by Andy Beckett
On 21 January, the Gazette published an article about the experiences of a typical Colchester family called ‘Life on a Three-Day Week’. Graham and Gillian Bober owned a semi on a new private estate in the suburbs. They were in their mid-twenties and had a five-year-old and a baby. Gillian looked after the children, and Graham worked for a long-established local printers. They were both left-wing – she was the granddaughter of a miner, he was the chairman of the Colchester Labour Party – but they made Heath’s three-day week sound quite harmless. ‘It hasn’t affected our budget that much,’ Graham told the paper. Like many Britons during the three-day week, he was working three long days instead of five normal ones. ‘All it means is that I don’t smoke so much … [and] we haven’t been able to put away the extra £5 each week.’ On his extra days off he was doing ‘some long-awaited decorating work’ and helping Gillian. ‘At least he can hoover,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind him getting in the way … The nice part is that now we go shopping in town together on Thursdays and then the whole weekend is free for other things.’
In the Bober household and others like it during the three-day week, a temporary but suggestive shift in the gender balance was under way. Sometimes it simply involved men being at home more and finding it harder to avoid helping out; but sometimes it involved women’s relative earning power. While businesses with predominantly male workforces – factories and other industrial concerns – were suffering selective shutdowns, the places where women tended to work – shops and offices – were less heavy users of energy and were therefore less affected by the power restrictions. ‘Today it’s no longer wrong for the wife to be a major contributor to household finance,’ the Daily Mail acknowledged on 23 January, as the emergency entered its fourth week. In this respect, as in others, the three-day week was prophetic. Within a decade, many men’s jobs in British factories would be gone altogether, and in parts of the country clerical and retail work for women would be all that remained.
The three-day week did not make instant feminists of the Bobers – Gillian was not working, after all. But their new life was intriguing. Through friends of friends, the Italian state television network RAI heard about the article on them in the Gazette, and Graham and Gillian were filmed with their boys for a programme on the three-day week. Graham wore a bold waistcoat and tie, Gillian wore a smart coat and scarf, and all of them sat for the cameras on their new cottage-style kitchen chairs with their new striped curtains in the background. Britain may have been in crisis, but it was not short of consumer durables.
When I met the Bobers three decades later, some of the confidence had gone from Graham’s broad mouth. He was a taxi driver now. ‘My printing company went bust five or six years ago,’ he said. ‘We were the last. There’s not one manufacturing job in that part of Colchester now.’ He slapped his knee and spilled some of his coffee on his armchair.
He and Gillian still talked about the three-day week with a degree of fondness. ‘People took sides on it,’ she said. ‘We were living on a very right-wing estate. You’d go into a shop and people would say, “Bloody miners!” and you’d say …’ Graham broke in: ‘At the time I thought Ted Heath was very right-wing. We met him at the Oyster Feast. I spoke to him. We thought, “This bloke, he’s dreadful.”’ He paused. ‘I certainly never saw that they’d move as right as they did afterwards.’
During the three-day week, the Bobers and their neighbours looked after each other’s children when there was no power at school. When there was no power at home, the Bobers would often go to Graham’s parents, who were on the same part of the electricity grid as a local hospital and so almost never got cut off; or Graham, Gillian and their boys would sit together in their new kitchen-diner. ‘Television wasn’t so dominant then,’ said Gillian. ‘There was enough light for reading. We had gas lights from camping and a couple of antique oil lamps that had been my grandmother’s.’ There was a whiff of the Second World War about how they dealt with it all. Graham’s employers did their best to keep him in work and earning. ‘The company were good, they did a deal with the union,’ he remembered. ‘Our managers were local people. They weren’t dictators.’
