Ertblog

Remembering the Seventies

The 1970s have had a bad press. Those 10 years have been written off as a grim decade of terrorist carnage, strikes and inflation. That's before the critics move on to popular culture: the years that taste forgot, with flares, garish colours, Gary Glitter and the Austin Allegro.

Tonight's BBC series The 70s is sure to prompt a debate about whether the decade has been wrongly maligned. As presenter and historian Dominic Sandbrook explains on BBC News' online magazine, the decade has been overshadowed by the Sixties, a period whose vibrant reputation doesn't match the reality of that iconic era for most people in Britain.

Back in 1970, the mood was optimistic. Cadbury's ran a television advert about the 'supersonic seventies' - sadly missing from YouTube - which reflected an era of technological advancement. Concorde was a symbol of that excitement, along with the moon landings that continued until 1972. (People of a certain age will remember space dust sweets, which made your tongue tingle.) Family holidays featured Benidorm rather than Bognor or Barry Island.

Yet the mood changed quickly. The evening news chronicled a descent into chaos and violence, from picket line battles at Grunwick and Saltley to bomb and bullet-scarred Northern Ireland. (Forty years on, I can still picture the BBC's Northern Ireland reporter WD Flackes, who was on our screen every night to record the latest horrors.) British political leaders of all parties seemed to have no idea how to tackle the country's troubles. I vividly remember my father Bob Skinner proclaiming the country was going to the dogs on eating of the latest destructive strike. (Aptly, we were on holiday in Benidorm at the time, on our first ever package holiday.)

Overseas, the Seventies saw Watergate, the Munich Olympics massacre, the end of the Vietnam war and carnage in the Middle East. Not to mention the continuing cold war.

Yet it's too easy to write off the Seventies as a time of hopelessness. Growing up in Cardiff, I enjoyed a happy, secure childhood. My parents, like so many, had more spare cash than in the Sixties, and we got our first colour television and automatic washing machine. (A contrast to the primitive machines we had before - I even remember one with a mangle on top!) And the glorious summer of 1976 and the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977 lightened the mood during the growing economic crisis.

The decade saw positive developments in society. The Labour government outlawed race and sex discrimination, and passed an equal pay act. The moves were symbolic - it would take years for attitudes to change - but important. Britain was changing for the better in many ways.

The BBC has already examined the Seventies. Its millennium year series We Love the Seventies was a nostalgic look back at life in that maligned decade. Author Andy Beckett brilliantly told the story of those years in When the lights went out.

Finally, a decade in which Wales dominated European rugby in scintillating style has to be honoured!

 

Was the Battle of Britain 1940 or 1941?

It was 1940, before you comment!

But there's a serious point here. My father, born in 1926, thought the Battle of Britain was fought in 1941. I was adamant - knowing the overwhelming documentary evidence in my favour - that 1940 was the year. And I was surprised that he was so wrong, given his strong memories of the Blitz.

But then it struck me. His memories are of the bombing. And to a 13 year old, there's no difference between being bombed in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz that followed through the winter and spring of 1941. Oh, and unlike us, Dad didn't learn about the second world war in history. It wasn't history to anyone born in the 1920s. It was news.

The lesson, though, is clear. Don't take memories as gospel truth. Don't assume people who lived through the events in question can give you the facts. But don't trust your own assumptions about history. Dad's point was that Cardiff was bombed before London, and that his parents and aunt sent him to the Welsh capital for safety just as the Luftwaffe decided Cardiff was a perfect target. (The debate about the Battle of Britain is a sideshow.) Looking at the records, he's right. I didn't realise Cardiff was bombed before London.

But my point remains. Don't assume that eyewitnesses are flawless witnesses to history. In fact, don't assume anything...

The Falklands war, 30 years on

Above: HMS Antelope explodes, San Carlos Water, Falklands, 1982

Thirty years ago Britain found itself unexpectedly at war when Argentina invaded the Falkland islands. It was a profound shock - not least to millions who had no idea where the Falklands were. 

According to my 1982 diary, I heard the news at 1.05pm on 2 April on Radio 4, but the British government only confirmed the news at 6pm. Yet that morning in my slumber I distinctly heard an armchair general telling Radio 4's Today programme about the possibility of attacking Buenos Aires with nuclear weapons. That was just the start of an open season for armchair generals, admirals and air vice marshals. 

I wrote a lengthy post about the Falklands conflict on the 25th anniversary in 2007. I recalled how challenging the war was for the media - it took days and weeks for film to reach Britain. (I even delayed going into school one morning in May to watch the first BBC film report from the South Atlantic.)

