by Andy Beckett
I began knocking on the doors of the houses. At the seventh one I tried, about fifty yards from the derelict plant, a slightly older Irish woman answered. She certainly remembered the pickets. ‘There were too many of them,’ she said. ‘They’d be standing on your window ledges.’ Was it frightening? ‘Actually, it was. There’d be people fighting. When you got up [in the morning], the pickets would be here. You’d open the curtains, you’d see them here. My husband – he was in a union – he agreed with the strike. I didn’t.’ She looked at me firmly in her turquoise cardigan. ‘I didn’t know what they were fighting for. I remember the police having to take us through the station when we wanted to use it. Otherwise we stayed indoors.’
In fact, Dromey and others in the strike coalition had had anxieties about mounting a mass picket on Willesden’s narrow residential pavements. For one thing, what exactly was the aim of it? Should the mass picket be to stop the remaining Grunwick staff going into work? Or to stop the company obtaining supplies? Or simply to draw attention to the strike and attract more support for it? Or a combination of all three? During the summer and autumn of 1977, as mass pickets were repeatedly mounted at Grunwick, the strike committee – let alone the thousands of supporters who converged on Willesden – never quite decided. Instead, Dromey wrote, the committee ‘varied its [strategic] emphasis from week to week’.
And there was another worry about the tactic. ‘It could easily lead to confrontation with the police,’ Dromey wrote, ‘and to the involvement of elements who were not as interested in democratic rights as they were in punch-ups. The mass picket was therefore a risky weapon unless good discipline was maintained.’
On 23 June, a police constable called Trevor Wilson, a member of the special patrol group, was hit on the head by a bottle during a fight with some pickets. For several minutes afterwards – ‘some say a quarter of an hour’, wrote Dromey – he lay limp and unattended on the ground, in his crisp dark uniform, as a great crescent of blood spread out across the pavement and the pickets, in their flapping jeans, walked past or stood watching him from a distance. The cameras framed the scene like a religious painting. Wilson was hospitalized and given ten stitches. Pickets had received comparable injuries at Grunwick, but it was the policeman who made the front pages. Wilson’s wife was pregnant, even the relatively unsensational Times reported the next day, and the recovering constable would ‘miss a charity sporting event which he had helped to organize … for an electro-cardiogram machine for a hospital in Northampton’.
The violence at Grunwick had a lasting impact far beyond Willesden. In March 1997, as Labour nervously prepared to return to office for the first time since the seventies, Tony Blair wrote an opinion piece about industrial relations for The Times. It was headlined ‘We Won’t Look Back to the 1970s’ and included this characteristic passage:
Let me state the position clearly, so that no one is in any doubt. The essential elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will remain. There will be no return to secondary action, flying pickets … The scenes from Grunwick … could no more happen under our proposals than under the existing laws.
In 1977, as Blair almost certainly knew, the confrontations outside Ward’s factories were a gift to the Conservatives. After ignoring the strike during its early stages, the House of Commons had been discussing the dispute with increasing intensity since November 1976. The afternoon after the assault on Trevor Wilson, there happened to be a session of Prime Minister’s Questions. During it Callaghan, usually unruffled in the Commons, was caught between condemning the pickets’ violence – ‘does he think I want to stand here and defend policemen being hit over the head with bottles?’ – and condemning Ward for his Victorian approach to industrial relations – ‘it seems to me deplorable [that] … people have been dismissed for joining a union’. Callaghan concluded unconvincingly by demanding that ‘Those who latch on to this industrial dispute to turn it into a political battle … should keep clear … This situation is getting extremely serious.’ That month a special Cabinet committee was created to monitor events at Grunwick, meeting daily and sometimes twice daily. Ten Downing Street also began to receive daily reports.
