by Alan Johnson
While there had been no ballot before the strike was called, a cursory one was organized nationally before a return to work. Ours was held at Oxford Avenue: a workplace ballot. The result of each branch decision would be translated into a national vote. The result was overwhelmingly in favour of the executive council’s recommendation to return to work.
I voted no. Given the anomaly that meant I was earning more than my basic pay while on strike, this may be unsurprising. Perhaps I was posturing, voting against because I knew the decision would be in favour of Hardman however I voted and it enabled me to claim some kind of moral superiority over my workmates. Maybe it was just that I was enjoying those magical evenings with Emma a little too much. Whatever my motivation, I didn’t talk about the way I’d voted other than in my quiet conversations with Tommy Chessman in the Reliant or with Judy. I didn’t feel betrayed by Tom Jackson and certainly harboured no animosity towards him personally. Although I believed he’d made the wrong judgement, I recognized that at least he’d had the courage to lead us back to work when he thought the failure of our action was inevitable.
The strike had lasted for forty-seven days: the highest number of working hours lost in a single dispute since the General Strike of 1926. We returned to work on 8 March to be faced with a mountain of mail and unlimited overtime (or ‘open docket’) to clear it. My customers seemed pleased to see me again. I’d been their regular postman for eighteen months by then and was on conversational terms with at least one family on every street.
With special arrangements in place to clear the backlog, I had two deliveries a day covering the same ground, which would only usually have happened at Christmas, and as a result I was meeting and chatting to many more customers than I would see in the early morning. I cannot recall any bad feeling over the strike – not from the posh houses in Linkswood Road, the more artisan dwellings of Hogfair Lane or the workers’ cottages on Fairfield Road.
When the Hardman committee reported in May it would recommend a 9 per cent increase in pay, backdated to 1 January. Given that this was only 1 per cent more than we’d been offered in the first place and well below the £3 we’d claimed, it was seen as a crushing defeat. But for us youngsters, whose principal gripe was with the incremental scales, there was a better outcome. The scales were reduced so that a postman would now receive maximum pay at twenty-one rather than twenty-four. There were corresponding reductions for clerical staff and telephonists. As a twenty-year-old postman turning twenty-one, my own pay would therefore increase by much more than the 9 per cent norm.
The fact that Tom Jackson had made these scales such an important element of the dispute meant a lot to us juniors. Yet our older colleagues seemed to see no injustice in this blatant age discrimination. Those who’d joined young and progressed through the scales saw no reason why we shouldn’t have to do the same, while those who’d come straight in on maximum pay simply thought we were daft to work for such a low wage when there were plenty of better-paid jobs available on the trading estate. But Tom Jackson was on our side regardless of the indifference of his members.
The strike had been a major national event. It was a tumultuous period in my life and in the history of the union. It would be a long time before the membership had the stomach for another national strike. If anyone had told me in 1971 that when that time came I would have the responsibility for settling it, I’d have thought they’d taken leave of their senses.
Chapter 9
THE EARLY SEVENTIES were a period of consolidation. Our house on the Britwell was the eighth address I’d lived at in nineteen years. But I was now sinking roots into the Buckinghamshire soil (though it was in fact soon to become the Berkshire soil, after Slough was redesignated to the royal county in the local government reorganization of 1974). Life there was good. Our little community round the green on Long Furlong Drive was closer than any either of us had known in our lives.
As well as being busy with her playgroup and later a youth club, Judy threw herself into organizing activities for children during the summer holidays and had a prominent role in running the Britwell Carnival, which took place every June. Within a few years Natalie, Emma and Jamie would all be at Lynch Hill, the infants’ and primary school a short walk away through the garages. At the church hall they joined various Baden-Powell-inspired troops and packs appropriate to their age and gender.
For me, seven-day weeks were a regular occurrence. I’d often take on a Sunday shift for a colleague as well as doing my own, usually at Oxford Avenue, spending the early afternoon and evening alone, opening the mountain of bags and tipping the parcels into skips ready for sorting by the night staff. When I wasn’t at work, my social life consisted of a Friday-night drink with my neighbours Mick, Tony and Robert, watching QPR every other Saturday and playing football on Sunday mornings, followed by a lunchtime drink with Mick and a different crowd at the British Legion in Faraday Road, just off the estate.
The Britwell was full of Queens Park Rangers supporters. This was unsurprising given that most of its residents had, like us, been exiled from QPR territory in west London. I soon found out that the PHG who ran the training school, Ron Gregory, was a devotee. He asked me if I’d like to join him and two other postmen on their fortnightly trips down the A40 to Shepherd’s Bush. I was overjoyed to have this opportunity to resume a regular pilgrimage to Loftus Road to watch the team I’d revered since attending my first match at the age of nine.
Rangers had now settled back into the second division after their one awful season in the top flight. I’m sure Ron would have been predicting relegation from the moment they were promoted, because he was one of the most pessimistic people I’ve ever met, constantly anticipating disaster, whether for Rangers, the Post Office or the UPW. He was branch treasurer for the union and could see no way it would ever recover from the effects of the strike. Ron Gregory always erred on the side of catastrophe.
