1974 E-Book

Nick Rennison

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 281

Beschreibung

1974 WAS A YEAR OF MAJOR CHANGE AROUND THE WORLD. Presidents resigned, emperors were deposed, and new governments came to power. On both sides of the Atlantic, major political figures left the scene, either through resignation or electoral defeat. Leaders of nations died. Regimes crumbled. In society, the second wave of feminism grew in strength and the rights of historically underrepresented groups were more powerfully asserted. The BBC aired the first lesbian kiss on British TV. In Italy, the right to divorce was protected in a landmark referendum. However, terrorism and the pursuit of political ends through violence became ever more commonplace. The arts and entertainment industries were in the midst of a period of great creativity and innovation. In America, Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola were making their mark. Popular music was arguably at a low point but the first stirrings of the punk revolution to come could be heard in New York clubs. And a Swedish band that were to become a phenomenon won the Eurovision Song Contest. The roots of many aspects of today's society which we take for granted lie in the 1970s and particularly in this, the decade's pivotal year.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR NICK RENNISON

‘Vivid… In this enjoyable slice of popular history, Rennison assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture’ – GUARDIAN

‘Fascinating and highly readable’ – DAILY MAIL

‘A delightful book… Intelligent and lively’ – SCOTSMAN

‘Entertaining and thoroughly readable canter through the events of a century ago… Fascinating’ – OBSERVER

‘In crisp and evocative snatches, Rennison gives monthly summaries of global events, domestic episodes, newspaper sensations, sporting triumphs and cultural acclaim during 1922’ – SPECTATOR

‘A revealing, kaleidoscopic snapshot of the most important events of a century ago… Rennison succinctly and vividly captures the major upheavals of 1922’ – SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

‘A fast moving and extremely readable book’ – ALL ABOUT HISTORY

‘An enjoyable biography of an important year that serves as another reminder of how much history just twelve months can contain’ – FOREWORD

To David Jones, a great friend for nearly 50 years whom I first met in… 1974

‘To those of us who lived through that era of polyester, platform shoes and power cuts, one thing seemed certain: no one would ever wish to revisit it’ – Francis Wheen

‘Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the seventies as an era has been simplified more than most’ – Andy Beckett

Introduction

The 1970s is not a decade that has enjoyed a very good press, particularly in Britain. It’s been called ‘the decade that taste forgot’ so often that the phrase has become a cliché. ‘If the 1960s were a wild weekend and the 1980s a hectic day at the office,’ Francis Wheen wrote in his hugely entertaining book, Strange Days Indeed, ‘the 1970s were a long Sunday evening in winter, with cold leftovers for supper and a power cut expected at any moment.’ Yet the decade, viewed with the hindsight of half a century, holds plenty of interest, as I hope this book will show.

An argument can be made for 1976 as its pivotal year. Some might claim that the real turning point, particularly in Britain, came right at its end in 1979. However, 1974 seems to me the one year in the 1970s which best exemplifies the decade. According to the journalist and historian Andy Beckett, this was ‘the apocalyptic year of the British seventies’. It was also a year in which huge changes took place around the world. On both sides of the Atlantic, major political figures left the scene, either through resignation or electoral defeat. Leaders of nations died. Regimes crumbled that had lasted decades. Portugal’s Carnation Revolution saw the end of a dictatorship that had come to power in the 1930s; in Ethiopia, an emperor who had acceded to the throne in the same decade was toppled from it. Terrorism and the pursuit of political ends through violence became ever more commonplace. The year saw a sustained bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA in both Northern Ireland and on the British mainland; Palestinian terrorists killed more than thirty people, including many children, in the town of Ma’alot; Basque separatists blew up a café in central Madrid.

Sport’s growing cultural importance is reflected in the number of entries devoted to it in this book. Football had not yet achieved the kind of worldwide all-pervasiveness (and enormous financial clout) it has today but it was well on the way. The 1974 World Cup attracted huge TV audiences. In Britain, rugby and cricket arguably had greater prominence than they do now and major tours by British teams, well remembered fifty years later, took place in both sports. Tennis saw the arrival of new young talents.

