Doctor Who and the Three Day Week
May. 4th, 2020 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: State of Emergency - The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974, by Dominic Sandbrook
This had been on my to-read list for a while, and it was a Christmas present. Now, somehow, seemed a good time to pick it up. Apparently as an infant I had baths by candlelight, due to power cuts (presumably in 1972, as power cuts were actually less of an issue in 1974). I do remember my mother tended to keep the cupboards "well-stocked", with typically two or three bags of flour (and I still have a couple of packs of left-over candles). Admittedly she did more baking, and also had a smaller range of items, but little risk of running out bar a major incident.
Sandbrook is a few years younger than me, born "about nine months after the start of the Three Day Week" (we are left to draw our own facile conclusions), so the book is all researched and unearthed rather than remembered first-hand. Part of a larger series, this book essentially covers the Heath premiership, though it doesn't pay too much attention to the date range, quite often looking forward into the late seventies or even eighties when a theme requires it.
Most, though not all, of the book is driven by political events, which Sandbrook chooses to discuss thematically, with a liberal chronology. Starting with the General Election of 1970, which unexpectedly promoted Heath to the office of Prime Minister: a time of relative affluence (certainly of greater affluence than previous generations) and parlous industrial relations, with the cracks (metaphorical and literal) beginning to appear in the post-war programme. One thing that strikes me is that Sandbrook is very scornful of Heath's naïvety and arrogance over the short-termism and greed of British companies and management (Heath expresses recognisably the same exasperation in rather different terms in his own autobiography). Add to this a powerful and political trade union movement, where the workers were rather more militant than their leaders in a time of near-full employment, and an overheating economy, and it all begins to break down rather quickly. Perhaps World War I is a comparison in the sense that it was probably no-one's intention, but combined stubbornness and denial brought about the events anyway. Yet there are other events to which the public seemed perhaps sceptical but largely indifferent - decimalisation in 1971 and entry to the EEC in 1973. Wilson's opposition was entirely opportunistic.
The couple of chapters on the Troubles in Northern Ireland are grim reading, at once for themselves, and also in comparison both to the state of Ulster unionism some sixty years earlier (described in The Strange Death of Liberal England) and also today: a combination of insecurity, intransigence and a belief in some sort of "Britishness" that doesn't exist in the rest of the UK.
Other chapters deal with race and gender politics in the period, with frequent reference to television and films of the era. Sandbrook's fondness for Doctor Who comes through in titling his chapter on environmentalism The Green Death. It was news to me that the Peladon stories are allegories for entry into the EEC and the miners' strike. Survivors (again stretching beyond the book's strict timeframe) seems all too relevant to today. The book draws to a close with the February 1974 General Election, again producing an unexpected, and this time inconclusive, result. Sandbrook notes that there are so many what-ifs in this period. Overall, this is an engagingly written book, mixing gloomy and desperate times with more light-hearted reflections, and makes you realise quite how much happens in just a few years.
This had been on my to-read list for a while, and it was a Christmas present. Now, somehow, seemed a good time to pick it up. Apparently as an infant I had baths by candlelight, due to power cuts (presumably in 1972, as power cuts were actually less of an issue in 1974). I do remember my mother tended to keep the cupboards "well-stocked", with typically two or three bags of flour (and I still have a couple of packs of left-over candles). Admittedly she did more baking, and also had a smaller range of items, but little risk of running out bar a major incident.
Sandbrook is a few years younger than me, born "about nine months after the start of the Three Day Week" (we are left to draw our own facile conclusions), so the book is all researched and unearthed rather than remembered first-hand. Part of a larger series, this book essentially covers the Heath premiership, though it doesn't pay too much attention to the date range, quite often looking forward into the late seventies or even eighties when a theme requires it.
Most, though not all, of the book is driven by political events, which Sandbrook chooses to discuss thematically, with a liberal chronology. Starting with the General Election of 1970, which unexpectedly promoted Heath to the office of Prime Minister: a time of relative affluence (certainly of greater affluence than previous generations) and parlous industrial relations, with the cracks (metaphorical and literal) beginning to appear in the post-war programme. One thing that strikes me is that Sandbrook is very scornful of Heath's naïvety and arrogance over the short-termism and greed of British companies and management (Heath expresses recognisably the same exasperation in rather different terms in his own autobiography). Add to this a powerful and political trade union movement, where the workers were rather more militant than their leaders in a time of near-full employment, and an overheating economy, and it all begins to break down rather quickly. Perhaps World War I is a comparison in the sense that it was probably no-one's intention, but combined stubbornness and denial brought about the events anyway. Yet there are other events to which the public seemed perhaps sceptical but largely indifferent - decimalisation in 1971 and entry to the EEC in 1973. Wilson's opposition was entirely opportunistic.
The couple of chapters on the Troubles in Northern Ireland are grim reading, at once for themselves, and also in comparison both to the state of Ulster unionism some sixty years earlier (described in The Strange Death of Liberal England) and also today: a combination of insecurity, intransigence and a belief in some sort of "Britishness" that doesn't exist in the rest of the UK.
Other chapters deal with race and gender politics in the period, with frequent reference to television and films of the era. Sandbrook's fondness for Doctor Who comes through in titling his chapter on environmentalism The Green Death. It was news to me that the Peladon stories are allegories for entry into the EEC and the miners' strike. Survivors (again stretching beyond the book's strict timeframe) seems all too relevant to today. The book draws to a close with the February 1974 General Election, again producing an unexpected, and this time inconclusive, result. Sandbrook notes that there are so many what-ifs in this period. Overall, this is an engagingly written book, mixing gloomy and desperate times with more light-hearted reflections, and makes you realise quite how much happens in just a few years.