He had an unusual claim to distinction: Ron told us he was the only man ever to have played in the famously all-woman Ivy Benson Band. It had happened during the war when he served in the RAF and played drums with various bands. After Ivy Benson’s percussionist ran off with a GI, she was desperate to find a drummer for a forces concert and Ron Gregory was called upon to make musical history.
Now, twenty-five years on, he’d abandoned the drums for the organ. In his neat house in Pemberton Road on the Britwell estate, Ron would, given half a chance, play for anyone and everyone who popped in, however short the duration of the visit. If we Rangers supporters arrived at his house five minutes early on match days, he would dash over to his organ and, while we exchanged pleasantries with Mrs Gregory, reel off a melody he’d been practising. Nobody bothered to comment or took much more notice than they would have taken of the background music that used to be played in supermarkets.
Ron would then put on his coat, flat cap and leather driving gloves, utter his battle cry (‘Let’s go and see them get thrashed!’) and lead us out to his immaculate Triumph Herald for the drive to Loftus Road. There was always plenty of space to park on the White City estate, then notorious for crime and vandalism. But Ron’s car, with its little QPR talisman hanging from the rear-view mirror, was never touched.
Once inside the ground it was worth the entrance fee just to watch the great Rodney Marsh in the pre-match kick about. There was none of today’s slick presentation back then. The players would emerge from the tunnel at about 2.50pm and just run around for ten minutes until kick-off. Rodney would entertain the crowd with ball-juggling tricks and generally muck around with his team-mates, nothing that could be construed as a pre-match exercise.
We all bowed down at the shrine of Rodney. I was young and prone to hero-worship but even Ron Gregory was left speechless by the dazzling skills Marsh displayed, almost none of which were captured on camera as matches weren’t routinely filmed in those pre-video days. When Rodney left us for Manchester City in 1972 the programme for our next home game was edged in black. There was no r
esentment. We wished Rodney well on the bigger stage to which his talents were better suited.
My rather less lavish footballing skills were on show every Sunday morning playing local league football for Slough Postal FC. I helped set the club up and persuaded the Post Office to pay for our expensive red-and-black striped shirts. Our strip may have resembled that of AC Milan but that’s where the comparison ended. I ended up captaining the team to our familiar mid-table position.
When the match finished at around noon I’d go straight to the British Legion where Mick Pearson, Johnny Cates (an AA patrolman), Idris and Doreen (a Welsh couple we’d befriended) and one or two others would sit together. The cast might vary if Johnny Cates was on duty, or one of the other neighbours joined us, but the play was always the same.
Act I was the greeting phase where we’d pool our resources in a whip-round, decide who was to hold the whip, get the first drink in and buy our bingo tickets ready for Act II. My tipple was a pint of mild (a drink that tastes exactly as it sounds) and I would savour those first refreshing mouthfuls after my exertions on the football pitch. Act I was the only opportunity we had for conversation so we’d chew over the week’s events while helping ourselves to the cubes of cheddar cheese and silverskin onions provided free in bowls dotted around the hall.
Act II was the bingo. Books of five games could be purchased singly or in multiples. Some participants would have two or even three long strips of five books playing ten or fifteen games at once. That needed more mental dexterity than we could ever manage so we’d sit with three books apiece on the go for each game.
Bingo was a solemn pursuit. The whole of that large British Legion hall, where there would be 150 drinkers on a Sunday lunchtime, would sit like druid monks in eerie silence as the caller pronounced the sacred words ‘Eyes down looking.’ The prize money was £10 for the first person to get a line and £20 for a full house. We didn’t pool any winnings. On the rare occasions any of us had a full house the custom was for the lucky winner to buy a round, which came to under a quid.
Act III was the card school. With the bingo finished, a gentle hum of conversation resumed, though only temporarily on our table. We’d borrow packs of cards and cribbage boards from the Legion, provided on trust for the use of patrons with no charge and no need even to pay a deposit. We’d play crib for half an hour or so, moving the small match stubs that served as pegs up and down the board. After that, the serious stuff – usually seven-card brag, occasionally poker. We played for small stakes, 5p and 10p pieces. It was rare to hear the rustle of notes from any of the card schools around us, just about visible through the thickening fog of cigarette smoke.
There was always music, usually from a trio of piano, drums and double bass belting out the old songs that my father used to play in the pubs of Notting Hill: ‘Heart of My Hearts’, ‘On Moonlight Bay’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ mingled with more recent favourites popularized by Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones or Ken Dodd.
Elsewhere the working-class Sunday traditions prevalent in my youth – when men got suited up to go to the pub, as I remember my father doing, while their wives cooked the Sunday dinner – were in flux. The British Legion was more old-fashioned but here, too, times were changing. Older men still put on a suit and tie but the younger ones, including me, dressed casually. In most respects, though, Sundays remained steeped in the customs of the 1950s.
