State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But by this stage Heath was being swept along by events like a drowning man in a roiling sea. On 23 January, the miners’ executive voted by a narrow majority to hold a pithead ballot on an all-out strike. ‘With fuel stocks holding out and spring around the corner,’ Joe Gormley wrote, ‘our final card had to be played now or never.’ Heath’s advisers were in despair: as Hurd remarked, ‘it was clear that reason was not going to prevail.’ But the Prime Minister had not given up hope: in one last desperate effort, he had a patriotic appeal photocopied and sent to every member of the NUM executive, reminding them that the oil crisis had plunged Britain into the worst economic emergency since 1945, and promising that if they settled within Stage Three, they would get a sweeping re-evaluation of pay and conditions later. It did no good: in Gormley’s view, ‘it was obviously designed for the public’s ears, as much as for ours’. In any case, many miners had long since made up their minds that they wanted a fight. ‘We’ve poleaxed Ted Heath before, an’ we shall do it again,’ one young miner told a television interviewer. ‘Heath’s decided he’s going to have the miners going back on their bellies,’ agreed the NUM’s spokesman in Mansfield. ‘I’ve got news for him. We crawl on our bellies all day long and we’re sick of it. When we’re done with Heath, he’ll be the one on his belly.’ But it was a miner from the Rhondda who best expressed the spirit of defiance:

  If Ted Heath would come to our colliery, I would take him by the arm and show him how we work. We would go down the pit and walk two miles to the coal face, crouching because of the low roof. His eyes would sting with the dust and he would think his brain was coming loose with the noise of the drills. He would see us eat sandwiches with filthy hands and hear about roof falls and he would get tired just watching us dig coal for seven hours a day in all that din and muck. Then I would say, ‘Would you do it – the stinkingest job in Britain – for thirty-one quid take-home?’ And while he was pondering I would tell him the day of the cheap miner is over.54

  On Monday, 4 February, the NUM announced that an overwhelming 81 per cent of miners had voted for an all-out strike to begin at midnight on Sunday. For Heath, it was a dreadful moment. Despite all his efforts, the miners had declared war on the government for the second time in three years. There was talk of trying to arrange a new bargain under the aegis of the Pay Board, which had just issued a report on the problem of pay relativities. But both the TUC and the NUM had lost patience with the government; indeed, Gormley refused point-blank even to meet Willie Whitelaw without an offer of more money on the table. As David Wood grimly but presciently wrote in The Times, there were now only three possible outcomes: ‘surrender by the government, in circumstances that would make further surrenders inevitable; a fight to the finish in which the British economy would be devastated; or a general election decided in conditions of bitterness and perhaps violence that would make Conservative Government nearly impossible and the return of a Labour Government the signal for runaway inflation’. But even Heath now saw no alternative: if the miners and the government could not settle their differences, then the people must decide. The following evening, he dined with his closest advisers at Prunier’s, his favourite restaurant. Hurd joined them ‘for a glass after dinner’ and found them in gloomy form. ‘Mr Heath explained more clearly than ever before his desperate worry about the size of the stake on the table,’ he recorded. ‘Everything which he had tried to do seemed at risk. No one pressed him that evening. Events had already taken over the argument.’55

  Not only had events overtaken the argument, but an extraordinarily febrile, almost hysterical mood had enveloped the highest ranks of government. In the Commons the next day, Anthony Barber – who had endured perhaps the roughest, worst-judged and unluckiest ride of any Chancellor since the war – was on astonishingly strident form, telling the House that the blame for the crisis lay with Labour, who had been deliberately stirring up ‘envy and hatred’ across the land. ‘The issue at stake’, he insisted, ‘is whether our affairs are to be governed by the rule of reason, by the rule of Parliament and by the rule of democracy. The vast majority of people in Britain detest the alternative, which ultimately can only be chaos, anarchy and a totalitarian or Communist regime.’ This was strong stuff, but Barber was not the only senior figure feeling the pressure. Only a few days before, Heath’s indispensable right-hand man, his ever-reliable mandarin Sir William Armstrong, had finally cracked under the strain. As the architect of Stage Three and the most intense and uncompromising of all the counter-inflation hawks, Armstrong had long since lost sight of his role as a supposedly neutral civil servant. Over Christmas and the New Year he had consistently urged Heath to take a hard line against the miners, even talking of the crisis as an apocalyptic clash between the state and the unions, between democracy and Communism. Many ministers worried that Armstrong was losing his mind: Prior thought he now saw himself as a ‘messianic’ figure.56

