May Day 1978 dawned cold and wet. In terms of the weather at least, and in typical bank holiday style, it then went downhill from there, as meteorologists reported the rainiest 1 May since records began, while temperatures struggled to rise above 6C.

Scotland had enjoyed (if that is the word) a public holiday at the start of May since 1871, but it was not until the final years of the Wilson-Callaghan government that this was extended to the rest of the UK. Labour MP Jo Richardson had led the campaign in Parliament to give England and Wales their eighth bank holiday of the year (Scotland and Northern Ireland get ten), and Michael Foot, first as Employment Secretary and then as Leader of the House of Commons, piloted the proposal through Westminster and Whitehall in 1976 before it was finally implemented two years later. But this additional day off was not universally popular.

Local newspapers all over the country scoured their readership for signs of disaffection.

The workforce at Coventry Industrial Pipework staged a weekend work-in as a protest. ‘I don’t normally get involved in politics myself but some of the staff feel this is a holiday in honour of Reds,’ managing director Noel Kelly told the Coventry Evening Telegraph (2 May 1978). In Hassocks, Sussex, some shopkeepers vowed to say open during the ‘unBritish’ new bank holiday. And in Folkestone, the Executive Club flew its St George’s flag at half mast, with one member telling the Daily Mirror, ‘We’re not interested in Marxism’ (2 May 1978).

To be fair, there were good reasons beyond the appalling weather for some to feel disgruntled. With no statutory right to be paid on their extra holiday, many workers lost a day’s wages. Shops, museums and other public attractions closed to give their staff a day off – so there was little enough to do anyway. And even television had few distractions: the three channels then on offer failing to capitalise on their captive audience by falling back on films and repeats, ‘including Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game favourites for what must have been at least the thirty-third time’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 2 May 1978).

But this was not the whole story. In London, a reported 8,000 Labour Party supporters and trade unionists ‘splashed their way from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park aided by pipers, brass and jazz bands’ (Daily Mirror, 2 May 1978). Interviewed on the march, a soaked Jo Richardson declared: ‘It’s an extra holiday we all deserve.’

Of course, May Day did not begin in 1978. It had been celebrated as a spring festival for hundreds of years, and was adopted as International Workers Day by the Second Socialist International in 1889 to mark the Haymarket massacre in Chicago. It soon caught on as a day for the workers, with 300,000 gathering in London’s Hyde Park in 1890 when Eleanor Marx was among the speakers calling for an eight-hour working day. Marches and rallies then continued throughout the twentieth century – but with differences between parties leading to rival events as Labour Party supporters chose to mark the first Monday of the month, while others to the Left stuck to 1 May regardless. In 1978, by good fortune, 1 May fell on a Monday, satisfying all concerned.

In addition to that year’s London event, an estimated 4,000 people took part in a march and rally at Digbeth Hall in Birmingham, with a twelve-hour programme of music, speeches, dances and exhibitions, and ticket sales that more than covered the day’s costs. Foreign Secretary David Owen spoke at the event, making ‘peace through disarmament and the fight against racism at home and abroad his main themes’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 2 May 1978). At Rochester in Kent, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson told a May Day rally attended by several hundred people that opposition leader Margaret Thatcher had become ‘obsessed’ with the Communist threat, and added: ‘If she knew anything about the British people, apart from Conservative tea parties and conferences, she would know that communism in Britain is virtually non-existent as a political force.’ The real danger, he claimed came from Trotskyists (Kent Evening Post, 2 May 1978).

There was also some discord at Leicester, where ‘300 people braved the bitter cold and fine drizzle’ to attend the Labour Party’s May Day rally in Victoria Park, while members of the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party and Indian Workers Association complained at their exclusion from the event (Leicester Mercury, 2 May 1978). The city’s Conservative Trade Unionists held their own meeting; about twenty people turned up.

Internationally, tens of thousands turned out in Paris, while hundreds of thousands of socialists and communists marched in Madrid, where previously no legal May Day parade had been permitted since the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Big official parades took place in Moscow and to a lesser extent in Beijing which had decided to focus on the country’s national day in October instead.

At Highgate Cemetery in London meanwhile, vandals poured red, white and blue paint over the grave of Karl Marx (Daily Mirror, 2 May 1978), while in a slightly more eccentric protest, Wolverhampton teacher Sheila Jack turned up for work as usual and stood outside her closed school in silent protest for an hour, telling newspaper reporters: ‘I do not believe I should have to take a day off work to celebrate a pagan festival’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 2 May 1978). Joan Bennett responded that she didn’t see any reason why her husband, the school caretaker, should have to open up the building for one teacher.

And despite some claims to the contrary, many people did head out for the day, even if not to attend marches and rallies. The AA and RAC monitored huge traffic queues around the New Forest, Bournemouth and Brighton, West Midland Safari Park reported one of its best weekends ever, and though misty rain prevented an air display at Sudeley Castle which would have featured ‘an intrepid woman standing on the top wing of a Tiger Moth, a helicopter piloted by a woman and a woman, described as a “flying Grandma,” in a hot air balloon’, visitors were able to make do instead with the castle and a model aircraft display (Birmingham Post, 2 May 1978).

As the Belfast News-Letter optimistically put it: ‘Even if May Day failed to impress this year, clearly it has prospects for the future.’

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Further reading

May Day: A People’s Holiday, by Dr Shirin Hirsch for People’s History Museum (1 May 2022).

May Day: the tradition that survived Margaret Thatcher, by Stephen Moss for The Guardian (4 February 2011).

300,000 Leftists March in Madrid to Mark May Day, New York Times (2 May 1978).