by Andy Beckett
At ninety-one, his persona was little changed. The TGWU headquarters had moved from Smith Square to Holborn, further from the centre of power, and was housed in an anonymous modern office block with corporations as neighbours. But Jones sat behind a desk, arms folded and watchful, in the corner office he still used several days a week as chairman of the National Pensioners Convention, an organization he had set up for retired trade unionists. He wore a blue suit and waistcoat, and looked about seventy. His cloth cap hung from the coat stand. A plaque commemorating the service of Liverpudlians in the Spanish Civil War hung from the wall. A sense that his life was part of an ongoing, age-old struggle lingered strongly in the room.
I started by asking him about his first years as TGWU General Secretary in the late sixties and early seventies. ‘We had our difficulties,’ he began, deadpan. ‘With Barbara Castle particularly … If it had been left to Barbara, the unions would have been tied up in all sorts of legislation’ – he meant the ‘In Place of Strife’ proposals – ‘and the trade union movement could’ve been considerably curtailed.’ In 1969, Jones and his union were crucial to the sinking of ‘In Place of Strife’ and, with it, Castle’s prospects, previously good, of becoming a truly front-rank Labour politician. But behind his desk Jones simply shook his head at her folly and said no more. We moved onto his relationship with Harold Wilson. ‘He was a peculiar fellow,’ said Jones after a long sigh. ‘I never got much out of him. I mean, he wasn’t unsympathetic. If I went to see him in Downing Street, he had a little barrel of beer, and we’d have a couple of half pints, as it were. For him, I suppose, that felt friendly enough … But he was a cold, cold man, very cold. You couldn’t make the measure of him. Wilson showed no enthusiasm about anything. It was like dealing with a rather cold civil servant all the time, which he was to some extent. There was no passion there. Never was.’
In the early seventies, Jones got on better with Ted Heath. Their Spanish link had a little to do with it, but more significant was Heath’s unvarnished manner and his desire, intermittently expressed, for the unions and the government to cooperate in the face of the growing economic crisis. The latter appealed to Jones’s patriotism and to his openness to political arrangements that would cement the unions’ position. During 1972, Jones was a guest at Chequers, discussed ‘wages restraint’ with Heath, and helped the Conservative government end a highly damaging national dock strike. ‘Heath was not unsympathetic to labour,’ Jones wrote with typical calculation in his autobiography, before adding with a dash of equally typical tribal sentimentality: ‘He genuinely wanted to get on with working people.’
But their efforts to establish some sort of social contract came to nothing. Heath fell, Thatcher replaced him, and Jones, for all his doubts about Wilson, did the deal with the new Labour government instead. In part, he saw the social contract as an economic and electoral shield against the free-market ideas that were now taking hold of the Conservative Party. ‘Once you took Heath out of the Tory crowd, they were very antagonistic towards the labour movement,’ he told me. As the mid-seventies turned into the late seventies, and the political appeal and right-wing themes of Thatcher’s policies became clearer, this defensive aspect of the social contract became increasingly important to the TGWU leader.
Yet the arrangement also had a more confident, expansive side. One of Jones’s political heroes was Clement Attlee, whose government he revered for its radical and long-lasting redistribution of income and social opportunity. Since Attlee’s defeat in the 1951 general election, Jones, like many in the unions and on the Labour left, had frustratedly endured almost a quarter of a century of less egalitarian administrations. ‘We wanted a Labour government that would act for labour, for working people,’ he told me; now, with the social contract, he saw an instrument to make such a Labour government a reality. The vulnerable state of the Wilson administration and of the British economy, Jones calculated, only enhanced his political leverage. ‘We have a right to expect action,’ he told the 1975 Labour Party conference, in a speech that ranged far beyond the usual concerns of unions by calling for more government action on unemployment and restrictions on imports, ‘because we are playing our part in solving the nation’s economic problems as never before.’
