The Baby Boomer Generation (14 page)

It was in the 1970s, after having spent several years since leaving school slumbering in armchairs, that we suddenly decided we wanted to get fit. Following a keep-fit trend in America, we British began joining newly opened gyms, playing squash and even going out jogging in the street, in public! This was a new and unusual sight on our streets back then and the pioneers of British jogging were very brave, attracting strange looks wherever they went. At the same time, we were all trying desperately to give up smoking after being shown horrible pictures of damaged human lungs on our television screens. A growing group of environmentalists were also hell bent on making us feel guilty about the damage we were doing to our environment and we were becoming more conscious of the world around us. The government was interfering more and more in matters relating to the state of our health and the way we lived our lives. For the first time, cholesterol and blood pressure became part of the ordinary person's vocabulary. When we weren't jogging to keep fit, we occupied our spare time making homemade wine and beer, another fad of the seventies, as was renting all those poor-quality VHS films from the high street video shops. However, our newfound fitness regime was subjected to competition from increasing amounts of takeaway fish-and-chip suppers, McDonald's burgers and all of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that we ate to stifle the hunger pangs brought on after we gave up smoking.

We baby boomers were a bit disgruntled in 1971 when the United Kingdom changed to the decimal system for currency. Employers had to organise training sessions to teach their employees how to calculate the new currency and handle the new coins. Ironically, the specially formed Decimal Currency Board filmed a promotional video for the new decimal currency, featuring its chairman, Lord Fiske, at a Woolworths store in London. Woolworths was thought to typify the British high street because most people regularly shopped at their local Woolworths store. Who would ever have thought that the day would come when they would completely disappear from the high street, as they did over a two-week period following Christmas 2008 (807 stores closed and 27,000 job losses following a period in administration) – no more Woolies' pick 'n' mix sweets.

We witnessed a lot of landmark events in the 1970s and there are many for us to be proud of: these include the ending of the Vietnam War in 1975, the first turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner Concorde coming into service (retired from service in 2003), the street parties of 1977 to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee, Margaret Thatcher becoming our first female prime minister in 1979, teenagers of 18 and over being able to vote in a UK election for the first time (the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969), the first pocket calculators and home video game consoles going on sale (remember that primitive tennis game we played through our television sets), the first domestic microwave ovens and video cassette recorders appearing in UK shops, the arrivals of the Raleigh Chopper bicycles and the Sony Walkman personal stereos, and it was also the decade in which colour television broadcasting became the norm in British homes.

The 1970s has certainly had its fair share of bad press over the years, and it is true that the decade is somewhat overshadowed by the excitement surrounding the 1960s and the glamorous Sloane Ranger lifestyle and yuppie dynamism of the 1980s, but we learned much and gained plenty from the 1970s and anyone who has trouble remembering anything good about the decade should start by reflecting on the long hot summer of 1976. Happy days!

30-somethings in Leg Warmers

A
deep recession, crippling inflation, high unemployment, strikes and widespread rioting marred events of the 1980s. The National Health Service was also failing as more and more health authorities across the country were going into the red and, despite higher spending levels and increases in staff numbers, waiting lists were growing longer and hospital wards were being closed to patients. Britain fought a war in the far-distant Falkland Islands while at home we endured the continuing threat of terrorism. We were just four months into the new decade when a six-man terrorist team seized control of the Iranian Embassy building in South Kensington, London and took twenty-six people hostage. This came to be known as the Iranian Embassy Siege and it lasted from 30 April to 5 May 1980. We watched the television news coverage as events unfolded over the six days and on the final day the terrorists killed one of the hostages and threw his body out of the embassy. This prompted the British Special Air Services (SAS) to make an assault on the building. Having abseiled from the roof, a team of SAS soldiers broke in through the embassy windows and killed five of the six terrorists. The entire SAS operation took just seventeen minutes. The sixth terrorist was captured and went on to serve a twenty-seven-year prison sentence. As in the 1970s, the IRA were at the forefront of terrorist bombing activities in mainland Britain and three years after they killed Airey Neave with a car bomb as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster car park, they returned to London to cause more carnage. On 20 July 1982, they carried out two bombings. The first of these targeted members of the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park and two hours later they bombed the bandstand in Regent's Park, killing members of the Royal Green Jackets. In all, the IRA killed eleven soldiers and injured fifty people including civilians on that ill-fated summer's day.

Earlier that year, we found ourselves immersed in a conflict with Argentina over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands and its surroundings. This followed the invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia by Argentine forces on Friday 2 April 1982. Neither side officially declared war but Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher immediately responded to the invasion of the British-dependent territory by sending a taskforce of 127 ships and a nuclear-powered submarine to take back the islands. At the time, the Falkland Islands were a place on the other side of the world that many of us knew little or nothing about. It was 8,000 miles from mainland Britain with a land area about the same size as Yorkshire and a population of around 3,140, similar to that of a small village in middle England. The conflict lasted seventy-four days and a total of 255 British servicemen and three female Falkland Island civilians were killed. The Argentine losses were considerably larger with 649 killed, including sixteen civilian sailors. The successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina showed we had strong leadership and this helped to increase Thatcher and her government's popularity with the British public.

