Great Britain: The Other Blackout

It was a clear, brisk autumn day in London, but much of the country shivered in fog and freezing mist. As darkness fell, housewives turned on their lights and electric heaters, started brewing tea and cooking dinner on electric stoves, snapped on the telly. Then suddenly, bang on 5 o'clock, it was New York all over again. The lights went out.

In London's Mayfair, office workers stumbled around in inky, icy blackness. At the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, diplomats read their documents by candlelight. Scotland Yard sped emergency flashlight details out to direct traffic at major intersections. Throughout great areas of southern England and the Midlands the blackout spread. Sections of Birmingham sputtered and went out, as did Maidenhead, downtown Derby and scores of other places.

But when the lights came on again half an hour or so later, there was no American nonsense about what had happened. The chief operations engineer for Britain's Central Electricity Board simply announced that he had pulled the plug. It was the peak power period, he explained, and the chilly inhabitants of England and Wales had turned on a lot more electricity (32,000 megawatts) than the state-owned power stations could produce (29,000 megawatts). The foul-up was due "partly to the weather and partly because we are rather behind on an annual overhaul."

Candid as the explanation was, it did not satisfy his customers. "It is really intolerable that power supplies should be inadequate," declared the Times, and other papers agreed. Tongue in cheek, BBC Television Commentator Cliff Michelmore appeared "on behalf of the electrical industry" to report that the blackouts were not "anything like the disgraceful failure of the electric supply in New York last week. Ours were on purpose." As if to prove him right, the Electricity Board's engineer pulled the plug again the next night.