In the summer of 1974, after the three-day week was over, a firm of management consultants was commissioned by the Department of Industry to examine how British bosses and workers had responded to the crisis. ‘A few companies consciously used the emergency as an opportunity to improve their industrial relations,’ the survey discovered. Other employers found they were simply forced to ‘set aside ongoing disputes’ with unions and ‘increase mutual cooperation’; in these cases the unions ‘gained confidence, and benefits’. And this more collaborative economy was more productive: across all the companies surveyed, ‘Output per direct labour hour did improve, generally by about 5%.’ The report added, ‘Thinking was stimulated on the possibility of arranging a permanent four-day week … Several companies began negotiations.’
The enhanced productivity of British business during the three-day week is still an article of faith for many former members of the Heath government. Peter Walker, Brendon Sewill and Heath himself all cited it; Walker even told me, in his confident, broad-brush way, that ‘Production in the three-day week went up to more than it had been in the five-day week.’ Looking down on London from his glass-walled office, he accompanied his claim with a worldly chuckle: the three-day week, he suggested, had confirmed what he and Heath had been saying since the sixties about the slackness of the British economy. On their government’s inability to alter this state of affairs, except accidentally and during a national emergency, he had less to say.
In fact, by most estimates, national output during the three-day week fell by about a fifth. And the revolution in workplace practices at the time was, at best, partial. The negotiations about a permanent four-day week came to nothing. In other companies, the Department of Industry report found, ‘The duration of extra effort and cooperation was limited … by growing fatigue, the fading novelty element … or the eventual intrusion of endemic problems.’ Workers and managers alike were resistant ‘to Saturday working and also … [to] starting work early or finishing late.’ Among the men surveyed, 61 per cent said they disliked the three-day week’s new working hours, with only 10 per cent favourable. Women were only slightly more flexible. People found the longer shifts tiring. They missed seeing family and friends on those days. They were unsettled by the disruption of their domestic routines. Even Graham Bober found the three-day week had its drawbacks. ‘When I was doing my twelve-hour shifts,’ he said with distaste, ‘I used to have a beard for three days.’
All this contained hints of the more relentless British workplace culture to come. But in Britain in 1974 that was still several governments away; commentators with an interest in the social implications of the three-day week were quicker to identify its more bucolic aspects. ‘Now, at last, we’ve time to do all those lazy – and free – things we always wanted,’ wrote the columnist Jane Gaskell in the Daily Mail on 21 January. ‘It already looks as if the 1974 crisis could, surprisingly, be good for us.’ She cited a report from the Samaritans of a significant drop in the number of calls it was receiving from would-be suicides. Next she quoted Dr Antony Allbeury of Oxford University, an authority on ‘leisure’ – a growing preoccupation for social scientists, architects and planners in mid-seventies Britain – who spoke of the value of ‘re-reading an old book or digging a garden … not spending money … finding ourselves back in that almost peasant state’. Finally, Gaskell introduced Dr Richard Fox, a consultant psychiatrist from Colchester, to give a more modern hippy tinge to Allbeury’s old-fashioned yearnings. Fox, she wrote, ‘approves of the three-day week … as what he calls “a channel to husbands and wives” – to get together, be more spontaneous, to experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school’.
For all the period’s problem-solving and difficulties, Britain did enjoy a sort of extended national holiday during the three-day week
. Fishing-tackle shops reported big sales increases. Golf courses were busier; some driving ranges stayed open into the winter dusk and beyond, using car headlights for illumination. Audiences trebled for John Peel and Bob Harris’s late-night BBC radio programmes of sprawling progressive rock because fewer people were having to get up for work in the morning. But like most holidays, the three-day week was not sustainable in the long run. ‘Being political,’ remembered Gillian Bober, ‘I thought, “It’s not going to go on.”’
