When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  It seemed rather a fine distinction. Perhaps sensing this, Healey immediately changed the subject. When the IMF crisis was over, he continued, he soon discovered that ‘We didn’t really need the money at all.’ How soon did he come to that conclusion? ‘About six months afterwards.’ In the end, the Callaghan government used less than half the IMF loan, and paid it back well ahead of schedule. ‘The whole thing was unnecessary,’ said Healey. ‘If I’d had the right figures, I needn’t have gone to the IMF. Very irritating, but there you are…’ His voice trailed off. Then, after a second or two, his usual domineering cheeriness returned. ‘But of course, once we got through it all, people outside Britain thought I could walk on water…’ Healey warmed himself with a proud smile. Then he got up from his desk, fetched some glasses and poured me a huge late-morning whisky to drink before my train back to London.

  By the end of 1976, sterling was back above $1.70. During 1977, it reached $1.80, then $1.90. There was a slight worry that its value was now too high, and that the exchange rate was making British exports more expensive, but the anxiety passed. In September 1977, Healey was chosen to head an important IMF committee. The following year, he writes in his memoirs, ‘I was approached several times to see if I would be prepared to take Witteveen’s place as Managing Director of the IMF when he retired [in 1979].’ Perhaps unwisely, Callaghan’s chancellor declined the offer.

  15

  Brent vs the Cotswolds

  With the IMF’s bailiffs back in Washington, less exotic but equally formidable opponents lay in wait for the British Left. One was a moon-faced London businessman called George Ward. Short and slightly plump, with big glasses, tight clothes and a voice like a slow, buzzing wasp, Ward was a factory owner in his early forties. He came from a middle-class Anglo-Indian family who had hit hard times. His father had been a prosperous New Delhi accountant who died young with unexpected debts, and Ward had grown up shuttling uneasily between India and England, between boarding schools and bedsits. He studied economics at a polytechnic, considered academia, and settled for accountancy. For a time in the late fifties, he had emigrated to Brazil to escape London’s racism. He came back to England for good in 1963: he had liked the entrepreneurialism of Brazil but not its coups and inflation. Finally, he set up a company with two men he met at a Catholic Mass in London, John Hickey and Tony Grundy. From parts of their three surnames they contrived an inelegant but moderately memorable company name: Grunwick.

  Grunwick developed photographs. They opened for business in a garage in St John’s Wood in north-west London in 1965. ‘At the outset,’ Ward wrote later,

  we had to do everything by hand, and dipping the strips of photographic prints into one trough after another made me feel that I was working in a Chinese laundry … But little by little, by offering better terms and quicker delivery times than our competitors, we managed to get ahead … We moved up and down the mews as other tenants moved out … The properties in the street were owned by the Council, which proved to be a tolerant landlord. We would knock down the walls of adjacent houses to give ourselves bigger rooms to work in. Our only real problem was the neighbours, some of whom would complain when the machines were whirring away in the dead of night, especially since we could not afford air conditioning and would keep the doors open in summer…

  By the early seventies, with cheap cameras, family snaps and foreign holidays part of everyday British life, Grunwick was one of the biggest independent photo-processing firms in the country. Its mail-order services, which had snappier, Americanized names like Bonuspool and Trucolor, were speedy, good quality and cheap. Ward was managing director, and he and his relations were the biggest shareholders. Between 1972 and 1976, the company moved from St John’s Wood into two factories a few streets apart, further west in Willesden.

  Willesden, like its borough, Brent, was one of the last heavily industrialized corners of the capital. It was in gradual decline: in its threadbare red-brick streets businesses were closing and unemployment was rising. Yet for Grunwick it seemed a shrewd choice. The expanding firm needed more staff, especially in the summer, when a single hot weekend could threaten to swamp it with films to develop, and it needed those staff to be unusually hard-working and flexible. One group its recruitment concentrated on was Brent’s large Asian population, which had grown especially fast in the late sixties and early seventies with the expulsion of the Indian communities from Uganda and other former British East African colonies. ‘Grunwick advertised door-to-door in Brent,’ Jayaben Desai, who joined the company in 1974, told me. ‘They said, “Any education, any caste, any experience.” I was working at home, sewing and dress-making, and I was depressed. I was afraid to go out. My big son said to me, “Mum, you need to go out.”’

