1974 Explained: The Year That Almost Crushed Britain
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- Опубліковано 26 сер 2024
- “Who governs Britain?”
Britain in the early 1970’s was a state in crisis, and by 1974, things had never seemed bleaker. Held hostage by the Trade Unions, British industry was flailing. England’s sporting record was atrocious, the economy was tanking and the prospect of a miners’ strike loomed large. Violence was surging in Northern Ireland, as the IRA escalated its bombing campaigns, and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War would send oil prices soaring, with the miners on the verge on plunging Britain into darkness. By the end of the year, the British people had voted in two general elections, had a three-day week enforced on them, and the Conservative party were on the cusp of electing their first female leader…
Join Dominic and Tom for the first episode of their four-part epic on 1974, undoubtedly one of the darkest and most dramatic years in British political history…
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It's a shame Tom's impression of Edward Heath wasn't included in the UA-cam version. It has to be the funniest introduction ever heard to a podcast.
@kian3jby • I completely agree with you! Tom was very convincing 😊
It was excellent and verged, I thought, on being slightly Thatcheresque
@@TheOilyRag1 yeah, I assumed it was Thatcher.
When I left school at 16 in 1982 in Sidcup, on the last day we all had to go up on stage in the assembly room in front of the rest of the school and teachers and shake hands with the headmaster and Ted Heath.
Ted Heath had a twinkle in his eyes, a creepy smile and was dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.
It was fekin obvious he liked young lads.
We were making joke about it afterwards as teenagers do.
Looking back though, it was fekin sinister.
It was an all boys school and thankfully most of us had stable family backgrounds.
There was some poorer kids, one parent and signs of violence in the home.
Those are the kinda kids that get targeted by pedophiles.
We also used to joke that Mr Joblin the PE teacher was a bender coz he'd watch us kids in the showers (we weren't pc in them days 😁).
If I had the wisdom then that I have now, I'd have looked out for those kids just in case.
The EEC/EU had an awful lot to do with it. Heath lied, betrayed the Nation, Nrexit was righting this wrong.
1974. I was 19 years old. Studying History at Southampton University. My first year. Politically interested. Attended election meetings. Brian Gould the Labour candidate. I am having a wonderful time. A £485 full grant. All fees paid. I had saved £100 over the summer working on the fruit harvest in Sussex. At the end of the academic year I still had that £100 in the bank. Perhaps because beer was 20p a pint in the common room bar.
Crisis? What crisis?
Oh, the selfishness of youth!
In 1974 I was 26 and the year I got married. So my 50th wedding anniversary is in a few days. I must say I do not recall it being that bad. It was the year I had my honeymoon in Paris, I put down a £500 deposit on a house which cost £6000. I got good pay rises. And my daughter was born in December. We did not have much money but we were happy. I think things were a lot better then than today.
@@doubleplusgoodthinker9434 I certainly think people were on average happier in those days and they were definitely much more sociable.
I was 15 & starting work & paying tax some of which would have paid for your university education when my children went to university we& they had to pay a fortune. I hope you did some good & didn't just make a pile of money for yourself,& d'ont employ a flash accountant to avoid tax
This morning on Radio 4 Today programme they had one of Harold Wilson's aids who is 92 now. He confirmed Harold did have an affair with Marcia before 1974 he also confirmed the story of the Doctor who wanted to bump her off. But according to him another press secretary called Janet is who he was having an affair with at this time. This aid also said he was saying this due to Janet had died a few months ago. It was a good interview due to what they said at the end about aids to Boris Johnson. 😂
@@harveybrant3352 I don't know if you addressing me but I got my first degree from London University in 1971. I started work in 1966 when I left school. So it took me me 5 years of evenings. Weekends and annual leave. I got no grant whatsoever but my employers did give me some time off to take the exams. A fee years later I did an MA course. As this required attendance at university one day a week, I had to use all my leave for two years to do this. I also spent a fortune on telephone calls to the USA at some unlikely times at night in order to get the information I needed for my dissertation. There was no internet in those days.
And no, I do not fiddle my taxes. I was a Customs & Excise Officer trying to stop other people fiddling tax.
This podcast has to be the perfect blend of fascinating learning and irreverent sniggering. I always learn something fascinating and there is almost always a laugh-out-loud moment in each episode. Fantastic stuff - please don't stop!
I hope adding video will help this channel to finally blow up as much as it deserves.
