The 'Winter of Discontent'. Roger Bingham records his personal recollections of troubled political times 40 years ago

MANY people, who were alive in the 1970s, will have gloomy memories of the so called 'Winter of Discontent' in 1979. Nevertheless, some of us confuse our recollections of 1979 with the troubled 'Three Day Week' of 1974. This, earlier crisis, had occurred when Edward Heath's Conservative government restricted industry to three days operations a week during a fuel crisis, caused when a coal miners strike coincided with an oil shortage prompted by a war in the Middle East.

Although in 1974 my classroom was lit by kerosene lamps, the wintry woes of 1979 seemed worst. It was bound to feel colder as both the drivers of fuel Lorries and the coal miners were on strike. Adding to the misery, council workers refused to take out gritting vehicles, or to collect rubbish. Famished rats were filmed gnawing garbage bags in the streets, and fresh vegetables could not be harvested from the frozen ground.

It was also the snowiest winter since 1947 with 'ice bergs' in the Kent Estuary and 12 inches of snow in parts of Lakeland. On January 4, the temperature sank in Strathclyde to minus 24.6 celcius, the lowest so far recorded.

Three days later I set out on a 15 mile drive from Ackenthwaite to start a new job as 'Senior Master' at Skerton High School, Lancaster. I had made sure that the school would be open by telephoning the head from my parent's house. I could not ring from my own house as there was a six months waiting list before a 'rented instrument could be connected' by Post Office Telephones. Because of the fuel shortage I'd had to siphon petrol from my mother's car.

Consequently after a cold breakfast and the electricity being off, I set out on to the un-gritted and unlit A6. Soon, near Beetham Paper Mill, I encountered a scene out of Dr Zhivago, where muffled, banner waving strikers were huddled round a flaming brazier. Eventually, after winding round abandoned vehicles through darkened Carnforth and Bolton-le-Sands and passing a sign reading 'Crematorium closed' because, notoriously, its operatives were on strike, I arrived at Skerton. Here, alone in the neighbourhood the school's lights were on. Yet, surprisingly, those pupils and teachers, who had managed to struggle in, were outside the gates. They were locked out because the caretakers were also on strike. But, strikingly, neither the head teacher nor myself could use our keys as, (we were informed by an 'activist'), that we would be breaking 'the fraternal agreement' between the public workers union and the teachers organisations.

Inevitably, it was the labour government of James Callaghan which got most of the blame. Mythically, as he was returning from a Conference in the sunny Caribbean, 'Sunny Jim' responded to an enquiry about the dire situation at home by murmuring 'Crisis? What Crisis?'

In fact, he never said any such ting but, unfairly, he never lived it down.

Arguably, however, the 'Winter of Discontent' contributed to Labour's defeat in the General Election on May 4, by Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives - but that's a sphere for other memories!