HEARD the one about the striking electricians, the women protesters and the Maori dancers?

Local authority electricians, seeking wage parity with private-sector colleagues, had been picketing Glasgow City Chambers for 10 weeks by the time this photograph was taken, on April 7, 1975 (Princess Margaret, visiting the chambers on April 1, had been whisked to a rear entrance in order to avoid them). The women, from Charles Street in Townhead, told a leading councillor that they were furious at the hardships they were suffering because the lifts in their multi-storey flats were not working; they alleged that fuses in the lifts had been removed, rending them inoperable. The councillor asked the electricians’ emergency strike committee if they would restore one lift per multi-storey flat to reduce hardship. Outside the chambers, there were angry exchanges between the women and the strikers. Some strikers left and the women jeered and shook their fists at those who remained. By chance, a group of Maori dancers also visited the chambers that day, to publicise a New Zealand film being screened at a city hotel. They sang a traditional Maori song, were presented with tartan stoles (for the women) and tartan ties (for the men), by Lady Gray, wife of the Lord Provost, and, for a while at least, entertained the Townhead women and the electricians, who cheered as the dancers performed the Haka.