And when it does you have the most amazing, timeless collection of gems for fans to discover.
Keep it up, gentlemen.
Sincerely,
a Kraut
Oh it will happen. Constant quality is rewarded.
I’m an Australian and in 1975 I was traveling. I’d seen a bit of Asia, North America and Europe and everywhere I went, and I was on a student’s budget, I could find good, cheap, food and accomodation. Then, as Xmas was approaching I thought I’d nip across the channel and catch up with friends in the UK. Well, the situation there was, frankly, shocking. Good food was expensive and scarce, they even ran out of sugar, the various eateries were awful and even the people looked miserable. I traveled around the UK a bit on the too expensive railways but I realised I could be spending my time better elsewhere spending less money and having a better time so I pissed off and a day or so later I was in sunny Spain eating like a king and mixing with happy people. I might say that the next time I was in the UK, some years later, the situation had I improved remarkably.
And now we're spiraling back to it haha
What about when you returned to Australia and found the biggest customer of Aus agriculture had abandoned them, as new EEC rules forced Britain to buy (predominantly French) produce?
@@martyn8116 Good point - I was a boy, but the economy in Australia was nothing to write home about - though the oil shock and Government spending had more to do with it.
@@martyn8116 well, when I got back I was in a reasonably cheap student share house and eating very well.
At least you can get a good burger now eh... No one lives in a cvounciol house and young people rent forever
Despite all the political and economic turbulence, living standards rose in the 70s. Back then it used to be expected and assumed that technology and progress would result in continually rising living standards for working people. Housing was more affordable in real terms. Unemployment was far lower than in the 80s and there was a functional welfare state instead of the food banks that have sprung up in recent years. Nowadays it's become normal to see homeless people sleeping in shop doorways. It seems to have become accepted by most people that living standards for working people will stagnate or even get worse, and that pay rises will fail to keep up with inflation. The last few years have been far worse than anything seen in the 70s.
Packaged holidays increased, although my family had domestic holidays so not rich enough.
You're right. And the reason we had better standard of living back then was that after WW2 we had consensus politics whereby both Labour and Tory governments recognised the beneficial impact of what were essentially Socialist policies.
It all changed direction when Thatcher came to power, and now 40 years on we see the results of her neo liberal policies on the British people.
While I think Thatcher was probably a realist, it was the selling off of the public housing stock and the state's inability to maintain a state pension at a reasonable level, that led us to become the mini property speculators we are today.
Thatcher deregulated credit.
I left gloomy UK in 1987 and returned in 1988 to find everyone driving new cars and taking out huge mortgages.
Everyone around me thought it was wonderful, their houses were growing in value by leaps and bounds.
Forty years later and the cost of housing is assumed to be a question of supply and demand. The banks and real estate agents are keeping very quiet about all the money they have taken from us due to our ignorant greed.
We need to put the breaks on domestic credit again, slowly, to depress the housing market so people begin living within their means.
It seems we are spending our grandchildren's earnings before they are born. Flashy cars and houses we can no longer fill because we can:t afford children.
@@AndyJarman Thatcher also made landlordism possible with the introduction of buy to let. Buy to let is the enclosure of the housing stock.
I found this podcast this summer and been playing it nonstop since then. It's hilarious, great chemistry between Tom and Dom
Fascinating to listen to 2 blokes discussing 1974 who are too young to remember it!
Indeed.
True for sure. To be fair, though, that's the definition of their profession lol.
Wait til you get to the rest of the podcast then - lots of Ancient Rome 😅. It’s all history!
@@HD-ol1mc Well, you know what they say: if you remember 1974, you weren’t there. Except I do, and I was.
I was a snippet of a kid and I remeber it.
Collapse of Empire - as someone who was 30 in 1974, I would say that it has been a constant theme in political events and strains of thought in press and populace ever since.
Echoes and reverberations. So faint now it’s mixed in with tinnitus.
The splash was through the 50’s and 60’s.
Few people in the UK define themselves by empire at all, only Guardian readers would say that.
Cos most people have no idea how important it was.
Anglophobe bigots are really the main ones who define the UK now as empire.
The British empire, eee bye gum, so what exactly did the British public gain from a British empire? even at the height of it? Just where did all the riches looted from India and China went to, in who's pocket? Who got rich? Not you!
what a fantastic channel ...... what a treat to hear 2 inteligent people discuss such matters .... thank you
My manual-worker parents bought their first home in London for £12k and a new VW in 1974.
