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Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, by Dominic Sandbrook
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In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. Under Edward Heath, the optimism of the '60s had become a distant memory. Now the headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish '70s had been forgotten.
Dominic Sandbrook has recreated the gaudy, schizophrenic atmosphere of the early '70s: the world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, David Bowie and Brian Clough, Germaine Greer and Mary Whitehouse. An age when the unions were on the march and the socialist revolution seemed at hand, but also when feminism, permissiveness, pornography and environmentalism were transforming the lives of millions. It was an age of miners' strikes, tower blocks, and IRA atrocities, but it also gave us celebrity footballers and high-street curry houses, organic foods and package holidays, gay rights and glam rock. For those who remember the days when you could buy a new colour television but power cuts stopped you from watching it, this book could hardly be more vivid. It is the perfect guide to a luridly colourful '70s landscape that shaped our present from the financial boardroom to the suburban bedroom.
In Seasons in the Sun, Dominic Sandbrook explores the bitter, turbulent world of Britain in the late 1970s, the years that brought punk to prominence and Margaret Thatcher to power. With inflation mounting, rubbish in the streets, bombs going off across London, and the economy in meltdown, the days of national greatness seemed a fading memory. Across the Western world, Britain was mocked as the "Sick Man of Europe", a byword for decline and self-destruction. In 1976 alone, race riots disrupted the Notting Hill Carnival, the retirement of Prime Minister Harold Wilson was overshadowed by allegations of corruption, the Sex Pistols made their shocking debut on national television, and Britain had to go cap in hand to the IMF.
Yet as Seasons in the Sun shows, there was more to late 1970s Britain than strikes and shortages. From rock music and television sitcoms to the novels of Martin Amis and the birth of the first home computers, this was a society caught between old and new: nostalgic for what had been lost, but already looking forward to a new and very different political and social order.
- Sales Rank: #80337 in Audible
- Published on: 2012-11-16
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 2479 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A splendid narrative
By Neil Adams
I wish I'd discovered this chap's narrative skills earlier, as they really are astonishingly fine. To turn one of the most dreary yet conflicted times in British history into a page-turning story like this one is a fine achievement. The trick appears to be to dip in and out of his protagonists' stories, and when you know a little of their histories already you can't wait to find their next mention. And what protagonists! Heath, Wilson, Thorpe, Benn, Callaghan, Healey and Thatcher and a host of others who make modern politicians look like dullards by comparison. Popular culture weaves in and out of the story, ably demonstrating the Zeitgeist of the age. I was a young lad when these events took place and they passed by and large over my head, but they've always been there as a sort of folk memory. Sandbrook, who is rather younger than I am, brings it all to life in a thoroughly engaging, largely non-partisan, and very readable book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Good but not as absorbing as the previous books in the series
By Mr. D. P. Jay
I well remember 1976 with its hot summer, like the one we've just had in 2013 and I note that it was followed by a very cold winter. I also remember the conversion of cinemas into bingo halls. Our author paints word pictures of this period very vividly. What is new, since his previous book: most people were better off in 1979 than they had been in 197o. They spent more money on entertainment, ate out more, went on more exciting holidays, bought their first colour televisions and even installed their first central heating. A few months after the end of the decade, some even bought their first home computers in the form of the Sinclair ZX80. Pockets of extreme poverty remained; yet for the great majority, wrote the columnist Peter Jenkins in 1978, 'the general quality of life in Britain remains probably as high as anywhere in Europe'."
And: At the turn of the decade, the typical housewife still went shopping three times a week, usually on her local high street. But shopping habits were changing: by 1973 Carrefour had opened Britain's first 60,000-square-foot hypermarkets in Caerphilly and Telford, and other retailers rushed to follow suit. By the time Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street, Britain boasted almost a hundred out-of-town hypermarkets, including 27 branches of Asda, 23 Co-ops, 21 Fine Fares, 20 Tescos and 11 Morrisons. The 'trendy, out-of-town superstore with its cut-price shopping and easy parking will become a British institution', predicted a spokesman for Debenhams.