When the three-day week had been announced, public opinion had been evenly split as to whether it was needed. As the restrictions continued through January and into early February, support for them diminished. Labour claimed that the three-day week was politically motivated, unnecessary and economically crippling. At least parts of this critique were persuasive. With the oil crisis abating a little, petrol rationing not introduced in Britain after all and the country continuing to function despite the miners’ overtime ban, the three-day week did increasingly seem like an overreaction – or, at best, a set of emergency measures so effective they had outlived their usefulness. At the same time, the economy was quietly suffocating. As early as the second week of the restrictions, the studiedly unsensational television current-affairs show Weekend World estimated that Britain’s national income was down by between 10 and 15 per cent, a bigger fall, the programme pointed out, than during the General Strike of 1926 or during the worst year of the Depression in Britain, 1931. Almost a million people had lost their jobs – only temporarily, it was hoped – because their employers did not have enough electricity to use them. The earnings of everyone else were down, on average, by between a tenth and a sixth. And as the three-day week went on, many smaller businesses developed cashflow problems: they were still paying full-sized bills from before the emergency, but they were now only part-time enterprises. ‘Many will not survive if the restrictions last for more than a very few weeks,’ wrote the director of the Small Business Centre at Aston University in Birmingham in New Society magazine on 31 January.
Yet to the miners the economic news was not bad enough. During January, their pay talks with Heath and his ministers had continued, with a settlement, based on further concessions from the government, at times tantalizingly close at hand. But the NUM did not trust the government: in public, Heath’s comments about the miners were still typically volatile. And just as importantly, the union was aware that its bargaining position was about to weaken. ‘With fuel stocks holding out, and spring around the corner, our final card had to be played,’ wrote Joe Gormley in his memoirs. On 5 February, 81 per cent of NUM members – a much higher proportion than in 1972 – voted in favour of a national strike. According to the Industrial Relations Act, a stoppage could not begin for at least thirty days after such a ballot, but the miners were in no mood to obey Heath’s despised union legislation. They announced that the strike would start in four days. On 6 February, the energy secretary Lord Carrington briefed the Cabinet that
We shall enter on a coal strike … with a capacity to maintain electricity supplies until the end of March, provided that the power workers are not prevented [by pickets] from entering the power stations … Within 4–6 weeks, some coal-dependent industries will be in difficulties … The three-day week will also have increasingly severe effects on business confidence, liquidity and the balance of payments … As each month passes, the effect will deepen: lower stocks, more shortages of components, more danger of bankruptcies, unemployment …
The next day, Heath called a general election. He had been in power for not much more than three and a half years, and had enough of a Commons majority to have continued in office without an election, at least in theory, for another seventeen months. Instead, voting would take place, after an unusually brief campaign, on 28 February. Heath went on television to justify his decision and to appeal for support. ‘The issue before you is a simple one,’ he told viewers. ‘Do you want a strong government which has clear authority? Do you want Parliament and the elected government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation? Or do you want them to abandon the struggle … under pressure from one particular group of workers?’ He went on: ‘This time the strife has got to stop. Only you can stop it … 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 is time for you to say to the extremists, the militants, and to the plain and simply misguided: we’ve had enough.’
At first, the Tory papers were in no doubt that the election was about trade union power in general and about the miners in particular. This view of the contest was quickly distilled down to a single short question: ‘Who governs Britain?’ Since the previous November, when the NUM had started its overtime ban, a growing number of Conservative advisers and ministers had been urging Heath to respond to the coal dispute by abruptly calling an election and making the miners the central issue. These anti-NUM ‘hawks’ reflected the feelings of many Conservative MPs and party members, who wanted revenge for 1972, and also a belief that an election victory would enable the government to be much tougher with Gormley and the other union leaders.