  On the last weekend of January, attending an Anglo-American conference at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, Armstrong was in particularly strange, domineering form. Showing an appropriately diplomatic touch, Hurd wrote later that ‘the atmosphere was Chekhovian. We sat on sofas in front of great log fires and discussed first principles while the rain lashed the windows. Sir William was full of notions, ordinary and extraordinary.’ Other participants remembered that Armstrong seemed obsessed with coups and coalitions, subjects much in the air at the time: that very week, the Spectator’s editorial had claimed: ‘Britain is on a Chilean brink.’ One of Armstrong’s more extraordinary notions, recalled the CBI’s Campbell Adamson, was that ‘the Communists were infiltrating everything. They might even be infiltrating, he said, the room he was in. It was quite clear that the immense strain and overwork was taking its toll.’ And when Armstrong returned to London the following Monday it was obvious that he was seriously unwell. ‘He really did go mad,’ Heath’s young aide William Waldegrave confided to the journalist Hugo Young. ‘He used to talk about the phoenix rising from the ashes … He really believed in the ruination of Britain, to be followed by the resurrection. He talked about things like “I’ll move my red army this way and the blue army that way.” ’ This was a bit much, even by the standards of the early 1970s: when a delegation from the CBI visited Armstrong on 31 January, they were horrified to find him ‘under great strain and almost mentally ill’. One account has Sir William haranguing a meeting of stunned ministers about the need to resist a Communist coup; another has him locking a group of Permanent Secretaries in a room before lecturing them about ‘the Bible and sex’. The climax seems to have come when, waiting for an appointment with the Prime Minister, Armstrong lay full length on the floor of Number 10 while lecturing the visiting head of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. Another version has him removing his clothes and haranguing the Governor of the Bank of England, though this is probably a bit of an exaggeration. In any case, this clearly could not go on: later that afternoon Armstrong was at last persuaded to see Victor Rothschild, who ‘diagnosed insanity’ and sent him off to his villa in Barbados to recuperate.57

  Even if Armstrong had still been on the scene in early February, it is unlikely he could have dissuaded Heath from going to the country. The pressure from his own party was now overwhelming: in the Commons on 6 February, Denis Healey memorably gibed that his old friend had been ‘manipulated into this dead end by an oddly assorted quartet of his colleagues, who are now trundling him like a great marble statue towards the precipice’. The polls were mixed: the latest Harris poll had the government 4 per cent ahead, but Gallup put them 3 per cent behind. But as David Wood explained in that morning’s Times, ‘the Conservative Party sees itself facing a choice of blind alleys and dead ends unless a general election brings in a government with refreshed authority and a renewed lease’. Better an election, most Tories thought, than another gruelling war of attrition against an enemy who had already beaten them once. And Heath himself, his reserves of energy and intellect utterly spent, no longer had the patience to
stand in their way. Just after half past twelve on Thursday, 7 February – ironically, the very day that the hawks had originally wanted for an early election – Radio Two broke into the Jimmy Young Show with a news flash that Heath had asked the Queen for a dissolution of Parliament and an election in three weeks’ time. ‘In the House it was like the end of term,’ noted Tony Benn, ‘with cheering and counter cheering and shouting and so on.’ But not everyone was quite so excited. ‘Some Tories are obviously distressed,’ recorded Barbara Castle. ‘ “No one wants this election,” one of them told me.’58

  That evening, Heath addressed the nation for the final time as Prime Minister. Even now he refused to take on the miners directly, talking only in vague but painfully sincere terms about the importance of Stage Three and the threat of inflation; indeed, he emphasized that he was happy to refer the miners’ claim to the Pay Board and would abide by its recommendation. But he insisted that an election would give ordinary people a chance to say to the unions: ‘Times are hard, we are all in the same boat, and if you sink us now we will all drown.’ Looking earnestly into the camera, he explained:

  The issue before you is a simple one. As a country we face grave problems at home and abroad. Do you want a strong Government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed?