I can't anyone accepting a 1974 VW as a deposit on a house these days.
I remember the blackouts - quite fun using candles as a school child. My parents weren't so keen on the 25% inflation.
This is first class stuff, gentlemen, very well done.
Im 57 years old and I remember 1974 very well.
I was just a kid, but I remember the strikes and the blackouts.
Every evening 6pm our family would sit around the table for dinner...... in the dark. We had candles for light and cold meat, salad, bread n butter and cold desserts.
We weren't hungry, people weren't fat in them days.
Mum and dad weren't worried, us kids were happy, it was quiet jolly really.
My mum is 92 now and she still has loadsa candles and matches in the drawers, just in case 😁
Same here. I remember paraffin lamps/lanterns, and candles on standby. I found the house being lit by candle and lamplight fascinating. We might have still have a coal fire at the time too, or possibly recently transitioned to a gas fire. 🤔The only issue was the lack of TV (black and white, of course). 🙂
Same here as well, very happy memories of this period, must have been very worrying for the parents but I think most children had a blast, anytime I smell candle smoke it takes me back..
Wow an absolutely amazing start to this mini series. I was born in 1999 and I am constantly being bombarded with stories of the horrors of the 70s from my parents. Can’t wait for the next one!! Please keep up the video format makes the pod much easier to follow
My mother routinely refers to the 70s as the reason she could never vote Labour, conveniently forgetting I suspect that the Tories were in charge for a good half of them.
@@nicholastaylor4437 Throughout the 80s and 90s the press lambasted Labour for the problems of the 1970s. Yet all they remember was 1979, where Callahan stupidly waited a year to call an election, and then tried to get the unions to put up with their 5th year of wage restraint, with a backdrop of 10% inflation. We then had the winter of discontent, and that's all that people are allowed to remember.
What is lost is that the problems were all caused by the disastrous Heath government, and the crisis was solved by Labour, working with the unions. The devaluation was probably unnecessary, but the government was misinformed, potentially intentionally, by the treasury, to make the situation seem worse than it was. In short, Labour saved the country, by working with the unions and taking the tough choices the Tories refused to (and would refuse to when they got back into power in 1979), and paid the price for doing so. In the process they lost two Labour giants - Wilson and Callahan - and struggled to find a charismatic leader to oppose Thatcher during the truly awful 1980s.
“Himmler had a very poor handshake” probably not the worst thing ever said about him eh
but one that he would have taken quite personally I suppose
😂😂😂😂
There's a lot of people who believe a poor handshake is a sign of other bad traits. It's a very upper class way of saying the guy sucks as a person.
It's a short step from "poor handshake" to "not club-able."
How interesting to hear about Heath's struggling with an undiagnosed thyroid problem. As someone who has been through this in the last year i can sympathize. Been an absolute nightmare trying to run a small business with no energy or drive. Can't imagine what it must have been like trying to run the country
That dark period of history, the 1970s, when working people could afford to raise a family and buy a house on one wage.
Some people not all.
I think the darkness of the 70s is found in the fact that this trend began reversing
Most people lived in council owned houses. Hardly anyone owned cars. I was there, from Australia, which seemed like a paradise compared to my co workers existence. I earned the equivalent of 53 pounds a week back home, in London 28 pounds pw with the cost of living a lot higher than home. I was broke before every pay day. Blackouts were common place along with the IRA bombings.
@@blueycarlton point taken
@@blueycarltonWages in Britain by the mid 70's were at their highest level ever in relation to the cost of living. Certainly worse today.
Great content and conversation, learned a lot
1974 the year Joni Mitchell's "Court and Spark" album appeared, without doubt one of the greatest albums of all time.
Most definitely (but 'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' is better still).
Out of the fire like Catholic saints comes Scarlett with her deep complaint, mimicking tenderness she sees in sentimental movies ... The Asylum albums are a pinnacle of musical achievement .. which one is the best? I keep changing my mind ..@@jasongray4517
All of the Asylum albums are excellent, I keep changing my mind about which is the best@@jasongray4517
And Don Juans Reckless Daughter is the best of all .
"Streets of London" by Ralph McTell. "Billy Don't Be a Hero"-Paper Lace. "Kung Fu Fighting"-Carl Douglas ... and then punk rock happened in the UK✌
I too am now listening to the podcast and then coming here to listen again, with pictures.
