Flashpoint

by Michael Gilbert

  He said, “I understand you went to see Jonas Killey yesterday. He’s got some complaint about this man Dylan. Can you explain what it is?”

  I did my best. Every time I repeated it, it seemed less plausible.

  “And he wants us to help him?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Didn’t he come to us about it before?”

  “It was the same man, but not the same complaint. Last time, it was a question of the rights and wrongs of the voting at a Union meeting. This time it goes a lot further. He’s suggesting that Dylan embezzled Union funds.”

  “If he thinks a criminal offence has been committed, he should go to the police. If they won’t help him, he can swear out an information himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are we bothering about it? What’s it got to do with us?”

  You have to be careful with Tom when he asks you a question like that. Sometimes he likes you to play everything straight down the middle. But every now and then, when you follow that line, you’re accused of being stuffy and civil service minded. You can’t win.

  I said, “He’s a solicitor, and it looks to me as if he’s going to make a thundering ass of himself. If we could head him off, it would be a good thing for the profession as a whole.”

  Tom thought about this, moving his lower jaw as though he was chewing my words into small pieces and getting ready to spit them out. He said, “Law and politics. Oysters and whisky. Both very acceptable on their own. But mix them and you’ll get nothing but a sour stomach.”

  After that he was silent for so long that I thought it was the end of the matter, and started to shuffle my papers together. Tom said, “If somebody had to read the Riot Act to him, who’d be the best person? He wouldn’t listen to you–”

  I agreed hastily.

  “And if I did it, it would bring the Society into it officially, which is the last thing I want. Laurence tells me you’ve got a brother-in-law in Fleet Street who might be able to have a word with Dylan.”

  “I’m having lunch with him today.”

  “And what are you hoping to achieve? Except,” he added unkindly, “a good lunch at the expense of the Society.”

  I explained what we had in mind.

  Tom said, “It might have worked before this embezzlement thing came up. I don’t think it’s going to work now. However, it’s worth trying. If there is going to be an olive branch it’s got to come from Dylan’s side. That’s clear.”

  “Do you think,” I said, “that Jonas might listen to Edward Lambard?”

  “Lambard,” said Tom. “Yes. That’s not a bad idea at all. In fact, it’s the most sensible thing you’ve said yet.”

  I looked gratified. Edward Lambard had been a member of the Council for twenty years. When his turn came for President he had passed the chair, being too busy to give up a whole year’s practice. This had meant, incidentally, that he had also passed up the knighthood which went with the job. It hadn’t worried him, but it must have been pain and grief to his lady wife. I knew that Tom thought a lot of him.

  He said, “You and Killey both worked for Sexton and Lambard once, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. And they do a lot of semi-political jobs. Trade Union, Friendly Society, Employers and Trade Association stuff. They’ve got a big practice with the Monopolies Commission.”

  “When you say political–” said Tom, wrinkling up his nose again.

  “I don’t mean they had any particular axe to grind. They were just as ready to argue a Union case against the employer as the other way round.”

  “I think it’s quite a good idea,” said Tom.

  He didn’t explain which of three different things we had been talking about wasa good idea, but I guessed he meant that he was going to talk things over with Edward Lambard.

  As I was leaving Tom, who always liked a good curtain line, said, “You’ll never understand Killey until you’ve read Killey against North West Marine Appliances. It’s in the King’s Bench reports for 1945 and Appeal Court a year or two later. 1948, I think.”

  I said, “Those dates can’t be right, surely. Jonas must still have been a schoolboy in 1945.”

  “I expect he was,” said Tom with a smile. “You look it up.”

  3

  “I have little use for either of the so-called major political parties,” said my brother-in-law. “I am myself a liberal-radical of the old totem.”

  To listen to Patrick, you’d think he was seventy-five and was sitting in the Reform Club, stroking a long white beard and talking about Gladstone. Actually he’s the same age as me. He’s one of the Lobby correspondents of the Watchman and they must have considered him promising to give him the job at his age. I fancy the Dylan profile was a sort of test of his abilities.

  “In my considered opinion,” he said, finishing a second glass of the Mazis-Chambertin which we were enjoying at the expense of the Law Society, “the political scene is a mess. It’s a two-horse race, and both the horses are losers. One of the parties is lumbered with the Unions – heaven save us from our friends – the other is weighted out by its old-school-tie image.”

  “Old port and ripe pheasant.”

  “The point is, they’re Them. With a capital T. The bosses’ party. The people who make money at the expense of Us.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go along with that. It’s not a very profound diagnosis. Where does Dylan come into it?”

  “Dylan comes into it because he’s got a foot in both camps. And because both sides trust him, and need him. And my God, how the country needs him.”

  “You think he’s as good as that?”

  “I think that if he plays his cards properly he could be Prime Minister by the time he’s forty-five. The first Prime Minister, since Churchill in 1940, with the country more or less united behind him. If we could get that, we could lick the world. That’s why you’ve got to get someone to strangle Killey.” Patrick took another sip of his wine and added, “He ought really to have been strangled at birth.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he wasn’t. He’s right there in Wimbledon. Full of fight.”

