Cooling off in the North Sea after a long, hot day at work, a ‘desert’ in Framlingham - and a witticism from a Radio One DJ. Those are Terry Hunt’s random memories from the summer of ’76.
I often think we look back through rose-tinted spectacles at past summers. My childhood memories of holidays are of long, hot days – on the beach at Clacton, or in the countryside around my home in Cretingham. But it can’t have been like that all the time, can it? There must have been wet days, dull days, chilly days, just as there are now. I have to remind myself of this every time I feel tempted to bore everyone about how “summers just aren’t what they used to be’’.
Having said all that, the summer of 1976 really was extraordinary. Week after week came and went with no let-up in the soaring temperatures. The records tell us it was one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers of the whole 20th Century.
For most of that time I was working with my father in his office at Tuckwells in Worlingworth, in the days before air-conditioned offices, and by the end of each day we were absolutely boiling. On several occasions we would drive straight from work to Walberswick and literally throw ourselves into the refreshing sea. I’m not sure whether you could see the steam coming off us, as in the cartoons, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I’m not the greatest fan of swimming in the sea, but it was delicious.
Parts of England went 45 days without a drop of rain in July and August 1976. The extreme weather caused huge problems as swathes of the country were in the grip of severe drought. It’s estimated £500m worth of crops failed – goodness knows what the value would be now. Food prices spiralled upwards by an average of 12% because of the shortages.
For me, one photograph summed it all up – stunning Framlingham castle, taken from across the mere. (See previous page.) Except, in this picture taken in the height of the summer of 1976, there is no mere – just a dried-up stretch of cracked earth. Only months earlier, in my final year at Framlingham College, I would have been wading through the mere on one of our regular school runs. In this photo, it looks more like a desert. The extreme heat did all sorts of things – even ever-reliable Big Ben broke down. In a way, 1976 Britain imitated all those places we like to visit on holiday – where you wake up in the certain knowledge that it’s going to be another boiling hot day, not a cloud in the sky, and not the remotest chance of any wet stuff failing from the sky. That’s great for a week or two, but wouldn’t it get rather boring after a while? The unpredictability of our climate is one of the great things about living in Britain. What would we talk about, if we couldn’t moan about the weather?
Back in 1976, the Government eventually did what they knew would end the heatwave – they appointed a Minister for Drought. As soon as dear old Denis Howell took office, it started to rain – and didn’t stop for about three months.
What’s my most memorable moment from that summer? Well, here’s an insight into how my weird mind works. I vividly recall driving out of Eye, in a Tuckwells van, probably having just collected the Friday fish and chips for people in the office. I was listening to Radio One (yes, it was that long ago) and “Diddy” David Hamilton was the DJ. Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music fame, was in the charts at the time, and Diddy David said: “And next, we have the heatwave song – Let’s Stick Together.” Ho ho! For some reason, that rather limp witticism has stayed with me for four decades. I told you I had a weird mind.
Invasion of ladybirds and an encounter with a dust-devil
As a boy of 11, the summer of 1976 passed in a wave of heat and hazy memories of cracked earth and dust clouds, writes Andrew Clarke. I remember spending most of the summer buried under a mountain of comics in a bright orange tent erected in our back garden. My Dad had a mate who was a newsagent and used to bring home lots of remaindered out-of-date comics like Beano, Topper and Hotspur. Also, plenty of those pocket-sized graphic novels called Commando, full of tales of derring-do from the dark days of World War II.
During the course of the summer the colour of the tent was bleached by the relentless hot sun and I remember the world looking a very odd, surreal hue when I eventually emerged from the tent in search of a cold drink or an ice cream.
We also had to contend with a friendly invasion of ladybirds, I seem to remember. They got everywhere. At first I recall Mum taking a very relaxed attitude towards them, saying something like: “Oh, they’re good for the garden. They’ll eat all the insects and bugs.” I thought this was sage advice and would result in more blackberries for me off our blackberry bushes, but as the summer wore on I think our patience with this friendly infestation grew rather thin.
Living in Kesgrave, my brother and I often went exploring on Rushmere Heath, heading out past the old water tower, round by the speedway stadium, hacking bits of chalk out of the dry banks, and then doubling back onto the golf course.
I still retain vivid memories of the almost desert-like conditions on the heath. The usually luxuriant bracken was withered and dry. In fact, much of the spikey, yellow-flowered gorse was blackened after a spate of heath fires which, my overly dramatic but probably unreliable memory is trying to suggest, threatened the houses in Blackdown Avenue and Linksfield. How an 11-year-old boy would know this I don’t know. What I do remember is being fascinated by the fact that not only was the large pond on the golf course dry but the bottom was parched and cracked by the baking sun. As we kicked around in the dust, I imagined this was what being in a desert must be like.
I also remember witnessing my first dust-devil on one of our expeditions, watching open-mouthed as a mini-whirlwind formed in front of us, picked up loads of dust and hopped across the golf course before disappearing into nothing.
I remember my brother Nick and I returning home with wild tales of what we had seen.
In those days summers seemed to last forever. Probably school loomed all too soon but I have banished all thought of that from my memory and now all that remains are comics in a tent, adventures on the heath and battling an invasion of ladybirds.
I recall that, being a Londoner, my Mum was grateful we had our annual summer holiday to Felixstowe arranged for late July, 1976, where we would all be “a lot cooler by the sea”, writes Gillian Atacocugu.
My childhood memories of 1976 were of sitting behind a windbreak at The Dip end of Felixstowe beach, surrounded by my lovely aunts and uncles. My Auntie Vi would always prepare her wonderful homemade sausage rolls and bring peaches, especially for me, as part of the family picnic on the shingle.
We would spend our two weeks swimming in the sea or sunbathing, sitting in the rented beach hut, playing card games, and walking to the golf course.
In the evenings we would usually head to the Dooley pub, where my cousins and I would be free to roam in the nearby fields, which my Mum would refer to as “The Dooley Fort”, or we would go to the Grosvenor pub, which at the time had a family room leading to the public bar.
My mum, aunts and young cousins would sit in this part of the pub, generally eating crisps, whilst my dad and uncles went into the actual bar area. It never occurred to anyone that men should take a turn looking after the children.
I recall Abba being very popular and most girls wanting to be like Agnetha or Anni-Frid. I also recall toy typewriters. My parents bought me one as my Mum said this would help me learn to spell.
Auntie Vi’s sausage rolls. Glorious!
I was 17 and living in Suffolk. The prosaic thing was I remember using the bathwater to keep the garden plants alive (the lawn was left to get brown), remembers Paul Geater. It was hot from June to the end of August. I didn’t like it very much because my skin burns easily and there were no sunscreens on the market in those days. I had to stay indoors during the middle of the day, otherwise I burned.
I worked a bit on a relation’s fruit farm. Because of my skin I was in the shed, weighing other people’s raspberries and strawberries, during the middle of the day, but for a couple of hours, early and late, I picked the fruit. I earned enough over the summer to buy a cassette recorder!
I hadn’t passed my driving test and I didn’t like to cycle in the heat of the day – but I do remember being taken to the coast quite a bit because it was cooler there.
And I also remember learning to sail on a lake in Germany with a friend whose family were in the army. I’ve never sailed since. I’ve always regretted that a bit.
At the end of August I went to Scotland for a week to stay with friends. Guess what! My first full day there, the heavens opened and the summer was over!
I think the summer came to a sudden end on the August bank holiday weekend – and the autumn of 1976 was incredibly wet.
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