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. 

In praise of the wonderful RAF Museum, London

Above: Owen and the immortal Hawker Hurricane, RAF Museum

Karen was off Christmas shopping yesterday, so Owen and I went to the RAF Museum at Hendon, London.

What a wonderful place. Owen's too young to appreciate the significance of the RAF's role in saving Britain 70 years ago, but he loved the aircraft - and the hands-on gallery that explains the wonder of flight.

He was intrigued by the film about the famous bouncing bomb that the valiant dambuster squadron unleashed against Nazi Germany in 1943. What he doesn't know is that his grandmother regularly saw dambuster leader Guy Gibson in her hometown of Penarth during the war: Gibson's wife came from the seaside town.

Yet I was slightly uncomfortable as we had a snack in sight of the peerless Avro Lancaster bomber. Yes, I share the regret of many that the enormous sacrifice of Bomber Command crews was brushed under the carpet after peace came in 1945. (Back in 1942, the nation was grateful that the RAF was alone in taking the fight to Nazi Germany. Three years later, the politicians were more queazy about the resultant death and destruction.) But as we sat underneath the gun turret, I knew that I'd want Owen to understand that war is something to avoid rather than glorify.

Here's my video of our day at the RAF Museum.

 

 

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. 

 

 

Goodbye to the Harrier

This week marked the final operational flight of the Harrier, Britain's extraordinary jump jet. The coalition government's defence cuts have consigned this iconic jet to history.

Growing up in the Seventies, I was amazed by the Harrier. It showed that Britain could still produce stunning technology. But it was the 1982 Falklands war that gave the aircraft a place in the nation's hearts. As I wrote in my blogpost marking the 25th anniversary of the Falklands war:

"The sight of Harrier jump jets screaming into the mist captured the imagination of the British people. We weren't foolish enough to think this was a re-run of 1940 - Britain would have survived defeat, although our pride would have suffered badly - but the Harrier briefly became a latter-day Spitfire in the nation's heart."

The Harriers played a magnificent role in supporting the British campaign to recapture the Falklands, acting as fighter and ground attack aircraft. They scored 22 victories, and only two were lost (one with the loss of a relative of a school friend of mine). 

The Falklands war was one of the most bizarre episodes in modern British history. Without the Harrier, Britain would probably have lost the conflict. 

 

Norton Fitzwarren: lightning can strike twice

Some places evoke memories of tragedy. We remember Hungerford for the 1987 massacre, and Aberfan for the 1966 disaster. 

On Britain's railways, the small village of Norton Fitzwarren near Taunton has similar associations. The Great Western Railway's mainline to the west runs through the village. The GWR had the proudest safety record in Britain, and went 50 years from 1890 to 1940 without a serious accident - an extraordinary achievement, reflecting the GWR's tireless efforts to prevent accidents. Yet the two disasters bracketing that period both happened at Norton Fitzwarren. 

The 1940 Norton Fitzwarren disaster struck 70 years ago today, during the darkest days of the war. It's hard to imagine a set of circumstances more likely to cause a disaster than those of 3 November 1940. The night was wet and windy. Train driver Percy Stacey had recently been bombed out of his home in London as the capital endured continual night bombing. Driver Stacey and fireman Seabridge took over express locomotive King George VI at 8.25pm on that wet and windy wartime night, to work the 9.50pm express from Paddington to Penzance. They were due to work it as far as Plymouth.

The train was already running over an hour late when it arrived at Taunton at 3.30am, as a result of an air raid on Bristol, which held the train in the city for more than an hour. We can barely imagine the impact this would have had on driver Stacey, who had lost his home in an air raid in London just days earlier. But he pressed on.

The stage was set for tragedy. Stacey would have expected his train to have a clear run on the main line. But because of the delays, the signalman at Taunton decided to let a newspaper train run non stop on the main line, leaving Stacey's train to continue on the relief line, which ended at Norton Fitzwarren. Stacey mistook the green lights of the main line signals for those applying to his train. As Stacey's train approached the end of the relief line, the newspaper train overtook it on the main line. Disaster was inevitable. 

At 3.48am on that dark November morning, the 89 ton King Edward VI jumped over a ditch and fell on its side. The overtaking newspaper train was showered with ballast thrown up by the crashing train. Tragically, fireman Seabridge and 26 passengers were killed. 

Driver Stacey escaped from the wreckage and struggled through the icy waters of the neighbouring flooded field to raise the alarm. Can you imagine how he must have felt? He would have been desperately tired, cold and wet. He'd have wondered whether his family was safe after another night's bombing. But more immediately, he'd have been shocked to the core by the fact his train had been wrecked, leaving him wondering what he had done. 

The irony of the disaster was that the GRW's pioneering safety measures should have prevented it. Over 30 years earlier, the company had invented 'automatic train control' (ATC), which automatically applied the brakes if a driver missed a 'distant' warning signal. The driver retained the ability to dismiss the ATC warning and the resulting brake application. At Norton Fitzwarren, driver Stacey did just that, which meant the ATC could not prevent tragedy. 

Norton Fitzwarren 1940 was a rare blot on the GWR's safety copybook in extraordinary circumstances. For 50 years, countless reports on railway disasters urged companies to follow the GWR's example and adopt ATC. It took the 1952 Harrow and Wealdstone catastrophe in which 112 people died before British Railways adopted a national ATC system, called AWS. But the GWR system survived until the early 1980s on parts of the old railway's network. The Great Western wasn't perfect, but its commitment to safety remains one of its greatest, proudest legacies. 

