“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. “ Golda Meir
I’ve been aware for some time that Napoleon Bonaparte was right when he claimed that History is just a recording of someone’s version of events, that it may bare no relation to what actually occurred. And I am aware that William Shakespeare felt that the past is prologue... and without prologue there is no motivation or context for a story. So yes... it has been a long time issue of mine to ensure that any history I’ve had a front row seat to is documented as accurately as possible and that I do not subscribe to a popularised version of what the past was like.
The seventies are consistently portrayed as a bleak dark decade in Britain. A time when people in platform shoes with big collars and crazy hair talked of revolution, against a backdrop of strikes, rubbish , IRA bombs and blackouts. It has become almost a received memory of what the decade was like. And the trouble with received memories is that people start to replace true memories and real experience with images that have been packaged and given to them.
Obviously TV is to blame for some of it. Its shows are often guilty of popularising a myth of the past. The BBC’s Life on Mars presented us with a sepia tinged 1970’s where sexism, racism and violence along with poor health and terrible clothes are the order of the day.
Not that the 1970’s are a solo victim of this treatment the decade is having done to it what it only too happily did to it’s own recent past. The 1970’s TV show ’The Walton’s’ repackaged the great depression of the 1930’s into the heyday of personal kindness (at least it was on Walton’s Mountain). It transported the desperate poverty of the times into something more palatable. I n the shows terms meant that the impoverished Walton’s lived in a house bigger that most of the viewing audiences’ homes. It gave a seductive version of the 1930’s that whilst had one toe in the icy pond of reality was as only truly accurate in contributing to a nostalgia for a time that never really existed.
As the little French solider said History is just a recording of someone’s version of events and may bare no relation to what actually happened.
I have kind of made it my business to unpackage the past and present what actually occurred. (Going way back to blogs 45/46/47, I wrote a series blogs about the 1980’s pointing out it wasn’t all poodle perms, carphones ,yuppies, and miners strikes. ) And now a couple of years later I find myself forced to point out the decade that preceded the eighties was not lived in sepia tones ,polyester pants and at wife swapping parties. There is something so potent about that that period following the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and before the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980’s that it will be a pity to lose it. I can’t believe that the mass memory of the time has been wiped and re-tweaked to something totally impotent, and therefore unimportant. The seventies was anything but that.
As the scribbler from the Midlands said, History is prologue... and without prologue there is no motivation or context for a story.
So here is the prologue... I grew up in 1970s Britain and it really seemed a great time to be kids. Sure there was stuff going on that maybe as children we didn’t understand completely, but as far as these things impinged on our world...it was all good. Take the "three-day-week" of the beginning of the decade. As kids it was the most amazing drama watching the lights go out over different parts of the city, playing boards games by candlelight cause there was no TV, need I mention the joy of a 4 day weekend! I just can’t see the decade I was in as a brown toned misery fest! I’m not alone in this - most people who were there have fond memories of the decade. In fact the BBC ran a poll in which almost 25 thousand votes were cast. 69.84% registered the opinion that they had found their experience of actually living in the 1970’s either positive or very positive.
Fact is in Britain it was socially an amazing time. The fruits of the 70’s include the race relations act, and the sex discrimination act, even the green movement has its roots in this decade... it was a time when people were not just thinking about themselves but the future. There was a definite passing of the flame. The older generation had finally accepted the end of fifties authoritarianism. It was the last decade of kids being left to their own devices. The seventies were freedom.
Okay, so what’s so special about the 1970’s then. Well one thing... the currency of the land changed. In 1971 we went decimal and the old imperial money stopped being used. They phased out the old faithful shillings, tanners, bobs and half-crowns and brought the pence’s we know today. To the nations children it was a simple exercise of counting in units of ten instead of twelve’s– but to the older generation it was a symbol of the end of the world they knew and understood. The oldies arguments to keep the established imperial currency failed. To that generation it was like the past and everything that came from it was irrelevant and a new world was dawning where only the present and the future had importance. They were right in a way, school taught the children the new currency, then expected kids to go home to teach their parents and grandparents. It was like only the young were being equipped for a brave new world. And maybe that was true.
