From sweltering temperatures to political scandals: the incredible story of Britain's 1976

Soaring temperatures, sky-high energy bills and a crisis-hit Labour government struggling to keep control under pressure both from within its own ranks and the political opposition. A public widely disillusioned with its national authority figures, some of whom found themselves arrested or jailed. The constant threat or reality of urban terrorism. A youth culture increasingly baffling to anyone over the age of forty. Drama and disappointment for the nation’s sports teams. The Rolling Stones with a new album rising on the charts.

Welcome to the Britain of summer 1976.

That Britain often felt like a broken nation, struggling to find its place in a world dominated by the continuing Cold War and threats to the global oil supply. In a telling moment, in September the UK’s chancellor, Denis Healey, ended what he called “a long season of hell” by turning his ministerial car around at Heathrow airport amidst reports of the pound crashing on the currency exchange markers, and hurriedly returning to his office to negotiate an emergency loan with the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. The alternative to this course of action was “complete national bankruptcy,” Healey later admitted.

While Britain’s currency fell, the thermometer rose. On each of the fifteen days from June 23 to July 7, 1976, the temperature reached at least 32.3 degrees celsius somewhere in the UK, which remained warmer than southern Europe. It would prove to be the country’s longest period of sustained dry weather for more than 350 years, and its driest summer for over 200. The hottest day of the year came on July 3, when the temperature hit an alarming 35.9 degrees celsius in Cheltenham. The spa resort somehow forever associated with retired colonels and blue-rinse ladies was in for a shock that month, as the racier tabloid press ran photographs of “buxom beauties frolicking topless” to illustrate their stories about the uninhibited young sunbathers seen in the city’s parks.

In time, the UK climate emergency was given its own minister in 52-year-old Denis Howell, a former professional football referee turned MP. Howell caused some perhaps unintended mirth by promptly inviting reporters to his Birmingham constituency home, where he revealed that he was doing his bit to help conserve water by sharing a daily shower with his wife, Brenda.

When Manchester City hosted Aston Villa on the first Saturday of the new football season, it was found that the players had collectively lost 7 stone (44 kg) over the course of the ninety minutes. The home team’s ex-manager, the fedora-wearing Malcolm Allison, had left the club not long before to take over at Third Division Crystal Palace. But that arrangement soon ended when Allison saw fit to invite the glamour model Fiona Richmond to join him in the bath at the club’s training ground, an event gleefully recorded by the press. This seemed to the stuffed shirts at the Football Association to be taking the government’s water-saving initiative to uncalled-for extremes, leading to a charge against Allison of bringing the game into disrepute.

The headline news in cricket was the arrival of Clive Lloyd’s touring West Indies team. Interviewed on the eve of the summer’s first Test at Nottingham, England’s captain Tony Greig rashly signalled his intention to make the visitors “grovel”, a word some thought had racist overtones, in the course of the five-match series. In the event, this was not quite what happened. The home team just about held their own in the first two matches, but the wheels spectacularly came off Greig’s prediction after that.

The last rites of the series were played out at The Oval in the middle of August, by which time the outfield had been bleached a sandy brown colour in the continuing drought. The visitors wrapped up a decisive 231-run victory, giving them a 3-0 win in the series. Having begun the summer by promising to make his opponents grovel, the England captain ended it by crawling on his hands and knees in comic supplication in front of the tourists’ jeering supporters. Tony Greig was still apologising for his choice of words until shortly before his death 36 years later.

There was some comedy on the golf course that summer, provided by a 46-year-old amateur player from Barrow-in-Furness named Maurice Flitcroft. Flitcroft, a crane operator by trade, had taken up golf just a year earlier, and admitted he was only modestly talented at the sport. Undaunted, he managed to get himself accepted for the qualifying round of that July’s Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, where he made news by shooting a score of 121.

This put him at 49 over par, the worst ever in Open history. Despite then being banned, Flitcroft continued to apply under a range of aliases for entry to the world’s most prestigious tournaments, often with the result of audiences being entertained by the sight of him being chased off the course by blazer-wearing officials. There were large crowds, too, if less in the way of obvious humour, at that summer’s Wimbledon Championships, where the singles titles went to Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, and a transgender player named Renée Richards was ruled ineligible for both the men’s and women’s competition.

On August 6, after a 68-day trial, the former Labour minister John Stonehouse was found guilty and sentenced to seven years for fraud. ‘Sleaze’ at the top of society was as much in the news then as it is today. Earlier, Stonehouse had faked his own death by neatly piling up his clothes and vanishing from a Florida beach to remain missing, presumed drowned, for several weeks. He had run up debts said to be about £900,000, or more than £10 million in modern money.

Amidst the summer’s heatwave and a series of public-sector strikes and IRA bombs, Britain also experienced the growing musical earthquake of punk rock. For the time being, punk still remained a minority interest. The Sex Pistols made two appearances at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall that June and July. There were probably only 150 customers present for both shows combined, although they would have had to have taken place at Wembley Stadium to accommodate everyone who later claimed to have been there. The list who did attend at least included future founding members of the bands Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths and Simply Red. As Joy Division’s Peter Hook once remarked, “The takeaway message was that if the Pistols could do it, so could we. That started it all.”

Later in July, another figure emerged to significantly add to the nation’s gaiety. He was 59-year-old Tom Keating, a former south London delivery boy, municipal roadsweeper and Royal Navy stoker who had discovered a talent for painting, and more specifically for reproducing the work of the Old Masters. He was nothing if not prolific in his new trade, producing about 2,000 forgeries over the years 1955-76, a rate of roughly one every four days. It remains a matter of opinion whether the bearded, jolly-faced Keating was purely in it for himself, or whether he was a combination of Father Christmas and Robin Hood, determined to strike a blow against the toffee-nosed art establishment and distribute his gains to needy fellow painters.

Following his exposure in the press, Keating’s activities became a much-discussed source of fun and satire, hotly debated by millions of people who never normally went near an art gallery. Was he, in fact, the ultimate working-class hero, a harmless old buffer who had gleefully pulled the rug from under the Burlington Berties? Or just another plausible chancer who was in it for his own gain?

Keating was duly arrested and in time sent for trial at the Old Bailey. He proved quite candid about his activities, and the Daily Express splashed his confession on the front page with ‘I FAKED THE LOT!’ When Keating’s case was dropped because of his poor health, in part the result of his having fallen off his motorbike while on the way to give evidence, he emerged from the courtroom a celebrity. He died of a heart attack in 1984, at the age of 66. With a certain inevitability, Britain’s long, uninterrupted dry spell in 1976 came to an abrupt end over that year’s August Bank holiday. In Scarborough, the England and West Indies teams defied the rain long enough to get through a one-day international to round off the summer cricket tour. The young Viv Richards scored a century for the visitors.

But the match is best remembered for the arrival of a fresh-faced newcomer to the home side, a future peer of the realm and all-round national treasure, but here just a promising 20-year-old making his first appearance in England colours, by the name of Ian Botham.