Margaret Thatcher, for her part, was quick to grasp the significance of the Grunwick battle. In The Path to Power, she devotes almost six pages to it:
What came to be known as the ‘Grunwick affair’ … was a clear case of the outrageous abuse of trade union power … Grunwick was a medium-sized business run by a dynamic Anglo-Indian entrepreneur … A left-wing coalition emerged to … punish Grunwick. Every part of the socialist world was represented … The National Association for Freedom took up the case … I gave NAFF as much support as I could, though a number of my colleagues regarded it with deep distaste and made public criticisms of its activities. Without NAFF, Grunwick would almost certainly have gone under.
Her Finchley constituency was not far from Willesden. ‘I would ring her up from time to time and brief her [about Grunwick],’ Gouriet told me. ‘And she had me in to brief the shadow cabinet.’ The Conservative shadow education secretary Rhodes Boyson was the MP for Brent North, a NAFF member, and a strong Ward supporter. Keith Joseph, too, was sympathetic to NAFF, and made speeches defending Ward in the Commons.
Yet, as Thatcher acknowledged in her memoirs, not all Tories were comfortable with NAFF’s militant anti-trade-unionism. The shadow employment secretary Jim Prior, one of the many shadow ministers she had retained from the Heath era – such, for now, was her incomplete authority over the Conservatives and her caution about appearing too radical to voters – favoured a less confrontational approach to the unions and, like Dromey at first, regarded NAFF as ‘cranks’. Moreover, much of the public and the media retained the traditional British aversion to political organizations that looked even a little like ‘private armies’. It was an aversion that the mid-seventies antics of General Sir Walter Walker and the other paramilitary right-wingers had only strengthened, so, during 1976 and 1977, Thatcher’s support for NAFF and what it was doing at Grunwick remained largely tacit. Messages were quietly passed on praising NAFF’s efforts, while in public the Conservative leader and her lieutenants concentrated on the issue of the Grunwick violence. Her memoirs record that during the mass pickets, ‘I wrote to John Gouriet … “We feel that the scenes of wild violence portrayed on television … are enough in themselves to put most of the public on the side of right and are doing more than hours of argument.”’
On 11 July 1977, she appeared on an edition of Panorama entitled ‘The Alternative Prime Minister’. Questions about Grunwick dominated the programme. ‘Mass picketing cannot be peaceful picketing,’ she began, boldly. Did she think, the interviewer probed, that the laws on picketing needed changing? Thatcher paused. ‘I do think some of the laws of picketing … need … if I say changing …’ She drew back: ‘I think we need a voluntary code of practice.’ Yet later, when the interviewer asked her whether she sympathized at all with Jayaben Desai and the rebellion she had led against Grunwick’s working culture, Thatcher’s eyes suddenly blazed, her big forehead creased with irritation and her voice deepened:
I must say that I have had the greatest admiration for those people who in the bus have gone through the picket lines day after day. Their courage and the courage of the bus driver … is very great indeed … A few days ago … I wanted to know what it felt like as a person to have to run the gauntlet of that sort of behaviour, and so I did ask my PPS to go in on the bus through the picket lines.
Adam Butler, then a young Conservative MP, was the PPS in question. ‘I went in on the bus with Jim Prior’s deputy,’ he remembered. ‘The workers were nervous. Everyone was nervous. But it was over very quickly. The bus was not stopped. There were a lot of angry faces. The bus shook. There were no bricks thrown or anything like that.’
By the high summer of 1977, Grunwick was an international as well as a national story. The strikers were receiving letters of support from China and America. Yet Ward sho
wed no sign of backing down. The government and the TUC began to adjust their priorities: restoring order to the streets of Willesden began to take precedence over securing all the strikers’ wishes. On 30 June, Lord Scarman was appointed to lead an official Court of Inquiry into the origins of the dispute and the issues between Grunwick and APEX. Public hearings would be held throughout July, and Scarman would publish his conclusions in late August. In the interim, it was hoped, the situation would calm down.
However, the sheer number of interest groups on both sides made a complete ceasefire unlikely. And so it proved. In mid-June, with much of the media’s attention on the mass pickets, the postal workers at the Cricklewood sorting office had again begun blacking Grunwick’s mail. For the next three weeks, their illegal action was ineffectually challenged by the Post Office and the national leadership of their union. On 5 July, the Post Office began to suspend the Cricklewood workers without pay, but, since they had not been sacked and could not instantly be replaced, locking them out of the sorting office had the effect of stopping the movement of post throughout Cricklewood and Willesden.