The other big thing was that the 1970’s where socially the world as anybody knew it was entirely upside down. The sexual revolution had happened. Up until this point the rules were clear... sex was all powerful. It was all about finding a way to have a regular supply of sex without the associated problems. Sex carried an unacceptably high risk of pregnancy and there were few social conventions that would allow for a child born outside of wedlock. Thus the social convention was to marry. This was the only safe way to have a regular sex life. The arrival of the contraceptive pill meant the threat of pregnancy was all but erased meaning that the structure of a young person’s life was no longer geared towards marriage. Thus youth could continue through into your twenties and taboo free SEX (it seemed)... was everywhere.
Advertisers cottoned onto this market and the role the sexual revolution had played in their economic freedom, thus highly charged sexualised images were freely used to encourage them to buy everything from Lambs Navy Rum to Harmony hairspray.Television got risque then out and out saucy... TV comedies in particular indulged themselves freely with sexual references and situations.
A phrase you heard every day was “The permissive society”.
The older people, who had missed the sexual freedoms granted by this tiny white pill, grew up in a world where the power of sex had to be damped down so that they contain themselves. They suddenly found themselves in a world where sex no longer had consequence as was actively being promoted as bone fide leisure activity unconnected to matrimony.
Younger people from teenagers upwards had never had a larger generational divide than the youths of 1970-79. They celebrated their sexual freedoms by messing with gender roles – boys growing their hair long, girls cropping all theirs off. Boys could play with glamour and girls could aspire to be more than just homemakers. The prospect of an extended youth, free from the burdens of marriage and raising a family meant that this generation could indulge themselves in pleasure and self centred activities like none before.
The generational divide, the feeling that the rule book had been torn up, the highly visible sexual images... this backdrop informed almost everything during the decade.
Therefore it was a time for big people. Adults were busy expressing themselves politically or artistically... or quite frankly just too busy to be focused on the small people in their lives. Children were not the centre of anyone’s existence. The indulging and worshipping of small people had not arrived on these shores yet. Children were not exactly seen and not heard... they were had and then they were distracted. Thus children were sent to their rooms or back garden to be distracted with TOYS. The 1970’s was they heyday of some really quite exceptionally toys.
There were some weird ones. In 1970 some nutter accidently invented the Stylophone which was a really naff musical toy. So naff that Rolf Harris was plugging them on TV (in his show NOT on an advert). Parents bought them in droves thinking their child could be a musical genius if only they practiced enough. We thought this fanciful in the extreme, educational toys were not much fun and Stylophones really didn’t offer much fun. BUT everything changed when David Bowie composed Space Oddity on one. Suddenly they electronic music was here to stay and the whining sounds of a Stylophone could be heard escaping from all the neighbourhood kid’s bedrooms.
But the next year was the best year for entirely useless toys. No one gave much thought to educational value... it was all about keeping the kids distracted and out of the way so adults could eat cheese on sticks in peace. In 1971 my dad came in with a big box with the words GONKY written on the side of it. We dashed out the garden to watch him unveil... A SPACE HOPPER!!!. Yes the most purposeless toy ever... you couldn’t go high, you couldn’t go fast, you couldn’t cover any distance. BUT thanks to this overinflated piece of rubber you could sit on it and bounce up and down till you fell off and grazed your knee. Genius!
But not as much genius yet another toy designed only to end in tears. I think the official name was Clackers but everyone (down south at least ) called them kerNackers. These were two plastic coated ball bearings each individually attached to a tab by string. The player holds the tab, allowing the balls to hang below. Through a gentle up-and-down hand motion, the two balls swing apart and together, making the clacking noise that give the toy its name. With practice, it is possible to get the marbles swinging so that they knock together above the hand as well as below and to have the clacking noise get faster and faster. The end result being that the child would lose control of the tab and the ball bearings would hit them... in some cases where the kerNackers were made of acrylic... they would just shatter causing puncture wounds. Despite the injuries we loved these dangerous toys. When they were withdrawn from sale in 1973 there was mass mourning by kids.