Oh, but we had the music 😊
Edward Heath could do a brilliant impersonation of Mike Yarwood!
Really love ❤️ the expressions and smiles of you guys telling this crazy story that one might read in a novel - yet happened
Your work is splendid - thank you 🤩‼️
I’m still shocked at how quickly everyone abandoned Churchill after the war.
In 1975 my working-class immigrant parents bought a flat in Clapham for £12k and a new VW. In 1980 they sold the flat for £25k and bought a 3-bed house nearby for £35k. They couldn't afford the town houses on the common for £45k. They also bought another new VW. Same house would now cost 30x average salary instead of 5-6x.
These two are brilliant. I was in my last year at school in 74.
It's funny ,unlike the Covid fiasco and all that " Furlough - lockdown- and everything being described as an instant crisis!!!" My family and I feel most people just got on with life .
Except that we didn't have thousands of people dying of a plague and a total goon in charge.
@@normanchristie4524 Yes, I feel that Sandbrook would be better calling maybe 1974, the worst peacetime year in the UK in the 20th Century.
Mostly true, although housing was easily affordable, the NHS worked much better, free university education and low unemployment.
In this period you talk about - the miners' strikes and power cuts - I was in a fortuitous situation of living near the privately owned Slough Estates who had their own power station from which a few local streets, like mine, were connected, so our lights at home never went out and our heating never failed! At that time I was the manager of Windsor Youth & Community Centre, a couple of miles from home, so we were legal allowed to have those lights on, although public pressure demanded we turn off the outside lights including those that illuminated the outdoor football court.
I was 11 in 1974. It was a fun time to be growing up - with great music, film, television and sport. Living standards, compared to a decade or two earlier, had risen considerably for many people. We had a family car, holidays, coloured TV, stereo record player, telephone, lots of 'white goods'.
For me, the early 1980s were far bleaker, economically and politically, and also in terms of the increasingly toxic and divisive atmosphere within Britain.
Even bleaker still has been the last decade and more of the country toiling under the most incompetent, corrupt, and malicious government in living memory.
The 1970s really weren't the 'worst of times' as frequently claimed in the accepted narrative.
We had strong family and community values in them days.
The worst attack on the family was the introduction of Sunday trading.
That only happened after the Shops Act 1950 was passed, making it only a recent tradition.
I'm Canadian, but I've always been fascinated by the shitshow that was the UK in the 1970s.
We had the Spring 1972 blackouts, including over the Easter break from school, I don't remember a 3 day week in 1974, or sitting around candles.
Excellent show. People forget this troubled time and look back at the past with rose coloured glasses.
As a young coal miner 1972/74 strikes I remember distinctly witnessing the mass exodus of miners leaving their industry due to low wages. 1972 saw miners 16th in 47:38 Britain’s wages league. After the 72 Strike Mineworkers were upgraded to 2nd in the nation’s wages league. By 1974 Mineworkers wages nosedived to around 16th in the said league. So the cycle continued…
Interesting statistic. It makes me wonder whether the UK economy as it was configured at the time simply could not function with that relative wage configuration. Every time the miners got a pay rise this induced inflation which in turn led to wage demands in other areas of the economy which led to the prior wage order re-emerging. Maybe it's a not complete assessment but it is one way of looking at it. If miners were not energy producers but making something else then the wage demands may not have resulted in such a cycle or it might have happened over a longer time frame.
Completely off topic. But can you two do a video on thirty year war.
Thanks lads, you brought back such fond memories of my youth.
Idi Amin had been a Sergeant-Major in the 1st King's African Rifles ('KAR' - the "Uganda Regiment") - he was never na officer, until he saved with the army of the independent state of Uganda.
The officer under whom Amin served in the KAR throughout the Mau Mau Campaign was a Scottish, with the said officer being a Scottish nationalist. The office becomes friendly with Amin and discusses Scottish nationalism and Scottish independence and it is from this connection that Amin develops his own ideas about Scotland and comes to support independence for Scotland.
It was in these modest circumstances that the 2006 film about Idi Amin (and his mythical Scottish advisor) "The Last King of Scotland" was born.
I was in the army in 1974 and I was 20. There was barrack room talk about us wanting to go and sort the miners out at gunpoint. It was only barrack room lawyering but it was a very popular view in my unit.
You didn’t have David Stirling as your CO did you?
