Cricket wives take the blame: The week that was July 4 to 10, 1980.

Meanwhile the big four banks – Barclays, National Westminster, Lloyds and the Midland – all cut their base rates for overdrafts by one per cent to 16 per cent following a one per cent cut in the Minimum Lending Rate announced a few days previously.

Chairman of the Building Society Association, Leonard Williams, said that the mortgage rate could be reduced from its record level of 15 per cent if the fall in interest charges continued.

The coal industry faced the threat of double trouble in the near future, miners’ union leader Joe Gormley warned. He predicted a huge financial loss for the Coal Board by the year end, coupled with the prospect of a big per cent pay claim from pitmen.

In his address to the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers, Mr Gormley said that the National Coal Board must avoid trying to screw the miners’ wage claim down to trim its anticipated financial loss.

Later he dismissed claims by union militants that the mineworkers would bring down Mrs Thatcher’s government if their 35 per cent pay demand was not met.

Cheap and inferior French Golden Delicious apples, which had led to the disastrous collapse of the English fruit market in 1979, were to be boycotted as part of a war for survival.

Importers, wholesalers and major retailers said they would refuse to handle anything but top quality imports from August 1, said the chairman of the Women’s Farming Union, Margaret Charrington.

In foreign news, the Yorkshire Post reported that more than half a million people marched through Tehran’s streets roaring approval for a hard line against leftists and liberals.

Millions took part nationwide in demonstrations to show support for the Islamic republic.

A 16-point manifesto, read to the throng outside the city’s university, demanded the dissolution of Iran’s two major left-wing movements, tougher action by revolutionary courts and further purging of counter-revolutionaries.

Yorkshire’s cricket leagues were between 10 and 15 umpires short each weekend and the blame was being put squarely – if not fairly – on the shoulders of cricket wives for “putting their foot down on their sporting husbands”, claimed Jack Shuttleworth, secretary of the Dales Council League.

“Woman trouble is adding to our umpire problem,” he said. “If wives want to go out on Saturday night, it is difficult if their husbands are umpiring until eight o’clock. It is surprising that after so many
years of getting pleasure from
the game, players don’t want to umpire.”

He was stoical, however. “We would rather play with no umpires than not at all.”

In other sports news, after nine years Australia’s Evonne Cawley was back as Wimbledon Champion. She defeated American Chris Lloyd 6-1, 7-6 to regain the title she had first embraced in 1971 as starry-eyed Evonne Goolagong.

In between her two Wimbledon wins she had married, had a daughter and suffered injures which threatened her career. She was the first mother to win the women’s title since Dorothea Lambert Chambers in 1914.