Roller skates, chopper and chipper bikes, and even stunt kites tried to make us outdoorsy... but nothing really got us excited till the arrival of ... THE SKATEBOARD. Early skateboards bore little relation to the fibreglass creations of today. They were basic in the extreme and the only break was your own body parts. They may have passed as just a fad if it was not for the Summer of 1976. I cannot tell you how hot that summer was. Pavements melted and we wore a lot of man made fibres. Then the Meanwhile Gardens Trust dug a massive hole and poured concrete into it ... suddenly it occurred to kids from all over London to take our wooden boards with roller skate wheels on them and roll back and forth on the cool cold concrete. Soon tricks and half pipes were being performed daily. Grazed knees, concussions and splintered bones were just part of the experience as what rapidly became known as Europe’s First Skate Park.
Of course it wasn’t all play... (though you will note how health and safety had little to do with fun for kids 1970 style!) A big activity was shopping – but not in a good way. A child’s play was often interrupted by a request for the child to ‘run errands’ to pick up items forgotten by adults incapable of making comprehensive lists. Children were often used to return unwanted items as parents felt a shopkeeper was less likely to confrontational with a child than an adult.
In the 1970’s shopping malls had yet to take over the way we shopped. You had two choices... your nearest high street parade of shops or your nearest city for an even bigger parade of shops. However shopping was beginning to change along generational lines. The over forties (who were classically old and beyond any reach of the era) insisted on shopping daily in local shops. They would buy only the resources they required to get through the next 24-48 hrs. The under forties (who were slightly more with it but still not quite in step with the decade of the day) would shop weekly at the newly created (and new fangled) supermarkets often located away from the immediate locale.
But the shopping that caused the biggest stress of all was for clothes. Children were not economically viable units and had to go shopping with a responsible adult. This normally meant your mother as retailing was still aimed specifically at women. Boutique shopping was still in its infancy and most clothes shopping was conducted in departmental stores, it was the job of any self respecting teenager to lure their mother away from the safe cardigans and A-line skirts towards the ‘boutique’ labels such as Halston or Laura Ashley.
Clothing was a huge indicator of the generational divide. For our parent’s generation as soon as they got big they dressed like their parents. Most of our parents had completely missed the invention of teenagers in the 1950’s as they were young adults by then. Thus your mother quite often thought you should dress like her (or your father if you were a boy) and of course you had your own agenda which did not accommodate such out moded thinking. Going shopping with your mother was a war played out in high streets the length and breadth of the land.
Much argued about items of clothing of the era included.... an afghan coat that stunk like a wet dog when it rained, a cheese cloth shirt that always looked unironed, a patch work gypsy skirt (“I didn’t move us out to a nice house in the suburbs with an apple tree in the garden for you to dress like a tinker!). Platform shoes, furry moon boots, flared trousers, oxford bags and anything made from stretch fabric also did not fare too well in their journey from the racks to my wardrobe. BUT nothing (I repeat NOTHING) suffered as much scorn as the yearning for a pair of designer jeans (Gloria Vanderbilt). After years of trousers so wide I could hide whole people in each leg, I saw an advert on TV which (again using the 1970’s promise of sex) assured me that if only I wore these jeans my life would be perfect. The jeans were the most figure hugging item of clothing imaginable and drew attention to the wearer bottom as they carried Vanderbilt's name embossed in script on the back pocket, as well as her swan logo. Given that our local supermarket had perfectly serviceable jeans of a more modest cut for a very reasonable £3.99, the war of the designer jeans (a shocking £30) was lost before I even tried them on... though given GV’s provocative shape...that probably would not have helped either!
Music influenced the way we dressed more than anything else. At the dawn of the decade it was all about The New Seekers. We used to sing ‘Beg Steal or Borrow’ in the playground so much we lost our voices. Then they released ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ and that was that... we were all dressed like hippies and were swinging our pants. Then 5 lads from Edinburgh started on about ‘Shang a lang’ and it was shrunken jumpers and tartan stitched down the side of your ‘trews’. Then we found out that members of the Glitter Band lived in Blackheath... so we used to hang round their house (oh the irony!) wearing glam rock gear that we copied from Sweet, David Bowie, T-Rex and Thin Lizzy. This was ultimately more wearable than our Bay City Roller outfits and we found the androgyny rather sexy! (Our parent’s not so much who used to complain that with all the long hair and nail varnish you can’t tell a boy from a girl). Then something really important happened.