Between 1974 and 1978, Labour adopted a series of Jones’s favoured policies. Despite the government’s already overstretched finances, there were increases in the state pension and freezes on rents for council tenants. There were state subsidies to keep down food prices. There was the Health and Safety at Work Act, which Jones proudly describes in Union Man as ‘the most comprehensive legislation ever drafted covering people at work’. There was the establishment of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), a body of which he had conceived, as an independent mediator for industrial disputes. More than any of these gains, there was a sense that Jack Jones was making much of the political weather, both in the government and in the labour movement. On 19 June 1974, the Guardian diary recorded:
At the Department of Employment yesterday, arriving five minutes early for a noon meeting with Michael Foot, a CBI [Confederation of British Industry] delegation … noticed a shiny TGWU limousine parked outside, being given a good polish by the chauffeur. Inside, with the Minister, was Jack Jones, whose important official deliberations kept the representatives of the tycoons cooling their heels for a good 20 minutes.
A fortnight earlier, Hugh Scanlon, head of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW), probably the second most influential union leader and usually a Jones ally, complained to Tony Benn that Jones had the ear of the prime minister. ‘I think Harold Wilson, Michael Foot and Jack Jones run the country,’ Benn replied. Frequently there were rumours that Jones was about to be asked to join the Cabinet. In Union Man he confirms one of them, with his usual blunt and impregnable self-assurance. At the 1974 TUC conference, he writes,
Sitting beside me on the platform Jim [Callaghan] whispered: ‘You’ve performed miracles. You should be with us in the Government. You could go into the Lords and be with us in no time.’ I whispered back: ‘I don’t want to go to the Lords and I don’t want to be in the Government, but I’ll help it all I can.’
Jones’s idea of helping out was not always what the government had in mind. In the autumn of 1977, he hinted heavily in the press that ministers and trade union leaders should set a ‘personal example’ as socialists in a time of economic stress by not living in ‘big houses’. The papers immediately printed pictures of the substantial country residences of Denis Healey, Wilson and Callaghan. In January 1975, Jones suggested that ministers should consult the unions in advance before making speeches addressed to their members. ‘Far better that they [ministers] should talk to us’, Jones said, an air of superiority unmistakable in his tone, ‘before they make speeches which are often a little bit away from reality.’ He used the same television interview to chastise Healey for calling on trade unionists to restrain their wage demands. ‘We worked out a TUC policy [on pay],’ Jones began. ‘We are trying to apply it … I think that’s the priority and not some Minister attempting to re-write something that is a matter for the trade union movement.’ The fact that in this case ‘some Minister’ was the chancellor of the exchequer, the second most senior member of the Cabinet and the traditional steward of the economy, did not seem to trouble the TGWU leader in the slightest.
‘A lot of Labour ministers were either afraid of the unions or felt respectful of them,’ remembered Bill Rodgers, who was transport minister in the late seventies. ‘They were older than us. Jack Jones – he fought in Spain. I was a young schoolboy then. They had little education, often. They had climbed up the ladder. Our ministers … were often apprehensive. Callaghan came in to see me once and said, “You’re seeing Jack Jones this morning. You won’t forget about the [Labour] conference, which is in ten days’ time?” What Callaghan meant was: “Don’t upset him unnecessarily. Because we need him onside.”’
Three decades later, Jones lean
ed right forward across his desk, round face immobile and long fingers intertwined, and characterized his dealings with the governments of the seventies. ‘It was a relationship of forces,’ he said in his precise voice. ‘If government wanted to talk to unions, it was a recognition that the unions must have been fairly strong. They wanted something from the unions … And one’s conscious of that all the time.’ He flapped a hand dismissively: ‘I always suspect politicians. You don’t become drunk because the prime minister sends for you.’