@@Mishima505 GB74
I lived through this as a nine year old. We had to leave school early because street lights were not on. We thought it was great. Copious amounts of candles. One lady in our street had a gas oven and hob, everyone else had electric. My brother was newborn at the time and my mum had to go to this ladies house to warm his milk up.
We ate salad or sandwiches. Those were the days! Looking back and listening to this, it was a very scary time. Not dissimilar to now, except I am an adult and can't be oblivious to it
brilliant stuff!
74 was the year my family emigrated to Australia, largely for the reasons given
We should have come too, wr had a home in Perth, but my Grandmother died and left my Father the house. So we stayed, because of my Mother and her wanting to be close to her Mother. Otherwise I would be an ossie too.
Interesting that you switched off comments on the Russian piece. I wonder why you can't debate the spin you put on the interview.
I can remember coming home from school and you'd have to get your tea eaten quickly because at about 6 o'clock the lights were going off until 10! We'd all be sat around candles. I can clearly remember reading Famous Five books by candlelight.
Working the summer of 1979 in upstate new york. Had to spend the lunch hour hunting for a gas station that had gas.
I remember the lights going out. Just after PM on Radio 4. Still had to do my homework, with a torch in one hand, fountain pen in the other.
1974 - the year my husband and I decided to leave the UK, the country of our birth - and we were not the only ones to make this decision. Far too many strikes and general doom and gloom.
Now 50 years later, never one micro-second of regret for making the move.
From that background how did Heath afford Morning Cloud?!?
Heath was getting backhanders from the Eurocrats in Brussels. The closet-Nazis knew Heath was one of their own kind.
Please make a video on how thatcher turned it around
From across the pond, it sounds a bit like 1974 was to Great Britain as 1968 was to the US. I would love to hear a comparison of the two.
We were a basket case, you never knew who would be on strike in the morning.But it all came to a head in 1979
@@terrym3837 Yeah, and how did that work out?
@@terrym3837funnily enough inflation was higher the day Mrs Thatcher left office in 1990 than it was the day Callaghan left office in 1979. The highest inflation peak was during Thatchers first term, while of course unemployment reached 3.5 million while she was in office. We are now in a situation again as with 1974 where a totally bankrupt Tory administration is about to hand over its mess to Labour to sort out and the client media will instant blame Labour for everything that’s wrong in the country.
We were punished really for not taking part in the Vietnamese war.
And Iceland played off the US's wish to use them for cold war intelligence to take 100s of miles of fishing grounds off the UK.
@joebloggs396 not just the uk, but from international waters.
This affected the UK but also France, Nederlands & Germany - who were savvy enough to let Britain battle it out with Iceland.
Yet all Iceland had to do was threaten to pull out of NATO and Uncle Sam started breathing heavily down our necks to get us to cooperate. More so after Nov '74 when, with a lot of our Navy and Maritime Patrol Aircraft sent to Icelandic fishery protection, a Soviet nuclear attack sub got into the Clyde, where it collided with a US nuclear missile sub leaving Holy Loch. Our forces should have been sanitising the whole Norwestern Approaches and Irish Sea as well as the Clyde estuary so this really wound up the Americans.
Fortunately Watergate was distracting the US media at the time so this bump was allowed to pass underneath their radar.
Still, the 200mile limit became the international standard for a country's maritime economic areas of interest.
Judging by the contents of Dominic’s bookcase, he’s more prolific than Danielle Steele!
Jesus! I’ve always had a lot to blame Thatcher for, and rightly so, but I was totally unaware of Heath’s role in making conditions so ripe for the Thatcherite backlash
I'm always checking the bookshelves for a copy of FIFA or COD that they forgot to hide.
I remember sitting in class at school we all had our coats on and the teachers.
Because the heating was off due to oil tanker delivery drivers were on strike bloody freezing it was , oh happy days
I was 15 and don't remember it. Maybe it was warmer in Cornwall!
2024 is much worse than 1974. The passive smugness we show now is going to haunt us.
I was 17,had a great job, so did my dad, lived through the strikes,power cuts ok for my family and myself, best year of my life. 😊
The 70,s was a hell-hole for families. Heavy industries closing down, inflation, no decent jobs. At the end of the decade I got myself and my kids out and moved to Germany. I never looked back.
@@mark9716 This is true, but in the time since then, Germany has continued to offer its, population what we would call real apprenticeships, resulting in qualified engineers, nurses, scientists, etc. My family have taken advantage of this and down to my grandchildren we,re all doing very well indeed.
