by Alan Johnson
If I had any kind of political epiphany, I suppose this was it. It came in the midst of the period of personal restlessness that prompted me to apply for promotion. I was now an acting PHG; I had also been elected on to the union’s postmen’s committee – nominated, I think, by Ron Gregory, our glass-half-empty branch treasurer and my fellow QPR devotee – a role that had so far hardly proved arduous since no meetings of the committee ever seemed to be called.
Mick, too, was restless. Ten years my senior, and an astute and entertaining companion, he was undergoing something of an early mid-life crisis. It had nothing to do with his domestic circumstances, which were happy and stable, and he enjoyed being an ambulanceman. He just wanted more. It would be a pretentious exaggeration to say that he yearned to put his considerable intellect to good use to improve his own lot and that of his fellow man. Suffice it to say he felt unfulfilled.
We talked about politics a lot, Mick and I. Harold Wilson was now back in Downing Street at the helm of a minority government. While we were both Labour voters neither of us was happy about what we saw as a drift away from its core principles by the party in Westminster. Mick was more focused than I was. He was keen to become a Labour councillor, or at least to do something that gave him an opportunity to have a say and make a difference.
I was all over the place politically. I had read a lot but analysed very little. I’d got hold of an Everyman edition of Das Kapital from somewhere and had read the first volume. I was taken by Marx’s view of the struggle between labourers and capitalists as the current stage of an evolutionary process which he regarded as the final phase of humanity’s march towards a classless society. I also read the novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, as well as devouring the works of the man I would then have described as my favourite writer, George Orwell.
I understood Marx’s theory of surplus value and, for a while, I would be the hopeless bore in the kitchen at parties on the Britwell. I tried to introduce a dose of Marxism into any discussion that bordered on the political. And in that tumultuous period encompassing Vietnam, the three-day week, pay and price freezes, industrial disputes, rocketing inflation, the Troubles in Ireland and the rise of the National Front, many of them did.
At the same time as all this was swimming around in my head I felt a growing affinity with the Labour movement. My political hero wasn’t Wilson, Brown or Crosland, or even Benn, Castle or Foot. It wasn’t anyone in the Labour party. It was the communist leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, Jimmy Reid: a man who’d led his members to the most significant union victory against redundancies not by going on strike but by remaining at work. The nine-month work-in ended triumphantly in 1972 and Reid, a charismatic shipyard engineer who’d left school at fourteen, became a national figure.
His famous speech ‘Alienation’ – delivered at the University of Glasgow, where students had elected him to be their rector, and reproduced verbatim in the New York Times, which described it as the greatest speech since the Gettysburg address – thrilled me to the core, inspired and moved me in equal measure.
Jimmy Reid’s passions – books, football, music – were my passions. He quoted Burns, Shelley and Shakespeare and was as comfortable in a pub as he was at a seminar. But for all of that, for all my adoration (which is not too strong a word) of the man, the Communist Party of Great Britain wasn’t for me.
I had read somewhere that its aim was to swallow up all the forces of society for the benefit of the state. I couldn’t see how a communist society could ever be a genuinely free society. Totalitarianism, repression of free speech, the burning of books: there was no doubt in my mind that allegiance to the state would eclipse freedom of the individual, which was as important to me as it was to Mike, my Conservative-voting brother-in-law.
Neither did I join the Workers’ Revolutionary party, an organization of which I became aware when one of its disciples, Richard, a dishevelled schoolteacher from Kingston-upon-Thames, sold me a copy of News Line, the WRP newspaper, one evening in the Ponderosa, a vast, canteen-like bar on the trading estate where the parcels men sometimes went on their break.
Richard was about my age and reminded me of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who regularly descended on the Britwell seeking to convert its residents in order to protect them from Armageddon. Like them he’d brave the pubs and clubs, a bundle of News Lines under his arm, asking for the address of anyone to whom he managed to sell a copy.
I bought one from him and even gave my real address, mainly because I felt sorry for this bedraggled figure who must have dedicated his entire leisure time to travelling round the south-east trying to recruit members. Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin were high-profile supporters of what was, in effect, a cult led by an ageing former communist, Gerry Healy, who reminded me, from his photograph, of Dickie Lawlor.
Richard delivered News Line to my door every week for about eighteen months, perpetually eager to recruit me to the cause. He was a nice, middle-class kid from Surrey who wouldn’t have harmed a fly. When he told me how, if we armed the workers on the Britwell, they would throw off the yoke of capitalism and rise up in revolutionary fervour, I would patiently point out to him that in identifying a perceived enemy some of them were as likely to pick an immigrant as a capitalist oppressor.
What the WRP and News Line highlighted for me was the extraordinary arrogance and intolerance of the far left. When challenged on how few followers the WRP had among us working-class council-house dwellers, the very people he purported to champion, Richard attributed the lack of interest to ‘false consciousness’. This was a reference to Marx’s contention that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’. According to Richard, voting in parliamentary elections was ‘bourgeois democracy’ and needed to be replaced by street committees and a programme of mass education. Every human hope and aspiration, every object of art and beauty, had to be pickled into an all-embracing dogma that would guide our lives, no doubt with the assistance of the secret police.
