The Baby Boomer Generation (13 page)

The 1970s was a fantastic time to be young and anyone who grew up in this decade will tell you what a colourful, exciting and fun time it was. Most have fond memories of their childhood and teenage years and feel they were fortunate to have grown up in that era. To the rest of the 1970s population, the period is probably best remembered as being one of extreme trouble and strife. Colourful, yes, but more importantly it was a problematical decade for all but the young and carefree. The mood of the country seemed to be light years away from the heady days of the Swinging Sixties. All around us there was evidence that the nation was in turmoil. The peaceful, post-war country we had known since birth changed on 12 January 1971 when terrorists representing the Angry Brigade began a bombing campaign. Targeting banks and embassies in Britain, as well as government ministers' homes, they even attacked a BBC outside-broadcasting vehicle that was covering the Miss World competition. These were the first bombings we baby boomers had ever experienced and the first the country had seen since the Second World War. In response, London's Metropolitan Police Service immediately established The Bomb Squad at their Scotland Yard headquarters in London. In October that same year an IRA terrorist group planted a bomb in the men's toilet at the Top of the Tower rotating restaurant, which was situated on the thirty-fourth floor of the Post Office Tower in central London. Fortunately, no one was injured but the building suffered extensive damage. The restaurant did reopen for business but was eventually shut down in 1980 because of on-going security fears. Everyone was shocked by that 1971 incident and it was to change our lives forever. From that moment, we all began to realise that the peace and safety we had known and enjoyed for the previous twenty-six years had come to an end and life in Britain would never be the same again. These were the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict and throughout the 1970s various factions of the IRA continued to carry out indiscriminate bombings and assassinations, and many innocent people were killed and injured. Other terrorist groups representing various causes and beliefs were also active during the 1970s, and the combined effect was frightening. The worst atrocity during the 1970s was the Birmingham pub bombings on 21 November 1974, when twenty-one were killed and 182 suffered injuries. It is still not know who carried out the Birmingham pub bombings; the IRA denied responsibility.

These terrorist activities left us shaken and insecure and they added chaos and fear to our country's already turbulent problems; our everyday lives were becoming increasingly stressful and difficult because of unrest whilst at work. The workplace had become an unstable pressure pot that regularly erupted. There was definitely a much more confrontational attitude than there had been in the 1960s. We were now witnessing constant battles of will between management and workers; there was a clear ‘them and us' approach to everything and, all at once, there was an abundance of militant shop stewards and union leaders shouting from the rooftops and ready to call their members out on strike on a whim. The unions made it impossible for businesses to implement any new ideas they might have had to increase productivity, and they fought tooth and nail to stop any form of rationalisation. More employers than ever were falling victim to the ‘closed shop', which meant that a worker could not be employed in certain jobs unless he or she was a member of the relevant union. The practice of ‘demarcation', when one category of worker was not allowed to do the work of another, became intolerable and soon hundreds of ‘how many men does it take to…?' jokes were doing the rounds. Shop stewards were unrealistic in their demands and totally inflexible when interpreting the rules of demarcation, and they seemed to delight in the power they had to bring businesses to a halt. The idea of protecting skilled jobs seemed quite reasonable in practical situations (for example, not letting a cleaner change a light bulb when there was an electrician on site), but the lines of demarcation became ridiculous and there were silly situations arising, like a factory worker being unable to move a small box out of the way and an office worker unable to shift a desk a few inches. The slightest infringement of the rules could lead to a walkout (instant strike action). The unions were tougher than ever, professing that they would to do anything to uphold the rights of the downtrodden workers and protect their jobs. Many people still had to work in unsafe conditions and many more had stories of being exploited by their employers, and so it seemed sensible for workers to back the stance that the unions were taking. The unions, however, made one demand after another: more pay, fewer hours, extra holidays and better conditions. The demands were endless and it was just a matter of what action they had to take to get what they wanted.