Meanwhile, back at home we remained in fear of imminent terrorist attacks and we did not have to wait long for the next major attack to happen. On the 17 December 1983, the IRA planted a car bomb outside the side entrance of Harrods on Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge. The bomb exploded killing six people and leaving ninety injured on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. For those of us who were not directly touched by any of the terrorists' bombings during the eighties, the one that probably remains most firmly in our minds is the bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton on 12 October 1984 when the IRA attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and members of her Cabinet who were attending the Conservative Party conference there. Five people were killed and 34 were injured, including some who were left permanently disabled. The final IRA bombing of the 1980s happened on the 22 September 1989 at the Royal Marines' barracks in Deal, Kent when eleven marines were killed and twenty-one were left injured. The horrible carnage and destruction caused by these and all of the other terrorist atrocities carried out by the IRA during their campaigns of mass murder left permanent stains in our minds, but the most appalling single terrorist action of the 1980s was not carried out by the IRA. This atrocity was the work of an entirely different terrorist group, thought to be of Libyan origin. On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew members. Eleven people in the town of Lockerbie were also killed when they were hit by pieces of wreckage falling to the ground. Several terrorist groups claimed responsibility for the bombing but it was alleged to be the work of Libyan terrorists and on 31 January 2001 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and alleged Libyan intelligence officer, was convicted of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was a really scary time in our lives; we were constantly reminded of the threat from all sorts of terrorist assassins and crackpot killers.

In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest outside a hotel in Washington DC, and in the same year Pope John Paul II was shot in St Peter's Square, Vatican City; both were seriously injured and nearly died. Inspired by the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 and these two high-profile assassination attempts in the spring of 1981, in June that year a 17-year-old unemployed youth from Folkestone in Kent fired six blank shots at the Queen as she rode her horse down the mall during a Trooping the Colour ceremony. Fortunately, the Queen managed to bring her horse under control and she escaped unharmed. The youth said that he did it to become famous: ‘I will become the most famous teenager in the world.' I won't fuel his ambitions by naming him but he went on to serve three years of a five-year sentence and was soon forgotten. There are a lot of crazy people in the world but they seemed to be especially active in the 1980s.

The decade was far from being all doom and gloom but there was an awful lot going on and once again we had to cope with a great many changes affecting all aspects of life. It was a very exciting period but for many it was also a nerve-racking time. Memories of events surrounding the untimely death of John Lennon on 8 December 1980 take our minds straight back to the start of the decade and act as an
aide-memoire to what was going on in our lives around that time. John Lennon and The Beatles had been a major part of our adolescent lives and his shocking murder was a wake-up call to remind us of how dangerous a place the world can be for innocent people going about their everyday lives. His death was also a milestone in our own personal lives because we now knew without doubt that The Beatles could never get back together again.

Most of us were touched by the early 1980s recession, high inflation, high taxes, redundancies and high unemployment. Some fared better than others, but we all suffered in one way or another. We had seen unemployment rise steadily in the early to mid-1970s and then surge in numbers during the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were 1 million people unemployed in Britain in 1972 when the population was 56 million. By 1982, the population had risen to 56.5 million and the number of people unemployed had shot up to an astonishing figure of 3.07 million, the highest number since the 1930s. One in eight people of working age were now unemployed, 12.5% of the workforce. Northern Ireland was worst hit with unemployment reaching almost 20%. Scotland and most parts of England experienced 15% unemployment, while the south-east fared better with levels of around 10%. More than 750,000 people were now classed as long-term unemployed. The then Labour Party leader, Michael Foot, said that whereas in 1979 there were five people chasing each job, there were now thirty-two people chasing every vacancy, and in some parts of the country the figure was double that. Unemployment levels in Britain were almost the highest in Europe, only second to Belgium. The levels of increase were mainly due to businesses closing down and British industry being forced to sharpen up its act and restructure organisations to survive the economic recession. The heavy industries, like car manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding and steel, were the hardest hit. Unlike previous governments, the Thatcher government was not prepared to bail out these industries every time they got themselves into trouble. Despite strike action, significant job losses were now inevitable across all of these industries. This was a great shock to those who had buried their heads in the sand throughout the industrial strife of 1970s and refused to accept that the long-standing ‘jobs for life' culture had to end. Traditional manufacturing industries such as British Leyland had to shut factories and make large-scale redundancies, and many well-known brand names like Biba, Laker Airways and Triumph Motorcycles went out of business. Any kind of work was hard to come by and many industrial workers found that the skills they had acquired over a number of years were no longer in demand. For many, their only chance of finding work was to retrain and possibly move to another part of the country. Some tradesmen had to find work in other European countries, often living in dingy digs or worksite cabins, sometimes having to share a bed with another shift worker, one on days and the other on nights – the practice was called ‘hotbedding'.