Only very rarely did Judy or Mick’s wife Susan come with us. There were some female regulars. Idris’s beautiful wife Doreen would play bingo but never cards. She’d sit in perfumed serenity, sipping her gin and tonic, while we covered our bets, raised the stakes or threw in our hands. Doreen was cultured and ladylike. I still have the paperback of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (the book I’d borrowed from the library during the strike) that she and Idris bought me for my twenty-fourth birthday, inscribed in her fair hand. Our shared admiration for the bard of Swansea emerged in conversation one day. I would have been reluctant to admit to a love of poetry to my other friends, not because they were in any way philistines, but for fear that I would have sounded pompous. Idris and Doreen, being Celts, were immune from such accusations.
The difference between the women who did go to the Legion then and those who stayed at home was a practical one: it boiled down to whether or not they had kids. Idris and Doreen did not have children, and those of most of the other women in attendance on Sundays had grown up. When Judy and Susan did come they were happy to play cards, although they hated brag, preferring more cerebral games like crib or Newmarket.
The British Legion, like thousands of such places around the country, provided social cohesion. Yes, there was drinking and gambling, but it wasn’t excessive and it wasn’t in any way immoral. Sons enjoyed a pint with fathers and grandfathers, solidifying the sense of community and continuity.
Act IV was exiting the stage. At 2.30pm (opening hours were 11.30 to 2.30 – you knew where you were with the British Legion), I would buy a bottle of light ale to take back for Judy, which she’d drink while putting the final touches to the roast dinner (never with the meal). If I was working I’d gobble down my dinner before setting off for Oxford Avenue. If I wasn’t working there was The Big Match to watch on ITV followed by a snooze in the armchair with the Sunday papers across my lap.
I’m conscious that this creates a fair impression of Andy Capp; of a bloke with a self-centred social life that left his wife to look after the kids, cook, wash and make a comfortable home. And that was pretty much the division of labour back then. I worked as many hours as I could to bring home the bacon and Judy ran everything else. My boozing may have been confined to Friday evenings and Sunday lunchtimes and my gambling to Sunday bingo and cards, but I was none the less perpetuating the male lifestyle adopted by my father, if not the excesses to which he took it.
Judy and I did enjoy the occasional night out together. On a Saturday evening, if we could find a babysitter, we might go to the Lynchpin, one of two pubs on the estate. The other one was the less respectable Jolly Londoner where there was little jollity and plenty of ‘trouble’. More often we socialized with our neighbours without venturing beyond the green. Robert Metcalfe two doors down had been born on Christmas Day and celebrated every year with a party. This began a craze for house parties and a fund was set up into which each household would pay 50p per person per week. Once there was enough in the kitty we’d take turns to host a do. There’d be huge cans of Watney’s Red Barrel and Double Diamond (known as Party Sevens, because each can contained seven pints) arrayed in somebody’s small kitchen, along with bottles of spirits and mixers (but rarely, in those days, wine).
Early on, the men would take up residence in the kitchen, joining their wives for dancing in the front room when they were either enticed or forced out by the women. Or, as was the case with Mick and myself, when inspired by a particular record (usually ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Stones) to cut ourselves a piece of the dance floor.
We were a diverse bunch united by a youthful exuberance. Our age range spanned around fifteen years. I was by some distance the youngest and Tony Gabriel the eldest. On Long Furlong Drive, as well as the beautifully spoken Martin and Karen next door, there was a couple from across the road, Glad and Del, enthusiastic party-fund contributors, who by most definitions would have been perceived as middle-class. Del, a senior manager at a film-processing company, was shy and quiet at parties while his hilarious wife, Glad, typified the ‘life and soul’ category. I remember her at one festive-season celebration loudly castigating her husband for buying her a book entitled Living With Lumbago for Christmas.
The diversity in social class might be surprising to those who think of council estates as being inhabited solely by horny-handed sons of toil like me. Perhaps this was the legacy of the elusive 1960s social mobility we hear so much about today but was scarcely mentioned then.
There again, I didn’t read much sociology. After the strike, I began to broaden my consumption of poetry. Despite penning a
vanity contribution to Spring Poets ’69, I had hardly read any poetry before my immersion in Dylan Thomas. Later that year the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Gray was commemorated at the St Giles parish churchyard in Stoke Poges, where he was said to have written his famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’.
Stoke Poges was only five minutes away from the Britwell so Judy and I went there with the kids. I bought a leather bookmark embossed with four verses from the ‘Elegy’ in gold lettering, including the scene-setting opening:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
My appetite whetted, I looked up the entire poem in Slough library, becoming increasingly intrigued by its theme of greatness denied by accident of birth. I’d soon learned my favourite lines by heart:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
I saw those flowers all around me in Slough.
A year after the strike ended I resumed my quest for a proper driving licence. I’d been quite happy with my permanent moped delivery but I was still determined to take advantage of being in one of the few occupations where I could be paid to learn to drive. After the unceremonious removal from my course following the fainting fit at Barnes, I nagged the Post Office in Slough to give me another chance.
They didn’t take much persuading. The shortage of drivers reflected the general shortage of staff in the Thames Valley. And driving wasn’t a separate function. All postmen were expected to do every aspect of the job: sorting outward and inward letters, packets and parcels, loading and unloading mail, cycling, driving, walking – the lot.