Give us a
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Give us a
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Give us a
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Give us a
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Give us a
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Disco came to note as a reaction by minority groups predominately Blacks, Latinos, Gays and Women against both the domination of rock music and the demonisation of dance music by the counterculture during the early 1970’s. But for most of us... it was uplifting music that we could dance to and be glamorous. For all the accolades laid at the door of early 70’s rock and pop none of it was particularly exciting. The disco sound had a soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady beat of strings, horns, electric pianos, and even orchestral instruments . But the key point was ... we could dress sexy. We could dress like Donna Summer. (Hence the Gloria Vanderbilt jeans) Hence the war with my mother about my wardrobe.)
We had seen newspapers that showed us that the it girl of the time Brooke Shields went to Studio 54 in New York, and that million dollar models Margot Hemingway and Janice Dickenson also went there. We read how the doormen turned away huge stars (including Henry Winkler, Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, and Frank Sinatra) in order to let in ‘sexy nobodies’ to mix with celebrities in order to concoct a place for the beautiful people. We were shocked and impressed that Disco had the power to turn away THE FONZE! (Henry Winkler was god in the1970’s). Copy cat versions of the legendary Studio 54 were opening all over the globe. We needed to become sexy nobodies...
Of course sexiness was not something the average 1970’s child discussed with an adult. I had ‘the talk’ of course, a detailed no holds barred infomercial on the joys of MARITAL sex and how the ultimate fulfilment of MARTIAL sex would be grandchildren for my parents which they do not expect to see until they are VERY repeat VERY old. Thus the desire to look and be thought of as sexy was not something you chatted about much (at all) with your folks. There was no way that any of my friends parents would fund the kind of wardrobe our love affair with disco required. However the solution was simple. Get a Saturday job. Buy sexy clothes. Keep them in a bag. Get changed once away from the parental home. 1970’s parenting was not as hands-on as it is today as long as we appeared occupied and were neither about to produce life nor end our own, our parents did not entertain themselves with fretting about us.
In lieu of deeper instruction from our elders, we had magazines. There was nothing you couldn't learn from amagazine. Fab 208 was great for music stuff and stalking celebs but for real life instruction we had Jackie Magazine.... famous for the fact it discussed ‘below the waist issues’ on the Cathy and Claire Page. Cathy and Claire were like your trendy big sisters who’d tell you what your parents wouldn’t. Cathy and Claire told us how to practice kissing, how to deal with a friend who wants to steel your guy, and how far is too far if you want to keep your reputation when it comes to boys. Even when in 1974 when the pill became free through the NHS our big sisters at Jackie gave proper advice on a page called ‘Dear Doctor’. They also showed us how look great in halter tops, shiny satin tops, polyester pantsuits, hot pants, sequinned frocks, and platform shoes.
Then one evening (December I think it was) in 1976... we were watching the Today Show because queens of disco or not we still liked the rock band Queen and they were due to be on it. We tuned in and the presenter Bill Grundy was presenting a filler as Queen couldn’t make it- he said something like...
“These are punk rockers. Its the new craze, they tell me. They're a group called the Sex Pistols”
The camera opened its shot to show us the presenter was surrounded by some peculiarly dressed boys who were revelling in the spotlight and a girl from Bromley called Siouxsie Sioux who seemed to blatantly be offering the hapless presenter sexual intrigue.
What happened after that is well documented. The world literally tiled on its axis and NOTHING was ever the same again. (It is also the most requested piece of archive TV on YouTube). It doesn’t matter how many times I rewatch that particular sequence nothing will ever take me back to the emotions of that moment. It would be impossible to recreate the combination of intense shock and intense joy that finally almost thirty years after youth culture was defined the divide between young and old was made permanent.It has become a moment I have since come to lament. Respect for your elders be they an old drunk TV presenter or the institution of television itself is probably no bad thing. But hey...it happened. (Funny to think one of those foul mouthed lads now advertises a brand of butter while striding around the English countryside wearing plus fours).