The WRP’s hatred of our ‘bourgeois democracy’ was as nothing compared to the hatred they reserved for other Marxist organizations, particularly the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was denounced as part of the establishment, with my hero Jimmy Reid condemned as a counter-revolutionary traitor.
The battle between the WRP, the International Socialists (the forerunners of the Socialist Workers’ party), the Maoists and a thousand factions of Leninism and Trotskyism was what kept these elitist cliques going. Any tiny perceived deviation from the path of enlightenment, as defined by some demi-god, led to fierce censures, splits and divisions that spawned a dozen more off-shoots whose handfuls of members claimed spiritual purity.
Poor Richard: his efforts to convert me had succeeded only in determining the direction I would definitely not take.
At least communism had a solid bedrock in reality and, at the time, could boast that half the world’s population lived under it. But while I wanted to live in a society that would not countenance the conditions we’d had to endure in my childhood, a society that would allow the intelligence of people like my mother to flourish rather than be suppressed, where greater equality and the eradication of poverty were fundamental objectives, I was repelled by the concept of an oligarchy.
If ever I questioned rejecting communism, a development widely reported in the press in 1975 reassured me that I had made the right decision. Jimmy Reid, whose eloquence, humour and compassion I so admired and who’d brought politics to life for me; Jimmy Reid, who’d twice almost captured a seat in Fife for the Communist party; Jimmy Reid had, not long after my conversations with Mick Pearson in the supporters’ club, announced his resignation from the Communist Party of Great Britain in favour of moving to the mainstream.
And so it was that Alan Johnson, Mick Pearson and Jimmy Reid all joined the Labour party within a few months of one another.
Chapter 12
; IT IS 8 February 1976, a Sunday morning. A weak winter light is beginning to illuminate the small back bedroom in which Judy and I now sleep. This used to be the children’s room but they now occupy the bigger bedroom, partitioned by our next-door neighbour, Tony Gabriel, to create a separate space at the front for five-year-old Jamie while the girls share the larger area at the back. It means, as Jamie frequently and loudly complains, that Natalie and Emma have to walk through his room to get to theirs.
I drift away from the arms of Morpheus and into the panicked realization that I’ve overslept. This day could change my life for ever but only if I can get to the canteen at Slough sorting office by 10.30. Unfortunately, it’s already 9.45.
It is the day of the annual general meeting of the Slough Amalgamated Branch of the Union of Post Office Workers. The first task of the fifty or sixty members present (out of the 800 in the branch) will be the election of officers for the coming year, of which the two principal posts are central secretary and branch chairman. I have been nominated and seconded for the latter.
After two years as a member of the postmen’s committee (during which time not a single meeting had been called) I’d decided to aim higher. As branch chairman I would have the opportunity to sort out its dysfunctional organization as well as having a key role in representing the members, whether in posts or telecoms, clerical or manual.
The incumbent chairman was ‘Digger’ Hughes. I have no idea where the nickname came from but he certainly wasn’t Australian. Digger was a genial chap in his mid-fifties who’d become a postman only a couple of years previously. I didn’t think he was sufficiently interested in the office and wondered how he could justify presiding over a branch whose committees never met.
Len Rigby, who had led us for so many years and been such a superb advocate of our cause during the strike five years earlier, no longer held the post of central secretary. Although, like most postmen, he continued to work past his sixtieth birthday, upon reaching pensionable age he had decided to step down as principal negotiating officer of the branch to make way for new blood.
His chosen successor was Joe Payne, one of the London diaspora, a PHG in his late thirties. Len and Joe shared the same Post Office grade and diminutive stature, but that was where the similarities between them ended. Len’s eloquence and exuberance were replaced by a much more cerebral and serious approach to the role. Joe had transferred to Slough from Paddington in the 1950s when he moved to the Britwell’s sister development in Langley, the Trelawney estate. He’d been a union rep in Slough for a while as assistant secretary for the PHGs and his intelligence and integrity made him an obvious candidate to replace Len.
The central secretary was given a specific duty that released him for full-time union work and a basement office next to the bike shed. Whereas Len had strutted around the sorting-office floor from 6am every day, Joe abhorred that kind of showmanship. He took the view that it was the job of the assistant secretaries for each grade to deal with any problems that arose on the sorting-office floor. He also had a fundamental aversion to overtime, on the grounds that it suppressed basic pay and prevented more people from being employed. So while Joe could have come in early on overtime he declined to do so, working his designated union release hours of 8am to 4.30pm.
On the rare occasions he did work overtime he was an unpopular workmate. At Oxford Avenue, for instance, his refusal to cut corners meant that we worked to time rather than getting away earlier on the ‘finish and go’ system we usually operated. ‘If you go home at 7pm and get paid until 8pm, how long will it be before management proposes to cut each job by an hour?’ Joe would ask. ‘Then you’ll expect the union to maintain the hours.’
