1970s History |
Accommodation, Demolition, Council Flats, Squats, Racism, Feminism, Notting Hill Carnival, Hare Krishna, Camden Lock
|
The 1970s era is known for being a time of cultural and political change, racism, women's rights, IRA bomb threats and widespread trade union strikes. Hare Krishna an Indian religious group emerged at that time.
British Women’s Liberation Movement (BWLM) consider that the year 1970 marked the start of the movement which was influenced by and took place within a context of diverse movements that had emerged in the 1960s in Britain, parts of Europe and also in the United States (Student Revolution, Sexual Revolution, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Civil Rights Movement, Hippie Movement, Gay Rights). quoted from Florence Binard Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité
British Women’s Liberation Movement (BWLM) consider that the year 1970 marked the start of the movement which was influenced by and took place within a context of diverse movements that had emerged in the 1960s in Britain, parts of Europe and also in the United States (Student Revolution, Sexual Revolution, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Civil Rights Movement, Hippie Movement, Gay Rights). quoted from Florence Binard Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité
The 1970s: London and the Three-day weekThe recession of the mid 1970s…..(Info taken from) David Rudlin
When not blacked out by power cuts the television was full of stories about strikes and trade union militancy. The recession had been triggered by the 1973 Oil Crisis and the miners strike later the same year. In January 1974 the Conservative Government imposed a state of emergency. Very soon we were in the three-day week and the country was plunged into an uncertain world of power cuts and strikes. The British economy – already branded the ‘sick man of Europe’ – was struggling under the burden of 20% inflation, unemployment of more than a million and a huge national deficit. 1974 saw two elections, the first of which resulted in a hung Parliament and the second a majority of three for Labour under Harold Wilson. |
The Fool had a stall at Camden Lock Market on Saturdays and Sundays. We were there soon after the market had opened.
The 1970s: London and the Three-day week (Info taken from) David Rudlin - However perhaps the best example of a creative quarter to emerge from the dark days of the mid 1970s is Camden Lock. Like Brighton this was the ‘victim’ of a proposed road scheme. A 27 year old called Eric Reynolds said ‘there was an explosion of arts and crafts in the Sixties and Seventies, but there were few places for people to sell their wares. I walked round London looking for an open space and came across this yard. In the week, it was a printers’ delivery yard, we got a short lease and on Saturday, March 4, 1974, we opened. ....Then Sunday trading became legal, so the market opened on Sundays as well.’ |
WOMEN - attitudes - power
Forty years after gaining the right to vote on an equal footing with men, British women felt that equality between the sexes was still a long way off. Mentalities were patriarchal and, based on retrograde values, women’s freedoms were restricted. The dominant view was that women’s ‘natural’ role was to care for children at home, that men were the breadwinners, and that money earnt by women was pin money.
Women and The Pill 1961- The Guardian
The contraceptive pill is often described as one of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century. Inextricably linked to the swinging 60s, free love and women's liberation, the pill, a combination of the hormones oestrogen and progestin suppresses women’s fertility. It was introduced in the UK on the NHS in 1961 for married women only - this lasted until 1967. The impact was revolutionary for women and men. From Motherwell by Deborah Orr (Page 184). "Each year Miss World competition was sacred enough almost to feel like a national holiday. The demonstration against it by 'women’s libbers' in 1970 had been disgraceful. No laughing matter. Elsewhere the women-driver jokes the wife jokes the mother-in-law jokes and the general women-are-thick and-a-drag jokes continued to rain down. ""Take my wife .......I wish someone would!""
You weren’t a sport if you didn’t laugh with it. Women were a joke, after all". |
The contraceptive pill was launched in 1961. The pill suppresses women’s fertility using the hormones progestogen or oestrogen (or both). In 1961 it was available to married women only, but availability was extended in 1967.
British Library Women - Feminism - Joan Bakewell - The arrival of The Equal Pay Act seemed hardly to make a ripple in the BBC: I tried out feminism on the BBC. “Might a woman one day read the news?” I asked of the head of news. “Absolutely not,” I was told.
