‘Strikes and Blackouts’ and ‘Th
ree Day Week’, written by the left-wing Johnny Speight and broadcast at the end of January, Alf Garnett’s daughter Rita and her radical husband Mike scurry around the house turning on every appliance they can find. ‘Don’t Save Fuel – Use It Up!’ is their slogan. Alf, of course, is horrified: conservative as ever, he blames the crisis on the ungrateful ‘wogs’ who are ‘acting like world powers and expecting us to pay for it’ and the ‘Mick Commies’ who write for Mike’s beloved Militant paper. ‘Mr Heath’, Alf insists, is going to ‘put the economy of this country right’. When Mike taunts him about unemployment, Alf angrily replies that Heath needs to ‘create some unemployment’. (Perhaps Alf had been going to the Institute of Economic Affairs’ lunchtime briefings.) But not even Alf can stick the three-day week for long, especially when his wife Else, who supports the miners, goes on a three-day week herself and refuses to cook his dinner. Outraged, Alf tours the shops, only to find none open. In any case, the housekeeping money has long since run out, eroded by weeks of price rises. The others, needless to say, are delighted at his discomfiture: unlike Alf, they hold Heath in total contempt. ‘Everyone wants to get back on the job, everyone,’ Rita bursts out bitterly. ‘And everyone wants to pay the miners. But old Fatso won’t, oh no. He makes me sick, every time I see him on there with his great porky face wobbling with fat.’35
The Garnett household’s experience of the three-day week conforms absolutely to many people’s recollections of the era. The lights are low, the cupboards are bare, the house is cold and the streets are empty. Since both the BBC and ITV close down at 10.30, Alf cannot even console himself with late-night television, and when the family try to play Monopoly, they are promptly struck by an apparent power cut. And of course this is how the three-day week is usually remembered: literally a murky moment in the nation’s history. It was a time when newspaper advertisements ordered households to ‘switch off something’; when clergymen took to the airwaves to debate the morality of family members sharing baths to save hot water; when the High Commissions of Australia and New Zealand were bombarded with enquiries about emigration; and when a government energy minister – the hapless Patrick Jenkin – urged people to ‘clean their teeth in the dark’, only to become a figure of public ridicule when the press found five lights blazing in his north London house first thing in the morning. Popular history has enthroned it as the defining moment of the entire 1970s and a landmark in the modern British experience, the point ‘when the lights went out’, when people lived by the flickering glow of candlelight, when they dug paraffin lamps out of the attic, nursed their dwindling food supplies and shivered in the freezing darkness.36
Ironically, though, the conventional wisdom that the three-day week saw ‘the lights go out’ owes more to garbled memories than to hard facts. It is true that street lamps were extinguished, many people dutifully switched off unnecessary lights and heaters, and the nation’s television screens fell dark at half past ten. But contrary to popular belief, the three-day regime did not see widespread power cuts. The whole point of the exercise, after all, was to stop power cuts from happening. And although demand for candles went through the roof – one Battersea manufacturer turned out a million a day, the most popular coming in the shape of the Prime Minister – most people barely needed them. Later, when they remembered hosting dinner parties by candlelight or playing board games beside a guttering paraffin lamp, people were actually recalling the last weeks of 1970 or the early months of 1972, not (as they thought) the first weeks of 1974. It was not even particularly cold: as luck would have it, the weather took a turn for the better in the New Year, and the temperatures in January and February were almost twice as high as usual. Indeed, the weather was so mild that after less than three weeks, it was already clear that the predictions of blackouts and anarchy had been wildly exaggerated. Fuel stocks were much ‘higher than had been expected’, Peter Walker told the Cabinet on 17 January, ‘because of warm weather and because of the satisfactory response to Ministerial appeals for savings in domestic consumption’. It was now likely that ‘the coal stocks by the end of March would still amount to 11 million tons’, something few had imagined possible just weeks before. And even at this early stage Walker thought there was ‘room for cautious relaxation of the three-day week’. Backed by the CBI and the Electricity Board, some ministers were even pressing for a transition to a four-day week, which would ‘help to maintain overseas confidence in the pound’. Indeed, instead of preparing to put troops on the streets to fight off revolution, the government was now thinking up ways to defend itself from accusations that it had overreacted. They should tell people, Heath said, that ‘common prudence had required them to plan for the worst’ – and thankfully the worst had not happened.37
