by Alan Johnson
What I can’t remember is any defining moment when I became politically aware. Can anyone? Is there ever an epiphany, a single event that separates the pre-political from the post-political? Perhaps university students could pin it down to joining a political society or studying politics as part of their degree course. For most of us it is a gradual development, directed to begin with by our perceptions and experiences of our own worlds.
At my school, Sloane Grammar, Mr Pallai, who’d fled his native Hungary as the Russian tanks rolled in, had integrated a bit of politics into his history and economics lessons, talking to us about why he had left his country. He told us that he was a socialist, but not a communist, and explained the difference. He would take groups of sixth-formers to the House of Commons. As I was long gone before the sixth form I missed out on those political field trips but I do remember Mr Pallai telling us younger pupils about Harold Wilson’s photographic memory and how he displayed it to good effect against Ted Heath at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Mr Smith had denounced apartheid in South Africa during our religious education lessons and my favourite teacher, Mr Carlen, had managed to get over thirty boys in his English class to read Animal Farm while he deconstructed the subtext to reveal Orwell’s critique of the Russian Revolution.
I’d lived through the Cuban missile crisis, without knowing much about it, as mankind teetered on the brink of nuclear war and, like everyone else, I saw the world as being divided between capitalism and communism. I found myself in one half and was keen to understand the other. Mr Pallai and Mr Carlen weren’t around to guide me any more, though Mr Carlen had sparked an enthusiasm for the work of George Orwell that led me to read almost everything Orwell had written by the time I was in my mid-twenties. While my admiration for Mike, my brother-in-law, knew no bounds, his working-class conservatism seemed dull and stunted, part of an era that was disappearing in the ‘white heat’ of Harold Wilson’s revolutionary new age. Neither did Mike’s benign view of the benefits of capitalism chime with my brief experience of living under it. Thus my political consciousness evolved from the books I borrowed from Slough library and from society as I experienced it on the Britwell estate and at Slough sorting office.
The impact of the swinging sixties on the Britwell had been limited. The ‘Keep Britwell White’ graffito still screamed its ignorant defiance and the estate was indeed still an all-white enclave. But this bigoted racism would be hard to sustain in a town where the growing Asian population was introducing enterprise and aspiration. At work, while brown and white mixed happily on the sorting-office floor they never sat together in the canteen, although come to think of it, neither did the postmen and the telephone engineers, who also colonized separate bits of the enormous ‘staff restaurant’. Although the Post Office and Post Office Telecommunications were now separate entities, we continued to share the canteen, as well as the sports and social club with its snooker room and table-tennis tables.
As for gender equality, there still wasn’t a single woman working in the sorting office other than at Christmas, when the casuals came. There were no female telephone engineers, either. Difficult though it is to imagine this now, even telephonists were subject to strict segregation. Only women could be telephonists on the day shift and only men could work nights. This practice continued until the Equal Opportunities Act became law in the mid-1970s.
As we entered the new decade, the seeds were being sown for two very different events that would mark it indelibly for me. As Judy and I were deciding that we’d like another child, pressure was building that would explode in another, far more serious, Post Office strike.
Chapter 7
I KNEW THERE was trouble brewing between my employer and my union in late 1970 when we were asked by the UPW to down tools in a token stoppage supporting the chairman of the Post Office, who’d just been sacked. Lord Hall was the first chairman of the newly created public corporation, which was supposed to have been removed from government control when it took us workers out of the civil service. Yet the new minister of posts and telecommunications – as it happened, the former postmaster general John Stonehouse – still had the power to hire and fire the chairman.
I knew nothing about Lord Hall then and little more now. His dismissal in November 1970 was seen as an attempt by a newly elected Conservative government to remove a chairman considered too sympathetic to the workforce. So, at the behest of the UPW, we went to the canteen for a couple of hours on what must have been one of the few occasions when a union took industrial action in support of a corporation’s boss.
The Labour government that had been in office for the best part of six years had been ousted by the Conservatives barely six months into the new decade. In the June general election I’d walked across to the church hall next to St George’s to cast my vote for the first time. Half of the Britwell was in the Beaconsfield constituency, which Labour would never win, and half in Eton and Slough. With my assistance, Labour held Eton and Slough: Joan Lester, our copper-haired, highly rated Labour MP, was re-elected. Britwell’s Labour allegiance helped to keep the red flag flying incongruously over Eton until a boundary change transferred the little town dominated by its famous public school to the Windsor constituency.
Labour won Slough but lost the country. With the Tories, led by Edward Heath, in office, one aspect of the swirl of events propelling us towards industrial conflict was the determination of the incoming government to tame the trade-union movement through a national industrial relations court.
The UPW put in a wage claim for a 15 per cent pay increase and a reduction in the incremental scales that were keeping me and others like me on a lower wage purely on the basis of age. The Post Office offered 7 per cent. The two sides were on a collision course.
