by Alan Johnson
Like many ex-servicemen, Tommy was a surprisingly strong supporter of industrial action. Loyalty to the union in a dispute was, I suppose, similar to loyalty to the nation during conflict. In common with the majority of my workmates, he had nothing but his savings and his wife’s income from a part-time job to sustain him. But he maintained a cheery optimism that was infectious.
With 200,000 members involved, and subscriptions suspended, the UPW was never going to be able to afford strike pay. It had dispensed with its strike fund many years before when it had been decided that a sophisticated system of conciliation and arbitration was a better way of resolving disputes.
When the strike began the union had established a hardship fund with £100,000 from their coffers supplemented by donations from other unions who saw our dispute as critical to winning the wider arguments with Heath’s new Conservative government and its plans to subdue the trade-union movement. We were often described as the thin red line holding back the enemy.
With my £12 17s 6d a week from social security I had no right to money from the fund. Tommy was too proud to apply. Those who did had to give personal details of their finances (and their lives) to a small committee of local branch representatives whose decision was final. The hardship fund caused seething resentment as stories were recounted (exaggerated with each retelling) of those who ‘qualified’ compared with those who hadn’t and the weekly meetings at the community centre spent more time dealing with vocal indignation about this money than it did on keeping us informed on how negotiations to resolve the dispute were going. Most of us thought we’d be better off as a union without this divisive national fund, which soon ran out anyway.
None of this affected the popularity of our inspirational branch secretary Len Rigby, who wisely delegated responsibility for allocating Slough’s portion of the fund to our treasurer. Indeed his reputation was enhanced as he organized the weekly meetings, led the picketing and arranged the coach trips to London as well as being the face of the strike in the local media and appearing at endless fund-raising public meetings around the Thames Valley. At those community centre gatherings he assumed his richest baritone to stress the inevitability of our eventual victory. But his job became increasingly difficult as the weeks went by and various negotiating initiatives came and went with no progress made.
One freezing Tuesday, Tommy and I arrived to find a national officer of the UPW there to address us. It was none other than Dickie Lawlor, the London official who’d come to Barnes to inform us of the one-day strike in support of the overseas telegraph officers. By now Dickie had risen to the rank of assistant general secretary, a paid employee of the UPW. With the membership’s initial enthusiasm for the strike gradually ebbing away, he was touring the country with his fellow officers to bolster our resolve and lift our morale.
Dickie was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a political institution that was fading as its adherents grew older and it failed to find new recruits even among the radical younger generation of the late sixties. The debate on the left was still about reform versus revolution. Those who supported reform had consistently shunned communism, with its suppression of religion and of other political parties and its contempt for parliamentary democracy. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, saw the Communist party as either too timid (for the supporters of Trotsky) or too tarnished (for those horrified by revelations about Stalin and events in Hungary in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia more recently). Their strongest presence was in the trade-union movement but it was not significant in the UPW, a union founded by guild socialists and solid supporters of the Labour leadership. Dickie was the most notable communist figure.
After some preliminary discussions, mainly about the vexed issue of the hardship fund, Len Rigby introduced our illustrious visitor, who strode to the front of the stage. He was a sturdy, thickset man with close-cropped hair that on somebody younger would have been described as a crew cut. Cigarette smoke rose in a blue haze and hung in the cold air above the hundred or so striking postal workers who’d turned up and were waiting to be inspired.
Dickie Lawlor was unapologetic about his politics. The government minister responsible for the Post Office was now Christopher Chataway, the former athlete who’d been Roger Bannister’s pacemaker when he ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954. Dickie began by saying that his dislike for the minister had begun when Chataway beat Vladimir Kuts over 5,000 metres. Apparently I was the only one in the audience who failed to understand the joke. Tommy Chessman whispered that Kuts was a great Russian athlete who’d been a rival of Chataway’s in the 1950s.
The oration was impressive – a twenty-minute speech without notes delivered to a beguiled congregation. ‘You are castigated because you’ve withdrawn your labour in pursuit of higher pay,’ he told us in one memorable passage. ‘But what does the capitalist do when he’s not getting enough for his produce? He withdraws it from the market. The farmer destroys his apples, the factory owner slows production: they create a shortage so the price they receive goes up. You only have the sweat of your brow – your labour – and if you’re not getting the right price for your labour, withdrawing it from the market is an entirely reasonable thing to do. You’ll provide your labour again when the price is higher, exactly as the capitalist does. If it’s acceptable for the bosses, why not for the workers?’
Lawlor went on to remind us of the validity of our claim and reassured us: ‘Do not be concerned about the union’s ability to finance this strike. This is a dispute about principles, not money. If we have to, we will sell union headquarters brick by brick until the battle is won and we return to work with our heads held high.’
In the Reliant on the way home Tommy Chessman enthused about the speech we’d heard. I commented that I’d thought ex-servicemen, more than anyone, were fiercely anti-communist.
Tommy smiled. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘But commies know what they’re doing in a dispute. They won’t give up easily and if we want to win we’ll need their disciplined approach.’