Tbis is all before teenagers had their own televisions in their bedrooms: It came to him that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets ... all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of ... oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.
Despite teenagers becoming a breed apart: Despite being caricatured by the press as a generation of selfish materialists, thousands were keen to get involved in voluntary work, and the number of Community Service Volunteers rose by six times in ten years.
With prescience, The Times predicted: By the end of the century, the microcomputer would be 'as common as the telephone. (What they didn't know was the phones and computers would merge.)
I am amused that 10 Downing Street had been bugged but that nobody ever monitored it. Harold Wilson had been paranoid at the possibility of bugging but everyone told him that his fears were unfounded.
Tony Benn, a man I usually agree with, is continually portrayed as a deluded traitor who repeatedly goes back on his word. Either my admiration for him is misplaced or our Tory author is being less than even-handed. (In his other books, he has scrupulously avoided bias.)
However: Tony Benn, enthusiastically promoted a bout of 'merger mania', which saw the concentration of Scottish shipbuilding in Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, the consolidation of the computer industry in Inter¬national Computers Ltd (ICL) and the creation of the behemoth that was British Leyland. By and large, however, the state-sponsored mergers of the late 196os were a shambles. Size did not automatically guarantee success. Instead, it became a cover for inefficiency, encouraging firms to grow by acquisition rather than by investing in new factories or searching out new markets, and fostering the delusion that there would always be more public money to bail them out.
About Harold Wilson: Lord George-Brown drunk is a better man than the Prime Minister sober.
By way of contrast, Dennis Healey and `Sunny Jim' Callaghan come out of this rather well. Is this because the author admired their more conservative approach? It was Callaghan who started the move to the National Curriculum, in my view one of the enemies of education for its own sake.
As if to comment on the present government being right and Labour wrong: the government's attempt to spend its way out of stagflation was a disaster to rank alongside the Barber boom
I have long sensed that Tories make laws without any thought of how to implement them. Then a micro-managing Labour government comes along and tightens the screws. I am not the only one to think thus: 'I see no reason for the existence of a Labour Government,' lamented Barbara Castle. 'We have adopted the Tory mores. The only difference is that we carry out Tory policies more efficiently than they do.'
The contemptible Hughie Green, with his patriotic, Tory New year's messages, is dealt with.
The Anti-Nazi league and Rock Against Racism get a look in. We all knew they were a front for the Socialist Workers' Party but their success in galvanising young people and changing attitudes was immense.
Remember the poll tax? Thatcher: promised to replace the rates with 'taxes more broadly done well to be based and related to people's ability to pay', a pledge she would have done well to remember fifteen years later.
Thatcher didn't start off as an enemy of the welfare state, unlike her successors in power today: `All men of good will', she told an audience in 1978, 'must be concerned with the relief of poverty and suffering.' This was sensible politics: a Conservative Party promising to slash social services would not have been popular with the electorate in the mid-1970s
Thatcher's speech, using the word `swamped' about people's fears of immigration were claimed to be a mistake, yet the author points out that all her speeches were meticulously prepared, with every word weighed for its effectiveness.
There is talk of a caretakers' strike that closed many schools. I was unaware of this, working in a school at the time.
Comprehensive schools did much to raise standards: while generations of bright working-class children were denied the boost of a grammar school education, others were spared the misery of life at a dilapidated secondary modern. Schools like Creighton were not without their problems, but these were reflections of the pupils' lives and backgrounds. Standards had not fallen since Creighton became
comprehensive; in its first seven years, the number of children going to university had risen threefold.