  Do you want Parliament and the elected Government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation?

  Or do you want them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one particularly powerful group of workers? …

  This time the strife has got to stop. Only you can stop it. It’s time for you to speak – with your vote.

  It’s time for your voice to be heard – the voice of the moderate and reasonable people of Britain: the voice of the majority.

  It’s time for you to say to the extremists, the militants, and the plain and simply misguided: we’ve had enough. There’s a lot to be done. For heaven’s sake, let’s get on with it.

  It was an appeal summed up in a simple two-word phrase – a phrase that became a symbol of the decade. ‘Who governs?’ But the answer was not what Heath was expecting.59

  16

  The Crisis Election

  These are the greatest days England’s ever gone through. The people are rising at last!

  – Mike Rawlins in Till Death Us Do Part, 30 January 1974

  Went to bed & dreamed that I was attending a political meeting addressed by Harold Wilson. I was talking to him & he was complaining of the sparse attendance, and I saw Heath in the front row smiling and wearing a ridiculous square shouldered ladies’ musquash coat. It was absurd.

  – Kenneth Williams’s diary, 9 March 1974

  The coach left from Chorlton Street, Manchester just after eleven on Sunday evening, picking up speed as it reached the M62. It was packed with servicemen and their families – young men telling jokes under their breath, young wives trying to get some sleep, children snoring or staring out of the window – who had spent the weekend with friends and relatives in Manchester, and were now heading back to their barracks in Catterick and Darlington. Normally they would have taken the train, but of course there were no trains, because of the ASLEF dispute that had crippled the railway network since December. So the army had booked a North Yorkshire coach company to pick them up. As it happened, the driver, Rowland Handley, was a director of the firm, and knew the route well. After twenty minutes he stopped in Oldham to pick up a second group of passengers, and half an hour later in Huddersfield he collected some more. By midnight he had almost reached Leeds, making excellent time along the motorway, and behind him many of the passengers were fast asleep. And then it happened.

  One moment the coach was cruising smoothly and effortlessly through the night. The next there was an almighty, heart-stopping bang, as 25 pounds of high explosive went off in one of the luggage lockers. In that instant, the entire back of the coach was torn apart, the force of the blast sending pieces of twisted, blackened metal spinning across the carriageway. At the front, Rowland Handley, who had no idea what was happening, struggled to keep his grip on the wheel as shards of the shattered windscreen flew into his face and the vehicle lurched across the road. Somehow – he never knew how – he managed to steer what remained of the coach towards the side of the road, braking desperately, blood pouring from his forehead. He turned off the engine, fumbled for a torch, and heaved himself trembling from the cab. Mr Handley could hardly have realized it in those desperate, frantic moments, but by keeping the coach on the road so long he had probably saved dozens of lives. But what he saw next would live with him for ever. He had served in Cyprus with the RAF, but he had never seen anything like it. The entire back section of the coach had simply been shredded. As he disbelievingly moved his torch over the wreckage, he saw ‘a young child of two or three lying in the road. It was dead. There were bodies all over.’

  The explosion was so great that it shook buildings half a mile away. But to many of the survivors it seemed like a terrible nightmare from which they would soon awake. ‘I just thought it was a dream, I just thought I’d fallen asleep into a bad dream and I just kept on shaking my head and trying to come round,’ said David Dendeck. ‘Then I found out it was real. I was just under all this metal. There was blood coming in my eye … It was dark and there were people screaming and running up the verge on the grass. I could hear my sister on the other side of the coach shouting for me.’ Another passenger, 20-year-old Trooper Michael Ashton, had been sitting behind the driver when the bomb went off. Now, staggering around the side of the vehicle, he came across ‘a girl about 17’, who had been thrown ‘200 yards back up the road’. She was hysterical, he remembered; her legs were crumpled and useless. Around her lay more bodies, motionless, bloody, some of them women and children. ‘It was just absolutely unbelievable,’ said John Clark, a passing motorist who stopped to help. ‘The smell was what upset me really. It was dark so you couldn’t see how bad the injuries really were, but it was the smell of it. It was absolutely total carnage.’

