by Andy Beckett
Callaghan slept on the flight back to Heathrow on 10 January. He woke up, feeling purposeful, with some hours still to go before landing. He held an impromptu meeting with McNally and his own long-standing personal press officer, the low-key but sure-footed Tom McCaffrey. Callaghan asked them whether he should hold a press conference at Heathrow about the situation back in Britain, where the road hauliers’ strike was prompting panic buying and walkouts were now threatened by public-sector workers. ‘I was in favour,’ said McNally. ‘I thought he was going to say, “Jim’s back. I’m in control.” And not get into the details.’ McCaffrey was against: he wanted the prime minister to get back to Downing Street first, be thoroughly briefed, and then assert himself. Callaghan, for once, ignored McCaffrey’s advice. He would speak to the press at the airport.
It happened not in a prepared room, with the reporters seated and kept at a distance, and the prime minister at a table, calm, behind microphones and with a glass of water, but in one of Heathrow’s charmless corridors. Callaghan, looking tanned but tired – it had been a night flight and he had only had a catnap – was pressed against a wall by the journalists and the flashbulbs. McNally stood to his left, watching. Almost immediately, he looked aghast.
Callaghan was asked about the pictures of him in the sea in Barbados. He tried to brush off the implication of the question, first with light sarcasm – ‘… and d’you know, I actually swam … I know that’s the most exciting thing of the visit …’ – and then with slightly pompous irritation – ‘I think you should put all that kind of criticism in perspective. One mustn’t allow jealousy to dissuade you from doing what you know is the best thing.’ Then he tried to sound fatherly and reassuring, the way he usually did when addressing the media and the public, but succeeded only in sounding patronizing: ‘[In the Caribbean] I kept very closely in touch with domestic affairs. Indeed, thanks to the miracle of modern communications, I was able to lift a telephone and press a button and I was through to Number 10 before you could say “Jack Robinson”, and talk to ministers and others …’
As his fifteen-minute interrogation went on, Callaghan seemed increasingly uncomfortable. He blinked in the flashbulbs; between questions, he looked impatiently at the ceiling, or from side to side, as if he wanted to walk away. His head movements were slightly unsteady and slow. He rambled. Finally, a junior reporter from the Evening Standard interrupted: ‘But what is your general approach in view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?’ The prime minister replied as if addressing a schoolboy. ‘Well, that’s a judgement that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside’ – Callaghan was not even bothering to meet the gaze of the cameras – ‘perhaps you’re taking a rather parochial view. At the moment, I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.’
It had not been an easy question: almost any answer was a potential liability. Yet Callaghan’s words – prickly, a touch complacent, too long-winded for the papers to properly quote his actual argument – were about the most politically vulnerable ones imaginable. The next morning, the front page of the Sun had the snap of a good line from Fawlty Towers: ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ Thirty years on, the phrase is still regularly used to accuse British politicians of complacency.
While Callaghan was in the Caribbean, there was one place in Britain where the stresses of the Winter of Discontent seemed at their clearest. Hull, even now, is a slightly emaciated, isolated city, out beyond the East Yorkshire flatlands on a narrowing neck of land between the vast, muddy Humber and the cold North Sea. The railway station is the end of the line, a great arched roof with too few trains beneath. The wide streets, especially at night, can be spookily empty. Hull’s population has been falling for decades. The revival of England’s northern cities has not changed it like Manchester or Newcastle or Leeds.
But, in the seventies, Hull was even more of an island. Its old port and old fishing fleet were shrinking. The Humber Bridge was not yet finished (there had been delays with the construction). By road, remembered Fred Beach, then a local truck driver and TGWU shop steward, ‘There were only two primary routes in: the A64 for traffic from the south and the Midlands; and the A1059 for traffic from Scotland and the north. The B-roads were slow …’ They were especially slow during the Winter of Discontent, when snow fell heavily and regularly in the north-east. That winter, Beach continued, with unionized hauliers like him on strike, ‘You had [non-union] trucks sneaking into Hull from all over the place. But eventually they had to come onto the main road.’ He grinned. ‘And that’s when we collared them.’
During January 1979, as part of the road hauliers’ strike, Beach and a handful of other Hull T&G officials organized a blockade of the city so complete and unyielding that Hull became known as ‘Stalingrad’ and ‘siege city’ in the press. Salt, sugar and dairy products had to be rationed in shops. Animals starved on nearby farms. Cargoes froze in the docks. All the while, the strikers ignored instructions, from government and T&G leadership alike, to loosen their grip. Instead, for five weeks the economy of Hull was effectively run by a ‘dispensation committee’ of shop stewards, Beach among them, that commentators on the left and the right compared to the revolutionary Soviets of Russia in 1917. The feelings of some of those affected by the blockade lingered for years afterwards. Hull, in short, was the Winter of Discontent at its most all-encompassing and alarming; and also, perhaps, at its most exhilarating. If I couldn’t find Jamie Morris, then perhaps Beach and his colleagues could explain why they did for Callaghan and gave the country Margaret Thatcher.