  “This new thing he’s got hold of. It’s a criminal charge?”

  I said, “Yes,” unhappily. I hadn’t told Patrick any of the details, but since I needed his help I’d had to give him a general idea.

  “Then I suppose it must be embezzlement.”

  “Look, you mustn’t start spreading this round. It’s none of it proved, and it’s probably libellous.”

  “Discretion itself,” said Patrick earnestly.

  My heart sank. I know enough about newspaper men to know that they look on an exclusive bit of news like a fox looks at a fat duck.

  To change the subject, I said, “Tell me what you’ve found out about him so far.”

  “His father was a farm worker at a place called Chapel-en-le-Frith, who never earned more than three pounds a week in his life. He had a quiverful of daughters, then Will arrived. Will was the only son.”

  “His Benjamin.”

  “You’d think they’d have spoilt him. But they’re hard-headed folk up North. He went to the local school, like everyone else, and left at fifteen and got a lot of casual jobs, and when he was eighteen he got taken on as a pot-hand at ASIA. Perhaps I should explain–”

  I said, “ASIA is the Anglo-Scottish Independent Aluminium Smelter. I know a lot of this story already. But carry on. It’s interesting to hear it from the other side.”

  “ASIA was a grand conception. You know they found big bauxite deposits in Northern Ireland? They came to light during the war, when they were excavating anti-aircraft gun shelters. The supply was cheap and plentiful and it was easy to ship across to the Mersey. Once it was there, they had unlimited water-power from the big Magland and Ladybower reservoirs. And – what was most important of all – they had a market for the stuff. The Midlands were at the start of the post-war boom.”

  “It all sounds too good to be t
rue.”

  “It was too good to be safe. The American and Canadian companies, who had the world market in their pocket at that time, decided to freeze it out. They lowered their prices, to rock-bottom and under. They reckoned they were big enough to take a year’s loss. Even two years. ASIA wasn’t. The management got worried. The banks threatened to withdraw their support.”

  “I’ve never understood about bankers,” I said. “You’d imagine, from their advertisements, that they were great big resolute father figures all ready to stand up for their struggling little clients. Actually they seem to lose heart quicker than a woman cornered by a mouse.”

  “They’re cold-hearted bastards,” said Patrick. “And pretty soon they’re going to be nationalized. It’s high up on the Liberal party programme.” He helped himself to another mouthful of burgundy. “It wasn’t the banks who saved the situation. It was Will Dylan. He was Secretary and Treasurer and practically everything else at ACAT. When things looked grim, he went to the ASIA management and offered them a deal. He guaranteed that the workforce would carry on for two years without asking for any increase in wages. They would even accept a marginal cutting down of numbers, not by sacking men, but by slowing recruitment. He’d worked out that if they did this, added to their cheap sources of supply and power, they could reduce the price of their aluminium ingot to a point where the Americans, who were running into labour problems of their own, simply couldn’t compete. The other side of the bargain was that when the markets had been re-established, they would take a three year rise at the end of the second year. It wasn’t quite as simple as that. There were a lot of special grades and hardship clauses and so on. But that’s what it amounted to. The management listened to him, and did their own sums, and arrived at the same answers.”

  “I can see Dylan convincing the management,” I said. “It must have been a hell of a lot more difficult to swing the men.”

  “It was difficult. His strongest card was that he wasn’t a visiting Union official. He was one of them. He’d worked alongside them in the pot-room. He’d got powdered borax in his hair and liquid aluminium on his boots. No one ever called him anything but Will. He barnstormed up and down the works, talking to men singly and in groups and at mass meetings in the canteen. He talked turkey to them. If the Americans took over, they were going to shut half the pot lines and put the other half on specialized production. Three-quarters of the men would be made redundant. Which did they prefer? To see three-quarters of their mates out of work, or all go on together with a fair chance of coming out square at the end of the day? If the management had said it, the men would have laughed at them and called it a wangle to increase profits. From Will, somehow or other, they took it.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Certainly it worked. As soon as they started making a profit again the banks recovered their nerve, the company was re-capitalized, the workers were properly paid, and Will Dylan became a name of power in the North. I should add that he was just twenty-four at the time.”

  I thought again about the face I had seen on television. I had imagined it, at the time, as being carved out of wood. I realized that I was wrong. It had been carved, by experience, out of some much harder material.

  “He had a number of Union jobs after that. When MGM took over he became their Assistant General Secretary, and was Secretary three years later. He didn’t hit the national headlines until they made him chairman of the tribunal which arbitrated on the metalworkers’ dispute. That was a bloody miracle if you like. No one thought he’d pull it off. The two sides were in entrenched positions, without any apparent room for manoeuvre. Somehow he wheedled and hectored and bluffed them into moving. Someone who was there said it was mass hypnosis. At the end of ten days they were surprised to find they’d climbed out of their trenches and were shaking hands in no man’s land.”

  “It’s a pity,” I said, “that he wasn’t around in 1914. He might have stopped the war.”