The logic was impeccable, and few were bold enough to argue with Joe Payne. Certainly not the supervisors who allowed the scams, thereby earning Joe’s contempt. He did the job properly, engaged in no scams or corner-cutting and worked hard, thus avoiding the possibility of any accusations of taking advantage of his union position.
The workforce had loved Len. His successor was respected without affection. Digger Hughes had spent his two years as chairman complaining about Joe behind his back – and he wasn’t alone. Even Len, who’d nominated Joe as his replacement, moaned about Joe’s aloofness, revelling in the almost universal view, expressed to him often, that things had been much better when he’d run the branch.
I decided that it would be me who’d take things in hand and run the branch. The central secretary’s job was to represent the workforce; running the branch was the role of the chairman. That much I had read in the handbook circulated by UPW House in Clapham where our leader, Tom Jackson, was based. According to their Branch Official’s Guide, the chairman was the custodian of the rules, the protector of the members’ union rights and the guardian of the standing orders. So I’d put my name forward and had been duly proposed and seconded.
That was all well and good, but to stand a chance of beating Digger Hughes and actually being elected to this important position I had to get to the canteen by 10.30. The rules insisted that candidates must be there in person for their names to be entered on the ballot papers hastily produced for those attending to vote.
By 1976 the Ford Anglia had been replaced by a blue Ford Escort 1100cc saloon. Our aversion to debt had had to be suppressed temporarily if we were ever to acquire a reliable car: there was no way such an expensive purchase could be made in one hit. I was paying for the Escort in monthly instalments over three years. It was only a year old when I bought it but had already done 20,000 miles as a rep’s car for Ross Fisheries in Grimsby.
It got me to the canteen at Slough sorting office at 10.29 precisely. There I found Digger Hughes laughing and joking with his supporters before opening the meeting as the incumbent chairman. Once it had been verified that candidates were present in accordance with branch rules, ballot boxes were made available at the rear of the canteen and the seventy members present, a reasonable turn-out, were invited to cast their votes, which were counted straight away.
I won by 63 votes to 7. Digger vacated the chair, I took his place and Len Rigby made a little speech about how effective I’d been on the postmen’s committee (which was nonsense, seeing as there had been no meetings to attend) and praising me as ‘a young man with an old head on his shoulders who will go far’.
I wasn’t sure I wanted an old head on my shoulders but I appreciated Len’s seal of approval. His support was still important even though he was no longer central secretary. I chaired the rest of the AGM, making competent use of a UPW gavel handed down through the years and presented to me by Len. On the dot of noon I banged it smartly on the table, thus fulfilling what I regarded as the most important function of the chair: to conclude the meeting just as the pubs opened.
I fell into trade-union work like an arctic explorer into a hot bath. By the end of 1976 I’d revised the branch rules, ensured that all the committees met regularly, set up more robust arrangements for the annual elections and ensured that the members were better informed about what we were doing on their behalf.
I got hold of a copy of Lord Citrine’s ABC of Chairmanship, which is to the trade-union movement what Erskine May is to Parliament. Its author, an electrician by trade, had, as Walter Citrine, been a distinguished general secretary of the Trades Union Congress from the 1920s to the 1940s. It set out the rules of debate, the functions of the chair and quoted useful precedent. I was one of those sad individuals who found this kind of prosaic stuff satisfying but there were even more satisfying and, indeed, exciting aspects of union work. I felt I had found the answer to my restlessness: a role that offered fulfilment, that tested and stretched what abilities I had and that would perhaps provide opportunities for me to find some new ones I didn’t know existed.
The trade-union movement wasn’t the malevolent force increasingly being depicted by those who had an interest in its demise and no experience of, or need for, its services. At a philosophical level it was a bulwark against discrimination,
a counterweight in the balance of power between employer and employee and an essential element of a mature democracy. But below the umbrella of these grand ideals was an organized body that delivered meaningful improvements to the working lives of its members. It was not merely a question of giving them a collective voice, but of involving them in the decisions that affected them. The UPW provided sick pay, legal services, medical services (established by the Post Office unions well before the creation of the NHS) and cheap life-insurance cover through our Friendly Society. There was even a death grant, which was becoming less important as working people became more prosperous but which was still crucial to families with insufficient savings to pay for a funeral.
Along with Dave Stock, the assistant secretary for postmen and women, I would visit the long-term (and sometimes terminally) sick, offering not only a financial helping hand but a familiar face that, unlike the faces of some employers, wasn’t presenting an outward show of sympathy while calculating the quickest way to get them back to work or off the payroll.
Sometimes that familiarity went too far. I remember on one occasion Dave and I visiting someone who’d had a groin operation. As we sat sipping tea on the settee our host suddenly leaped up and pulled down his pyjama bottoms to show us his scar. With our cups and saucers balanced on our knees and his groin at eye level, we were a captive audience. Going to see a member took on a whole new meaning after that.
The Post Office wasn’t a bad employer. On the contrary, it was among the best in the country. The sick pay arrangements were particularly generous. However, in an industry where a large chunk of take-home pay was derived from allowances and overtime, any lengthy spell of sick leave caused real financial hardship.