Such was Tommy’s cracker-barrel philosophy on the subject of communism. Dickie Lawlor’s authority, though, was limited. He may have been a prominent officer in the union, but he wasn’t our leader. That was Tom Jackson, a man who was to have a profound influence on my life.
Chapter 8
THE COMMENT MADE most often about the extravagantly bewhiskered general secretary of the UPW was that he was instantly recognizable. Tom Jackson’s huge handlebar moustache lent him the air of a Battle of Britain pilot in the eyes of some; others remarked on his resemblance to the comedian Jimmy Edwards. He had grown it as a young man in an attempt to look older than he was in order to be taken more seriously by the managers with whom he negotiated.
Brought up by a single mother in a poor part of Leeds, Tom had left school at fourteen to become a telegram boy. After war service with the Navy he had returned to the Post Office as a postman, and then a PHG, rising simultaneously through the ranks of the union. Now, thanks to the strike, he was a national figure, featuring in the top story in the news most evenings as the nation coped with the protracted withdrawal of what was then its primary means of communication.
I knew very little about Tom or his background at the time but I remember warming to his personality – or to as much of it as was penetrable in his appearances on the little black-and-white TV, with its two channels, perched in the corner of our front room (BBC2 had been launched five years earlier but we couldn’t pick it up until we could afford to buy a new set a few years later).
I liked the timbre of his voice, admired his eloquence and wondered how he could bear the strain of leading so many people through such a long dispute. There were many thousands of members with no income whatsoever, those with no dependants who couldn’t find temporary work and couldn’t access the by now dwindling resources of the hardship fund. Some of them also appeared on the national news, speaking of their determination to continue fighting for the £3 wage increase irr
espective of whether they had to remortgage or even sell their houses.
In the early days of the strike Tom looked exuberant, eyes twinkling above the whiskers and a ready smile below. He displayed a cheerful reasonableness that must have done more for our public relations than a hundred press releases.
I recall how delighted I felt when Michael Barratt, who presented the current-affairs magazine programme Nationwide on the BBC every evening after the six o’clock news, told viewers that Tom Jackson was his friend; that he cooked wonderful meals for the Barratts in Brighton, where they were neighbours. Tom was not just our leader but a friend of TV stars.
That winter, Nationwide was followed on several evenings by a five-minute cartoon explaining ‘decimalization’. On 15 February, a month after the strike began, the United Kingdom was to change its currency. Out went pounds, shillings and pence (twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound) and in came ‘new pence’, a hundred to a pound. The BBC had made a series of information films called Decimal Five, narrated by the newsreader Robert Dougall and leavened by songs from the Scaffold (the government also commissioned a dreadful record, ‘Decimalisation’, by Max Bygraves).
There were dire predictions of chaos on changeover day and, given the importance of the network of around 25,000 post offices in the planned exercise, not to mention the role of postal workers in delivering the explanatory leaflets, we strikers believed that Decimalization Day was one of our biggest weapons. Like Tom Jackson’s twinkling eyes, our optimism shone brightly in the days leading up to 15 February and began to lose its sparkle as we realized that the new currency was bedding in nicely without our assistance.
The government had lifted the Post Office’s statutory monopoly for the duration of the dispute and rival postal services were set up, charging 3s (now 15p) a letter at a time when a first-class stamp cost 2p. Whole sackloads of mail distributed by companies such as Randalls Postal Service were found dumped under hedges long after the dispute ended, but in spite of the lack of an effective replacement for our services, it was clear that the strike was failing.
As I’ve mentioned, I could not have been described as an activist in the great 1971 strike. I did my bit, religiously attending the Farnham Road meetings every Tuesday, occasionally going to a Hyde Park rally; a smattering of picket duty. I can’t pretend, either, that I used the time I had on my hands to toil over domestic chores in the Britwell house that was now home to two adults and three small children. Judy was coping with a newborn baby and two toddlers with minimal help from me. The changing of nappies was exclusively franchised to her without discussion or complaint. That kind of thing was (I’m embarrassed to say) considered to be the mother’s responsibility. Judy prepared and cooked all the meals, cleaned the house and trudged to the row of shops on Wentworth Avenue that was already being deserted by those Britwell residents who had cars in favour of the shopping nirvana of Slough High Street or the supermarkets in Farnham Road.
We had no car and neither of us could drive. Come to think of it, as well as having no fridge, we had no washing machine, no vacuum cleaner and no phone, either. Judy washed the clothes by hand exactly as my mother had done, scrubbing the collars of my shirts against a washboard, squeezing as much water as possible out of each garment by brute force before hanging it on a clothes horse to dry in front of the fire.
It’s not as if I can mitigate my appalling record of domestic inertia by claiming that I was any kind of handyman. It was Judy who changed the fuses and wired the plugs. I did once lay some awful sky-blue rubber floor tiles on the landing at the top of the stairs and I could wield a paintbrush when required. But there was no decorating done during the strike.
