Portrait of the week
Anational dock strike was called: in accordance with custom and practice, those dockers whose labour was least in demand were quickest to withdraw it. Felixstowe, Dover, Belfast, Lame, and other ports continued to work normally. The freighter Ostia, which had precipitated the strike by berthing without the assist- ance of tugboatmen belonging to the TGWU, was unloaded by steel workers, and most of its cargo of coal sent to the Ravenscraig works by lorry. At Easington Colliery in County Durham, striking min- ers claimed that the Coal Board had• broken an agreement when the sole work- ing miner was smuggled in by the pit baths, and not at the main gate where 250 pickets were waiting to persuade him peacefully to remain at home; in the subsequent riot, 500 miners broke windows and destroyed cars belonging to colliery officials. Five policement were injured, and four miners arrested. Polkemmet colliery in Scotland and one face at the Shirebrook colliery in Nottinghamshire were destroyed for want of maintenance.. Mr Arthur Scargill casti- gated the television news for ignoring 'the national police-riot force imbued with para- military techniques'. Mr Mick McGahey called for Scottish miners to make their views known at the TUC conference in Brighton next week. The Chief Constable of Sussex expressed his anxiety about this and similar plans. Mrs Thatcher returned from her annual holiday in Switzerland, accompanied by a rumour that she would advance the date of her projected cabinet reshuffle. The Treasury floated the idea of imposing VAT on newspapers and maga- zines, arguing that the bingo games and pinups of the popular press justified such a step. The weekly prize in the Times 'dingo' game rose to £60,000, after going un- claimed for two weeks. Mr Hetherington, Town Clerk of Manchester, was able to relieve anxiety about Mr Chernenko's health after the Russian leader wrote to him praising the idea of nuclear-free zones. Mr Hetherington is also in favour of them. Amabel Williams-Ellis, nee Strachey, liter- ary editor of the Spectator in 1922-3, died aged 90.
The Republican Convention in Dallas chose President Reagan as its candi- date. He accepted. Mrs Geraldine Ferraro appeared to recover some of the sym- pathies lost to her by her husband's Italian- American style of accounting, when she said that :she. might not have accepted the nomination as Democratic vice- presidential candidate had she known what suffering this would cause her family. A French freighter which sank off Ostend after a collision with a German passenger ferry was discovered to be carrying 450 tons of uranium hexafluoride as part of a regular traffic between Le Havre and the Latvian port of' Riga. Though no radio- activity leaked out in the collision, vessels were warned against handling the cargo, and a salvage operation was mounted as soon as possible, 'after experts explained that if sea water were to reach the sunken cargo dangerous explosions would im- mediately result. The Swedish government protested to the Russians after a Russian fighter chased a Swedish charter airliner over the island of Gotland. Swedish offi- cials had earlier pooh-poohed a report in Jane's Fighting Ships that Russian troops had landed on Swedish soil from sub- marines more than 150 times since 1962. . Fighting broke out on the Green Line in Beirut again, but was quickly quelled. Israeli jets bombed a base in the Lebanon used by the PLO faction of Abu Moussa. Eighty of his prisoners were feared killed when their jail was hit. The Iraqis sank another tanker in the Gulf.
In Pakistana 16-year-old who had under- gone a sex-change operation was refused schooling, since Islamic law did not cover his case. Bernard Youens, the actor who played Stan Ogden in Coronation Street, died, as did PC Brian Bishop, whose death was blamed by his Chief Constable on Home Office guidelines which required him to challenge before shooting the man who shot him first. The English cricket team, which had hoped to restore its morale after being beaten 5-0 by the West Indies, was further humiliated by Sri Lanka, whose cricketers were generally thought to have played more attractively, as well as more effectively, than the En- glish. Lord Whitelaw wounded two people while shooting grouse. Bjorn Borg announced that he was divorcing his wife Mariana. Two days later, his 17-year-old friend, whom he had met while judging a beauty contest earlier this summer, announced that she was three months pregnant. Mr Borg begged the assembled 'I'm sorry, I must have dropped off — I had quite forgotten about Scargill for a moment.'
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