I met Keith Joseph once - he came to do a prizegiving at the school in which I worked. Although I was no fan of his policies, I have to admit that he was one of the few education ministers who actually wanted this job and who tried his best: Memorably described by Harold Macmillan as 'the only boring Jew I've ever known', Sir Keith Joseph made many people feel faintly uncomfortable. As the heir to the Bovis construction giant, he was a child of privilege, but he could not have been more different from the country squires who traditionally dominated the Conservative Party. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, he had been wounded at Monte Cassino, laid bricks and dug trenches to earn a licence from the Institute of Building, won a prize fellowship at All Souls and was elected MP for Leeds North East in 1956. He was an intense, gaunt, sickly man; having been bullied at school as a Jew, he had a profound sense of being an outsider. (with).... guilt about the plight of his social inferiors, yet utterly detached from the concrete realities of ordinary life. He seemed more comfortable with schemes for improving people than with people themselves, a kind of Tory Robespierre..... when he got into government in 1970, running the massive Department of Health and Social Services, he proved to be rather less radical than his rhetoric suggested. Not only did he introduce new benefits for the disabled and the long-term sick, he increased benefits for widows and pensioners and he spent more money on the health service at a faster rate than any of his Labour predecessors. What was more, he even told Tory activists at their 1973 party conference that they were wrong ' to bang on about 'scroungers' and should 'face the fact that there are a large number of people who are not employable ... Should their children starve? Of course they should not.' It was no wonder that the Sunday Mirror called him 'The Tory Minister Who Really Cares', or that he got a standing ovation at a Child Poverty Action Group conference.
Yet he was described as being as `nutty as a fruitcake because: he broke off at one point to declare that the country needed 'more lavatories. I'm in favour of lavatories. Very much in favour of them.' Coming from somebody else, it might have been funny. Coming from a man already widely believed to be 'as nutty as a fruitcake', it was a catastrophe. With each gaffe, the chances of the Tories electing a man who seemed a combination of 'Hamlet, Rasputin and Tommy Cooper' (as Denis Healey put it) became more remote. Joseph was 'dotty and lacks moral fibre for high office', Lord Hailsham recorded in his diary. 'A silly man and always wrong: By the middle of November, the man Private Eye now called 'Sir Sheath.'
Seaside resorts are becoming run down as I write this. Either people holiday abroad or they can't afford any holiday. So all the B & Bs become cheap accommodation for people on benefits. Yet much earlier: Blackpool remained staggeringly popular with working-class holidaymakers from the north of England. Sixteen million bookings were expected during 1976: well down from the inter-war years, but still an awe-inspiring total. Evidently not everybody agreed with the acerbic MP Alan Clark, who had not enjoyed his visit to the Lancashire resort three years earlier. 'Isn't Blackpool appalling, loathsome?' he wrote in his diary. 'Impossible to get even a piece of bread and cheese, or a decent cup of tea; dirt, squalor, shanty-town broken pavements with pools of water lying in them...
There is little or nothing about the role of the church in this book (unless you count a mention of liberal bishops who opposed Mary Whitehouse). Previous books dealt with it. It is probably owing to the increasing secularisation of the period.
I enjoyed previous books in this series and found this less interesting. Maybe this is because I was a political active adult during the period it covers whereas I had less knowledge of the preceding periods, having lived during them rather innocently and naively.
However, it seems there will; be no more of these books. At the end of each previous book in the series, there is a hint of what is to come. No hints in this one. (Yet his website hints at a fifth volume covering the early 1980s.)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The birth of monetarism
By Rototuna Rocket
The period covered by this book coincides with my entry into adult life and my interest in and understanding of current affairs.
The references to social and popular cultural icons brought back happy memories for me but it is the author's focus on the desperate political and economic landscape of Britain in the mid to late 70s that makes this book so interesting. The world was going through profound economic and social changes at the time and some countries adapted very well but Britain was struggling to do so. The book details the birth of monetarism, self interest, consumerism, the free market and the rise of Thatcher.
There is no doubt that the trade union stranglehold on British life had to be broken and the excesses of the so called loony left curbed and Thatcher was probably the one to do it. The changes that came in the 1980s ended up more radical than anyone expected but that's another story.
Well worth a read.
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