You can read the official Ministry of Transport inquiry report into the 1940 disaster by Lieutenant Colonel Mount here. I also recommend AR Kingdom's excellent account in The Railway Accident at Norton Fitzwarren, 1940, by ARK Publications (ISBN 1 873029 10 1).

 

A good day's work: the end of the death penalty

Forty years ago today, the House of Lords voted for the permanent abolition of the death penalty in Great Britain, following a vote by the lower house two days earlier. The decision marked a victory for campaigners such as Ludovic Kennedy, Sydney Silverman and Harold Evans, who had been appalled by the judicial killings of a series of innocent men, most famously Timothy Evans. 

Evans was an illiterate bakery van driver who as hanged in 1950 for the murder of his baby daughter. Harry Evans has recently recounted in his book My Paper Chase the appalling story of how his namesake was wrongly convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit. As Evans says, the sequel to Timothy's killing was as awful as the crime itself. Timothy Evans' landlord John Christie was convicted and hanged three years after Evans after confessing to killing Evans' wife and other women in the same house - the notorious 10 Rillington Place. Still the authorities refused to admit any doubts about Evans' judicial killing. The British establishment and judiciary refused to accept that it could have hanged an innocent man, even as the compelling evidence to the contrary was piling up. Yet the logic of their view was that there had to be two men independently strangling in the same way, in the same small house, with the same fingerprints - a chance of four billion to one. 

The campaigners finally won a degree of justice for Timothy Evans with a free pardon in 1966. By then, the death penalty had been suspended in Great Britain. Three years later came the end for good. (Note: Northern Ireland didn't follow suit until the 1970s, and technically the whole of the UK retained capital punishment until 1998 for a small number of crimes such as treason. But there was no prospect of those powers ever being used.) 

There are still those who call for the return of the death penalty. But for any right-minded person, the idea of the state killing anyone in cold blood is appalling. How can you condemn murder but then demand the right to kill someone yourself? And more seriously, if murder is a dreadful crime, how more chilling is the idea of the state killing innocent people? As the Evans case showed, the very finality of capital punishment made the state utterly refuse to contemplate that it might have made a deadly mistake. One of those stone-walling home secretaries described the idea as a fantasy. 

There have been a string of miscarriages of justice since 1969, including the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. The victims spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit. But at least they weren't killed by the state, thanks to the efforts of Kennedy, Evans and Silverman. 

Remembering Sam Salt, Falklands war hero

The news of the death of Rear Admiral Sam Salt recalls memories of one of the most dramatic weeks in recent British history. In May 1982, Salt had the misfortune to be the captain of the first British warship to be lost in action since the second world war. The loss of HMS Sheffield during the Falklands war stunned the nation, as I described in my blog post, the Falklands war 25 years on, in 2007. 

Salt's distress at the loss of Sheffield - and 20 of its crew - was plain for all to see. Yet his personal history gave him the strength to recover. He was just six months old when his father died serving on a Royal Navy submarine during the 1939-45 war. His mother later married another naval officer.

Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile fired from a Argentinian Super Etendard aircraft. It was the first time most people had heard of the Exocet, yet the expression 'faster than an Exocet' soon entered the language. Whenever I hear my wife use it, my mind goes back to the night we heard that Sam Salt's ship had been lost.

NB: I have updated this post to correct a reference to 'the 1939-56 war'. No idea where that howler came from! But my mother, who was a wartime schoolgirl, has a certificate  from the Red Cross that refers to the 1939-46 war...

In remembrance

It's a sobering thought that tomorrow is the very first Armistice Day without a single survivor of the Great War alive in Britain. 

The last link with that brutal conflict has been lost. The collective memory of millions of lost and shattered lives has passed into history. 

Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday were always dignified events, as a nation honoured the sacrifices of its sons and daughters in two world wars, and in the many smaller conflicts since 1945. Controversy and politics were forgotten. Almost every family in the land identified with events at the Cenotaph in London and at ceremonies throughout the land - they had all suffered loss or injury on foreign fields, or in air raids. In our case, my grandfathers and great uncles endured the hell of the Western Front. The photos above of my grandfather Frank and great uncle Bert were typical of so many taken in photographers' studios between 1914 and 1918. You can sense the pride and fear these young men experienced before being sent to the trenches in France. They both survived the trenches, but Bert tragically died in the flu epidemic of 1918. 

How bitterly ironic that as we mourn the last, modest heroes of the Great War, the very idea of remembrance should become polemicised, as the media grubbily seek to mock and condemn people for not wearing a poppy. As my father - a veteran of the Second World War - points out, how foolish is the idea that a footballer from Senegal should be expected to wear a poppy on his shirt as he takes the field. And how monstrous that newspapers should seek to stamp on our freedom to choose whether to wear the symbol of sacrifices made in the fight for freedom. 

But we shouldn't be surprised. The Sun newspaper reached a low even by its pitiful standard in its exploitation of a grieving mother of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan. I'm no fan of Gordon Brown, but I believe he showed his human side in sending a hand-written letter to Jamie Janes's mother. For the Sun - the paper that is still loathed in Liverpool for its contemptible behaviour over the Hillsborough tragedy - to use this as part of its campaign to oust Brown is beneath contempt. The decline of newspapers may be a very good thing if the press no longer has power without responsibility - in the words of inter-war prime minister Stanley Baldwin.