Winning at tennis and Yorkie bars for 14p. The ’70s were not so bad!

SHE is a lady of intense interests, from horses and dogs to the niceties of dress and uniform and juicy political gossip. Yet the Queen has no interest in tennis – and would sooner watch paint dry.

But in her Silver Jubilee year of 1977 there was a serious prospect of a British tennis champion and Her Majesty, in pink woollen coat-dress and turban hat, took her place in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, where Virginia Wade duly did her bit for Queen and country and saw off the Dutch player Betty Stove to lift the Venus Rosewater Dish.

‘I’m in the final for the first time,’ Miss Wade remembers thinking. ‘The Queen is watching. Everybody is watching. I’m going to win this thing if I have to kill myself to do it…’

Now 40 years later, Britain may have another female Wimbledon champion if Johanna Konta sees off Venus Williams this afternoon. Miss Konta has won three of their five encounters, is 11 years younger and will have a deliriously baying home crowd behind her, so she has every prospect of victory.

Meanwhile, we may gaze back over these four decades to a country and a way of life that now seem very different, even quaint. If you look at Wimbledon footage of the era, most of the female stars are attired in coy mini-dresses by Teddy Tinling.

Practically everyone played with wooden rackets. There were polite little powder-puff serves and endless rallies, and nobody shrieked or grunted. It all now seems very slow.

Female tennis players were then ‘ladies’ – commentators such as Dan Maskell or John Barrett might call them ‘girls’. And it would be 1985 before a woman (Miss Wade, of course) was given a seat on the All England Club’s committee.

And at the time of winning Wimbledon, Miss Wade was controversial – the volatile archdeacon’s daughter of strangled accent who played with what many felt was unbecoming aggression, wearing extraordinary frilly knickers that looked like smashed Venetian blinds. At least she wasn’t Billie Jean King who dared, as one appalled observer put it, ‘to charge all around the court exactly like a man’.

AFTER Miss Wade defeated Miss Stove, in contrast to our era when sponsors’ names appear on everyone and everything, she donned a wholly unremarkable pink cardigan without a logo in sight.

We were then a far less commercial country. Almost everything of importance was nationalised – gas, water, electricity, British Airways, the monopoly that was British Telecom. The state even owned the Pickfords removal firm and, less happily, British Leyland, legendary for its strife and strikes and the appalling Austin Allegro.

In 1977 we had a hung Parliament, too, and James Callaghan’s Labour administration was kept afloat only by the ‘Lib-Lab Pact’ with David Steel – while the Scottish Nationalists, then top of the polls in Scotland and desperate for an election, made their fury clear.

Callaghan was an avuncular chap in headmasterly glasses, who enjoyed his little Sussex farm at the weekends and would on occasion wander around No10 singing hymns. But he sat well with what was then a much dressier, primmer country, where hats were still de rigueur for church and many more of us went to it.

Well into the 1970s, women undergoing teacher training at Jordanhill College of Education were not allowed to wear trousers and Scotland’s schools had changed little since the Second World War – with rigorous uniform, much learning by rote, morning prayers and, of course, the sting of corporal punishment.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter became US President. The first Apple computers went on sale, along with such marvels as the pocket calculator and the digital watch. France staged its last execution – by guillotine. And Scotland qualified for the World Cup finals, all the sweeter as England didn’t.

At playtime, schoolchildren chomped the new Yorkie bar, price 14p. Petrol sold for 70p a gallon. The skate-boarding craze hit Britain. Star Wars, with its unprecedented special effects, took cinemas by storm, while Saturday Night Fever made John Travolta a global sex symbol.

Punk rock reached its apex in 1977. The charts were dominated by the likes of The Ramones, The Clash, The Stranglers and Elvis Costello – though there were also The Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder and a creepy new hit from The Eagles, called Hotel California.

Television featured such gentle comedy as Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Tom Baker’s Doctor Who found a new companion, Leela, clad only in scanty leather – she was, a BBC executive said frankly, ‘really there for the dads’.

Scotland humiliated England 2-1 at Wembley and a great many jolly youths in tartan flares and big hair broke the goal posts.

Meanwhile the Grim Reaper had a bumper haul of celebrities in 1977. The dead included Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford, Anthony Eden, Groucho Marx, Marc Bolan, Maria Callas, Vladimir Nabokov and – most shockingly – Elvis Presley, still only 42.

PEOPLE now tend to talk of the 1970s as if it were a dark age of industrial unrest, economic woe, weak governments, tyrannical trade unions and interminable strikes. Yet, as Andrew Marr pointed out in his 2010 biography of the Queen, it was a very good decade for ordinary British people. Wages rose steadily, while unemployment was low.

Public life in many respects was more civil. There was robust debate but far more respect for freedom of speech than there is now when, as Tim Farron can attest, there is frightening pressure on even our freedom to think.

The new threat of terrorism – from the IRA – was handled far more proportionately and calmly than it is now, and there was still a general regard for decency. We still remember the Sex Pistols but few now recall how their foul-mouthed rant on Thames Television, cynically egged on by host Bill Grundy, led to his suspension and ended his career.

The 1970s also saw a striking change in attitudes, largely for the better. By 1980, racism was generally deplored, Catholics were no longer barred from the highest offices of state and advertisers were growing far more careful about how they portrayed women. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Scotland and a determined campaign had begun to ban the belt from our schools.

The 1970s saw the birth of modern environmentalism, the first effective conservation campaigns and, after decades of extolling the novel, the industrial and the plasticky, a new interest in the countryside, traditional crafts and growing your own food, as satirised by TV’s The Good Life.

We cannot return to 1977, nor could Miss Konta take us there even if she triumphs. But it is good to be reminded of that distant, sunny summer and its very British humour.

Also in the Royal Box that Wimbledon day was actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov, who would recall: ‘At the moment of the match point, I remember looking across at the Queen – and Her Majesty was utterly engrossed in a copy of Horse and Hound.’