For many people, of course, the three-day week was not only inconvenient but deeply alarming. Many small businesses, forced to become part-time enterprises overnight, found it impossible to pay bills left over from their five-day operations. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs – albeit only temporarily – because there was not enough work for them to do, and on 13 January LWT’s current affairs show Weekend World claimed that national income had fallen by up to 15 per cent, a bigger drop than in the General Strike or the worst year of the Great Depression. And yet the truth is that the economic impact of the three-day week was much smaller than anyone had imagined. Since many companies offered their men longer hours on their three working days, average weekly take-home pay actually fell by just £2 from £37.69 in December to £35.71 in January. The rise in unemployment, too, was much less drastic than expected, the figures rising from 2.1 per cent in December to 2.4 per cent in February, by which time only 600,000 workers were still on short time. Perhaps most strikingly, though, the three-day week caused much less damage to production than had been anticipated, not least because many firms responded with energy and ingenuity, using battered old screwdrivers and spanners to keep working even when the power had been turned off. In Nottingham, clerical staff at Raleigh Industries worked without heat or light so that all power could be switched to the production line; in Sheffield, a snuff-making firm reverted to using a waterwheel that had last seen action in 1737; on the King’s Road, Chelsea, a furrier’s shop displayed the sign ‘OPEN SIX DAYS A WEEK – BY CANDLE POWER, BATTERY POWER AND WILL POWER’. And in the Berkshire New Town of Bracknell, production levels fell by less than a tenth – which spoke volumes for the energy with which firms approached the three-day week, but did not exactly say much for their efficiency beforehand. Indeed, even though many firms lost 40 per cent of their working hours, they still maintained production at 75 to 80 per cent, and by the end of February output was virtually back to normal. British industry had handled the crisis with ‘something approaching gusto’, enthused the Sunday Times, hailing its ‘impressive powers of improvisation’ and ‘imaginative derring-do’ – but rather glossing over the implication that firms could not be working very hard over five days if they found the transition so easy.38
The irony of all this was that it worked against the government. Heath’s advisers had banked on the three-day week stoking a crisis atmosphere that would mobilize people behind a brave, Churchillian Prime Minister, but the anticipated sense of outrage never materialized. Indeed, some people seemed almost to enjoy the experience, rediscovering habits they had lost since the advent of television, from reading and playing board games to pursuing hobbies and diversions outside the home. Audiences trebled for late-night radio shows hosted by John Peel and ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, who liked to torment night owls with interminable progressive rock. Fishing-tackle shops reported booming sales, golf courses were deluged with aspiring Tony Jacklins, and the introduction of earlier kick-off times and Sunday games allowed the Football League to continue as normal, with Don Revie’s Leeds United setting a record of twenty-nine matches without defeat. The average worker’s loss of £10 a week (an estimate that later proved wildly exaggerated), the actor Robert Morley helpfully suggested in The Times, was
surely worth ‘freedom, happiness, getting to know the neighbours, even one’s own kids. Discovering literature and theatre, discovering art and life. Ten pounds a week – it’s cheap at the price.’ ‘Now, at last, we’ve time to do all those lazy – and free – things we always wanted,’ agreed the Daily Mail’s Jane Gaskell, suggesting that ‘the 1974 crisis could, surprisingly, be good for us’. Given the materialism of modern society, it was no bad thing to return to an ‘almost peasant state’, and people ought to relish ‘re-reading an old book or digging a garden’. She even found a psychiatrist who thought, in classic early 1970s style, that the three-day week was a chance for husbands and wives ‘to be more spontaneous, to experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school’.*39
The obvious problem for Heath was that in the absence of any sense of crisis or Dunkirk spirit, people were bound to turn against the government who had inflicted the three-day week on them. As Alan Watkins remarked in the New Statesman, there seemed to be no sense of personal involvement in the crisis, since most people knew ‘perfectly well that switching off the odd electric light bulb here and there is going to have about as much effect on the power situation as collecting Lord Beaverbrook’s ludicrous aluminium saucepans had on the course of the Battle of Britain’ – the wartime analogy again. And as Watkins predicted, unless the government quickly resolved the situation, there was a strong chance the voters would elect another to do it for them. Polls found support for the emergency measures steadily declining, and even many Conservative supporters concluded that the government had overreacted. In Downing Street, Douglas Hurd became seriously worried that the miners were winning the propaganda war. And on 10 January, Kenneth Williams found himself on a commuter train ‘packed with vexed & irritated passengers’ whose services had been disrupted in the ongoing ASLEF dispute. ‘We all seem to be taking these ridiculous measures like a load of sheep,’ one passenger from Lancashire remarked. ‘Nobody is protesting … no coal, no transport, nothing.’ ‘And you feel this in all conversation,’ Williams recorded later, ‘that it has gone too far … that the 3 day week etc. is all rubbish and the miners should be paid. Oh, it’s ghastly.’ Even Doctor Who came out for the NUM, albeit a few months late. When the Doctor makes a new expedition to the planet Peladon, where miners are striking for better conditions and against modern working methods, he advises the Queen to send for their moderate leader Gebek (but not his hot-headed deputy Ettis, an intergalactic Mick McGahey to Gebek’s Joe Gormley). ‘Promise him a better way of life for his miners, and see that they get it,’ the Doctor suggests. ‘You’ve got to convince your people that the Federation means a better way of life for everybody, not just for a few nobles at court.’40
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 79