Arthur Scargill, then leader of the Yorkshire region of the National Union of Mineworkers, said, ‘You get as much as you are prepared to go out and take.' The unions were prepared to call strike after strike to bring the employers to their knees, but they were also bringing the country to its knees and putting their workers' jobs in jeopardy. The 1973 industrial action by the coal miners coincided with the OAPEC oil embargo and subsequent oil price rise. The combined effect was to cause a British energy crisis over the winter of 1973–74. The energy crisis led to the prime minister, Edward Heath, limiting the use of electricity in most commercial and industrial premises to three specific days each week from 31 December 1973. This became known as the ‘three-day week': a period of short pay, power cuts and television closing down at 10.30 p.m. every night. Petrol ration books were also issued in anticipation of the government having to ration the amount of petrol motorists could use and Ted Heath asked the British people to heat only one room in their houses over the winter to save energy. The prime minister and his Cabinet had seriously considered banning people from heating more than one room in their homes as part of an emergency energy-saving package, but an all-out ban never happened. Other restrictions that the government had secretly planned but never implemented included a compulsory 50mph speed limit, banning Sunday motoring, shortening the school week to four days and banning Christmas package tours abroad. They also drew up a list of one hundred mains-operated domestic appliances that they proposed should be either taxed or withdrawn from used during the emergency and possibly after. These included such things as electric food mixers, heated hostess trolleys, electric toothbrushes, coffee percolators and desk fans, as well as labour-saving equipment such as electric hedge trimmers.

The 1970s was an awful period of unrest with strike after strike, resulting in the average number of working days lost each year through industrial disputes being 12.9 million, compared to 7.2 million in the 1980s, 660,000 in the 1990s and 692,000 in the 2000s. The number of working days lost in the 1970s peaked at 29.4 million during the so-called ‘winter of discontent' in 1979. There were 4,500 disputes in the 1978–79 period alone. Managers spent most of their time negotiating with the unions instead of running their businesses and for some time it did seem like the lunatics were running the asylum. The unions appeared to be in control and were not afraid to wield their newfound power. Unfortunately, some union leaders seemed to lose sight of their main objectives and appeared more interested in breaking businesses rather than protecting members' jobs and increasing benefits for them. Some militant union leaders showed no sympathy or understanding of a company's need to maintain profitability in order to stay in business and provide jobs. There was no mercy, and any sign of weakness in management resulted in a further tightening of the screw. Union-organised marches were a common sight in every town and city throughout the UK. Many ‘closed-shop' businesses were known to be over staffed but employers were unable to do anything about it for fear of strike action. With so much over staffing, absenteeism was rife. The wartime spirit of everyone pulling together for the good of the country was nowhere to be seen, and skiving and poor workmanship became general topics of conversation. There was talk that night workers in the print industry, which was mainly based in London's Fleet Street at the time, were regularly sleeping through their shifts. Disgruntled workers in the motor industry lacked the motivation to produce good-quality goods. The sense of pride in workmanship wore thin through the week and by the time Friday arrived it had manifested itself into a less-than-caring attitude and an increase in absenteeism. In fact, a brand-new car that was found to be faulty was often referred to as a ‘Friday car'; the inference being that it was made on a Friday when nobody much cared. Our entire daily lives seemed to be consumed with matters concerning industrial action, even if we were non-union and not directly involved at all in any kind of dispute.

Union leaders were high profile and famous. Ordinary people in the street who struggled to remember the names of leading politicians of the day found it easy to recite union leaders' names and industrial action was regularly used as a theme for television sitcoms and comedy shows. There were, however, certainly workplace issues that needed addressing during the 1970s. Some things had not advanced very much since the war, especially sex discrimination in the workplace. Considering that the majority of women were in some kind of employment, there were still very few women managers because men were usually promoted ahead of them. Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1970, it was also still common practice for women to be paid less than men for doing the same job and there were still a number of jobs that were, in a derogatory way, considered to be women's jobs. It was hard for women to be taken seriously at work when glamour calendars and pin-up pictures of topless women were still displayed on office and factory walls throughout the land. Yes, there were a great many issues for union leaders to get their teeth into – not least greater equality for women and sex discrimination in general, racial discrimination and matters of health and safety – but they seemed to be consumed with wage and benefit demands that were crippling the country.