Beach met me at the station wearing a blue suit and a blue tie. He had a pocket watch on a chain and a T&G badge on his lapel. It was August 2006, and he was seventy-nine. He had recently retired after a quarter of a century as the local branch secretary, but that was only officially, and he had never had that much time for the official way of doing things. He was still wiry and upright, with a penetrating voice that expected to be heard, and he drove me straight to the new TGWU headquarters in the city centre. Once inside, he checked on the progress of someone who was fixing the lights, and then sat me down in a small kitchen with a humming fridge. He made mugs of tea and tilted his glasses forward.
Normally in the seventies, he said, ‘You couldn’t get lorry drivers to go on strike. You couldn’t get lorry drivers angry. To lorry drivers, low pay and long hours was just a way of life. Drivers were ten-apenny. Ex-army men with heavy-goods licences. Easy sacking, easy hiring. Weak regulatory authorities. Sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week was normal. The lorry driver was a mobile tramp, a nonentity. The lorry driver didn’t have any respect; their employers didn’t have respect for them. If you don’t like it, lump it. A heater in your cab? Never heard of it.’ He paused over his tea. ‘Good training for a cold picket line.’
Hull, he went on, had been a low-pay economy ‘for centuries’. But, in the winter of 1967–8, there had been a rebellion against it: an unofficial strike by TGWU members that started in Scotland and spread southwards. He and the Hull T&G had been involved, and had gained useful experience. By the winter of 1978–9, another decade of resentments had accumulated in the port city’s greasy world of haulage firms and freelance truck drivers. ‘If you went into a cafe, everyone was saying, “This effing job.” We’d had three years of pay restraint, and people had got fed up of it. You’d get back after going down to London and back again in one day, and see the gaffer go off home in his nice car, to his detached house in the country, and his daughter getting her pony out. And you said: “We want a bit of that.”’ Britain might have been at its most egalitarian in the late seventies, but for the discontented truck drivers, like the low-paid public-sector workers, it was not nearly egalitarian enough.
During 1978, lorry drivers around the country began talking about a national strike. ‘Low-level officials in the T&G were sympathetic. At first, T&G headquarters were not keen. We thought, “We’ll go without them.” There’s a bi
g gap between us and them in London. They get down south and – it must be the air or something – they change their principles. The leadership were in that golden room down there in Smith Square. They only knew what was under their noses. Moss Evans was too nice a man to be leader of the T&G. Headquarters were frightened to death of a strike. They and the TUC were virtually part of the government. There was an election due …’ And that hadn’t worried him? ‘Oh no,’ said Beach emphatically. Immediately he slightly changed the subject. ‘The political nuance of the average lorry driver is zero. They were working too hard. Too tired. You’d go to meetings and mention something political, and nobody would know what you were talking about.’ Beach was no radical in the seventies; he was, he said, a ‘broad left’ man. But he became part of something that would have large political consequences. ‘By the end of 1978, there was a vast and efficient communication between shop stewards.’ A kind of union within a union? ‘Yes. Of shop stewards. We were disciplined. We knew people everywhere. Lorry drivers do. The mood was very, very strong, and it was universal. I think it was unstoppable.’
In November 1978, the Road Haulage Association, which represented lorry drivers’ employers, told the transport secretary Bill Rodgers that they were aiming to keep the annual pay rise for British truckers within the government’s 5 per cent guideline. Rodgers told Callaghan the good news, but the transport secretary thought it might be too good to be true. The Association, he knew, was not a tough or united body but a loose alliance of small firms without a strong leader or much in the way of negotiating skills. At the start of January 1979, alarmed by the lorry drivers’ anger and their plan to go on strike, it suddenly offered them a 13 per cent pay rise. It was not enough. The strike went ahead.
In Hull, it had a particular fierceness. ‘We didn’t just want to hurt the haulage companies,’ said Beach calmly, sitting with his mug of tea. ‘We wanted to hurt everybody. To describe our actions as vicious sometimes would not be an exaggeration.’
The Hull strike committee put pickets on the docks and on the main roads in and out of the city. They put pickets on the oil-storage depots at Salt End at the eastern end of the waterfront. They put pickets everywhere a lorry might pass and where its driver might need persuading not to make his delivery. The pickets were there every day, all day and all night, in all weathers, with braziers and Primus stoves and flasks of Heinz soup that ‘fell off the back of a truck’, Beach remembered. He and the other members of the strike committee drove round checking on the pickets, right up until midnight. ‘The gaffers were getting up to all kinds of naughties,’ recalled Barry Andrews, another truck driver who was on the committee. ‘Their trucks would come after midnight. But the lads were there waiting for them. The longer it went on, the worse the lads got. They almost pulled off a door off a [lorry] cab. They knocked fish off the back of fish trucks when drivers refused to cooperate. All over the road. Useless.’ Beach broke in: ‘There was one particularly nasty incident … when the lad put the concrete thing over the flyover into the windscreen.’ He continued more softly: ‘That could have been a death job.’
