LOSE YOUR SELF IN 1972
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE…
One movie release sat in sinister command of the box oce and would soon become the highestgrossing lm for its time ever made. Mario Puzo’s maa doorstop The Godfather took only three years to rise from the book’s rst printing to the release of the lm. It picked up Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando, pictured below) and Best Adapted Screenplay. The sequel followed in 1974 and a whole cache of famously brilliant quotations was immortalised forever.
MINERS’ STRIKES BEGIN
The rst national coal strike for more than 50 years began on 9 January following a lengthy overtime ban. Miners wanted their work’s inherent danger to be reected in a pay rise of up to 35 per cent, which would have added around £9 a week to their wages – well above the neareight per cent that Edward Heath’s struggling Conservative government and the National Coal Board actually wanted to pay. With coal stocks running low, a state of emergency was called on 9 February. A threeday working week was introduced with power cuts of up to nine hours a day and more than a million workers were laid o. A compromise giving the miners an average 21 per cent was eventually reached and the strike was called o on 25 February.
OH MY COD IT’S WAR!
This year saw Britain and Iceland squaring up to each other in a war over… sh. There had been tensions between the two countries since the 1890s over British trawlers shing near Iceland, with the latter gradually extending exclusion zones; the limit reached 50 nautical miles in September 1972. British shermen carried on as before and the Icelandic Coast Guard retaliated by cutting their nets, at which point the Royal Navy intervened.