Many jumped ship after world war 2, can't say I think much of them.
This is brilliant and fascinating history told by two of the masters of this stuff. I have the Dominic Sandbrook book State of Crisis. I must go back to it. Brilliant and funny. Love the politics plus pop culture.
In the 1970s, we had the spectre of unemployment approaching 1 million which was then unthinkably high. It nearly reached 5 million in the 1980s and that was averted by reclassifying over a million people as long term sick. I was eighteen in 1974 and had never seen a young able bodied homeless person in my life. By the mid 1980s most homeless people were both. In the 1970s every town I knew was in the process of building a swimming pool, leisure centre, library or something similar. By the beginning of the 1990s, local authorities were selling off public amenities to lower costs. In the 1970s, you could always find a police officer if you needed one. Every small town had a permanently manned police station. By the early 1990s, the local police presence was usually just an unmanned station with a phone for reaching the much more "efficient" super stations.
This piece appears to be suggesting that the 1970s was a narrow escape: a decline arrested and reversed by the miracle of Thatcherism. In fact, for working people, it was the opposite. It was the last gasp of a period of improving living standards brought to an end by the restoration of the pre-war status quo ante and signalling a rise in the power of the finance class which was to culminate in the financial collapse of 2008.
Heath in his back down , saved Rolls Royce aero engines , still one of a handful of major British manufactures. Sweeping false statements by Sandbrook.
Rolls Royce is German-owned company now.
@@wuffothewonderdog Rolls Royce cars are German owned. Rolls Royce aero engines are a British Company, based in Derby and listed on the London a stock exchange
When will the next episode be available please?
If this era helped push Thatcher to the top, it really must have been hellish.
I listened to Dom's Who dares wins audiobook.
Ruddy brilliant. Led me to this podcast actually.
I was 13 in this year n remember the blackouts etc but completely unaware of the politics behind it. Really interesting analysis.
Everything the public knew about these guys back in the day we got from Mike Yarwood.
Domonics book is great (I've only listened to the one covering the period covered in this video) Its funny and informative. Anyone know where I can watch his 70's documentary series its really good but cant find an online or DVD version anywhere?
Poor old Ted, everything went wrong on his watch
Old Ted was Dry dear god
Quite ironic that Idi Amin did a Bob Geldof in reverse!
Ted Heath later faced a lot of scandalous rumours concerning the PIE and his yacht. The then head of the PIE Mr Tatchell appears on media interviews, still up to his old tricks, very much in the news.
Love these two. But there is no way their voices match their faces!!
I really enjoyed this , I was eleven and remember it all . I remember petrol coupons being issued . Didn't something like this happen in 1971. Idi Amin was a Sergeant , I believe . The politicians were institutionalised and economically incompetent. Are you in the same room?
ps. on 14th November the IRA planted a bomb on my route walking to school...
Best year Kraftwerk Autobahn and the VW Golf. Loved 1974.
Very interesting.. sheds light on the current status of Britain.When peoole think .ahh its history. history repeats itself so its always useful and interesting to know.
During the 1950 election the Met police quietly informed the Tory whips’ office that Edward Heath had been apprehended cottaging in gentlemen’s lavatories, and discreetly released without being charged.
Another future prime minister cottaged during his time at Oxford university as Miranda.
Heath cottaging-new one on me. Is this sourced anywhere (book? academic journal?)-I'd like to read more about it.
utterly superb discussion of a fascinating era, i was 9 years old in 74 and i was very fortunate to be living with my parents in a nice, comfortable middle class home in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, my memories of 74 are wonderful, obviously i was aware as far as a 9 year old could be of what was going on in the country, i remember the power cuts for example but my life was fine and i have a great fondness for the 70's as much of the aggro just passed me by, i've read both of dominic's books about the period and they are brilliant, i'd highly recommend them for anyone who has an interest in that turbulent time, incidentally 74 was the year that the gorgeous sue menhenick joined the fabulous pan's people so as far as i'm concerned it truly was a vintage year! i eagerly await the rest of the podcasts, thank you
Half-baked stuff.
Too many times does this broadcast make reference to how awful it all was in 1974, without presenting us with sufficient justification for that conclusion.
1974 wasn't all bad. Leeds United won the Division One title. Also you could buy Curly Wurlies for 10p.
Britains crash started in 1979.
In fact, Ted Heath, Denis Healey and Madron Seligman had a rather fraught experience getting out of Germany in August 1939!