In America, movies were undergoing the renaissance known as ‘New Hollywood’ in which great directors such as Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola were making their mark. Popular music was arguably at a low point but the first stirrings of the punk revolution to come could be heard in New York clubs. And a Swedish band that were to become a phenomenon won the Eurovision Song Contest.

1922, the subject of my last book, was not within living memory, except perhaps for a handful of super-centenarians around the world. 1974 most definitely is. Indeed, it is in my living memory. That year, I celebrated my nineteenth birthday and left home to enjoy my first term at college. It has been an interesting experience to revisit events of 1974, some of which remain vivid in my mind. I can recall working in a bookshop at the time of the three-day week when the lights went out to be replaced by oil lamps and older members of staff reminisced about wartime power cuts and shortages. I remember watching the World Cup on TV and marvelling at the ‘total football’ played by the Dutch team. I remember listening to Bowie’s Diamond Dogson a rackety old record player in my cousin’s bedroom. I can recollect the media furore that surrounded the disappearances of Lord Lucan and John Stonehouse. Other events seemed to have made no mark at all. Did I ever know at the time about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk in New York? Or the prison siege at Huntsville, Texas? Or the train disaster that killed dozens and dozens of people in Zagreb? If I did, I had long since expunged them from my memory before I began the reading for this book.

Reading about and remembering the events of 1974, the year can sometimes seem as if it is far further back in history than a mere fifty years. The famous LP Hartley quote about the past being a foreign country where they do things differently comes readily to mind. Yet at other times, my greatest feeling was one of familiarity. Much of what happened then has echoes now. Like 1922, this book is a collection of snapshots from the past which I hope readers will find both enlightening and entertaining.

January

New Year’s Day becomes a bank holiday. The three-day week begins in Britain. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier face one another in the second of their three heavyweight fights. The Commonwealth Games opens in Christchurch, New Zealand. In North Africa, the Djerba Declaration suggests that Tunisia and Libya might become one state – The Arab Islamic Republic. In the USA, Sam Goldwyn, one of Hollywood’s most eccentric but successful producers, dies.

New Year’s Day

In 1974, the New Year in the UK began with an extra holiday. Most people probably assume that New Year’s Day had been a British public holiday ever since bank holidays were first introduced in the nineteenth century. In fact, it was only in Scotland that 1 January officially became a holiday in 1871. The rest of the country had to wait more than a century. (Many people, recovering from over-exuberant celebrations the night before, had unofficially decided it was a day of rest for many years.) The prime minister, Ted Heath, included plans for the extra holiday amidst a whole host of other measures in a televised press conference to announce the third phase of the government’s prices and incomes policy on 8 October 1973. Amidst all the less than cheering news about the state of the economy, he may have felt the need to throw in something to please his listeners. The announcement of a New Year’s Day bank holiday, which had been proposed in a private member’s bill two years earlier and rejected, must have seemed just the ticket. Later that same month a Royal Proclamation (‘We… do hereby appoint New Year’s Day in the year 1974 to be, in England and Wales and Northern Ireland a bank holiday…’) confirmed his statement. Scotland, where the day after Hogmanay had long been a holiday, received a further day for rest and recuperation. As if to prove that it is impossible to please all the people all the time, even when providing them with an extra day’s holiday, the Tory MP Richard Hornby wrote a letter to the Times, published a week into the New Year, bemoaning the fact that all cultural venues had chosen to shut on 1 January. It’s safe to assume that he was in a small minority in not welcoming the new bank holiday.

Ali v. Frazier

Muhammad Ali always referred to himself as ‘The Greatest’ and plenty of boxing aficionados would agree with him. In proof of their claim that he was the greatest of all heavyweight champions, his fans can point to the years of his prime when he defeated Sonny Liston to take the world title for the first time and then defended it against a succession of fighters. They can also cite his achievements in 1974 when he fought bouts against, arguably, the two best boxers he ever faced and beat them both.

The first fight took place at Madison Square Garden in New York on 28 January and was against ‘Smokin’ Joe’ Frazier. It was the second time that the two boxers had faced one another in the ring. The previous bout, which had been in the same venue nearly three years before, had been nicknamed ‘The Fight of the Century’. Frazier had won a unanimous decision on points, inflicting on Ali the first defeat of his professional career and retaining the world titles Smokin’ Joe had won earlier that same year. Neither man was now champion, Frazier having lost his titles the previous year when George Foreman despatched him in two rounds in a contest in Kingston, Jamaica. In many ways it was a grudge match. Ali wanted revenge for his defeat; Frazier wanted to prove that his victory in March 1971 had been no fluke.

Tension between the two fighters was already high before they even stepped into the ring. Five days earlier, during a joint appearance in a TV studio, Ali had called Frazier ‘ignorant’. Justifiably indignant, Frazier stood menacingly over his seated opponent, shouting, ‘Why you call me ignorant? How am I ignorant?’ The confrontation had developed into fisticuffs in front of the TV cameras. Both men were later fined for ‘deplorable conduct demeaning to boxing’.

After they entered the ring in Madison Square Garden, Ali started the fight as if he meant to bring it to an end as quickly as possible. He nearly did. In the second round, Frazier took a right punch which left him wobbling and in difficulty. The contest might have finished at that point. Frazier retreated to the ropes and Ali moved in for the kill but the referee, Tony Perez, thinking he had heard the bell to end the round, stepped between them. In fact, the bell had malfunctioned and the round went on but Frazier had been granted a precious few extra seconds in which to recover.

As the fight went on, it clearly demonstrated the contrasting styles of the two boxers. Ali, tall and elegant, circled the ring, throwing combinations of punches in quick succession and then holding on to his opponent when he grew tired. (In fact, Ali held on so often that Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, complained to the referee, saying ‘You gotta stop this!’. The referee told Futch, quite rightly, that clinging to your opponent was allowed. It was holding on and punching at the same time that was illegal and Ali was not doing that.) Frazier, four inches shorter and barrel-chested, moved relentlessly forward, struggling to get under Ali’s longer reach and land the kind of knockout left hook that had won him their first fight. At the end of the 12 rounds, all three judges gave the fight to Ali, although one of them – Tony Perez, the referee – saw it as a very close contest, marking six rounds for Ali against five for Frazier with one drawn. ‘In the end, it was a unanimous decision for Ali,’ one boxing journalist, Mark Kram, wrote, ‘ring generalship over a one-man army fighting a war of attrition.’ The third and final meeting between the two fighters, the famous ‘Thrilla in Manila’, took place the following year. Ali was declared the winner again when Frazier’s team conceded the bout in the 14th round.

Three-Day Week

Britain began 1974 with severe restrictions on the use of electricity. Ted Heath’s Tory government had been growing ever more concerned about the state of the country’s economy for many months. One of the chief worries was the power supply. The oil crisis in the Middle East and the threat of another miners’ strike to follow that of 1972 were concentrating minds. When the National Union of Miners, the NUM, decided upon a ban on overtime in support of their wage claims and other unions made clear their support for the miners, fears began to grow that coal supplies might run out. In the 1970s, most of the nation’s electricity was supplied by coal-burning power stations. The government felt they had no option but to take drastic action.

Some restrictions had come into force nearly two months earlier. A fifth state of emergency in three years had been announced in the House of Commons in the middle of November 1973. Electric floodlighting and advertising had been banned; public offices were told to cut energy consumption by a tenth; TV companies were obliged to cease broadcasting at half past ten. Government adverts began to appear in the newspapers exhorting people to leave their cars at home at weekends and, if they must drive, to keep below 50mph in order to conserve fuel. Those charged with providing the country’s energy requirements were growing desperate. ‘The choice is stark,’ the deputy chairman of the Electricity Council told an American journalist. ‘Either the public cooperates or complete cities could lose their supply of electricity at a stroke. It could even happen before Christmas.’

The public did respond to all the calls for more careful consumption but it was not enough. The government decided that more needed to be done. In December 1973, Heath, looking visibly exhausted – he had barely slept in four days – appeared on the nation’s TV screens to deliver the bad news. He pulled few punches. ‘We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war’, he said. ‘We shall have to postpone some of the hopes and aims we have set ourselves for expansion and for our standard of living.’ He appealed for people to put aside their differences. ‘We must close our ranks so that we can deal together with the difficulties which come to us.’ And he announced that, beginning at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1973, electricity was, in effect, rationed. Commercial consumption was restricted to three consecutive days in the week and shops, unless they were deemed essential, had to choose either mornings or afternoons to switch on the lights. According to one newspaper report, government ministers were secretly even concerned that a two-day week might have to be introduced.

As the lights went out across the country, some people were sympathetic to the government’s dilemmas and difficult choices. Others most definitely were not. ‘Dictator Heath and his £10,000-plus a year henchmen have imposed a three-day working week,’ one correspondent to the Times wrote. ‘Why? Because this yacht owner claims the miners/electricians are causing such severe damage to the nation that it is essential.’ He ended his letter with the contemptuous words, ‘Unite us, Heath? Not me.’ Patrick Jenkin, a government minister, put his foot in it with what he must have thought was a helpful suggestion. His recommendation that people should ‘clean their teeth in the dark’ did not meet with approval. He was ridiculed at the time, not least when it was reported that his own house in north London was a blaze of electric light early in the morning, and his gaffe was long remembered, featuring prominently in most newspaper obituaries when he died in 2016.

The effects of the three-day week were immediate. For some, the consequences seemed almost enjoyable, almost a bit of a lark. The spirit of the Blitz was regularly evoked as oil lamps replaced electric lights and candles once more became an essential household item. (A candlemaker in London raised its daily production total to nearly a million because of increased demand. Amongst its more popular lines was a candle in the ample shape of Ted Heath.) For others, the three-day week was a disaster. Earnings went down. Hundreds of thousands of people were put out of work, if only temporarily. Smaller businesses faced cashflow problems and other difficulties. ‘Many will not survive if the restrictions last for more than a few weeks,’ the director of Aston University’s Small Business Centre warned at the end of January. Some businesses proved ingenious in the pursuit of alternative power sources. One Sheffield firm brought a watermill back into use that had last been operational in the middle of the eighteenth century but not many had similar options.

It seemed to some as if Britain was on the slippery slope towards economic ruin. The best option was to get out while they could. During the first two weeks of January, the New Zealand High Commission in London had to deal with three times more inquiries about emigration than usual. Applications to move permanently to Australia and Canada also shot up by as much as a half. Meanwhile, others abroad could scarcely conceal their glee at what was happening. The previous year, the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, had offered to do his bit to help Britain out of its economic crisis, suggesting that he would contribute 10,000 Ugandan shillings out of his own savings to any charitable donation to the former colonial masters. Now he rubbed further salt in the wound by reporting that his ‘Save Britain Fund’ was up and running. On 21 January, he wrote to Heath to say, ‘the people of Kigezi district donated one lorry load of vegetables and wheat’ and it only needed ‘you to send an aircraft to collect this donation urgently before it goes bad.’ The offer was politely declined by the British High Commissioner in Uganda but it must have been galling for the government to be mocked by a man they rightly considered little more than a murderous psychopath.

The three-day week restrictions were finally lifted on 7 March 1974. By that date, the crisis had pushed Ted Heath into announcing an election he need not otherwise have held. The miners had gone on strike on 5 February and Heath had called the election two days later. He had lost it (see p. 39) and a new Labour government, led by Harold Wilson, had come to power. The miners’ strike had been brought to an end by offering them a 35 per cent pay rise. And the lights had come back on.

