Discover what the world looked like on Monday, 15 February 1971 on Takemeback.to. Which News were making the headlines? Which were the top Hits and the most popular. February 1. 97. 1, Monday, What happened on. The Oregon Trail. Platform: Android; Apple II, i. OS, Macintosh; Black. Berry; Commodore 6. DOS; Facebook; Java ME; Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3. DS, Wii; Windows, Mobile, Phone 7. Genre: Simulation. Why does the 1. 97. Of all post- war decades, the 1. Britain were better off than ever, writes historian Dominic Sandbrook. The 1. 95. 0s are symbolised by the television and the washing machine, which transformed the lives of so many families. We misremember the 1. Mini, which was actually invented in 1. Pill, which most women never took. This bill provides that three of our national holidays will be celebrated on Monday. The following are legal public holidays: New Year. We remember the 1. Filofax and the home computer. But in the popular imagination the 1. Edward Heath, the decade of the donkey jacket, the age of the Austin Allegro. When they flash up on our screens, we see lurid wallpaper, silly hairstyles and burly men warming their hands around braziers. Who would ever want to commemorate all that? In many ways this habit of giving decades different historical personalities is a bit of a gimmick, a quirk of the calendar, that distorts the way we remember the recent past. Look at any photograph from the mid- 1. Footage of picket- line confrontations often shows strikers wearing suits and ties, as though dressing for a family wedding. The teenagers dancing on Top of the Pops are usually wearing yesterday's fashions, topped off with a pair of National Health glasses. Even the burly policemen standing protectively around Margaret Thatcher as she walked into Downing Street in May 1. Politics of the 1. Following the miners' strike against its incomes policy Edward Heath's. Conservative government loses the 1. By spring of 1. 97.
In 1. 97. 8 in an effort to tackle inflation James Callaghan's. Labour government tries to persuade trade unions to limit pay rises to no more than 5% - the unions refuse and Britain is hit by a wave of strikes. In 1. 97. 9 the Conservatives win a general election and Margaret Thatcher. Britain's first woman prime minister. Read more: Thatcherism and the end of the post- war consensus. But like so many stereotypes, the cliches of the grim 1. These were desperately difficult years for Britain, both politically and economically. In many ways they marked a reckoning for a country that had been too complacent for too long, basking in the sunshine of post- war affluence, and indifferent to the fact that our foreign competitors had not only caught up with us - they were leaving us behind. In 1. 97. 0, the self- made builder's son Edward Heath came to power promising a . Sailor Ted, however, soon ran aground, his ship scuppered by the lethal combination of an energy crisis, a financial crash and a second miners' strike in two years. And though Labour's Harold Wilson got the country back to work, it came at the price of inflation at almost 3. IMF. Perhaps fittingly, the decade ended with another prime minister being humiliated by the unions in the Winter of Discontent, though this time the victim was the veteran Labour bruiser Jim Callaghan. Perhaps never before had the political establishment seemed so impotent and irrelevant - little wonder, then, that for the first time in years, emigrants actually outnumbered immigrants. Image caption. Space hoppers became the toy of choice for many children in the early 1. Even Callaghan himself seemed to have little faith in his native land. It has become a cliche to look back through rose- tinted glasses at the world of Bagpuss, space hoppers and Curly Wurlies - all of which, I should admit, dominate my memories of the decade, because I was born in 1. But in a funny way, those things actually work very well as symbols of the decade, because what they represent is the reality of everyday affluence. The cultural texture of British life probably changed more quickly between 1. The fact that so many children had space hoppers, ludicrous as it may seem, is testament to the fact that even working- class families now had a solid disposable income and could afford toys for their younger members. Even Star Wars, which first went on general release in Britain in early 1. Palitoy figures. The truth is that behind all those terrible economic and political headlines, most ordinary families in 1. Britain were better off than ever. While people shook their heads sorrowfully over the breakfast table, digesting the news of some new IRA bombing or absurdly petty British Leyland strike, their surroundings often told a rather more optimistic story. The lurid furnishings of their new suburban homes, the swanky hostess trolley in the kitchen, the bottles of Blue Nun and Black Tower cooling in the fridge, the brand new colour television in the lounge, the turmeric- coloured Rover SD1 in the drive, even their teenage children's painfully tight flared trousers - all of those things, which are so easy to satirise today, reflected the realities of a brave new world, forged in the crucible of mass abundance. And although we often think of the 1. Swinging Sixties - it makes much more sense to see them as the beginning of a new chapter in the story of modern Britain. For most ordinary people, after all, the 1. The most obvious example is the package holiday abroad, which 3. In 1. 97. 1, British tourists took some four million holidays abroad - which then seemed an awful lot. But by 1. 97. 3 that figure had jumped to nine million and by 1. For even relatively poor, working- class families, holidays no longer meant Blackpool and Bognor but Malta and Majorca. Yes, the TV schedules were still full of casual sexism and astonishing racism, while teenage boys who wore make- up in emulation of Marc Bolan and David Bowie often risked a vigorous kicking. Image caption. David Bowie re- emerged in 1. Ziggy Stardust. But from professional working women to long- haired footballers, from pornography in the corner shop to computers in the office, the cultural texture of British life probably changed more quickly between 1. As late as 1. 97. Wimpy Bars on their own, after midnight, on the grounds that the only women out on their own at that hour must be prostitutes. Yet only eight years after that rule was lifted, Margaret Thatcher was walking into Downing Street as Britain's first woman Prime Minister. There could hardly be a better symbol of change. Of course Mrs Thatcher's election victory is often seen as the decisive watershed in our recent history - the moment when everything was radically transformed, for good or ill. But Mrs Thatcher won in 1. Britain had changed already. As a working woman distrusted by the traditionalists, she was a fitting representative of the changes that had remade Britain in the previous 1. She appealed to a new spirit of self- interested materialism - the same spirit that the Yorkshire miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, of all people, had captured as early as 1. Thatcher, Scargill and Bowie. You could hardly imagine three stranger bedfellows - the grocer's daughter from Grantham, the Marxist miner from Barnsley, the gender- bending rock star from Bromley. But in their different ways, they captured the complicated, contrary spirit of a decade that was richer, more interesting and a lot more important than most of us realise. Dominic Sandbrook's series The 7. BBC Two at 2. 1: 0. BST on Mondays 1. April and 7 May 2. Catch up via BBC i. Player (UK only) at the above link.
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