An icy month and chilly economy with record unemployment against a background of industrial collapse but a successful month for my family and computer industry leadership with seminars, meetings, committees and press and TV interviews. We have ridden health problems and have renovated The Lady and bought a Blue Peter dinghy for a new boating year but elsewhere the misery of strike-torn and unemployed Britain is eating away at Thatcher’s credibility as she faces widespread criticism and the Ethiopians are still caught in a famine of biblical proportions but arms talks are started and South African apartheid has its future under challenge
And so ends the first month of 1985. The country gripped in a big freeze of snow, ice and the CEGB generating record electricity levels as we have 10 degrees of frost and the temperature in London is the lowest since 1953. Amongst the key domestic headlines are the cold weather causing house fires and gas explosions as the world economy deteriorates with Midland’s Bank losses mounting over their US Crocker Bank problems, 679,000 youngsters are on special schemes. and UK unemployment rises to 3,341,000 and up to 90% in Middlesbrough. Sterling and Gilts fall and the Bank Lending rates rise to 14% with a full Sterling and Exchange rate crisis in prospect. A rail strike now adds to the coal strike misery as Thatcher thwarts every prospect of a NCB/NUM negotiated end to the miners strike. In the first ever televised House of Lords debate, the Government was savaged for forsaking unity and industrial recovery as imported fuel to break the strike costs £2.7billion
The British tyre manufacturing industry collapsing as economic uncertainty feeds on the misery of the rising unemployment. My family are fine with my Mum, Grace, now slowly recovering from her heart operation at Papworth, Freda settled with my £7,000 gift for her daughter and my sister-in-law, Sue Jackson, starts in her new Essex University job, her brother Charlie and wife Chrisula blessed with their first baby girl and Debbie is recovering from her nervous nights but both the girls both suffering from colds. I am beginning to look forward to the spring, the bird nesting season and the return of The Lady (fully commissioned) for a full summers cruising as we buy the Blue Peter dinghy for Daniel from the boat show. I am also making enquiries about the acquisition of forests or agricultural land, which I see as an amiable interest and a hedge against inflation. I attend my first SDP/Liberal Alliance political meeting and start reading books on the history of mere drainage and the Norfolk Broads as future interests. My work is now widespread in industry and government liaison matters and press comments and interviews are frequent and becoming a little hectic to cope with. The BMMG prospects look brighter than for some time, with Martin Isherwood now helping us and more media interest for our views and initiatives. My industry role this month included membership and participation with PICOM, NEDO, the DTI advisory committee , the NCC advisory committee, as well as full participation in the BOTB seminar and Sunday Times features and ITN TV interviews about the computer industry’s prospects for the coming year. I was also leading a successful BMMG Local Area Network seminar for the microcomputer industry at the famous St Ermin’s Hotel and my Heraldic stationery arrives and impresses everyone including me. Elsewhere, a runaway Soviet missile causes panic as the US/USSR prepare for ‘Star War’ arms talks. South African leaders start to feel the anti-apartheid pressure with Kennedy and Jess Jackson taking an interest and Terry Waite struggles to free the Libyan hostages who are moved to complicate matters. Israel have to pull out of the Lebanon after their first ever defeat. The 40th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp is a poignant moment and the latest blow to humanity is starving Ethiopian refugees trekking 600 miles to the Sudan