  Eleven people died that night, Sunday, 4 February 1974, victims of the Provisional IRA. Eight of them were soldiers in their late teens or early twenties. One of the dead soldiers, 23-year-old Corporal Clifford Houghton, had been travelling with his wife Linda and their two children, 5-year-old Robert and 2-year-old Lee. All three were killed alongside him, an entire family wiped out in the blink of an eye. Fifty people were injured, many of them seriously; one, a 6-year-old boy, was so badly burned that doctors feared for his life. For years afterwards, the survivors had to cope with nightmares, trauma and disability: as one Oldham lad, just 18 when the bomb went off, remarked at the unveiling of a memorial thirty-five years later, it was a moment that, try as he might, he could ‘never forget’. But of course he was one of the lucky ones; four days after the atrocity, a twelfth victim died of his injuries, his death casting a dark shadow over the first day of the general election campaign.1

  It was not the first time the Provisionals had launched attacks on the mainland. In March 1973 they had set off bombs at the Old Bailey, while in August and September they had planted explosives at Harrods, King’s Cross and Euston, as well as in Birmingham, where a soldier had been killed trying to defuse the bomb. But this was something new: a devastating, indiscriminate atrocity, extinguishing the lives of a dozen people. In the next few days, newspaper columnists and politicians clamoured for the reintroduction of the death penalty for terrorists. And in the panicked rush to judgement, a mentally ill but entirely innocent woman, Judith Ward, was eventually sent to prison – the first in a series of miscarriages of justice born out of the intense pressure to find scapegoats for the murderous handiwork of the IRA.

  The horror on the M62 seemed yet another indication of a society in which the veneer of consensus had cracked, a society lurching into violence and disorder. And although the election campaign meant that the coach bombing quickly disappeared from the headlines, it was far from the last attack o
n British soil. On 13 February a second bomb ripped through the National Defence College in the sleepy village of Latimer, Buckinghamshire. Ten people were badly hurt; no one, miraculously, was killed. But by now terrorism seemed to be the stuff of everyday life. Quite apart from the slaughter in Northern Ireland, the previous six months had seen a hijacking in Austria, an embassy bombing in Marseilles, a massacre at Rome airport, the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister, and the kidnapping of the American heiress Patty Hearst. Not even the Royal Family, ‘the symbol of the nation and of the standards which Britain has lived by’, was immune. On the evening of 20 March, as Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were returning from a charity event for disabled children, an armed madman held up the Princess’s car in the Mall and told her to get out. ‘Not bloody likely!’ she snapped, and in the ensuing melee she managed to get away. But it was yet another sign, said The Times, that ‘acts of casual terrorism’ had become ‘part of the texture of our lives in the 1970s’. ‘There is no pause in violence,’ it lamented; it was ‘as though the vanguard of anarchy were at loose in the world … We do not suffer this pressure of anarchy more than other countries, but we do not suffer it less either. It is a sign of a civilization in regression, turning back from achievement to a neobarbarism.’2

  It was against this dark and bloody backdrop that Edward Heath launched his great election gamble. It was, the press agreed, an election without precedent in modern British history. Both the Sun and the Mirror called it the ‘Crisis Election’: every morning the slogan adorned their front pages. What was at stake, said The Times, was ‘more than one strike: it is the future of the country’. Nobody could remember an election in grimmer circumstances. The Harris poll found that nine out of ten people thought ‘things are going very badly for Britain’, while only two out of ten expected the desperate economic situation to improve over the next twelve months. And while the politicians warned darkly of bitterness and extremism, and exchanged accusations that their opponents were dividing the country, perhaps the really depressing thing was the sheer passivity, the gloom and apathy that seemed to have enveloped the general public. The experience of the last ten years, wrote the Guardian’s perceptive columnist Peter Jenkins the day after the election was declared, proved only that ‘neither party’ could handle Britain’s problems. As the authoritative Nuffield study of the election put it a few months later, ‘it was an unpopularity contest between two contenders widely seen as incompetent on the major issues’.3