The year the pavements sizzled: remembering the great heatwave of 1976

The Who and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band topped the bill at a sun-splashed rock concert at Celtic Park in early June. Seven long-haired drugs detectives, each wearing a necklace with a scales of justice motif, mingled with the 35,000-strong crowd. Thirty-three arrests were made for alleged drugs offences. There was a lot of great music around in those days but sometimes, when the radio coughed out a particularly execrable song – Brotherhood of Man's Eurovision hit, Save Your Kisses for Me, comes irresistibly to mind – you were too listless in the heat to get up and turn it off.

By late June, London was sweltering in temperatures of up to 33C (91F), only a shade lower than the capital's hottest recorded day in 1940. Office workers plunged into Trafalgar Square's fountains to cool off: but some sedate business types kept hold of their bowlers and brollies and simply bathed their tired feet.

The Glasgow Herald advised that Scotland could be in the path of the heatwave. On Sunday 27 June, it arrived: 25C (77F) at Lossiemouth, 22.8C (73F) in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, 22.2C (72F) in Glasgow – the city's first day in several weeks without rain. The AA was stretched to capacity dealing with cars overheating and breaking down, especially near the hilly tourist hotspots of the Trossachs.

There was already a drought on the Continent, leading to warnings of increases in EEC wheat prices in the autumn. Barmen in the House of Commons rebelled after being told that, heatwave or no, they still had to wear their green jackets. (They went on strike – and won.) Some 270 paint-shop workers at the Rover plant at Solihull in the West Midlands walked out, saying they could not work in temperatures of more than 37.8C (100F). Around 1,500 other workers stopped in sympathy. In Buchanan Street, Glasgow, a menswear store boss moved his desk out on to the pavement. It was just too hot to work indoors.

On July 1 Glasgow's temperature soared to a record for the month of 29.5C (86F). The heat caused salad items to leap in price: tomatoes increased by 10p per pound. In England, it was too hot to pick strawberries or to transport those that had been picked (and this during Wimbledon, too). A Herald writer wrote evocatively, drowsily, about the heat, about seeking shade under a tree in her garden. But the sun is relentless. Her phone rings: she pads indoors to answer it. "It's a wrong number," she writes. "The voice at the other end is as hot and irritable as mine."

Bjorn Borg beat Ilie Nastase at Wimbledon after Chris Evert had despatched Evonne Cawley. Down at Royal Birkdale, near Liverpool, officials feared a serious fire risk in view of the continuing drought and high temperatures at the Open, which began on July 7. Emergency measures were put in place to protect the course in the event of outbreaks of fire. A Scots nurse on duty at Birkdale, Irene McCafferty, was kept busy treating spectators with mild sunstroke.

The English NFU warned that farmers in south-west England desperately needed torrential rain to avoid severe damage to food production. The Evening Times' resident cartoonist, Willie Gall, drew two Glasgow women melting in the heat. Says one: "Ah bet ye could fry an egg oan that pavement if ye could afford an egg!" Some people did, of course, try to fry eggs on car bonnets. Next to Gall's cartoon, columnist Cliff Hanley was writing about "the glaring light, the balmy breezes, and the girls in their summer dresses".

On Monday, July 5, to no-one's great astonishment, two soft-drinks firms reported record sales, shifting 116,000 bottles as their staff worked overtime to keep up. The previous week had seen AG Barr and Co selling more than 400,000 gallons, substantially more than its usual weekly total of 252,000 gallons. "If demand keeps up at its present level," said the boss of Blantyre's A Robertson, "we'll be on our knees praying for rain."

The heatwave might have made people wilt, but the news agenda that summer was as busy as ever. In March Prime Minister Harold Wilson had announced that he would be leaving No10; his successor, after a Labour Party election, was "Sunny Jim" Callaghan. America was celebrating its bicentennial. Hostages were rescued at Entebbe airport in Uganda. The Black Panther, Donald Neilson, was on trial for murder.

"I do remember the 1976 heatwave," says Glasgow comedian Andy Cameron, "and one Saturday in particular when I was opening a church fete at one o'clock and a lady in the platform party fainted with the heat and three Penguins melted. Fortunately they weren't the birds you find in the Antarctic but the more palatable version made by McDonalds Biscuits [the Glasgow manufacturer who produced the first Penguins]. The heat was intense that summer and I remember going to the Derby Cafe in Netherlee and tasting, for the first time ever, hot ice-cream. My most vivid memory of that summer was, however, driving up Allison Street in Govanhill and seeing a water hydrant skooshing water a hundred feet into the air and being so hot I stopped the car and stood under it with the weans."

The BBC Scotland weather presenter Judith Ralston was 10 years old in 1976. "I remember the long summer days, it was so warm. I'm very dark anyway, and I was as brown as a berry. I remember being thirsty all the time and my mum shouting at me to use a cup because I had my mouth under the running tap. I spent a lot of time at my aunt's house in East Lothian – she had a great big rambling garden and I spent a lot of time hanging about with her there, that lovely summer. I was out on my bike all the time, too."

The journalist Joan McFadden was brought up in Caithness – a place "which memorably has had snow in June", so the summer of 1976 was "simply extraordinary – we spent hours on Thurso beach and I remember gulping down a bottle of Coke and then sneezing – and it all shot back up my nose and out on to the sand. I also remember my parents let us stay up till all hours and pitch a tent in the garden – though we were a bunch of scaredy cats and didn’t make it through the night, all piling into the house to our own beds."

