The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Abba, Lord Lucan and IRA bombs
How was 1974 for you? Nick Rennison sets off on a nostalgic romp through a wildly tumultuous year
1974: SCENES FROM A YEAR OF CRISIS by Nick Rennison 256pp, Oldcastle, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £6.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
How was it for you, 1974? Scrolling back through half a century, I landed on my second year at university. I was busily losing the last of my innocence, “sexuality” was the new buzzword and we all earnestly regarded Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook as gospel. Our politics were noisy and sentimentally Leftist, but well-intentioned. Hair was generally shaggy and I think that by today’s standards we were a bit dirty and smelly, the whiff of Players No 6 (“numbies”) being pervasive. The coffee we drank in greasy spoon cafés – scarcely any other existed – was instant and disgusting, the ubiquitous cheese and tomato sandwiches were damp and stale, even if supermarket food had suddenly improved, with the likes of avocados and nectarines suddenly available, the fruits of our newly acquired EEC membership.
As for culture, The Godfather Part II and Chinatown were the year’s two indisputable movie masterpieces. I can also remember seeing John Gielgud as Prospero at the Old Vic (he kept getting his lines muddled) and sitting in the gods at Covent Garden for the première of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Kids listened to Abba and Slade; Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and Roxy Music satisfied more grown-up tastes. Television was rubbish: Monty Python petered out and we were left with the start of The Rockford Files and the end of Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who. So not, overall, a great heroic moment: the sheen on the liberations of the ’60s had worn off and left a stagnant miasma – as Auden wrote of the ’30s, the ’70s seem “a low, dishonest decade”.
Nick Rennison thinks that 1974 exemplifies the period: he calls it “a year of crisis”, but what year isn’t? Still, there was plenty happening, as Rennison shows in 1974: Scenes from a Year of Crisis. On the world stage, Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate, Georges Pompidou died in office, Helmut Schmidt succeeded Willy Brandt, and Portugal bloodlessly turned democratic. In Britain, Harold Wilson won two elections for Labour and inflation ran rampant at 16 per cent. It’s as disturbing to be reminded of the IRA’s murderous bombs (Westminster Hall, Tower of London, pubs in Birmingham and Guildford among them) as it is to read of the miscarriages of justice that ensued. I can remember almost nothing of the privations of the three-day week that lasted through the winter – were universities exempt?
Mental instability seems to have loomed large, underlying the theft of Vermeer’s The Guitar Player from Kenwood, an attempt to kidnap Princess Anne, and the drama of Patty Hearst’s conversion to the revolutionary cause in a classic instance of the Stockholm Syndrome. Judith Ward claimed responsibility for a bomb on the M62, but all the evidence suggested she was nothing but “a female Walter Mitty”; John Stonehouse faked his own death and then refused to resign from parliament when his fraud was uncovered; the mystery surrounding Lord Lucan’s madness has never been resolved. Most chilling of all is the tale of Christine Chubbuck, the American talk show
hostess who shot herself on screen.
In sport, Manchester United was relegated to the Second Division, West Germany defeated the Netherlands to win the World Cup, Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman in Zaire, and sweethearts Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors took both the singles’ trophies at Wimbledon. The fast bowling of Australia’s Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson stunned England during the Ashes in Australia. A vogue for streaking naked at high-profile events provided light relief.
Phenomena almost unnoticed at the time would subsequently have enormous consequences: it was in 1974 that Stephen King published his first novel, that Britain’s first
branch of McDonald’s opened in Woolwich, and that a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum inaugurated the new technology of the barcode in a supermarket in Ohio. With more fanfare, Volkswagen rolled the first Golf off the assembly line. Fifty years later, all of them are still going strong.
Rennison proves a chatty and amiable guide through all this and more. He’s not aiming at serious history – he hasn’t dug deep into the sources, his bibliography is only three pages long, and he hasn’t interviewed any of the players or witnesses from the time. But for survivors such as me, he offers an enjoyable and highly evocative ramble down memory lane.