However, the fact that Heath had resisted this pressure for over two months, and had kept on negotiating with the miners in the meantime, ought to have alerted the hawks and their allies in the right-wing press that the Conservative campaign in February 1974 was not going to be that satisfyingly tribal. Heath wanted to assert the government’s authority over the miners, but he did not want to crush them utterly. He was exasperated by their stubbornness; he was alarmed by what he saw as their militant elements (in fact, according to Gormley, at least two of the communists on the NUM executive were opposed to a strike); and he sometimes talked publicly about the coal dispute in emotive, uncompromising language. But as had been demonstrated repeatedly since he had become Conservative leader, the confrontational right-wing side to his politics was essentially an illusion: Heath was a One-Nation Tory, much more interested in keeping the country together than dividing it. In December 1973, before the election was even announced, and with the Conservatives behind in the polls, Heath’s speechwriter and confidant Michael Wolff told the Sunday Times journalists Stephen Fay and Hugo Young: ‘Ted’s real worry is about the consequences of a Tory landslide. It would sweep away the moderation which post-war Tories went into politics to defend.’
Creating exactly this scenario would be the central aim of the next Conservative leader. Yet over the three weeks of the February 1974 campaign, Heath attempted a more subtle, but no less ambitious political manoeuvre: winning a general election in the midst of a divisive national strike and a wider national emergency with the minimum of aggression and triumphalism. Thus, alongside the antiunion rhetoric in his election broadcast, he announced a major concession to the miners: while the campaign was going on, their pay claim would be examined by the Pay Board, a semi-independent body recently set up by his government to consider wage demands. The Pay Board would be permitted to offer the miners more money, and the government would accept its decision. On the first day of the election campaign, Heath also announced that the three-day week would be relaxed immediately in a small but highly visible way: the 10.30 p.m. television curfew would be lifted.
This nuanced approach was not pure high-mindedness; it also had a degree of electoral logic. British parties had a patchy record when they tried to win general elections by shaping their campaign around a single issue, as a small but telling New Society article had pointed out the previous month. Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald had won in 1918 and 1931, standing, respectively, as the leader of a victorious war effort and the head of an emergency cross-party coalition. But William Gladstone and Stanley Baldwin, equally formidable campaigners, had both lost, Baldwin in 1924 (campaigning for tariffs on imports to protect industry), and Gladstone in 1874 (advocating tax reform) and again in 1886 (advocating Irish Home Rule). Moreover, during the 1974 election, the NUM shrewdly took steps to minimize their strike’s electo
ral impact. ‘We were determined not to present the media with any free propaganda for the Tories,’ Gormley wrote, ‘and therefore put a strict limit of six men on any one picket line.’ Jim Prior, one of Heath’s closest Cabinet allies, recalls with frustration in his memoirs: ‘Whether at the mines, power stations or docks, the miners were as quiet and well-behaved as mice.’ There were no Saltley-style battles this time. During the election campaign, Gormley and his family received anonymous threats, and moved out of their London home as a precaution, but that was as far as the backlash went. Public support for the miners actually rose.
There were two other problems with Heath’s strategy. The first was that it inevitably exasperated many Conservatives. ‘I was furious,’ remembered the usually loyal Brendon Sewill. ‘Because I believed that if you were going to win the election, there had to be a [sense of] crisis … Instead of which … the crisis was cancelled for the period of the election. But if the crisis had gone away, why have an election?’ He feared that the Tory campaign was too soft and subtle – or just incoherent – for many Conservative-inclined voters. In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher recalls encountering some in late 1973:
Shortly before Christmas, Denis and I went to a party at a friend’s house … There was a power cut and so night lights had been put in jam jars to guide people up the steps … The businessmen there were of one mind: ‘Stand up to them [the miners]. Fight it out. See them off. We can’t go on like this.’
But while the Conservative campaign disappointed such hopes, it still contained, from Heath’s opening television broadcast onwards, enough abrasive moments to alienate more moderate Britons. This had always been one of the big flaws in Heath’s public persona: he was a man of the centre, but with his impatience and air of certainty he often didn’t seem like one. During February 1974, he copied Harold Wilson’s successful tactic from the 1970 election of relentless public walkabouts. ‘I enjoy meeting people,’ Heath told a BBC news reporter with one of his enormous television smiles on 20 February. Yet on the same news item the cameras caught the irritation in his face whenever he was challenged by members of the public.