The year I was born....says it all!!
I recall 1979 being shrouded in ‘power strikes’ - which became the byword for simply power cuts, whatever the cause, because the energy workers were on strike …. But perhaps the greatest privation was having to take cheese & pickle ‘Ryvita’ sandwiches to prep school as there was no bread due to bread strikes! 🙁😂
I think Idi Amin had good intentions although could have been extremely impractical.
The fact that British public considered Amins helping intentions however impractical as humiliating is the basic problem that plagued Britian and other former colonial powers and is probably what characterises any sunsetting power throughout history.
Remember it well..compared to now it was almost a happy time 😆 😅😂
I remember it well to save energy. The TV stops broadcasting at I think 10pm or earlier
We urgently require a podcast dedicated to the life and crimes of Idi Amin.
Thatcher was the milk snatcher not Heath
1974. Platform boots, flares, loons. My second year at college. Loved it.
You actually CAN run cars on coal... its what the nazis did... and in 1974 all our gas for heating was made from coal too...
I was 10. I remember sitting in the kitchen in Salford in candle light because the lights wouldn't turn on. No central heating so ice on the inside of my bedroom window. Looking forward to spending all school holidays in Armagh NI visiting relatives; seeing the Union Jacks as we got off the ferry in Belfast and thinking they were welcome flags. 11+ exam coming up> De La Salle>run by Catholic Brothers: everything bad you've ever heard about Jesuit schooling, minus the education!
Should've gone to Thornleigh (brilliant)
I arrived in London in May 1974, after living in welfare luxury Denmark for 7 years. I arrived Friday had a job Monday and was paid £12.00 per hour to type in an office. Think wages in 2024. I walked thru Leicester Square and was in total shock. Tramps littered the pavements, homelessness was rife and London looked like a medieval slum. The food was not much better. Jump to Hampstead in September. Drama College. Anna Pavlova's House. Another world. As a Drama student I was protected from all the horrors of the day and Margaret Thatcher was down the road in North Finchley. Two worlds. The World of everything and the World of nothing. 50 years later, nothing has changed.
The Rest is History is my favorite channel by far... 👍🇿🇦
At least we beat India at cricket. 42 all out at Lords! However, I was an impressionable 12 year old in 1974 living in east London. so it was pretty vivid, especially as there were so many struggling at the time. I think that this collective trauma is over shadowed by what happened later with mass unemployment in the 80's. As you implied in your vid, there was an air of hopelessness about the time, apart from the usual dry humour. In one instance, it was mocked on BBC's 'Nationwide' as gloom week-the title above the presenters. I also remember that Mike Yarwood joke on TV when he quipped that the PM would issue everyone with begging bowls as state policy but the miners would be issued buckets!
Few care about cricket now anyway, logically with our population size we won't compete. We still invented the game and exported it however.
And Amiss scored 188 in that match
Going to England as a child in 1974 my father cautioned me that "England is a poor country." He was right. It looked more like what I had seen behind the Iron Curtain, grey, hopeless, and dirty, than countries in western Europe or North America.
Probably because everything was still black and white then
It wasn't that we were poor, it was just that Britain was still reeling from WW2. Whilst the US was building its consumer dream we were building our hospitals and schools; still clearing bombsites and having to export many goods to pay for US war loans. So things like Cars, Fridges, TVs got made and sent abroad, leaving few for supply within the UK, possibly driving up prices - hence wages were kept low to head off limited supply feeding a demand led inflationary spiral.
Then we got mullered by oil inflation following on from the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars.
About this time the post WW2 reconstruction of West Germany had got to a stage where their industrial goods, produced using new systems and machinery, were outcompeting British equivalents made on old equipment kept going because we couldn't afford to stop and replace them as we needed revenues to pay war loans and fund cold war levels of defence spending of about 7% of our GDP from 1960.
you should see it now. Bleaker than 70's Moscow!
I absolutely loved the section about Idi Amin and all the different voices 😂
So Heath, like Sunak, had run out of ideas
The idea of Ted Heath as genuinely naive to the private culture of the Tory party is laughable.
One can observe much about a man's character and voting traits by how open his shirt/rugger top is, Dominic.
All I saw as a teen in the good ol' was gas lines. (i.e. petrol queues lol)
It now seems like yesterday
'Strange Days Indeed' by Francis Wheen is a great book on the insanity of the 70s