But music changed from that day forward, even for us Disco queens. Our clothing changed again. (Although out in the suburbs punk was so diluted that my ‘safety-pin’ earrings came from Richard Shops in the high street and were clip-on’s). Even our new anti-heroes were less cutting edge than the fabled Sex Pistols... we liked everything from Sham 69 to the Boomtown Rats (but these days will only own up to liking The Clash). In fact we were so suburban that we really liked Elvis Costello thinking ‘Watching the Detectives ‘was the way forward. Our clothing changed yet again when Ska made a comeback and joined forces with punk influences and we were blasting The Specials (Too much to Young) out of our bedroom windows. (Our parents despairing of the lyrics referring to a girls contraceptive needs and wishing for songs where June rhymed with Moon). Never let it be under estimated how much anyone over the age of 25 felt completely cut adrift from the youth of the day - the Today programme broadcast of December 1976 had redefined everything.
Meanwhile technology moved on from the heady days of the digital watch in ’71, through to calculators in ’72, to a whole heap of fuss about computers and digital cameras in the middle of the decade. No one in the suburbs cared about most of that middle decade technology, computers were for boffins and we all used instamatic camera that took a cartridge (126 film that was really easy to load and unload) and you took it to the chemist when you wanted to see your pictures. If you wanted good gossip on your neighbours you’d go into the chemist... he knew EVERYTHING and sometimes he’s have made extra copies of the photos to illustrate the point.
The only photos that REALLY mattered to my friends were the ones we got out of the photo booths. A lot of our youth was spent balancing on each others knees in photo booths trying to capture the group bonhomie. We’d take a few strips a week and save the best shots of ourselves sellotaping the backs of them together so they’d form a long concertinaed strip. We’d keep them in our purses. I have no idea why as I have no recollection of ever showing the strip of photos to anyone, but I do recall diligently working on them. Real photos (ie those taken on my instamatic) were put into albums. The photos from 126 films always seemed to be developed with a white border framing them. It seems quaint now but it was the norm. Photos were always high gloss and the frame was to stop fingerprints on the picture. The new self adhesive albums had just become available, meaning you were now released from the chore of having to glue your photos in. These were primarily holiday albums.
Although the era of global travel began in 1970 when the first Pan Am Boeing 747 jet landed at Heathrow, no one we knew really went anywhere. The newspapers were always saying that air travel is now so cheap it is possible to take a holiday in almost any part of the world. I don't think theidea of jet travel was initially tempting to our parents generartion who were mcuch more excited about camper vans. It was a true status symbol to have a Knowsley Clubman parked in your drive. It told the world that you could at any moment freewheelto somewhere like Camber Sands, or Dorset. It was considered a little over the top to wish to take a family holiday 'Abroad'. We were thought of as exotic in our suburb,as we took our summer break in The Lake District and one year we even went to Wales. This did not mean we were immune from the overwhelming developments in air travel though. The fastest passenger aeroplane in the world (Concorde) came into service in 1976. It was built by Britain and France and it could fly at about 2,100 kilometres per hour...the speed of sound! It made an amazing whooshing noise when it went overhead. I know this because it did just that when I was in Wales. And I took a photo – and put in my self adhesive album.
The glue came out for scrapbooks. It was a regular activity for some unknown reason – like the concertina of photo booth photos. You’d cut out pictures of things you liked or keep souvenirs of places you’ve been and glue them in a book. I found one of mine the other day. It has magazine pictures of cars (Aston Martin, Triumph TR7, two door Capri and a MGB GT), pop stars (Michael Jackson, Phil Lynott and Stuart Woody Woods), entry tickets (to DreamLand Margate, and the roller disco under the arches at Charing Cross Station), local newspaper article (of the trees chopped down due to dutch elm disease), a Queen Elizabeth silver jubilee napkin and 2 celebrity photos- me with Leonard Rossiter (actor) and me with Jim Callaghan (prime minster) . All involved in the last items are wearing questionable outfits.
I’m glad I did those scrapbooks now. I’ve clearly forgotten much more of the decade than I lived. But you don’t forget your feelings, When I think of the 1970’s I don’t feel depressed or sad. I usually smile. I remember blackouts and strikes of course- I don’t whitewash my memories. But the decade suffers a bad press. It was a decade of change, ad with change comes some strife. But change only comes when people can see another way... sometimes a better way. I’m so glad i was there. I’m so glad I experienced it first hand and my memories are not received from the telly or told to me by some expert with an agenda. I smile at my memories because like the vast majority of people who were there... it was fun to have a front seat when history was being written by people with big collars, crazy hair.... and platform shoes.
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