Ultimately, whatever the unions achieved for their members came at a high cost to us all, with high inflation, high taxes, spending cuts, public money ploughed into troubled industries, businesses closing down and rising unemployment. Industrial unrest was worse than it had been since the British General Strike of 1926. In the period from 1965 to 1980, 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost and by the end of the 1970s, many workers were getting fed up with all the strikes. More and more were rejecting strike action and crossing the picket lines to get on with their work. They began to see that change was inevitable; British industry had to modernise to compete in world markets. Like it or not, we had to make way for new ideas and find better ways of running our industries. There was a need to organise workforces to work in different and more effective ways and this would mean that some of the old jobs would have to go. Jobs for life were becoming a thing of the past.

From 1970 to 1974 we had a Conservative government, and in1973 the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, took the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (Common Market). We then had a Labour government from 1974 to 1979, and in accordance with their general election manifesto of October 1974, they allowed the British people to have a referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the Common Market on renegotiated terms or leave it entirely. The Labour government recommended a ‘Yes' vote, even though it later emerged that seven out of the twenty-three Cabinet members wanted us to withdraw. The Conservative Party, under the leaderships of Edward Heath (1970–75) and Margaret Thatcher (1975–90), also campaigned for a ‘Yes' vote. Just over 67% of the British voting public believed all the rhetoric and supported the ‘Yes' campaign to stay in the EEC. After all, surely it would be good for us to be part of the Common Market – we were told that it was just a way for us to improve trading with other members of the European Community; just think of all those British manufacturing jobs it would create; there was no possibility that it could ever lead to the erosion of our national sovereignty and a transferral of powers to Europe. It was just what it said on the tin – a Common Market, that's all. And 67% of us fell for it.

For many of us baby boomers, the negative events of the 1970s will score highly on our list of lifetime memories, albeit ones that we would perhaps rather forget. These may well have been days of trouble and strife and the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict, but it would be wrong to paint a picture of complete misery throughout the UK. There was indeed a lot of good stuff packed into those ten years, and many of us have very fond, personal memories of happy times and events that touched our lives back then. The 1970s weren't just about power cuts and the dead being left unburied. Okay, so it was the decade in which the dumbing down of educational standards first began in England and Wales, when the Labour government abolished grammar schools for virtually all but the wealthy, softened all forms of discipline in schools and removed spelling and handwriting from the marking criteria, but perhaps they were right; with all of the electronic communications and abbreviated text messaging of today, does anyone really need to be able to spell or write legibly?

Very often, silly and unimportant things crop up in our daily lives to stir light-hearted memories of days gone by, and we are reminded of so many things through radio and television and in books and newspapers. Simple things transport us straight back to the 1970s, like the old Polaroid instant cameras that we all wanted to get our hands on back then, the sounds of Demis Roussos' songs on the radio, K-tel records and the products they regularly promoted in their television adverts, such as the K-tel Brush-O-Matic. Our way of life has altered so much since then. Unfussy pleasures, like going down the local pub, have been diminished because our changing British lifestyle and new laws have forced many of the local pubs that were once packed full of regulars to close down. In the 1970s, it was still common practice for workers to go to the pub at lunchtime to enjoy a liquid lunch. This was before many of the big old pubs were turned into gastropubs to attract families with young children. It was a time when a pub was still a sanctuary for adults, one of the few places in which adults could take refuge from the delightful sounds and activities of their darling little children. It was a time when you had to search hard to find a pub that sold food any more substantial than a cheese roll. A local pub was a place in which old boys played dominoes at a table in the corner while the true athletes played darts and drank pints of Watney's Red Barrel and other keg beers. Women's favourite drinks included port and lemon, vodka and orange, lager and lime, and perhaps a Babycham at Christmas. And, of course, everyone's favourite cocktail drink at Christmas was the Snowball, a mixture of Advocaat and lemonade. If you were very grand you would serve it with a
glacé
cherry on top. If you lived in a very posh house then you might well have had one of those luxuriously padded, bow-fronted cocktail cabinets fitted into the corner of your front room with your very own spirit-dispensing optics attached to the back wall – very tasteful.