  “He stopped a very nasty strike, and became a national figure. Both parties were angling for him. Then the member for West Sheffield broke his neck stepping off a train at what he thought was a station and was really a twenty-foot drop into a culvert, and Will saw his chance. It was his home constituency. He stood as an Independent, and romped home.”

  “He was in luck there,” I said. “It was a by-election. That’s when personalities pull in votes. At a general election it’s the party ticket every time.”

  “Maybe. My guess is he’d have got in at a general election. But I agree he’d have had to declare his allegiance in advance. As it was, he reached Westminster without any pre-commitment, which not many people have done since they abolished the University vote.”

  “And as soon as he got there, he accepted the Government whip.”

  “That was sensible too. He couldn’t have done much on his own. What you’ve got to understand about Dylan is that he’s a practical man. He doesn’t believe in shouting slogans or nailing doctrinaire colours to the mast or laying down a lot of rules as though politics was a game of county cricket.”

  I said, “That sounds like a sentence from your profile, Patrick.”

  Patrick had the grace to blush. He said, “I’d back a man like Dylan every time, because whatever methods he uses, his motives are sound. He believes in equality of opportunity. And so do I. Do you think we could get a third glass out of that bottle?”

  I poured him out a third glass and he rolled it appreciatively round his tongue. He saw nothing incongruous in talking about equality while he was drinking a bottle of wine which cost as much as the average housewife’s shopping for the week. Mutt is like that too. I’ve known her make an impassioned plea for the underpaid agricultural worker while spraying herself with Madame Rochas’ Audace. Like her brother, she’s perfectly sincere. I guess it’s just a matter of compartmentalizing your feelings.

  The discussion was on the point of disappearing into the mists of politics warmed by the red glow of wine. I dragged it back ruthlessly. “What we want you to do, is to slip in a word next time you have a session with Dylan. Tell him that a small olive branch might be a good investment.”

  “I couldn’t possibly say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a mixed metaphor.”

  “Don’t be tiresome. You know what I mean. He’s a big man, and you say he’s a practical man. Jonas is a small man, and a copper-bottomed crank with an obsession. I believe that all he really wants is a gesture of reconciliation. Couldn’t Dylan slip in a word in one of his interviews with you? Say that he realizes now that Jonas was technically correct–”

  “I’ll try,” said Patrick. “But if Killey is going to press criminal charges it will be almost impossible for Dylan to climb down. If he did, wouldn’t he be admitting that he was guilty?”

  It’s never satisfactory to have someone else explain to you something you know to be correct and don’t want to face. I said, “You’ve got to do something to justify that burgundy.”

  “It was a lovely wine,” agreed Patrick. “I’ve got a date with Dylan at the House at four o’clock. Do you think we’ve got time for a glass of port?”

  Will Dylan said, “The way you spell it out, amalgamation’s a dirty word. That’s the message, is it?”

  “It’s not the amalgamation. It’s the jobs we lose, lad,” said Jacob Brown. He was the leader of the deputation, and Vice-Chairman of the West Sheffield constituency association.

  “All right, Jacob. Let’s look at it that way. Two firms get together. Some of the jobs overlap. Some men are made redundant. But the joint firm’s more efficient. Increases its turnover, grabs more of the market. Takes the extra men back, but uses them properly.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that,” snapped the thin man who sat next to Jacob. The right sleeve of his jacket was pinned to the lapel. He had lost an arm when an overhead conveyer belt had slipped and dropped a hundredweight of scrap metal on to his right shoulder.

  “Nothing’s
certain in this life, Martin. But I’ll make you a forecast. You take two firms that are too small to be really efficient. They’re up against the competitors who are bigger and better organized. What’s going to happen to them?”

  He looked at the eight men who were sitting round the table. None of them said anything.

  “You know as well as I do. You’ve all seen it happen. They stagger on for a year or two, piling up losses. Then they fold up. Their machinery’s sold for scrap. Their men are out of a job. Not only just a few of them, Martin. The lot. Look what happened when Warfields wanted to join up with Cunningham and Bennet. It might have worked. I don’t say it would have. But it had a chance. As soon as it was even whispered about, you had the Warfields men out on strike. You know what the pickets had on their banners? ‘Protect our Jobs.’ I saw them. I’d have laughed if I hadn’t been crying. Well, that strike was effective. Very effective indeed. It put Warfields right out of business and lost six hundred jobs. Now Cunningham and Bennet want to join up with Tolburys. Are we going to have the same thing all over again?”

  “I can see the sense of that,” said Barrow. “I mean, speaking personally I can see the sense of it. But it’s not easy to get it across to the people who are going to lose their jobs. You say, when the joint firm gets cracking and when it makes more money and expands, some of the men are going to get their jobs back. Right? But that’s a year or two ahead. It’s what they bring home now that pays the bills.”

  There was a growl of agreement round the table. Almost all the men there had known what it was to be out of work; to come down with a bump from a working wage to a social security payment which barely covered the needs of their families.