Did this relationship between the unions and the government feel sustainable at the time? Jones maintained his poker face. ‘It was always going to be a bit abrasive, you understand that. It was never a question of, because I was a Labour Party member and a Labour Party supporter, conceding to Labour things I wouldn’t concede to the Tories.’ His first duty, after all, was to the swelling and restless TGWU: ‘If the union membership was strong, you obviously had to get some results from that.’ Jones sat back and out came his coffin-lid smile. ‘That’s what a union’s about, isn’t it?’ he said with a knowing laugh. ‘We want more.’
In the seventies, the nakedness with which Jones exercised his power was compensated for, at least to a degree, by the modesty of his manner and by his widely perceived personal integrity. Jones was not an upstart with a loudhailer like Arthur Scargill. Nor was he, unlike some union leaders, and despite his public appetite for TGWU limousines and goujons de sole, even faintly baronial in his private life. Although he led the biggest union, he did not draw the biggest union leader’s salary. He and his wife Evelyn, a Labour activist who like him had risked her life fighting fascism in the thirties, took most of their holidays in a caravan in Devon. When they went to the Algarve in 1976, on a six-day package in the cheap period before Christmas, the Daily Mail considered the trip newsworthy enough for a two-column story with three photographs.
Back in England, the couple lived in a ‘one and a half bedroom’ flat on an estate in Denmark Hill in south London. He had bought the flat from the Greater London Council in the early seventies – the then Conservative-controlled GLC was a pioneer of council-house sell-offs – but otherwise his home life was plain and old-fashioned. He often walked into work at Transport House. While he was out, Evelyn, who was the local Labour ward secretary, would sometimes arrange for party events to take place in the flat. In the evenings, Jones recalled, ‘I’d come home from a bloody meeting with a minister, and the living room would be full of people. It wasn’t a big flat, so I’d have to sneak to bed.’
He was still living in the flat when I met him and, a few months later, I paid his estate a visit. I found a hillside of unusually handsome old blocks, with brass fittings on their doors and views of central London framed by rose bushes. There was almost no graffiti or litter; instead, there was a sense that some core of mid-twentieth-century municipal idealism had been preserved. I asked one of the estate’s gardeners if he had heard of Jack Jones. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, carefully putting down his wheelbarrow. ‘The union man.’ The gardener pointed out a flat with net curtains, a neat row of mugs along one windowsill and a folded-up chair on its balcony.
‘I believe trade union leaders should identify with the workers you represent,’ Jones told me. ‘You’re much the same. You’re part of them … I never moved out of a working-class background.’ For almost the only time, his voice took on a slight hesitancy: ‘I tried not to, anyway. I had the flat, and I had a council house in the Midlands … Other union leaders, they move away from working people – even Joe Gormley had a big house – so their outlook becomes quite different. They begin to have friends amongst the middle class. I think you should continue to be … with your own class.’
During the seventies, Jones’s power and dedicated proletarianism discomfited some. He campaigned for the abolition of the House of Lords. He advocated higher taxes for ‘the landed gentry, who don’t contribute anything to society’. Some of his opponents in the press took to calling him the Emperor Jones, after the doomed self-made autocrat in the play of the same name by Eugene O’Neill. Other critics found him bafflingly colourless: in 1976, the Spectator described him as ‘that earnest, bespectacled figure with the curious speech impediment’. In 1977, the Social Democratic Alliance, a new pressure group on the right of the Labour Party – which would ultimately play a part in the forming of the SDP – produced a dossier alleging that Jones was ‘a dedicated opponent of Western Parliamentary Democracy’. Between 1966 and 1977, MI5 compiled forty volumes of material on Jones and the AUEW leader Hugh Scanlon, and repeatedly sought to block their appointment to positions on government bodies.
Yet, just as often, Jones received extraordinary praise from parts of the press and political establishment usually critical of trade unions. ‘Jones … with the social contract, has emerged as a national statesman,’ declared the Financial Times in 1975, ‘devoted to doing what he believes to be best for Britain’s workers and their families … confounding his critics who had dismissed him as a negative man of the Left.’ In 1974, the head of industrial relations at the textiles conglomerate Courtaulds wrote to the Guardian: ‘Everyone with first-hand experience of industrial relations will agree with much that Mr Jack Jones says …’ That March, Paul Dacre, the future editor of the Daily Mail and scourge of the British Left, interviewed the TGWU man for the Daily Express: ‘James Larkin Jones … probably the last of the cloth-cap union leaders, possessor of a blunt, rough-edged Scouse charisma, is very far from being a monster.’ In December 1977, a Sun editorial described Jones as ‘one of the nicest men anyone could hope to meet’.
In 1975, and again in 1977, Gallup polls found that a comfortable majority of the public considered him more powerful than the prime minister. During the 1974 general elections, graffiti appeared: ‘Vote Jack Jones, cut out the middle man.’ In 2004, I asked him how he had felt during the seventies about the idea that he was running the country. He looked at me unblinkingly. ‘It was utter nonsense, of course. The press are always inclined to simplify. I was reflecting the point of view of the members …’
Jones was due to retire in March 1978. During his final months as TGWU leader, his public statements grew increasingly philosophical. In December 1977, he gave the Richard Dimbleby lecture on BBC1, a rare honour for a trade unionist, and proposed a new model of British industrial relations centred on the election of ‘ordinary shopfloor and office workers’ to company boards. ‘We must develop the idea of the Talk-In rather than the Walk-Out,’ Jones concluded, as if a scaled-down version of the social contract could be introduced in every business in the land. In February 1978, he talked more ambitiously still to the New York Times. ‘There’s no use’, he told America’s establishment paper, in unions ‘going after the wage full stop’; the work of such bodies for their members ‘doesn’t end at the plant gates’. Instead, unions should continue to press as well for a shorter working week, for longer holidays, for ‘a civilized life’ for ‘the working man … with a home, time for the wife and kids, leisure, fun’.
Jones did not mention it, but there was a place in Britain where this enlightened vision of working-class ease and fulfilment was already a reality. When Bevin had been head of the TGWU, he had conceived of setting up a holiday centre for his members somewhere on the south coast of England. The scheme was not pursued: the Depression and the Second World War meant the union had other priorities. Yet the idea endured. When Jones became General Secretary, he broadened the project to encompass ‘a combined centre for convalescence, holidays, and union education’ and began looking for a location. ‘Almost by accident, I came across a vacant site on the seafront at Eastbourne,’ he writes in Union Man. ‘A group of speculators had “caught a cold” over their plans for a new hotel … The land was to be sold. A “For Sale” sign caught my eye and we were able to buy the site at a reasonable price.’ In 1974, he laid the foundation stone, and in 1976 the TGWU Centre opened, a miniature workers’ utopia built on the site of a capitalist failure in a traditionally Tory re
sort town, in the middle of the traditionally Tory-dominated south of England. As a symbol, and as evidence of the unions’ advance in the seventies, it was hard to better.
In February 2005, the centre was still open. I arrived in Eastbourne on the coldest morning of the winter, with pensioners hurrying between shops and snow in the forecast. The seafront was deserted: palms absurd in the stinging wind, grey waves humping shingle onto the beach, an endless succession of white stucco hotels. Gradually as I walked, a taller, more modern, more angular structure revealed itself in the distance, a great dark honeycomb of smoked glass. When I reached its main entrance, there was a salt-stained sign: ‘T&G Centre’. Above the sign rose ten storeys of balconied rooms, piled up in the heavy, hard-edged architectural style I had seen in seventies oil-company headquarters in Aberdeen, as if the decade called for fortresses after the breezy glass boxes of the fifties and sixties. Below the sign, at doormat level, was the foundation stone Jones had laid, still crisp, dedicating the complex ‘to the working people of all lands’. Up on a third-floor balcony a lone guest, white hair thrashing in the wind, was taking a picture of the sea. Otherwise, the building’s brown glass skin hid its inner life almost completely. The first snowflakes began to fall, and I stepped inside.
