Summer of 76

Some years are defined by the weather. I still remember grown ups reminscing about the ferociously cold winters of 1947 and 1963. I’d been alive for the latter, but was too young to remember it. Summer heatwaves came and went, but none seemed to outstay its welcome. The memorably hot summer of 1959 was eighteen months too early for me, and the 1960s saw a run of rainy summers punctuated with violent thunderstorms. But the mid 70s would bring one of the best remembered and most talked about years in British meterological history...

The first prolonged hot summer I remember was 1975. Indeed, if it hadn’t been trumped by the following year’s events, we’d still be talking about it today. After a cold and mostly dry spring with snowfall at Easter, a high pressure area settled over the UK in late June, bringing warm weather to most parts. The hot weather continued into July, interrupted by thundery outbreaks, one of which gave me my first sight of golfball-sized hail. August saw a similar pattern. The autumn and winter, however, were notably dry – the period from October to December was the driest over England and Wales since 1879. The below average rainfall continued into early 1976, and by early spring, much of the country was already in a drought situation. The prolonged dry spell was so alarming that the BBC put out a Horizon Special at the end of May – some weeks before the really hot weather took hold. Weather presenter Jack Scott topped and tailed the programme, ending on a long range forecast for the period up to the middle of June. Even then, the Met Office was using computers (albeit of the analogue and tickertape variety), but the equipment at their Bracknell headquarters could only project thirty days ahead. The forecast was for average rainfall in June; but apart from north west Scotland, all areas would see below average rainfall, with a few places recording monthly totals of less than 0.5mm. The weathermen had got it wrong. July was drier still, the driest since 1955, and August was largely the same. The prolonged hot and dry spell came to an end in September, which the Met Office Monthly Weather Report summed up as ‘mostly very wet’. So much for the statistics: but what was the summer of 1976 really like?

As I remember it, the dry, sunny weather seemed unremarkable at first. It was summer, after all, and one expected at least a few sunny days. We were taking end of year exams at school, and the heat didn’t help: we were given permission to take off our blazers. It wasn’t until a few weeks into the hot spell that anyone began to really remark on the conditions, and items began to pop up on the news and in the press. One of the first phenomena that grabbed people’s attention was the swarms of ladybirds that plagued parts of the country, notably at the seaside where one normally didn’t encounter the creatures in such numbers. The insects had abandoned the parched countryside in search of food and water elsewhere.

Seen in retrospect, and as presented on TV documentaries, it’s easy to imagine that no rain fell at all during the months of June, July and August, and that bright blue skies held sway for the whole time. Neither description is wholly accurate. We took our family holiday in mid July, and although the weather was hot and sunny on arrival at our rented cottage on the mid Wales coast, there was prolonged and heavy rain on two days during the week. As for those blue skies, if you want to see the reality, you can find it in episodes of The Sweeney (series three) shot during that summer. After a few weeks of the endless hot, dry weather, a haze of dust and pollutants had developed, lending a diffuse, milky quality to the sunlight, especially in urban areas. Rather than brilliant azure, the summer sky was more of a misty blue, certainly by late August when I well remember the hot, hazy dusty conditions during a trip into Birmingham.

No documentary about the summer of 1976 is complete without the obligatory film of housewives queueing up to draw water from standpipes. In certain areas where supplies were dwindling, the water companies reduced mains pressure so that the supply wouldn’t reach homes, but could be accessed from the street. This, of course, was the reality for people in the affected areas, but we saw nothing like that in the midlands where the water supply came largely from reservoirs in the Elan Valley in mid Wales – an area with very high rainfall (as we discovered on our holiday). I do, however, remember talk of hosepipe bans, and water saving tips in the media, such as the often repeated suggestion that couples should share a bath. Well, it was the 1970s after all… In our house, we recycled bath water for use on the garden.

The government’s save water campaign was fronted by Brummie Dennis Howell, MP for Birmingham Small Heath – ironic, in light of the fact that Birmingham was one of the areas least affected by the drought. Officially dubbed ‘minister for drought’, a dubious online story (originated as late as 2012 in the Birmingham Mail) claims he was ‘ordered by No.10 to do a rain dance on behalf of the nation’. I well remember Howell’s chubby face and avuncular manner – he seemed to be on the national news most nights – but the rain dance story is nonsense, a typical online misconstruction of an idea that had occurred to most wags back in the day. What is true is that, when the hot weather finally broke and heavy rainfall ensued, he was instantly dubbed ‘Minister for Floods’.

The hot weather didn’t make much difference to me, as I wasn’t really the outdoor type, and didn’t go in for sports or al fresco recreation of any kind. Indeed, I spent quite a lot of that summer indoors watching television – repeats of Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and the ITC series Strange Report. It was, as I’ve written elsewhere, a notable summer for vintage television, with seasons of repeats on both ITV and BBC. Perhaps in an effort to counter all this, our mum bought a badminton set – complete with net – that was set up in the back garden and provided some alternative entertainment for the summer months.

Nothing captures the feeling of a moment in time like the pop charts of the era, and for me, the essence of Summer ‘76 is to be found in singles like Peter Frampton’s ‘Show Me the Way’ (number 10 on 19 June), The Isley Brothers’ ‘Harvest for the World’ (number 10 in early August), Wings’ ‘Let ‘Em in’ (number 2 in late August), and Manfred Mann’s Earthband’s ‘Blinded by the Light’.

There was, of course, rather more to the summer of 1976 than a British heatwave: America was celebrating its bicentennial in July, and the BBC marked the occasion with a season of programmes (more on that story next time). Further afield – on Mars, to be exact – NASA had just landed its Viking 1 mission, whose images were being beamed back to Earth in late July – I remember seeing them on the tiny portable television in our holiday cottage. In London, the punk rock scene was just getting off the ground, but would only really come to national prominence later in the year in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ notorious TV appearance with Bill Grundy. In July, David Steel was elected the new leader of the Liberal Party; Ford launched its new small hatchback the Fiesta; and the work of forger Tom Keating was exposed in a series of articles in the Times. As the drought continued into August, former MP John Stonehouse, who had famously ‘done a Reggie Perrin’ two years earlier, was sentenced to seven years in jail for fraud, and the month ended in riots at the heavily policed Notting Hill Carnival.

Today, with the issue of climate change so much in the media spotlight, it’s easy to look back at the summer of 1976 as a foretaste of things to come. Yet even then, scientists were wondering if the freak weather was a random occurence or an early indicator of long term climate change (a few years before, the big worry had been a new ice age). The weather of 1975-6, both here in Britain and across large swathes of the planet, strongly suggested that all was not as it should be, and some observers cautioned that we might be in for a run of hot, dry summers. 1977 put paid to that idea: the summer was mostly dull, cool and wet. And while today the warming trend is undeniable – all five of the warmest UK summers having occurred since the year 2000 – prolonged heatwaves and drought still aren’t inevitable, and next year could easily be cool and rainy. There’s still no reliable way of knowing. The Met Office computers of 1976 could ‘only’ predict trends up to thirty days ahead, and even then with no guarantee of accuracy. Yet fifty years later, with advanced modelling tools available, the long range forecast still isn’t very much better. Will this coming summer be a repeat run of 1976? I'm all for repeats when it's old television, but I draw the line at heatwaves...