It was Ilie Năstase who first realised something was amiss. At Wimbledon, during the Men’s Singles Final on 3 July, he surrendered a 3-0 lead after being distracted by a ladybird on Centre Court. Within moments, there were thousands of the little creatures, and they had spread far beyond south-west London.
Everyone knew that the weather was to blame. A dry winter had been followed by an even drier spring, and the sun continued to shine through tJune and July. Cheltenham recorded temperatures of almost 36°C, whilst Milton Abbas and Teignmouth saw no rain for 45 consecutive days. The effects were shocking: wildfires destroyed 50,000 trees in Hurn Forest in Dorset, Chew Magna Reservoir in Somerset nearly dried up, and a drowned village re-emerged from the depths of Burrator Reservoir in Devon.
Conditions were much the same across the country. Standpipes appeared in the streets, and tarmac melted on motorways. In London, Big Ben broke down. Back at Wimbledon, thousands of spectators required treatment for heat exhaustion, while at Henley Regatta, conditions became so oppressive that stewards were forced to remove their blazers.
The real problem lay in the fields. Crops were maturing early, triggering a surge in the aphids that feed on crops and, in turn, the ladybirds that fed on them. But when the crops failed, the aphids died off leaving the ladybirds with no choice but to search elsewhere for food.
When the ladybirds came
The first place that reported a swarm was Burnham-on-Sea. On the final day of Wimbledon, ladybirds suddenly covered pavements, walls, shopfronts and buses. “It’s a nightmare,” one resident told a reporter for the Bristol Evening Post at the time (headline: Insect invasion rocks resort). “Children are getting quite upset.”
The town even made the televised news. “All I’m trying to do is get down to the beach,” one frustrated visitor told the camera, as ladybirds crawled all over him. “I’m going to pack it in, I think. Cheerio, Burnham. I’m off”.
The council announced that there was no defence against the insects, but people devised their own methods of dealing with them. Children rode around on bicycles, swatting them with ping-pong bats. Some turned to treacle, which was said to deter them. Ken Boulton, owner of the Royal Clarence Hotel, told the Evening Post he had poured paraffin over thousands of them and set them alight.
It was turning out to be quite a year for arrivals. Concorde had made its first commercial flight. The first Body Shop had opened in Brighton. And Elsie Tanner had returned to Coronation Street after three years away. In Westward Ho!, meanwhile, another town overrun by ladybirds, shopkeepers were scooping them up in buckets. “Many people are getting a bit frightened now,” said a man named Freddie Meadows, “because of the numbers.”
When the ladybirds bit back
Holidaymakers in Weston-super-Mare were forced to take cover. “People came in with shirts covered in ladybirds,” someone at the tourist information centre told Western Daily Press (headline: Plague on the West Beach), “and children even had them in their ice creams.” In Clevedon, when the swarms descended, they turned the roof of the bandstand red.
As far north as Hull, the swarm was so dense that workers building the new Humber Bridge downed tools, while at the fish docks in Grimsby, filleting had to be halted. But these were not the only “ladybirds” in Britain that summer. Ladybird Johnson, the widow of the former US President, was visiting in London. And a Danish cabaret act called The Ladybirds was touring the clubs with its “topless go-go-show”, appearing every night for a week at the Webbington Country Club in Loxton.
The insect ladybirds, however, were becoming a real nuisance. Reports began to circulate that they had started biting people, including guests at the Grand Central Hotel in Weston. Experts said that they were attracted human sweat; they might nip, but they could not actually break skin. Yet this provided little reassurance.
The mood was febrile. Moths were blamed for damaging carrot crops in East Anglia. A python named Monty was on the loose in Sussex. In a village near Loch Lomond, women took to wearing tights on their heads to keep off the blood-sucking midges. And in the Somerset village of Sedgemoor, three cases of psittacosis, a disease most often transmitted to humans by parrots, were confirmed.
And then they were gone
As July wore on, officials estimated that there were now around 24 billion ladybirds in the country. In Weston, once again, members of a Darby and Joan club were assailed when they ventured outdoors. “A battle commenced, with hordes of ladybirds attacking right and left,” one of them wrote in the Hinckley Times (headline: Barwell D and J go to Weston). “They settled on everyone walking on the promenade and beach, and we had to beat a hasty retreat to an hotel.”
In August, as the film Taxi Driver opened, sunworshippers across the country were reported to be fending ladybirds off with towels. Funfairs, open-air baths, and beaches were forced to close. And the Daily Mirror published a cartoon of a ladybird wearing a Nazi helmet.
Then they were gone, almost as suddenly as they had arrived. At Gloucestershire’s cricket match against the West Indies in Bristol, spectators had nothing left to contend with but the still-searing heat. A Minister for Drought was appointed three days later, and the rains at last arrived a few days after, in most places on August Bank Holiday.
The autumn that followed would be unusually wet. The year 1977 would be much cooler than 1976. And the ladybirds did not return. “Topless go-go” performers, however, continued to be popular.
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