1976 was my last year of primary and of course therefore the year I started secondary school. What I remember more than the heat that summer was the dry weather. Given my age this crept up on me, although it probably crept up on most of the adults too. I do remember seeing the dry brown fields as we drove past them on car journeys and I remember my parents couldn’t water the garden due to a hosepipe ban. We definitely didn’t have to get our water from standpipes in the street. That I would remember! My mother always said the water in our part of Birmingham came from the Elan Valley in Wales. This is untrue. I recently discovered it comes from Staffordshire. The source must be in limestone country though since its pretty hard. Wherever it came from – we were lucky – it kept coming. We were strongly encouraged to save water and ‘bath with a friend”, less people had showers then. We had a shower, but neither of my grandparents never did. Eventually that summer a rather harmless amiable labour MP called Denis Howell was made minster for drought. He was as I recall spectacularly successful, since relatively soon afterwards it started to pour and he became known as the minister for rain.
The right wing press are right about somethings. In those days you just got on with it. There were no hydration breaks and no one carried bottled water – least of all to school. We had a rather odd supply teacher in my last year of primary and he opened the door and windows to the classroom that led to a lawn between us and the street. The windows were single glazed fitted and in badly fitting cast iron which had distorted over the years and never closed properly – leading to the opposite problem in winter. That side of the school was entirely glass so you overheated with everything closed. The drawback of opening the windows was that we were under Birmingham airports flight path. That’s another thing that’s changed – aircraft noise. In those days they were absolutely deafening. So when the door and windows were open you couldn’t hear yourselves think. Our teacher was constantly ordering the windows opened and closed. As an aside my friend Bob would sneak out of the open door onto the grass when he wasn’t looking. I think he eventually got caught. Possibly what saved us that summer was the large mature trees along the boundary with the road which to an extent protected us from the worst of the sun. We also had lessons outside on the grass.
Not just buildings, but cars were also hot inside. I would imagine very upmarket models had aircon, but the first time I came across it was when we bought a rover 45 in the 2000’s. In those day electric windows were very rare too (although we had them in cars before the Rover). So you laboriously had to wind the windows down. The worst thing was – and I’ve no idea why they hung around so long – the plastic seats. These literally would burn your bare skin in summer and were freezing in winter. I have many happy memories of being stuck to the seats by the sweat on my back. Still you could lean right forward since there were no seatbelts (I have a feeling one of Denis Howell’s later jobs was to introduce them).
We usually went on holiday to France for two weeks of the August holiday. (What happened the rest of the holiday I can’t remember.) This time we went to the Ardeche. This was extremely hot. I’ve no idea if France also had a heatwave. But the Ardeche is a long way south so possibly this was normal. We stayed in a small house high in hills with a large gate and a tiny courtyard. This reminded me somewhat of a castle and I took great pleasure in bolting it every night. My parents slept upstairs in a very hot room and were tortured by mosquitoes. Meanwhile brother and I were downstairs in what was a sort of cellar. This was cooler but had a large gap underneath the back door to the outside. For some reason we had no problem with mossies, but had plenty of scorpions wandering around, including across our sleeping bags. The holiday was spent swimming in lots of rivers including those at the Pot d’Arc and Pont du Gard. I believe this was the holiday we went to a large unheated swimming pool in Nimes. It was packed with people and the water was like a very warm bath. It was actually rather unpleasant and too hot to swim in. My main memory of the summer is when we got home. Our lawn was totally brown. Then Dennis Howell worked his magic and it rained a couple of days later. The grass started to go green overnight, the heatwave was over and it was back to school.
There are some things that I don’t remember, or didn’t happen around us. The first is school closures. My impression was these were rare. My mum was was a teacher and I’m sure her school kept going. Mine certainly did. Another thing that 1976 was famous for was a plague of ladybirds. According to myth these ran out of aphids to eat and clouds of them would start biting people. I don’t recall seeing especially large numbers, or getting bitten. I don’t remember seeing any burst water mains either.
There are however an interesting number of similarities between now and then. There was labour government struggling to solve a multitude of different problems – economic and social. There was also the threat of the far right. What lessons can we take away from 1976?
The first is it wasn’t as bad as recent heatwaves since was dry heat. The drought came first. Dry heat is a lot easier to deal with than the wet heat that we’ve had more recently. In this regard as I said it above clearly crept up on people until suddenly there was a crisis and there was a lack of water.
Are we better prepared? Overall I’m not sure we are really. My old school has double glazed windows and less glass, but I suspect still overheats. The trees I remember have been removed. Our buildings generally still have a tendency to be cold in winter and hot in summer. Perhaps since we don’t suffer at the moment from extremes of hot and cold and our weather is very changeable we’ve been blasé about all this. I’ve been working on improving my house to tackle both (see blog posts passim).
After the drought was over the government started building a national water grid, but abandoned the project due to a lack of money. This idea is still raised now and again, but apart from the cost of construction and the arguments over whose water goes where, would take phenomenal amounts of energy. My understanding following 1976, Edinburgh’s council built a number of reservoirs in the Pentland hills. In 1995 we had sixth months without rain. At the end of this there was enough water to last years, whilst Glasgow had 6 weeks left (they were selling water to the Spanish). In England if not so much Scotland and Wales the losses from leaking pipes are huge and our water use is amongst the highest in Europe. Denmark uses about half of what we do.
I think the rosy eyed nostalgia in the right wing press comes from the fact that the people writing the articles were children at the time. There is tendency to remember the weather in your childhood fondly. My overall impressions of 1976 are positive. But then I don’t remember the shortages of food in the shops, the subsequent inflation, we didn’t suffer the indignity of queuing at standpipes in the streets, nor was I bitten by a ladybird.