  Desai, who was tiny and slight, and in the mid-seventies still spoke erratic English, had come to Britain half a dozen years earlier. Like Ward, she did not find immigrant life in London easy at first. Her husband, who had previously been a manager in a tyre company when they lived in Tanzania, had to settle for work as an unskilled labourer. His reduced wages and the boredom of sewing at home drew her to Grunwick, first in the evenings and then full-time. As she stuffed films into envelopes and processed cheques, complaints and invoices, she watched the workforce alter. ‘Gradually the white girls left and were replaced with Indian people. The white girls would not do overtime.’

  Life for the few hundred employees at Grunwick was less dirty and physical than in Willesden’s heavy industries. The mostly female staff, joined by students during the university holidays, sat at rows of desks piled with envelopes and boxes, under bright lights, like a cross between workers in a postal sorting office and a typists’ pool. The company’s two premises, in Cobbold Road and Chapter Road, were better equipped and less bodged-together than the St John’s Wood garages where it had started out. In April 1976, Grunwick moved many of its staff, including Desai, into Chapter Road after a refurbishment costing £70,000. At both plants, ‘Physical working conditions were reasonably good,’ concluded a government report the following year. But then the report continued: ‘Compulsory overtime was at times a burden … The management was strict in its insistence upon overtime during the summer season. Although it was clear that some applications for relaxations on overtime … had on occasions been granted, there was on other occasions a lack of human understanding in dealing with such requests.’ The report also found fault with the pay rates at Grunwick (‘low’); with the turnover of staff (‘high’ and ‘disquieting’); with ‘petty restrictions’ on workers, such as ‘“no talking” in the mail order department’. Above all, the report found a ‘lack of effective machinery for handling grievances’.

  The company did not recognize the right of unions to represent its employees. Even in the seventies, this was quite common in small firms, especially those with fluid workforces like Grunwick’s. Yet by 1973, the year before Desai joined the company, enough tension had already built up around the issue, both inside and outside the firm, for there to be a public battle. The spark was the sacking of a handful of staff. Ward said the redundancies were because ‘work was short’. The unions said the workers had been fired for trying to organize a TGWU branch at Grunwick. Either way, between fifteen and twenty other employees went on strike. The dispute lasted seven weeks and drew in workers from other Willesden factories as pickets. It became a struggle, even Ward was forced to concede, about whether there should be a union in his factories.

  But he prevailed. It was winter, the company’s slackest season and the worst time to picket, and an inconclusive industrial tribunal failed to interpret the original sackings as his opponents wished. Attitudes on both sides were left to harden. Ward was marked down as a dangerous reactionary by the unions; meanwhile, he was left convinced that the union movement was, as he put it later, ‘an arrogant establishment… claiming that it stands for workers’ solidarity and the “sacred right” of collective bargaining when what it wants is more power’.

  In
1975, Grunwick set up its own, highly watered-down version of a union: a works committee, to which each department in the company could elect representatives. ‘This committee was not encouraged as a forum for the handling of individual grievances,’ the 1977 government report found. ‘The minutes… do not create the impression that it was a very effective body for dealing expeditiously with collective issues.’ The report concluded that some staff did not even know the works committee existed, and that other employees had no faith in its power to challenge the management. The mail-order department where Desai worked and whose staff ‘consist [ed] largely of Asian ladies… never did elect a representative’, the report discovered. Instead, the department was spoken for by its manager, Malcolm Alden. He was close to Ward, young and abrasive, and ‘the source of many of their grievances’ in the first place.

  On Friday 20 August 1976, the latest in a long succession of sweaty days that heatwave summer, with the recently installed air conditioning at Chapter Road not yet functioning and the films to be processed piling up as they always did at that time of year, Alden had a confrontation with an employee called Devshi Bhudia. Bhudia was nineteen, a ‘boy’ in Ward’s later description, who had been with Grunwick for almost a year. He had become so dissatisfied with the pay and conditions that he had lined up a job elsewhere, but he had yet to hand in his notice. Instead, earlier in August, he had agreed with three students who worked in his department and shared his resentments that they should mount a protest of some sort, which would provoke the management into sacking one of them; then the rest of them would publicly walk out.