But the changing climate of the 70s gave me courage in my private life. I knew that women were taking charge of their own lives. My mother had always been a housewife and bore the disappointments of a frustrated intelligence. I was determined to avoid that. I had growing confidence in my own abilities and by the 70s I was earning enough to stand on my own two feet. I made what was then a momentous decision: I would get divorced. |
RACISM
In the 1970s racism was rife in the UK, prejudice permeated the fabric of many British towns and cities.
1970s Portobello was still mainly very white – white traders, white shopkeepers
"Except that the people around it were not. There was a Caribbean barber’s shop on Portobello Road. But there were no middle-class type businesses. I remember it must have still been very white. I met a man, now in his 80s, who was a butcher in Portobello in the 60s and 70s; he’s from Dominica; he worked for a white man. He said that the guy just suddenly told him to go, he didn’t need him anymore; he’d have to go.
I still think it is quite interesting that, even in the early 90s, it was still predominantly white. There were Asian people in some of the shops but not many people from Afro- Caribbean" Myrna
"Except that the people around it were not. There was a Caribbean barber’s shop on Portobello Road. But there were no middle-class type businesses. I remember it must have still been very white. I met a man, now in his 80s, who was a butcher in Portobello in the 60s and 70s; he’s from Dominica; he worked for a white man. He said that the guy just suddenly told him to go, he didn’t need him anymore; he’d have to go.
I still think it is quite interesting that, even in the early 90s, it was still predominantly white. There were Asian people in some of the shops but not many people from Afro- Caribbean" Myrna
Racism - The Notting Hill Carnival riot helped to usher in a new period of race relations in the UK. Later that year, the Race Relations Act was passed, which made racial discrimination unlawful in employment, training, housing, education and the provision of goods, facilities and services.
Police forces were granted exemption from its conditions, however – and it wasn’t until further riots, most notably in Brixton in 1981, and the ensuing Scarman Report, that a new code for police behaviour was put forward Racism - Donald's story - In 1976, I won a scholarship from Nigeria to come to London, the UK. It was amazing luck. I arrived in England wearing a bright red suit. I lived around Queensway, then Westbourne Park, Portobello area.
When I arrived here people didn’t notice the colour of my Red Suit . They noticed the colour of my skin. Here I am a Black man. In Nigeria I am a man. Here in London it was a shock to me being abused, discriminated or insulted just because you are a Black man. |
Racism - David Olusoga - extract from David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History.
"I grew up amid racism in Britain in the 70s and 80s. I was eight years old when the BBC finally cancelled The Black and White Minstrel Show. I have memories of my mother rushing across our living room to change television channels (in the days before remote controls) to avoid her mixed-race children being confronted by grotesque caricatures of themselves on prime-time television. I was 17 when the last of the touring blackface minstrel shows finally disappeared, having clung on for a decade performing in fading ballrooms on the decaying piers of Britain’s seaside towns. I grew up in a Britain in which there were pictures of golliwogs on jam jars and golliwog dolls alongside the teddy bears in the toy shop windows. One of the worst moments of my unhappy schooling was when, during the run-up to a 1970s Christmas, we were allowed to bring in our favourite toys. The girl who innocently brought her golliwog doll into our classroom plunged me into a day of humiliation and pain that I still find painful to recall, decades later". |
Racism - Runnymede Trust - By the end of the 1970s, it was clear that black people, and minority ethnic communities more generally, were ‘over-policed but under-protected’. There are numerous examples of this tendency, but in what follows we examine over-policing through the use of the power to stop and search and underprotection of victims of racist violence. -
Riots erupted at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival after tensions developed between the police and black youths attending the festival. Over 100 police officers and around 60 members of the public were injured in the skirmishes
Riots also erupted at the 1987 Notting Hill Carnival. See Yvonne's story
|
Jennifer Hudson - The Forgotten Black History of London’s famous Notting Hill neighbourhood.
Warner - a historian and social entrepreneur, has been running his guided tour of Notting Hill for 11 years. His motivation is simple: “You do any of the usual London walks that you see advertised and there’s no reference to black people — and I thought that was ridiculous,” he said. By the ’70s, Notting Hill was one of London’s hippest boroughs. Island Records turned a church on Ladbroke Grove into a recording studio. Bob Marley, Van Morrison and the Beatles hung out in local bars. Pink Floyd played gigs at All Saints Church Hall. |