Our living conditions were a universe away from the slums of Southam Street where I’d spent my childhood but the memory of the tallyman and my mother’s debts still haunted me. We were both terrified of debt. Judy had a similar aversion to the increasingly popular ‘live now, pay later’ philosophy and we elected to save up to buy what we needed. The order of the purchases we planned to make was agreed in advance, each to be saved for consecutively: a twin-tub washing machine was the priority.
In the days before disposables, nappies created a mountain of additional washing. Once the contents of the used nappy had been flushed away, both the terry towelling nappy and the muslin square placed beneath it next to the baby’s skin would have to be subjected to a bleaching process involving buckets of Napisan and Milton sterilizing fluid, followed by a thorough wash to ensure that the baby’s delicate skin wouldn’t be burned when the clean nappy was reused.
A fridge and a Hoover were next on our wish list. We would be phoneless for another decade. In the meantime, our kitchen in 1971 was indistinguishable from how it might have looked in 1951. And as the long strike entered its sixth week, it seemed our saving regime would be suspended for some time yet.
I have two abiding memories of how I spent my time at home during those seven long weeks. The first is being around to enjoy the paternal privilege of putting Emma to bed in the evenings. She was two years old and would be settled down an hour before four-year-old Natalie in the room they shared. Working such long hours, in normal circumstances I was rarely there to play a part in her bedtime rituals but now, for almost two months, I was able to carry her upstairs at bedtime. I’d sing with Emma (‘In a cottage in a wood, a little old man at the window stood’) before reading her a story. Then I’d switch on Mr Moon (the cheery blue crescent-shaped night light fixed to the wall), give her a goodnight kiss and tuck her in. In the winter cold, an electric heater in the kids’ room and a paraffin heater on the landing substituted for the central heating that was still years away. How I cherished those moments, lingering awhile to bask in the warmth of a father’s love and absorb the scent of talcum powder, baby cream and small, clean child.
My other memory is of reading by the fire. When the washing wasn’t in front of it, I was. All the living rooms on the Britwell, so far as I knew, were equipped with a Rayburn fire: a small iron stove with a slotted glass door. They were finished in a kind of spangled bronze. We had a coal shed in the back garden that would be filled up in the autumn by the coal merchant, who came with a lorry by then rather than in the horse and cart I remembered from my youth. The shed door was fitted with removable slats that could be taken out as the coal stock went down to make it easier to get at. The day’s supply would be shovelled from the shed into a coal scuttle, carried inside and set down in the fireplace. Practically anything could be burned on a Rayburn. To eke out the coal supply Judy would use potato skins and other vegetable peelings as a fuel supplement, particularly overnight, when the stove just needed to be kept going. The thin walls allowed some heat to permeate the house from the fire, providing a kind of rudimentary coal-fired central heating that at least took the edge off the cold.
So when I wasn’t watching Nationwide or Decimal Five on the TV, I would be sitting by the fire reading poetry and short stories, the strike having coincided with the onset of my Dylan Thomas phase. Just before we were called out I had borrowed two books from Slough library: Collected Poems and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. I don’t recall how I discovered Dylan. It was probably via Robert Zimmerman, who’d adopted the poet’s name and whose songs had sparked my interest in poetry. It was, I concede, a poncey way to have been occupying myself but I never considered time spent reading any book to be time wasted.
In spite of the lack of assistance with her significant workload, Judy read more voraciously than I did. She was an amazingly fast reader and no matter how tired she was she never went to sleep before propping herself up in bed for half an hour to read.
We were just about to board the coaches bound for another Hyde Park rally when news reached us that the strike was to be called off by the union’s executive in exchange for a committee of inquiry. None the less we marched along Oxford Street loudly proclaiming our defiance: ‘We ain’t going back, we ain’t going back, ee-aye-addio we ain’t going back.�
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The cry would prove to be as inaccurate as it was illiterate.
The Slough contingent was once again on the very edge of the Hyde Park crowd, with London workers at the front. We could just about make out the figure of Tom Jackson, elevated above the throng on a makeshift stage, sporting a trilby hat. He was flanked by members of his executive and officials of the London District Council, faces set like granite against the cold wind and the angry abuse being directed at them. Those of us at the back caught fragments of Tom’s address as he shouted into an amplified loud-hailer, words carried to us like confetti on the currents of the freezing air.
‘This … been … valiant … but … am not prepared … this … destroyed. Hardman … solution … Hardman … union … have our representative … committee.’
The committee of inquiry was to be led by a former senior civil servant, Henry Hardman. The union had nominated the vice-principal of Ruskin College, John Hughes, as our representative. This wasn’t arbitration, a process that began with the union’s claim and the Post Office’s offer with the aim of reconciling them somewhere in the middle. All offers and demands were to be removed from the deliberations and Hardman would be starting from scratch, focusing on productivity as well as pay.
Our coachload of strikers grumbled about the union, Tom Jackson and the settlement all the way back to Slough. These dissenters were, in the main, the activists; not particularly politically motivated but with an allegiance to the union and the social solidarity it represented. And yet I sensed in their complaints a note of battle-weary relief that the strike was almost over.