Diane Goodwin, of Edinburgh, recalls: "I was a young student nurse in Inverness having gone there from the States four years earlier. I refused to believe you could use 'heatwave' and 'Scotland' in the same sentence. On a day off I went to the beach at Findhorn and, being the know-it-all that I was, insisted I did not need sunscreen as it was nothing like the hot American summers." You can guess the rest. "It took days to turn from beetroot red to my normal colour and the blisters on my back eventually healed. It did not deter me and I am still here 44 years later."

For Liz Coll, of Newton Mearns, Glasgow, 1976 – the year in which she left school – was a time of boys with long hair and unisex Wrangler jeans and T-shirts. "The pavements sizzled with that kind of mirage haze one often sees in movies where the hero staggers, dying of thirst, towards what he thinks is water. In the days before electric windows and vehicle air conditioning, every car window was rolled down, while elbows with rolled-up shirt sleeves rested on window frames.

"That summer is seared into my memory. Diving into dark, cool dams and lochs, or running across tide-rippled sand to the sea. Emerging from a swim chilled at first but warming up swiftly after drying off with a rough towel, then a lie down on the belly-warm sand, with the sun caressing your back. Day-trips on ferries to Arran or Rothesay, with the salty sea breeze blowing through your hair and the headiness of young love. Everything already a wonder to a teenager, heightened by the sunshine and the music on the radio: Abba's Dancing Queen, Elton John and Kiki Dee's Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Wings' Let 'em In."

Bobby Houston holidayed in Scarborough that year. "You couldn't go barefoot anywhere. It was scorchingly hot. Ice-cream sellers must have made a mint that summer. It was so warm the tarmac on roads was melting in the heat. There was no air-conditioning in the wee car I had then – it was a case of driving about with all the windows open. I guy I knew got Bell’s palsy from doing just that, lucky for him it was temporary. I just hope this summer lives up to the summer of 76."

Jim Hamilton rented a house in Elie, Fife, for the month of June to mark his son's first birthday and had a "fantastic sunny time". "We were back on the same beach in April to celebrate our grandson's first birthday and again it was warm and sunny – fantastic." Janet Smith was living in Nottingham in 1976 and expecting her first child that August. "From the end of April onwards, it seemed, we woke up to blue sky and sunshine every day till the middle of September, when the weather broke and the rains came." Donald Fraser remembers: "Car seats were so hot you had to place towels over the seats so you could sit in the car to drive. Pharmacies sold out of sunglasses and sun tan lotion."

Brian Hill acquired a "superb" left-hand drive Opel GT from a doctor at Kirkcaldy's Victoria Hospital. "I had been a bit unlucky on the drink-driving front," he recalls, "and was about to lose my licence so I determined to drive my pride and joy down to Sorrento. I love Italy and had been several times but I really wanted to see Pompeii and climb Vesuvius, which I did. I spent six or seven weeks driving through Italy, returning via Monte Carlo and the south of France. The weather was brilliant but when I heard just how hot our own summer had been I was a wee bit peeved to say the least."

Andy Cumming was 10 years old that blissful summer. "In some bizarre way," he says, "the summer was a real coming-of-age. The heat went on for ever and I was out playing the whole time. I only went home when I was hungry or thirsty. Ice-cream, drinks, ice-poles, salad and chips for dinner every night, drowned in salad cream. Pogo sticks, roller skates and a Space Hopper that always went flat ... and my first bike. I cycled for miles and the local cycle speedway tracks of King's Park and Holmlea were dusty, and sore when you landed on the red blaes. Purchasing my first single with pocket money – Slik's Forever and Ever. Going into the house and drawing the curtains to cool down and watch Test cricket. We were safe ... we did not have a care in the world. Because we lived next to Hampden, the European Cup final between Bayern Munich and St Etienne was the most strange thing – having all these continentals in the neighbourhood. We ended up with French fans sleeping in our front room."

By early August, however, Scotland's great summer had eased slightly, but a drought had southern Britain firmly in its grip. Many in England remember those searingly hot days, which continued almost until September. Some luckless areas saw the erection of signs warning: "You are entering a drought area: Save water." Farmers and agricultural scientists fretted about the impact on crops. The Guardian journalist Martin Wainwright, writing in 2006, recalled that ladybirds were absolutely rife: "A colleague remembers the sound they made when you walked on them – crunch, crunch, crunch! – and the absence of green on the ground was made up for in the air by apocalyptic swarms of aphids."

On August 19 (a week after the last rain had fallen on Scotland) the Glasgow Herald reported that Scotland could be asked to help its southern neighbour with water supplies, with fleets of tankers taking water to particularly badly-hit areas. (Scotland's main reservoirs were fuller than normal at that time.) But ministers were nervous that this could hand the SNP a propaganda victory along the lines of "They've taken our oil: now they want our water too".

Scottish councils, however, thought the plan impracticable. Wessex Water was interested in importing Scottish water by rail. British Rail in Glasgow said there was sufficient rail-tanker capacity to take more than a million gallons of water from Glasgow to Bristol every day.

Callaghan appointed Denis Howell as minister for drought co-ordination on August 24 as the Cabinet continued to fret over England's worst drought for 250 years. Howell spoke about rationing until December, but England's heatwave finally came to an end in the last week of August with severe thunderstorms. Rain seemed to fall everywhere Howell went, to the point where he was nicknamed the Rain King. But Britain's hard-pressed water authorities still had a problem when it came to ensuring water supplies for the months ahead.

If there was a song that fitted that hazy, balmy, sun-streaked summer 40 years ago, says Liz Coll, it was Bobby Goldsboro's song, Summer (the First Time). Even though it had been released a few years earlier, its lyrics seemed tailored to 1976:

"It was a hot afternoon/

The last day of June/

And the sun was a demon/

The clouds were afraid/

One-ten in the shade/

And the pavement was steaming."