Djerba Declaration

Politically and geographically, North Africa would today be very different if an agreement signed on 11 January 1974 had ever been made a reality. Djerba is a large island off the coast of Tunisia and, on that date, it was the venue for a meeting between the seventy-year-old Habib Bourguiba, long the president of that country, and the much younger Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s head of state. The Djerba Declaration, the outcome of that meeting, proposed the unification of the two countries so that a new political entity would emerge – the Arab Islamic Republic – which would have a single constitution, a single president and a single army. Bourguiba would be president of this new state; Gaddafi would be in charge of its armed forces. Referendums would take place in both countries. To describe the signing of the Djerba Declaration as unexpected would be an understatement. There had been little prior discussion of the plan and the agreement that Bourguiba signed was handwritten by Gaddafi at the last minute.

Gaddafi had been calling for Arab unity for some time. In 1971, he had signed an agreement with the leaders of Syria and Egypt to work towards a merger of their three countries in a unified Arab state but arguments over the specific terms of such a merger had soon wrecked the idea. The following year, in December, he had made a speech in Tunis in which he had called for a union between Libya and Tunisia. Although Bourguiba had himself expressed a desire for a ‘United States of North Africa’ in the past, he had been highly dismissive of Gaddafi’s speech, responding with one of his own in which he denied that there had ever been much Arab unity in the past and suggested that Libya was scarcely a united country itself. What had happened to change Bourguiba’s mind in the thirteen months leading up to the Djerba Declaration and reconsider the idea is not clear. One historian of North Africa has called the sudden agreement to a union with Libya ‘one of the most perplexing moments in Tunisia’s political history’. Whatever motivated Bourguiba to put his name to the Declaration (advancing senility which allowed him to be manipulated, according to his enemies; a Machiavellian plan to wean Gaddafi away from prospective alliances with rival countries like Egypt, according to his supporters) his commitment to it turned out to be short-lived. The proposed referendum in Tunisia was postponed indefinitely, the minister in Bourguiba’s government most enthusiastic about unity was sacked, and the agreement between the two countries collapsed inside a month.

Commonwealth Games Opens in Christchurch

First held in 1930 as the British Empire Games and later known as the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, the quadrennial sporting competition took place for the tenth time in Christchurch, New Zealand at the beginning of 1974. It was only the second time that the word ‘Empire’ had been dropped entirely from its official name and it was known just as the Commonwealth Games. Prince Philip represented the Queen at the opening ceremony on 24January, which included 2,500 children dressed in red, white and blue forming a NZ74 symbol in the middle of the stadium, a Maori haka and the traditional march past by competing athletes. Thirty-eight nations, from Australia to Zambia, via others such as Botswana, Fiji, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago, took part and there were medals to be won in 121 events.

This was the first major multinational sporting event to be held since the 1972 Munich Olympics, which had been the scene of a terrorist attack on Israeli athletes. Security, which had not even featured in the original budget for the Christchurch games when it had been put together six years earlier, was now central to the planning and far tighter than it had been for earlier Commonwealth Games. The athletes’ village, created from the student accommodation of the local University of Canterbury, was temporarily surrounded by fencing and guards patrolled the perimeter, ensuring that only those with official passes could enter. It could have made for an intimidating atmosphere but the organisers came up with a new idea to make competitors welcome. ‘Host families’ had volunteered to ‘adopt’ athletes for the duration of the games. Visitors were given an address where they could, if they wanted, escape the intensity of the athletes’ village and relax in the company of an ordinary New Zealand family.