Reclaiming the Falklands was an extraordinary feat of arms by Britain. The first ships of the famous task force set sail just three days after the invasion. The Royal Navy suffered grievous blows, losing HMS Sheffield, HMS Coventry, HMS Antelope and HMS Ardent, while many of the navy's other ships were badly damaged. The army successfully 'yomped' across forbidding terrain to capture Darwin and Goose Green and later the island capital, Stanley. (It also supplied a hero from central casting in the form of Colonel H Jones, killed in the attack on Goose Green.)

But in many ways the RAF's contribution was the most remarkable, if not the most decisive. The Vulcan raids on Port Stanley's airport were the most extraordinary British air attacks since Guy Gibson led the Dambuster raid on Nazi Germany 39 years earlier. To get to the Falklands, the Avro Vulcan would need to fly 4,000 miles beyond its maximum range. That would take 15 tanker aircraft and 17 in-flight refuellings - for just one bomber.

If that wasn't enough, there was a bigger challenge: the Vulcans had not been refuelled in air since the 1960s. As Roland White recounts in his enthralling book, Vulcan 607, RAF engineers visited aviation museums around the world to grab vital refuelling probes to replace those removed from the Vulcans over 15 years earlier. As White says, the curator of the Castle air force base museum in California turned a blind eye as an RAF team removed a probe from an exhibit, covered the hole with a blanking plate and made off with an item that could help Britain reclaim the Falklands.

The cunning didn't end there. The ancient Vulcans were horribly vulnerable to modern air defences. The RAF wanted to give them a better chance with the Dash 10 system fitted to its Buccaneers. But there was nowhere to fit it on the V bombers. Or was there? Someone with a long memory remembered that the Vulcan was meant to carry the huge Skybolt missiles. Skybolt was cancelled, but perhaps the Skybolt fitting points were still there. After much prodding, the engineers found them.

One more piece of British ingenuity was still needed to fit the Dash 10. RAF Honington's  engineers found a perfect way to create a pressure tight seal for the wires from the Dash 10: a home brew cork with a hole in the middle. Happily, one of Honington's crews brewed their own beer, and supplied the corks.

The Falklands war carried many echoes of the second world war. The 1938 Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by the British in 1982, had survived Pearl Harbor as USS Phoenix. The media reporting was closer to that of 1940 than 2012. And those Vulcan bombers carried an updated version of the H2S radar sets used by Bomber Command's Lancasters in the raids on Berlin. The version of H2S used in 1982 was far better than its 1940s predecessor, but it was still an antique, over six foot across and producing an image of the target that its operators described as green porridge. But it proved its worth: the moment Mount Usborne showed up on the H2S was the confirmation that Vulcan 607 was within a mile of its plotted path after its 4,000 mile flight from Ascension to the Falklands. Minutes later, Martin Withers' crew placed two 1,000 pound bombs on Stanley's vital Argentinian-held airfield. The occupiers now knew they had a battle on their hands. And little hope of using Stanley as a base for fast jets to attack Britain's capital ships.

As I said in my 2007 post, war represents a tragic failure of politics and diplomacy. The idea of Britain and Argentina flighting was extraordinary, given the links between the two countries. (Not least the Welsh-speaking community in Patagonia.) I cherished those links, with an Argentinian brother-in-law. And Britain's most famous Falklands veteran, Simon Weston, has movingly described on Desert Island Discs how he met and embraced the Argentinian pilot who bombed him and his comrades.  So many British and Argentinian lives were needlessly lost during that tragic south Atlantic autumn. Yet it had one positive outcome: a brutal fascist dictatorship was overthrown. 

Thirty years on, the controversy over the Falklands remains. Democratic Argentina's president, Cristina Kirchner, has taken a tough stance on the Falklands issue. Yet she, like so many in South America, seem to have difficulty understanding a basic concept: self determination. The simple fact is that the Falkland islanders don't want to be Argentinian citizens. And they never will as long as politicians like Kirchner regard them as pawns in their political games.

Britain may have been foolish to provoke south American sensitivities by sending Prince William on a tour of duty in the Falklands. But after the events of 1982, we won't sell out the interests of the Falkland islanders. If anyone in Argentina feels upset about it, they should reflect on the fact that Britain was about to agree a settlement before its brutal junta made its fatal mistake 30 years ago. 

Osborne's budget: so wrong, so wrong

Yet another year's budget proves the pointlessness of this annual exercise in politics over prudence.

This year's edition cut the 50% top rate of income tax. but inevitably the Chancellor had to show that he wasn't rewarding the rich. So he took back the rich people's budget dividend with the other hand. Or dd he?

I was against Labour's imposition of the 50% rate. It seemed wrong to take half of anyone's income in tax. Far better to have a universal rate of income tax, and make it the main way of raising money for public services. (By contrast, regressive VAT is little short of evil, as it steals from the poor and benefits the rich.) 

But at a time when the coalition government is making the plight of the poor worse with its aggressive spending cuts it seems criminal to reward the rich. But what would you expect from a cabinet of millionaires?

The theatre of the annual budget is hugely overplayed. Back in 2007, Gordon Brown's cut in the basic tax won the plaudits. I couldn't understand how no one had noticed that the cut had been bought by axing Brown's own 10% tax rate, punishing the poor. I pointed this out in an Ertblog post - Gordon Brown's trick or treat budget. But the political storm only battered Brown a year later. 

We'll see how George Osborne fares in the months to come. 

Digital victim: Encyclopaedia Britannica ends print editions

The digital revolution has claimed another victim. Encyclopaedia Britannia will no longer be printed. The world's most famous (if you exclude Wikipedia) encyclopaedia will live on in digital form. 

The company behind Britannica pointed out in a news release that it had pioneered digital knowledge, creating its first digital version in 1981 and its first internet encyclopaedia in 1994. Encyclopedia (note US spelling) Britannica company president Jorge Cauze explained: “We’re digital, we’re mobile, and we’re social...We’re a very different company from 20 or 30 years ago." In other words, Britannica's print demise is not the final volume. 

Many will name Wikipedia as the cause of death of Britannica's print edition. Yet Wired's Tim Carmody names another suspect: Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia. He points out that millions bought the Microsoft reference work on CD and later DVD with their first computers. The tech giant delibarately priced the product cheaply to encourage families to buy home PCs in the 1990s. (I remember buying a couple of editions for £20 or less.) Expedia buyers were very unlikely to splash out £1,000 or more on Britannica.

This strikes me as a compelling argument. I'm not so convinced by Carmody's argument that Britannica was largely a vanity purchase. As a book-loving 18 year old, I was very envious when my older sister bought a Britannica set, along with a number of Britannica yearbooks. Britannica seemed like a wise and kind investment by parents keen to help their children learn about their world. 

Wrting this post has reminded me that I was once the proud owner of a set of Children's Britannica. I loved browsing those volumes - for study and for interest. Years later, I bought occasional editions of Pears' Cyclopaedia, but only really got back into the idea of an encyclopaedia when Encarta came along. 

Ironically, Encarta died three years before Britannica's print edition.  

Britannica's blog rightly said that change is OK. After all, organisations need to adapt if they're to survive. I'm not the right person to say if ditching print is the right move for Encyclopaedia Britannica. (But I'm not impressed by the blog's use of that awful cliched way of emphasising a point: "Every. Single. Day." That's not how you prove authority in a digital age.) 

I can't wait to hear whether Britannia has boosted interest in its iPad and iPhone editions since its announcement. This month's bold move must have been the biggest interest in Britannia for years. It's time to reap the rewards. 

 

A spring day by the river, Richmond

Misty morning: the Thames, Richmond, Surrey, 8.50am

I love working close to the River Thames in Richmond. Especially on a day like today, when the river alters its appearance faster than a quick change artist. 

As I approached the office, I just had to take a photo of the moody, misty vew of Richmond Bridge. I knew that the mist would soon give way to a glorious spring day. So it proved, and I went back at lunchtime to take a contrasting shot from the same place (below). 

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But the river had a further surprise. As I started my drive home, Water Lane and Riverside were flooded by the high tide, so I quickly reversed - and took another couple of photos!

One last image. I was struck my the fine features of this Great War soldier, carved in stone on Richmond's war memorial in front of the office. That stony sentinel has seen countless tides in the last 90 years!

Poppy day pride - and prejudice

Above: my father and uncle in uniform during the second world war

I wore my poppy with pride today, as Britain marked Remembrance Day. 

On Friday, the 93rd anniversary of Armistice Day (11.11.11), I left my office in Richmond to walk to the Poppy Factory, the place where remembrance poppies are made for people in Britain and many other Commonwealth countries. The modern entrance stood in stark contrast to the original building, built soon after the end of the Great War.

Above: Richmond's Poppy Factory

The last veterans of the Great War have passed away in recent years. Yet there are still some very old people alive who lost a father in that terrible conflict. The Guardian yesterday interviewed several, in a very moving feature. As Donald Overall, 98, said, "I'm an old man, I am supposed to be tough. I thought I was hard but I'm not. He's my dad and I miss him." The killing fields of Flanders exert a powerful emotional pull down the years. 

My grandmother (born 1891) and her siblings lived through terrible times. The two world wars left millions dead and injured, while economic depression and recession blighted many other lives. How lucky we are by contrast. 

The poppy appeal is a simple call to commemorate the dead of the great and small wars alike, while helping today's veterans. Yet my father, Bob Skinner, who served in the army during the second world war, is uneasy at the way this quiet tradition is becoming a compulsory exercise in sentimentality. He asks whether BBC newsreaders would be allowed to go on screen without a poppy. Political correctness has taken over. Bob hasn't worn a poppy for several years. 

I'm also uneasy. I was appalled by the undignified argument between England's Football Association and FIFA over whether players could wear a poppy on their shirts during a game. FIFA's view that it was a political symbol was as crass as the FA's totally inappropriate aggressive stance. It's significant that these arguments are raging now, over 70 years after the end of the second world war, and not in the immediate aftermath of those great wars. This is the era of Daily Mail intolerance of alternative opinions - especially ones that are critical of the military. Back in 1921, when the first poppy appeal took place, no one would think to glorify war. The object was to mourn, to commemorate and to help survivors. Almost a century later, Britain is much less likely to criticise its warriors, their leaders or the decision to send them to war. As a result, we've been involved in wars that have nothing to do with us for well over a decade. 

 

 

RAF Lyneham's Hercules farewell

Above: farewell to RAF Lyneham from the iconic Hercules. Photo: Siân Wildeboer

The skies above Wiltshire lost an icon on Friday with the departure of RAF Lyneham's famous Hercules aircraft. The huge transport aircraft have been transferred to RAF Brize Norton, ahead of Lyneham's closure. The above shot, taken by my niece Siân during Friday's flypast, captures perfectly the 45 year relationship between Wiltshire and the Herc. 

Lyneham has played an important role in Britain's defences, especially in times of crisis. I remember the constant Hercules flights over Wootton Bassett during the Falklands war, and the base has played a similar role in later conflicts. When I lived in Wiltshire in the 1990s, the sight of a Herc on final approach added interest to many long waits on Swindon station. There was always something special about the aircraft - an echo of Britain's earlier four-engine propellor 'heavies'. Back in the 1970s, I enjoyed making the Airfix kit of the Herc, complete with Land Rover cargo and moving loading ramp!  

Winston Churchill himself flew from RAF Lyneham during the war in 1943, in an unheated converted Liberator bomber, bound for Cairo and Moscow in 1943. When he returned to Lyneham, his train was waiting at Dauntsey to take him back to London. His staff had arranged for the PM to be served breakfast on train, but this was hurriedly changed to dinner after WSC's flight from Gibraltar left much earlier than expected!

 

 

In praise of the A303, England's holiday highway

Above: far better than a service station: Crown & Victoria, Tintinhull, Somerset

We had a magical drive home from our Devon holiday on Saturday afternoon. The traffic had vanished by the time we set off from the beach at Blackpool Sands near Dartmouth. The sun was out, highlighting the under-stated beauty of Southern England.

We took the A303, which is normally a slow road, with its mixture of dual carriageway and twisting, hilly single carriageway sections. The lack of traffic made it a wonderful choice, as its quirky character made a great change from the M5 and M4. Best of all, we were able to admire the sublime majesty of Stonehenge without the usual long queues.

We stopped for a drink at one of our favourite pubs, the Crown & Victoria in Tintinhull, a Somerset village just off the highway. It was a glorious evening and Owen enjoyed his picnic in the garden. (We were too early for the pub's food service.) It set us up for an equally enjoyable final leg of the drive - and even the M25 behaved itself.

Obama in Britain: let's stop talking of special relationship

An essential relationship? Photo © Prime Minister's Office

President Barack Obama's visit to Britain has been a huge success. We like America's 44th president. We're touched by his place in history as the first black president. And we cheered his election, as I blogged at the time. So the fact Obama has stolen hearts is no surprise. 

But I was dreadling the visit, in a small way, as I knew it would prompt a wave of comments about whether Britain and America shared a 'special relationship'. This is an obsession of politicians and the media. Yet no one in the bars of London, Cardiff or Edinburgh would give it a moment's thought. If they did, they'd surely point out that the UK and US have lots of relationships with lots of countries. And then get back to talking about Ryan Giggs.

Yet The Times carried an Obama and Cameron article lauding the essential relationship. 

It's true that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt forged a very close relationship during our darkest days, the second world war. But the war leaders weren't in total harmony: FDR was soon tormented by WSC's wilder ideas, and Churchill was rightly frustrated and frightened by FDR's complacency about Soviet designs on eastern Europe. 

And all this talk of a special relationship encourages the two countries' addiction to military adventures, as the Guardian's Simon Jenkins comments today. At a time when the BBC's World Service (not to mention all our public services) has had its spending slashed, David Cameron miraculously found £1 billion to burn on a war in Libya that has absolutely nothing to do with Britain. Yet a BBC reporter said in all seriousness that America thinks Britain should spend more on 'defence'. 

Britain admires America and its president. But neither country has any reason to spin an idea of a mythical special relationship.