Strikes are planned for every single day this December and the disruption was crowned by snow earlier this week.

For older readers, this brings back memories of the Winter of Discontent in 1979 when both freezing weather and mass industrial action paralysed the country. Senior reporter Sam Lennon, then aged 14, looks back on that period of chaos...

The dead were left unburied and rubbish piled up on the streets, providing a feeding frenzy for rats.

Such was the grotesque chaos in January and February 1979 when waves of strikes were caused by public employees in dispute over pay with the government of the day

The timing couldn't have been worse as it happened during a period of snowfalls spanning over six weeks.

This was the Winter of Discontent and it also created long-term history.

It led to Britain's first woman Prime Minister entering Downing Street a few months later with laws to tame the trade unions.

Her Conservative Party remained in power for another 18 years.

The present strikes, by groups such as rail and postal workers, are usually for one or two days at a time but industrial action by just one set of workers in 1979 could last weeks.

Gravediggers in Liverpool and Greater Manchester walked out for a fortnight and Liverpool City Council hired a factory to store corpses until they could be buried.

Bodies could be kept in heat-sealed bags for up to six weeks. But the city's Medical Officer of Health caused alarm by warning bodies may have to be buried at sea if the industrial action went on for months.

Many waste collectors were on strike for an entire month, from January 22, 1979, and Westminster City Council kept uncollected rubbish in, for example, Leicester Square at the heart of London's West End.

This led to a mass feast for rats and a soaring in their numbers locally. The media therefore nicknamed the place Fester Square.

Additionally, NHS ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances so many could only take in emergency patients.

As the weeks of misery continued, patients were left stranded at Medway hospitals when ambulance crews would only deal with 999 calls.

The area was left with only one ambulance, 23 schools closed and icy roads were left ungritted.

In mid-February Medway Council manual workers brought depots and swimming pools to a standstill during a single day of protest.

The largest picket lines could be seen at the council's Southill depot in Maidstone Road, Chatham. Staff from the Black Lion Leisure Centre in Gillingham walked out in sympathy.

Meanwhile porters at Medway and St Bartholomew's hospitals worked to rule.

John Underdown, chairman of the Medway branch of the then trade union union COHSE (Confederation of Health Service Employees), said the aim was to make life as difficult as possible for administrators but not patients.

Medway and Gillingham Chamber of Commerce also warned that 5,000 Kent workers could lose their jobs because of a continuing lorry drivers' strikes.

The then Gillingham Rural Dean Canon Donald Mills said the spate of walkouts was "impossible to justify morally'' and savoured "more of greed than justice".

Already interested in journalism, I kept newspaper cuttings reporting the turmoil and their cartoonists often took to gallows humour.

The London Evening Standard artist, pen name JAK, had an image of the then Prime Minister Jim Callaghan uncompleted and left in a join the dots outline.

The caption said: "JAK is on strike too: draw it yourself."

Lorry drivers from the Transport and General Workers' Union walked out from January 11 and action like this let to non-delivery of oil to my school, Acland Burghley in Kentish Town, north London, for heating.

It meant that the school would regularly have to close for a day or half-day.

So us kids were among the few who benefited from the Winter of Discontent.

When the headmaster announced a closure on the tannoy we would cheer in the classroom and we could hear the squeaky voices of Year 7 children in the room next door cheering even louder.

At break times the snow meant replacing games of football in the playground with exhilarating snowball fights.

During this time one boy mistimed committing offences and ended up in youth custody for aggravated burglary. He had been caught by leaving a trail of footprints in the snow.

My family were lucky enough not to have to struggle to work or school through the snow during this time. I was only 10 minutes' walk from my school and my sister's school was about 20 minutes away.

My mother, who is Finnish, was a freelance journalist for her country's media so mostly worked from home.

My father was employed by the Sunday Times and was at home on full pay during a management lockout.

Yet another industrial dispute from the time and that one led to Rupert Murdoch taking over the paper a couple of years later.

The first warning of snow for me came on Saturday, December 30, 1978, when it was dry but suddenly turned bitterly cold because of freezing winds.

The white stuff dumped heavily on the streets in London and the South East on the night of New Year's Eve.

On January 2 it was reported that the A20 between Dover and Folkestone (now the B2011) was blocked with snow, making it impossible for people in outlying villages to commute.

Freezing temperatures also cracked concrete on Dover seafront.

In the coming weeks roads cracked under the Arctic conditions, with potholes forming and road surfaces disintegrating.

In more remote areas, such as the Isle of Grain in Medway, cars were buried under snowdrifts. Nine cars in a line were seen bonnet-high in snow on the Isle of Sheppey.

Railway lines were also impassable. At one stages this affected the Ashford to Maidstone and Ashford to Rye routes.

On Romney Marsh, 200 children on their way to school on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway had to be rescued when their train got stuck in snowdrifts.

The Winter of '79 was to date one of the three worst in the first decades since the Second World War, rivalling only those of 1963 and 1947.

January 1979 had an average temperature of −1.4 °C and, was the 17th coldest January since records began in 1659.

In February, with a report of fresh blizzards, a regional TV newscaster tried to assure viewers: "Cheer up, spring can't be far.''

Thankfully it wasn't and on February 16, the day my school broke up for the half term holiday, I had my last snowball fight with two pals as we walked home. The thaw set in during the week-long break.

The strikes also began to phase out after an agreement between the government and union leaders on February 14.

Callaghan was accused of failing to fully appreciate the turmoil, let alone solve it.

The most notorious incident for him was on January 10 when he had just come back from holiday in Barbados after an international summit in nearby Guadeloupe.

When asked by a British reporter about the chaos he said it didn't look as bad from the outside and some were taking a more "parochial view."

He also accused the press of exaggeration.

The Sun paraphrased him with the headline: "Crisis? What crisis?"

JAK portrayed the Prime Minister lying on a sun lounge in the Caribbean telling someone over the phone: "Let them eat cake."

The Winter of Discontent had been the last straw after years of strikes and industrial disputes in Britain during the 70s with previous action from workers at car plants such as Ford and British Leyland.

All this seemed part of this country's culture and ushered in mockery, even from schoolchildren.

A classmate of mine once scrawled on his desk: “Glenn Hoddle (of Tottenham Hotspur) strikes faster than British Leyland.”

Even Basil Fawlty says in a episode of Fawlty Towers from March 1979: "Another car strike.The taxpayers pay them millions each year so they can go on strike. The British Leyland Concerto - in four movements, all of them slow, with a four-hour tea-break in between."

I remember the public anger being summed up on TV in February 1979 by a woman berating men on a picket line for the disruption the strikes had caused her: "I'm sick of you trade unions."

So were many other voters, who let Margaret Thatcher take over from Callaghan in that May's General Election.

Her appeal for some of the electorate was that she appeared to have a thorough grasp of the crisis for a start.

She also pledged reforms to control trade unions such as secret ballots for strike votes and a ban on secondary picketing of businesses not targeted directly by a strike.

The term Winter of Discontent comes from the lines in the Shakespeare play Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York."

The phrase was adopted for this crisis after it was used by Larry Lamb, then editor of The Sun, in an editorial comment on May 3, election day.