Beach had driven me from the TGWU building to Andrews’ house near the centre of Hull. It was a small red-brick terrace with a minibus parked outside. Andrews was much younger than Beach and looked more like a trucker – tattooed, thickset, with a check shirt, sweatpants and a big stud earring – but nowadays he did something gentler for a living: he used the minibus to take people to hospital for dialysis treatment. He had an air of weary contentment about him. As we sat in his front room, with the August evening sun coming in, a clock ticked; his wife sat there too, with her feet up, knitting. Occasionally she got up to feed a parrot in a cage by the back window. After an hour or so she brought out plates of pastries, sandwiches and chicken drumsticks.
Yet the Winter of Discontent was still raw in the room. ‘We told the pickets, “Violence is out,”’ Beach went on. ‘But if a factory had to close because they weren’t getting supplies in, I don’t think there was any sympathy from our lads.’ Andrews cut him off: ‘They never worried about us!’ Hull in the seventies was a Labour city, with a Labour council and Labour MPs. There was a struggling Labour government, and Beach, like a lot of the strike committee, was a Labour supporter. Yet the truckers’ strike in Hull, like many of the other strikes that winter, had an almost millenarian quality that went beyond politics – or at least beyond electoral and party politics. It was a kind of peasants’ revolt, inward-looking and based on ancient grievances. ‘I wasn’t interested in what the rest of the country was doing,’ said Beach. Did he worry that the government would bring in the army to drive their trucks? ‘We weren’t worried. We thought, “If the army comes in, well, they come in. But the threat of them won’t stop us.”’ Despite months of rumours and Cabinet discussions during the Winter of Discontent about the deployment of soldiers, the army never came.
Beach drove me to where the picket had been at Salt End. Under an endless North Sea sky, we passed miles of docks, still operating but fringed with sunken businesses. Then, in a lay-by at the top of a long straight road that led down to the Humber, we stopped. Beach turned off the engine. In the distance, on the waterfront, were the fat grey cylinders of the oil depots. ‘The tankers would come out in sixes or sevens, up this road from the depot,’ Beach said. ‘We would have six or seven cars in the lay-by here, with drivers, fuelled up, waiting to go. Working in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. When the trucks eased down for the traffic island’ – he nodded at a small nearby roundabout where the depot road met the road into Hull – ‘their drivers would wind down a window, give a flash of their lights, and throw out a piece of paper.’ The tanker drivers were union men themselves who had recently returned to work after their own pay dispute. ‘They would leave gaps between the tankers,’ Beach continued, ‘so the paper could be picked up. The paper would have the address of their destination. It could be a petrol station fifteen miles away. One of our cars would beat the tanker to the garage. We’d set up a picket there. And the tanker driver would say, “I won’t cross a picket line.”’ Beach smiled. ‘Every tanker driver, virtually… The depot managers were furious – the tankers would come back full. On their way back the drivers would wave to our pickets, sometimes give a thumbs-up …’
He fell silent. Then he turned his lean, proud face away from me and looked out through the windscreen at the horizon. ‘What we did,’ he said in a new, grave voice, ‘in many ways and on many occasions, I’ve regretted it. But it was so effective. We stopped everything. The employers, they were so humiliated. Humiliated! Some of them were country people, so of course rank Tories … I wasn’t feeling sorry for ’em. Later on in life came more realization about what we’d done.’ He waited while a few clouds passed. ‘It was the world turned inside out.’
During the Winter of Discontent, the dispensation committee of the Hull TGWU sat from 8 a.m. until 4.30 p.m. at Bevin House, then the union’s local headquarters. It was a heavy, slightly charmless two-storey building with a big car park just outside the city centre. Beach was the committee’s chairman. Early each morning, in the grudging winter dawn, the car park would fill up with cars, trucks and farm vehicles, and then a queue of local employers would form across the tarmac, into the TGWU building, along its dark central corridor, and into a chilly, strip-lit room that was normally the canteen. ‘The corridor was 145 yards long,’ Beach said with characteristic precision, ‘and they were often stood two and three deep.’ It was not unusual for people to stand in line all day. ‘When the dispensation committee closed at 4.30, we told the people still in the queue, “Come back tomorrow.”’
Those that reached the front found themselves facing a long white table with three shop stewards sitting behind it, drinking mugs of tea and rolling cigarettes. Beach was usually in the middle. The three of them would be wearing smart jackets rather than their usual driving clothes. Elsewhere in the room, Beach remembered, ‘We had a couple of handy lads. One of them was the doorman. Be
hind him was another, not showing his knuckledusters. Once or twice they had to take a couple of paces forward. But there was never any violence.’ Instead, as the Sunday Telegraph reporter Nicholas Roe memorably described it in a front-page piece about the committee on 21 January, ‘Business was conducted with a taut formality.’ Beach recalled: ‘We would say, “Take a seat, sir,” to the employers. Everything was done right. They had to prove that the destination of the load was OK. Deliveries to nursing homes and pensioners were OK. Hospitals were OK. Perishables were OK – but not much was perishing: it was very cold. But the employers had to have the paperwork to prove it.’ Lists would be consulted, pens pointed at the supplicants. Roe depicted a typical negotiation, between the committee and a man wanting to move a truckload of wood for coffins:
