Ferdinand Mount

A time to moan and weep

Ferdinand Mount recalls the crisis years of the early 1970s, when Britain was pronounced ‘ungovernable’

Ferdinand Mount recalls the crisis years of the early 1970s, when Britain was pronounced ‘ungovernable’

The residents of Flitwick, Bedfordshire, were enjoying a wine-and-cheese party in the village hall when the invasion happened. Five hundred Tottenham Hotspur fans had run amok on the special train bringing them back from Derby, where they had been beaten 5–0. They had smashed everything smashable on the train, pulled the communication cord again and again, forcing the train to a juddering halt, and the driver had had enough. He stopped the engine and summoned the police to force the fans off. They then ran down the street throwing stones and breaking windows and driving the terrified citizens to take refuge in their homes where they cowered, no doubt still swallowing the last mouthfuls of Brie and Rioja.

The Battle of Flitwick in September 1969 has not gone down in the history of civil disorder in Britain like the later Battle of Grunwick in 1977 or the Battle of Saltley Gates in February 1972, where the young Arthur Scargill won his spurs. Yet this clash between the startled inhabitants of leafy Beds and the hooligans from the Smoke was in its way even more emblematic of the terrors of the times. The middle classes were seized by panic that the gentle nation they knew had been overcome by an epidemic of coarseness and violence to which no answer was in sight.

The early 1970s, Dominic Sandbrook tells us in this compelling, amusing and exact history, was perhaps the most maligned moment in our recent experience, a period marked not just by outlandish fashions, cosy sit-coms, long-haired footballers and women in dungarees, but by a pervasive sense of crisis and discontent with few parallels in our modern history.

Lord Radcliffe said that the British had become ‘ungovernable’.

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