Our UPW branch secretary in Slough was Len Rigby, a Welshman with a real talent for clear and, when necessary, fiery rhetoric. What Len lacked in height he made up for in Celtic charisma. While I heard my workmates moan about the union nationally, I rarely heard a word said against Len. He’d been the secretary of the branch for as long as anyone could remember. Despite being a PHG, and therefore able to start work at a more civilized hour than us delivery postmen, he would come in early every day and strut around the delivery frames, a cigarette held aloft to one side of his face in debonair fashion, in the manner of Noël Coward. And, yes, he did strut, chest puffed out like a courting pigeon – but his air of pomposity was easily punctured. Len could self-efface but he was perfectly willing for someone to do the effacing for him.
Nobby Deadman, a big ex-soldier from the Britwell with the deep voice of a radio presenter and the looks of a film star, performed a little ritual with Len at least once a week. As Len strutted around the rural delivery frames where Nobby worked, a mock argument would break out. Len would threaten to beat up big Nobby, whereupon Nobby would pick Len up in his arms as if he were a baby, date-stamp his forehead and place him in a skip for outward dispatch. It was a show the audience never tired of.
But everyone knew when Len was being serious. In the run-up to Christmas 1970, he sought permission from the supervisors to hold an impromptu union meeting at around 6am, just after the inward sorting had been completed. He was helped up on to a rickety table, from which he addressed the 200-odd early-shift postmen who gathered round. In his most mellifluous Under Milk Wood voice, he conveyed the news from union headquarters with a flourish at the end designed to stiffen our resolve for the struggle ahead. ‘My advice to you is to work all the hours you can over Christmas because there is a battle approaching the like of which we’ve never seen in the long and noble history of the Post Office. It might be a long time before you’re able to earn any money again.’
The meeting ended with Len receiving a rousing cheer. In truth we didn’t expect to have to go on strike. There would be a deal, some kind of compromise. There always was.
While the possibility of a strike was, of course, a concern that Christmas, it took a back seat to a more importa
nt and joyous event: the birth of our third child. Jamie was born at home on 10 January 1971. We’d chosen the name as a male alternative when Judy was pregnant with Emma after seeing an awful sixties comedy at the Odeon in Hammersmith, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, memorable only for its soundtrack (provided mainly by Traffic, featuring the impossibly talented teenager Stevie Winwood). The lead character, played by Barry Evans, was called Jamie. We might not have liked the film but we liked the name, and firmly insisted that our son’s birth certificate recorded it as Jamie, not James.
At that time the NHS was having a drive to increase the number of home births. Judy was keen to play her part and our front bedroom became a labour ward with a midwife and a nurse/assistant in attendance. They made it clear that my presence would be unwelcome and, truth to tell, I wasn’t desperate to persuade them to change their minds.
I did pop my head round the door occasionally to deliver tea and platitudes but I spent most of that long night sitting downstairs, on the little two-seater sofa we’d picked up in a second-hand furniture shop in the Portobello Road, while the drama unfolded in the room above me.
Jamie arrived into the world exactly as I had in 1950, with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Judy told me later how calm and collected the midwife had been as she skilfully prevented our son from strangling himself on his first appearance. Having been told the baby was a boy I resumed my seat downstairs and wrote a song in his honour. The first verse ran:
Welcome to your first day, my son.
Now your journey really has begun
I really hope you like it on the train.
You’ll never see that waiting room again.
The next day was Judy’s twenty-fifth birthday. I stayed at home to look after the girls, who’d slept through the excitement of the previous night, wandering into our bedroom to examine the wonder of a new baby brother in the grey dawn of a winter’s day.
Needless to say, paternity leave did not exist in those days. However, I was soon to be provided with seven weeks of it courtesy of the Union of Post Office Workers.
The industrial action of 1971 was the first all-out Post Office strike involving all grades across the country in the union’s history. There hadn’t been a vote on whether to strike. The union’s rules gave the executive council complete discretion in such matters. Had a ballot taken place I have no doubt that there would have been an overwhelming majority for the action we were now taking.
There was a deep-seated grievance about pay and, now that we were no longer civil servants, it was felt that we had to assert ourselves in the new commercial environment we had been forced to enter. We were incensed by the Post Office’s use of average earnings figures – which of course included a lot of overtime – to describe our wages, given that the real problem was basic pay. The only reason overtime was available to boost low pay was because, in London and the south-east in particular, the basic wages weren’t sufficient to attract enough staff.
This issue alone convinced me of the justice of our case, even without taking into account the burning resentment I felt about the other bone of contention, the incremental scales. At that time a postman over the age of twenty-four started on around £18 a week (the union’s claim was for another £3), while my wages, as a twenty-year-old with over two years’ service, were only £12 10s.
On 26 January, a week after the strike began, I was to be found amid a long line of men at Crown Buildings on the corner of Farnham Road, opposite the Three Tuns. There were hundreds of us there, from Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead and elsewhere in Bucks and Berks, divided into three groups according to the initial of our surname. We were waiting our turn to have our entitlement to benefits assessed by social security. The irony of Post Office workers queuing to be served escaped me at the time.