The first day of competition in the athletics, 25 January, was marked by a victory for the host nation in the Men’s 10,000 metres when New Zealander Dick Tayler beat several more fancied runners, including the great British hope David Bedford, to cross the finishing line at Queen Elizabeth II Park in a time of 27 minutes and 46.4 seconds. Other victors over the next eight days included the Jamaican sprinter Don Quarrie who took the gold medals in both the 100m and the 200m, the Tanzanian runner Filbert Bayi who set a world record in the 1500m, the Australian Raelene Boyle who, in the women’s events, matched Quarrie and won both the 100m and the 200m, and Mary Peters who, in the pentathlon, added another Commonwealth gold medal (she had won in Edinburgh in 1970) to the Olympic one she had collected two years earlier.

Swimming was dominated by the Australians who took the majority of the gold medals in the men’s and women’s events, although Scotland’s David Wilkie came first in both the 200m breaststroke and the 200m medley. The South African-born weightlifter Precious McKenzie, representing England, won the third of four successive Commonwealth gold medals. His fourth, at Edmonton in 1978, came at the age of 42, when he was competing for New Zealand, a country which had so impressed him four years earlier that he had moved there. In the cycling events, the team from Uganda pitched up without any bikes, having wrongly assumed that the games organisers would provide them. People in Christchurch came to their rescue and found them some cycles to ride. Sadly, their new bikes did not help them to success. England and Australia divided the seven gold medals on offer between them. Other sports on display included bowls, badminton, boxing, shooting and wrestling. The final medals table was headed by Australia who took 29 golds to England’s 28 and Canada’s 25. The hosts, New Zealand, won eight further golds to add to Dick Tayler’s.

Ian Wooldridge, then one of Britain’s best known sports journalists, had predicted a disaster when he had first arrived and seen what he considered the sub-standard facilities for some of the events. However, he was proved wrong. After two weeks of competition, he was happy to agree with those who ‘were declaring the Christchurch Games the friendliest, the most efficient and generally the best… in the Commonwealth series’.

Death of Sam Goldwyn

On 31 January, one of the greatest and most colourful film producers in Hollywood history passed away at his home in Los Angeles. Szmuel Gelbfisz was born in Warsaw, probably in 1879, although he later claimed 1882 as his birth year. He left his native city in his teens and, after sojourns in Hamburg and Birmingham, where he anglicised his name to Samuel Goldfish, he arrived in America in January 1899.

By 1913, he was involved in the movie industry, forming a production company with his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky. Their first release was a western, The Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B DeMille. His name now changed once more, Samuel Goldwyn established the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation in 1916. (Although the biggest of all the studios in Hollywood’s Golden Age was MGM, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Goldwyn had no direct connection with it. It was the result of a sequence of company mergers, one involving Goldwyn Pictures, but Goldwyn had left before the merger. However, MGM did retain the roaring lion which had been used as Goldwyn Pictures’ mascot. It remains their logo to this day.) From the mid-1920s onwards, Goldwyn worked as an independent producer with great success. Amongst the many films to which his name was attached were Dead End, Wuthering Heights and The Little Foxes. In 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives, a Samuel Goldwyn Production, won the Oscar for Best Picture.

He became as famous for his ‘Goldwynisms’, which were widely quoted both during his life and after his death, as for his movies. Sadly, some of the most memorable of these verbal mishaps and contradictions (‘A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on’; ‘I read part of it all the way through’; ‘Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined’) are apocryphal. However, it may be the case that he said some of the many mangled remarks attributed to him, even though he himself grew weary of the belief that he couldn’t speak English properly. ‘Goldwynisms,’ he once said to the writer Garson Kanin. ‘Don’t talk to me about Goldwynisms, for Christ’s sake! You want to hear some Goldwynisms, go talk to Jesse Lasky.’ As Kanin later wrote, this was ‘a pure Goldwynism, created as he was attempting to deny the existence of such a thing’. Whatever the truth about the assorted quotes attached to his name, it would certainly be delightful to believe that, when an underling once pointed out that Goldwyn couldn’t make a film version of Radclyffe Hall’s then controversial novel, The Well of Loneliness, because the central characters were lesbian, the mogul replied, ‘That’s OK, we’ll make them Albanians.’

February

A fire in a multi-storey building in Sao Paulo causes the deaths of 179 people. In Britain, the first of two general elections in the year takes Labour’s Harold Wilson back to Number 10 Downing Street as prime minister after four years of Tory government. A bomb tears apart a coach travelling along the M62 motorway in Yorkshire, killing a dozen people and injuring many more. Skylab 4 returns to Earth, bringing back three astronauts from the American space station. A Vermeer painting is stolen in Hampstead. Grenada wins its independence. The dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union. Alison Steadman and Myra Frances share the first lesbian kiss on British TV.

Joelma Building Fire

The Joelma Building was the name given to a 25-storey skyscraper in the centre of Sao Paulo, Brazil which was the main office block for the banking company Banco Crefisul S/A. At around 8.50am on 1 February 1974, it became the scene of one of the worst fires in a high-rise building before the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. On the twelfth floor an air conditioning unit short-circuited, overheated and then burst into flames. Because so much flammable material had been used in the interior furnishings of the Joelma, and because there were no sprinkler systems in place, it took only twenty minutes for the fire to spread to many of the other floors. Stairwells filled with smoke, preventing people trying to escape from using them. A lack of emergency exits and lights added to their confusion and terror.

A young woman named Clara Gomes had been among the first to smell the smoke and raise the alarm. Once she made it down to street level she was appalled to see the speed with which the fire had seized hold of the Joelma. ‘When I got there,’ she told a journalist, ‘the flames were already racing up through the building.’ Fire crews were alerted but held up en route, ‘inching their way through the traffic jams that were now rapidly building up in the city centre’, as one report put it. When they arrived at the Joelma, they were able to lead many workers in the building to safety but the heat and smoke in the stairwells prevented would-be rescuers from reaching the building’s higher floors. Not only that but the ladders they had could only reach just over halfway up the building. It was very soon impossible to get beyond the 11th storey. Dozens of people on the floors above, cut off by the fire, took to the roof and there were initially hopes that they could be rescued by helicopter. These were dashed when it was realised that the intense heat and the billowing plumes of smoke had made any landing there impossible. Desperation had taken hold of many of those trapped. According to Clara Gomes, ‘Already people were jumping from the windows’. At least 40 anguished individuals, losing hope, took this option but none of them survived.

With firefighters on the scene, pumping thousands of gallons of water at it, the fire began to die down between 10.30 and 11am. By mid-afternoon, with no more material to feed it, it had simply burnt itself out. However, by that time, at least 179 people who had worked in the Joelma Building had died and another 300 had suffered burns and injuries caused by smoke inhalation. Thirteen victims were found in the shell of one of the building’s elevators, so badly burned that they were never properly identified. The death toll at the Joelma was so high that it led to a re-examination and tightening of fire safety regulations not only in Brazil itself but in countries around the world. The building itself remained closed for four years while substantial reconstruction work was undertaken. When it opened again, it was renamed Edificio Praça da Bandeira (‘Flag Square Building’) after the plaza facing it. The name ‘Joelma’ was too tainted by the horrors of the day of the fire.

Election in Britain

At the beginning of 1974, the British prime minister was Ted Heath. He had come to power with the Tory victory in the 1970 election after five years as leader of the opposition. His premiership had had its successes (he had fulfilled his long-standing aim of taking Britain into the EEC) but it had faced crisis after crisis. Five states of emergency had been declared in less than four years. On 7 February, confronted by a multitude of problems, from increasing troubles in Northern Ireland and industrial turmoil throughout the UK to unrest and rebellion on his own backbenches, Heath made what has been described as ‘one of the great miscalculations of British political history’. He called a general election. He had no need to do so until the following year but he was determined to gain a new mandate for his government and his policies. ‘Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed?’ he asked in his TV announcement of the election. Most people probably did but the question of whether they thought that government should be led by Ted Heath was still to be answered. What followed was, in the words of the historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘one of the most tumultuous election campaigns in modern history’.