By 8 July, Ward wrote, ‘There were nearly a thousand mail bags containing about a hundred thousand packets of processed [films] piled up in every available corner in the Chapter Road works. There were also some bags at Cricklewood that we had been unable to retrieve.’ It was a Friday, and there was no immediate prospect of shifting the backlog. With a neatness that any defender of workplace rights could appreciate, a company which had provoked a strike by demanding that an employee delay his lunch hour to ready some parcels for posting was now choking, steadily, on a build-up of unposted mailbags.
Except that Gouriet had had an idea. It had long been the view of NAFF and The Free Nation and other libertarians in Britain and America that a single, state-run postal service was an oppressive and inefficient monopoly. The blacking of Grunwick’s mail, in addition, had helped NAFF realize that an unchallenged Post Office also gave great power to the postal unions. The previous winter, shortly after the first Grunwick blacking, The Free Nation had launched a campaign ‘to allow voluntary groups like the church and the scouts to take around people’s Christmas mail without breaking the law’. The campaign came to nothing but, eight months later, the notion occurred to Gouriet again. ‘George was running out of money. I’m a soldier. If you’re faced with a problem, you solve it. I’d hunted with over forty packs of hounds. Once you get networking through the hunts’ – Gouriet grinned at his Somerset dining table – ‘they’re game for anything, those sort of people. And it was a very simple concept, the sort of thing that we were taught to do in the army …’
He called it Operation Pony Express, after the mythologized nineteenth-century mail business that overcame the human and natural perils of the Wild West. ‘I planned it all in the Waldorf Hotel [in London]. I took a room there, for three or four days, made lots of phone calls. I didn’t want to do it from my own office [at NAFF]. There were no written instructions, just verbal ones.’ At first, he continued, ‘Ward wasn’t keen. He thought Pony Express might exacerbate things, end in disaster.’ But Gouriet persuaded him.
On Thursday 7 July and Friday the 8th, Ward sent out ‘a team of girls’ from Grunwick to buy £12,000-worth of stamps. ‘A girl would breeze into a London post office,’ he wrote, ‘ask the clerk if they had “plenty of stamps” and then slap in an order for £600 or £700 worth.’ No suspicions were aroused. In the meantime, Gouriet hired two large trucks and a minibus from a haulier in Andover, far enough from the capital for discretion. He also asked two dozen NAFF members – ‘sixteen people from the City, one or two from the office’, and the Conservative MP and Ward advocate John Gorst and his wife – to meet him in north London. ‘They didn’t know what they were in for,’ Gouriet recalled with a pleased look. ‘I told them we were having a party.’ Instead, on the Friday evening, he briefed them and told them to get into the minibus and the trucks. After midnight, with Gouriet leading in a car like the cavalry officer he was, they drove in a convoy through Willesden. At 1 a.m., they arrived outside the Chapter Road plant.
Graham Smith was in the minibus. ‘I’m not sure we gave any thought to it turning nasty,’ he told me. But the road was empty. The Court of Inquiry had just begun its public hearings, and there had been no mass pickets that week; and since Grunwick was closed at night and at the weekend, smaller-scale picketing was patchy at these times anyway. The only people waiting for the convoy were Ward, a couple of his managers and a few policemen outside the plant. For the next hour and a quarter, with the lights of the factory fully on, the Grunwick men and NAFF volunteers heaved the mailbags into the trucks. Then Gouriet, Ward, Gorst and his wife posed for a hurried photo – Gouriet in shirtsleeves, beaming, he and Gorst doing victory signs, all of them crowding the frame with excitement. Finally, at 2.20 a.m., the convoy drove off into the thin summer darkness.
They left London and headed into the countryside. Smith fell asleep. When he woke, the convoy had pulled up in front of a large new corrugated iron barn. Outside were dozens more NAFF volunteers and a farmyard full of newly parked estate cars, Land Rovers and horseboxes. When I asked Gouriet where the barn was, his lunchtime jolliness disappeared for a moment. ‘You don’t need to know,’ he said. ‘The farm owner was very worried he’d be duffed up. He died eighteen months ago.’
The location of the hub of the Grunwick strike-breaking scheme has been kept quiet since 1977. ‘A secret depot sixty miles from London’ – Ward’s description – is as concrete as the participants have been prepared to be, at least in public. However, it has been possible to make a rough guess. In the right-wing milieu inhabited by Gouriet in the seventies, the West Country is a recurring motif: General Sir Walter Walker lived and schemed in Somerset; Airey Neave did the same from his home near Swindon; the even more hardline Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley – ‘a good friend of mine’, said Gouriet – made hints about coups to army acquaintances in his constituency in Gloucestershire. The rural West Country was politically conservative, full of military bases and retired officers, and easy to reach from the smart parts of London where the capital’s rich right-wing doom-mongers tended to live.
A few weeks after seeing Gouriet, I found out from someone else the full truth about Pony Express. When Gouriet had been planning the operation, he had contacted another ‘good friend’ in Gloucestershire, and asked if he could borrow a barn for a night and a day. The Honourable Robert Wills had said yes. The Wills family had barns to spare. They had made their money in tobacco in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first in Bristol and then across Britain: Woodbine and Embassy were Wills Tobacco brands. By the seventies, their tobacco business was in decline, but the family still owned thousands of acres of Gloucestershire, and their political allegiances had shifted from the Liberals to the Conservatives. Robert Wills was a ‘traditional squire’, in the words of his Daily Telegraph obituary; ‘bluff, slightly eccentric’, he ran ‘one of the best shoots in the country’ on his estate.
I drove there from London on a cold sunny April day in 2006, following the same route as the Pony Express convoy. After an hour and a half, I knew I was approaching Gloucestershire when the road rose with the Cotswolds and I saw the first pro-hunting poster – ‘Liberty & Livelihood’, it read with a NAFF-style libertarian flourish – on the windy grass verge. Just past Burford, I turned off into a valley of hidden dips and branching country roads. Then, next to an empty stone bus shelter, came the beginning of a grand tree-lined drive and a weatherbeaten sign: Broadfield Farm. At the end of the drive was a big honey-coloured farmhouse, almost a manor house. Behind it was a thick screen of conifers and a crescent of barns around a large rutted yard.
I parked in the yard, got out of the car, and a burglar alarm started. After a few minutes, a rather correct woman appeared. ‘Can I help you?’ she said, and I explained that I had come to see the farm manager. She told me to wait. For a quarter of an hour I stood and watched the cold wind make dust devils in
the yard, and thought about the old class loyalties that British right-wingers in a crisis could call upon. Then the farm manager appeared, friendly and barely old enough to have been alive for Grunwick. But he knew what had happened at the barn. First, he took me to his office and showed me a photo of Robert Wills in the seventies, a hawkish middle-aged man with command in his eyes. ‘Mr Bob was very much in the Conservative mindset,’ said the farm manager. ‘Tony and Blair were swear words.’ Next he offered to show me the barn.
It was at the back of the yard, windowless and partly dug into the hillside. He hauled the doors open. The barn was feet-deep in dusty brown animal feed. Its high walls and ceiling were a dull grey and quite blank. It was hard to envisage the installation of a commemorative plaque. But then the farm manager gave me a phone number for a retired Broadfield foreman who had got the barn ready for the strike-breakers. I called him straightaway from the yard, and he was happy to talk.
‘On the Friday evening, the boss [Wills] wanted the barn unlocked,’ he remembered. ‘He didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask, but when I came to take the padlock off, the key was lost. The boss had to come with the cutters. When he had cut through the lock, he picked it up and gave it to me and said, “One day that may be a piece of history.”’ Then, the foreman remembered, Wills gave all his farm-workers the weekend off.