As we shuffled slowly forward, the banter was entertaining and spirits were high. Like infantrymen in the First World War thinking it would all be over by Christmas, we were convinced that victory would be ours within a couple of weeks. The men around me talked of the arrangements they were making to see out the strike. Many of my workmates had secured part-time jobs working for cash in hand as drivers or labourers or factory hands on the trading estate. Others complained about not being allowed overdraft facilities by Girobank, the Post Office bank established a couple of years before. I learned that Sid Rockall (known as Smokey because of the cigarette lodged permanently in the corner of his mouth) had been stocking up food in something called a freezer. It was the first time I’d ever heard of such a state-of-the-art appliance. Judy and I didn’t even have a fridge.
Despite the good-humoured bravado, being involved in an all-out strike with no end in prospect was terrifying. At that time striking workers could claim benefits but only for their dependants, not for themselves. Many of the men waiting at Crown Buildings knew they would receive nothing but felt it was worth hearing it from the horse’s mouth just to be sure.
When I reached the front of my queue the middle-aged social security officer I encountered there took one look at the fresh-faced youth standing in front of her and waved me away. ‘I’m sorry, young man,’ she said, removing her glasses for emphasis. ‘Benefits can only be claimed for dependants. The person on strike isn’t entitled to anything.’
‘I know,’ I protested. ‘I’m married and my wife isn’t working because she’s just given birth to our third child.’
A long interrogation followed during which the children’s birth certificates were produced (with no access to my Post Office moped for the duration I’d had to walk to the registrar’s office in Burnham on the first day of the strike to record Jamie’s arrival), marital status was proven and calculations were made. It emerged that I was entitled to benefits of £12 17s 6d a week. The state had decided that for my family alone, I should be receiving 7s 6d more than my basic Post Office wage. In theory I was earning more for being on strike than I would have made at work (although of course, without overtime and various allowances, in practice we were much worse off). The clerk continued to glare at me suspiciously as I made off with the paperwork I needed to claim the cash.
The strike lasted for seven weeks, from deepest winter until early spring.
We thought that postal services were essential but we discovered they weren’t. The Post Office services that were deemed vital had been maintained by the union, so our counter clerks reported for work on Thursdays to pay out pensions, which could only be obtained across a Post Office counter, and postmen went in to deliver blood donor cards and urgent medical supplies.
Although the telephonists, who were also members of our union, were part of the pay claim and involved in the strike, a substantial minority continued to work. Younger telephonists were strong supporters of the action, older women less so. This wasn’t surprising given that incremental scales were much worse for telephonists than for postmen. While I would not reach the threshold for maximum wages until I was twenty-four, their wait was seven years longer. But the need for large numbers of telephonists to route calls had been melting away rapidly since the introduction ten years earlier of subscriber trunk dialling (STD), which enabled callers to dial direct. It was said even then that if STD hadn’t been developed, every working woman in Britain would have had to become a telephonist to cope with demand.
Few postmen broke the strike nationally and none did in Slough. I can’t pretend to have been the most active striker. It was a formative period of my life and it left a deep impression but it didn’t nourish an all-consuming passion for conflict. I did stand on our picket line at the gates of the Wellington Street site a few times. It was all very British and terribly polite. As the telephonists who were breaking the strike walked past we’d smile and wish each other good morning. The nine or ten pickets on duty would have been embarrassed to shout slogans so we exchanged pleasantries instead. Many telephonists were married to postmen. One guy used to drop his strike-breaking wife at the gate, park his car and then join us on the picket line.
> Every week a union rally would be held in Hyde Park in London. These were huge affairs. We’d travel there in forty-seater coaches with music blaring out to keep us entertained. We youngsters (a minority contingent) would sing along to records like ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T Rex while being good-humouredly barracked by the old boys (the men in their forties) waiting to hear Jimmy Young on Radio 2. I would wear my pride and joy, a long blue overcoat with wide lapels.
In the early days there would be three coachloads of us marching behind our branch banner but the numbers dwindled as the weeks went by. The London UPW branches were always at the front of the procession down Oxford Street, which meant that by the time we reached Hyde Park we would be too far away from the stage to hear very much of what the speakers were saying.
There was a little group of us youngsters, postmen and telephonists, who hung around together, and we’d be lobbied by far-left sects like Red Mole or the International Socialists, who handed out bloodcurdling leaflets and magazines in a bid to recruit us as cannon fodder in the class war.
We were certainly being radicalized by the strike but never to the extent of being impressed by these college kids from middle-class backgrounds seeking to express their solidarity with the workers. Quite apart from their humourless hectoring, they dressed scruffy but talked posh. We dressed posh but talked scruffy. We knew that their interest in us was fleeting.
At that time there was another dispute going on involving college lecturers, who were pursuing some esoteric issue concerning their contracts. Sometimes our long column of marching Post Office workers crossed their much smaller demonstration. Whereas we had a clear objective (‘What do we want? Three quid!’), theirs was more opaque. Their banners read: ‘Rectify the Anomaly’. Very much an academic dispute.
Most of the news we received about the progress of the strike came from our own weekly meeting in the community centre on Farnham Road. Every Tuesday morning at 9.45 I’d be waiting, gloved and scarfed against the bitter winter weather, for Tommy Chessman to pick me up in his Reliant Regal, just as he’d done to take me to work before I’d acquired the Post Office moped.