  At 1 o’clock on the 20th, the opportunity presented itself. Ward had left that day for a fortnight’s holiday in cooler, greener Ireland, but in his absence a certain high-handedness towards the shop floor remained. As Bhudia was about to go out for lunch, Chapter Road having no canteen, he was suddenly instructed by Alden to sort an additional thirteen crates of mail for posting by 2 o’clock. Bhudia had the students to help him, and the difficulty of the task would later be disputed, but his response was unambiguous: he and the students began a go-slow. At 3.30 p.m., Alden noticed that the crates had not been dealt with and called Bhudia into his office. ‘There was a scene,’ as the 1977 government report put it, and Bhudia was fired on the spot. As he was leaving the premises, on his own, the students told Alden they were resigning in protest at Bhudia’s treatment. They followed Bhudia out of the factory.

  They went through the main gates and found him standing just outside in the hot afternoon. Like him they were angry and excited, and they discussed letting down the tyres of Alden’s Jaguar. But as their adrenalin began to subside, it dawned on all of them that they had lost their jobs without having any clear idea about how to take their campaign for a fairer Grunwick any further. So they just stayed where they were. In front of them, down the long straight expanse of Chapter Road, the shadows of the street’s trees and terraced houses slowly lengthened. Afternoon became evening.

  At 6 o’clock, with Bhudia and the students still at the gates, Desai started packing up to go. She knew nothing about the earlier incident, but she wanted to get home. She lived two bus rides away in more respectable, more suburban Wembley. ‘My husband objected to me doing overtime in Willesden,’ she told me, ‘because the area is not good.’ Yet that evening, unusually, one of Alden’s junior managers told her she could not leave until she had done at least another half an hour’s work. Desai, whose dislike of Alden and Grunwick’s style of management had been steadily building, objected and lost her temper. Alden appeared and took her aside. There was an argument, and Desai announced she was resigning. It was a spur-of-themoment decision, but before she exited the building she was joined by her son Sunil, who had a temporary job in the same department as a student. ‘The two of them stood in the middle of the floor like soap box orators,’ Ward wrote. ‘“Can’t you understand what these managers are doing to us?”, Mrs Desai demanded. Malcolm [Alden] requested them to leave the premises, and eventually he and Peter [another manager] escorted them to the main gates.’

  The Desais found the original four Grunwick dissidents talking to the company’s personnel manager. He was making conciliatory noises about speaking to Alden on their behalf, but Jayaben Desai dismissed his chances and his likely motives. Then, she told me, she dissuaded Bhudia and the students from having a go at Alden’s car. ‘I said, “Don’t do that. It will involve the police.” They said, “What should we do then?” I said, “We don’t know anything about involving a union, but let’s find out.”’

  Over the weekend, Desai spoke to her husband. He had a new job with the unionized film company the Rank Organisation, and was confident that a union could civilize Grunwick. Sunil had vaguely discussed the same idea with some of his co-workers there a few weeks before. So the Desais and the other dissidents resolved that they would find and join an appropriate union the following Monday, 23 August. They also decided to draw up a petition in favour of a union representing the Grunwick workforce, and to invite the staff at Chapter Road to sign it as they arrived for work.

  When Monday morning came, Desai and her five allies mounted a rudimentary picket outside the gates and collected signatures. Even Ward later conceded that ‘many’ of his employees agreed to sign, although he insisted that the petition was deliberately blank where the detail of its demands should have been. During the rest of the morning and the early afternoon, the Desais made plans with sympathizers inside the plant for a mass walkout of Chapter Road staff. At 3 o’clock, over fifty people, just over a tenth of the Grunwick workforce, got up from their desks and joined the picket. Press photographers were also present outside the gates. ‘There was shouting and excitement,’ records the 1977 government report. In small, unselfconscious, only vaguely political stages, a famous strike was crystallizing. Next, the participants decided to take it further. They were going to march on the other plant at Cobbold Road.

  The second Grunwick premises, which contained the company’s colour-processing and transport departments, was ten minutes’ walk away across several busy roads. The Chapter Road rebels had supporters there, but so far work had continued at the Cobbold Road premises uninterrupted. Before the marchers could reach Cobbold Road, one of Ward’s allies raced over by car from Chapter Road and warned the management what was coming. According to Ward, the arriving ‘crowd’ of strikers then proceeded to ‘shout, scream, swear and spit’ at one of the Cobbold Road managers. ‘One woman [striker] tried to climb through a window into one of the offices,’ he continued, ‘and had to be shoved back. People ran back and forth along the side of the building, smashing reinforced windows and hacking at doors with sticks, iron bars and heavy plastic tubing …’ The account in the 1977 government report on Grunwick is less graphic but probably more accurate: ‘Although there was some violence, it was short-lived – no more than an explosion of excitement following upon the Chapter Road walk-out… The strikers were calling upon those who were inside [Cobbold Road] to come out and join them. Some fiery spirits tried to force an entry… The management resisted and it is possible, though by no means certain, that… a girl striker was hit. The police were called and the strikers went away. Only a few from Cobbold Road joined the strikers that afternoon.’

  Nevertheless, for the rest of the week the dispute gained momentum. By Friday 27 August, 137 Grunwick staff, approaching a third of the total, had stopped work. Ward was still on holiday with his family in Ireland. It had taken him four days even to hear about the initial Chapter Road walkout, and he would remain away on holiday until 6 September. ‘No one could have foretold’, he wrote afterwards, ‘that [the strike] was to grow to the proportions it later assumed.’ Yet, by the end of August, talks between his managers and the strikers about a return to work, something both sides in theory still desired, had in effect already reached a dead end. The strikers wanted a union established at Grunwick to deal with their grievances, and the management did not. On 2 September, the company sent a formal letter to al
l the strikers: ‘Your participation in strike action has brought [your] contract to an end, and accordingly your employment with this company has ceased.’

  The Grunwick walkout had provoked the response of tough employers down the ages to industrial action: a lock-out. Meanwhile, inside the gates of the Grunwick plants, between two thirds and three quarters of the staff were still working. Given the nature of the company’s workforce, and the local unemployment rate, it was not hard to envisage Desai and the other dissidents being quickly replaced, and their campaign fading away.

  Yet the world outside the gates would prove much more hospitable to their cause than they or Ward initially imagined. The first sign of this came when the strikers inquired about joining union. On 23 August, Sunil Desai had cycled to the Wembley branch of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and had been given three phone numbers: for the TUC, for the Brent trades council, and for the Association for Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staffs, or APEX, the union that seemed most suitable. Sunil called the TUC first; a few hours later, a TUC staffer rang back and confirmed that APEX was the best union to try. The following day, a Tuesday, over sixty of the strikers held a meeting, elected a delegation to talk to the union’s London organizer and filled in APEX application forms. By Friday, every single striker who had been on Grunwick’s permanent staff was an APEX member.

  The person who more than any other made this swift coming together of forces possible, and who would lead the resulting coalition against the company management, was an ambitious young Brent activist called Jack Dromey. Like Ward, Dromey was a fleshy man with a flat voice and a liking for open-necked shirts, coupled with a defiant, relentless manner that won him both enemies and admirers. And like Ward, he was a mixture, politically speaking, of the past and the future: someone who would continue the eternal power struggle between employee and employer by new means. Yet unlike Ward, Dromey regarded Brent as home territory. He had been born and brought up there in a family of poor Irish immigrants. After university, and a noted career in student politics, he had returned to the borough as secretary of the trades council. The position sounded workaday but in fact the trades council was radical, run by a combination of communists and Labour left-wingers like Dromey, and it was energetic and innovative in its alliances and activities. When it first became involved in the Grunwick dispute, Dromey wrote in his 1978 book Grunwick: The Workers’ Story, the trades council ‘was simultaneously fighting hard against cuts in the National Health Service in Brent, and cuts in education, and… in support of the long-running strike for equal pay [for women] at the TRICO-Folberth factory in Brentford, an effort which involved 24-hour picketing…’