by Alan Johnson
My first taste of the genuine excitement of trade-union work came in May 1976 when I attended the UPW’s annual conference for the first time. Held at the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth, it lasted from a Sunday afternoon – opening with a rally at which the new prime minister, Jim Callaghan, spoke (he had taken over only a month before after the sudden resignation of Harold Wilson) – until the following Friday evening. Every day was a new and invigorating experience for me.
For a start, it was the first time I’d ever stayed in a hotel. I was sharing a room at the East Anglia with Dave Stock, who had been to conference before as the secretary of the Pontypridd branch. It was at a UPW conference that he’d met the Slough telecoms rep, Pam Graham, who’d been a friend of mine ever since the 1971 strike, when she and I had been part of the same group of youngsters who had banded together at the rallies and meetings we attended. Dave transferred to Slough to marry Pam and as a by-product of this union romance I benefited from the support of an experienced and loyal colleague in a position – representing postmen and postwomen (by far the most numerous grade in the branch) – that was crucial to my ambition of putting Slough on the UPW map.
The conference at its best was pure theatre, as enthralling as any stage drama. With over a thousand delegates and hundreds of visitors in attendance, the Winter Gardens was as packed as a post office on pensions day. On the stage, seated in a long row behind draped trestle tables, sat the executive council. At their centre was the familiar moustachioed figure of Tom Jackson, our general secretary.
Tom had not only survived but thrived in the aftermath of the union’s comprehensive defeat in 1971. While the strike had been a disaster, it was felt that Tom had shown flair in the early stages of the dispute when presenting our case to the public, and courage at the end, when he needed to tell us what we didn’t want to hear. He’d also demonstrated the advocacy skills of a leading barrister in putting the union’s arguments to the Hardman commission. Even those critical of his handling of the strike accepted that, in the five years since, he’d negotiated some of the best pay deals we’d ever achieved. That year, for example, our pay was increasing monthly with inflation to protect the value of the above-inflation deal agreed in January. So if anything, he was regarded with greater affection by the union’s activists than he had been before the strike.
Like almost every other member of the executive council ranged across the front of the stage and the serried ranks of headquarters staff behind them, Tom smoked almost continuously throughout the proceedings. As did a majority of us delegates, sunk into our red velvet tip-up seats. A thick fug rose into the spotlights that lit the stage, adding to the atmosphere as it reduced our life expectancy. Not for nothing was union activity characterized as taking place in smoke-filled rooms.
I was impressed by the eloquence of many of the speakers. Those from the floor (delegates like me) had their say from a rostrum positioned below the stage; raised, but not so high as to be level with the platform from which members of the executive made their speeches – invariably to oppose the propositions being put forward from the rostrum. Those who wanted to enter the debate after a proposal had been moved and seconded had to catch the chairman’s eye, which meant leaping up and yelling ‘Chair!’ to get noticed. The executive usually had the last word before a vote was taken.
One speaker from the floor particularly caught my eye. John Taylor was a postman from the East End of London in his late thirties, skinny as a rake, sharp-suited. He stood with his shoulders pinned back as if standing to attention. John was the leader of the London District Council, the most powerful group in the union. It was the LDC that had come to Barnes to tell us about the strike in support of the overseas telegraph officers seven years previously. John Taylor had now replaced Dickie Lawlor, who had gone on to become one of the twelve national officers of the union before retiring in 1975.
John’s oratory made no concessions to the Queen’s English. He was an East End cockney and proud of it. The letter H was never pronounced in his everyday dialogue and therefore did not feature in his conference speeches, either, but they were no less effective for that. He wore a suit and tie throughout the proceedings, as did the men on the executive council. It was obvious that John was destined to join their ranks and the word on the street was that Tom Jackson saw John Taylor as his eventual successor.
John was staying in the East Anglia and we met in the bar one evening. To me it was like bumping into a film star at Cannes but John wasn’t at all remote and was remarkably patient with me, a new delegate. Such treatment belied the advice he gave me that same evening, which was that the perfect personality trait of a union representative was arrogance tinged with compassion.
While I was thrilled by annual conference, it taught me an important lesson about conference debates, which was that decisions made solely in that rarefied atmosphere are seldom informed and often perverse. The big debate at my first conference was a proposal that Post Office staff should be compulsorily retired at the normal pension age of sixty. It was moved by John Taylor on behalf of the LDC. He spoke movingly of the need to open up job opportunities, particularly to young people. The union, having fought for a retirement age of sixty and negotiated an excellent final salary scheme, should not accept a situation where staff worked beyond pension age, thus denying somebody else the Post Office career that all of us in the conference hall had enjoyed. The union’s officers were instructed to reach an agreement with the employer preventing this abuse and forcing out those who wished to carry on working.
Tom Jackson’s deputy, a short, wavy-haired former telegraphist named Norman Stagg, opposed the proposition on behalf of the executive council. Norman was one of the union’s finest negotiators. It was he who had formulated the excellent contributory pension scheme put in place when we left the civil service. He was also a fine debater. He pointed out the number of vacancies that existed in many parts of the country and the ramifications for the service of losing experienced staff. Those forced out in this way would have an occupational pension but not their state pension, which men couldn’t draw until they were sixty-five. We would be plunging our members into financial difficulties by removing their reasonable expectation to remain in jobs around which they’d planned their future.
This splendid oration was to no avail. The platform lost and the proposal was carried. I sat transfixed throughout, itching to take to the rostrum to explain the problems such a change would create in Slough. But I lacked the courage and, I felt, the ability to hold an audience. In any case the atmosphere and rhetoric had swayed my own delegation. There were six of us there representing the various grades in Slough. A hurried consultation between us produced a majority of four to two in favour of John Taylor’s argument, with Dave Stock and me in the minority. So Slough’s eighty votes (one for every ten members) were cast for the proposal.
The union’s national officers did as they were instructed and negotiated an agreement whereby, after a particular date (1 January 1979, I think it was), no postal or telecoms worker would be retained beyond the age of sixty. The reaction across the country was immediate. Men and women who’d planned to retire later were outraged. Those who hadn’t accumulated enough service for a decent pension and needed more pensionable years were horrified. In an occupation where the average age of the staff must have been well over forty – and, as a consequence, where pensions were closely scrutinized by a majority of the workforce – there was deep concern, manifested in a spate of resignations from the union.
In the end the Post Office and the UPW had to quietly rescind the agreement, replacing it with an arrangement that allowed staff to be retained after sixty ‘subject to fitness and efficiency’. Calm prevailed. But it was a squall that should never have been whipped up in the first place. That conference debate had not been at all representative of the views of our members.
As well as being captivated by the work of conference, I enjoyed the social life that came with it. There was an event every even
ing – the Branch Dance, London Night, Manchester Night … I fell in with a bunch of Scots who insisted on taking me to the Glasgow shindig on the final evening. The leader of the pack was ‘Big Joe’ Menzies (pronounced, I learned, Mingus), a former railway worker from Perth. My allegiance to the Scots began that evening. I loved their humour and their sense of propriety (no man was allowed to swear within the hearing of a woman, a quaint custom I suspect may have eroded over time). Perhaps it was my Celtic blood (my mother’s father was a Scot, her mother Irish) that endeared these people to me.
The evening ended in a large room at the Durley Hall Hotel where we’d gathered after Glasgow Night finished. Joe Menzies was the master of ceremonies, his huge frame dominating the centre of the room. He insisted that each one of us either sang or recited a verse. One by one, from around the room under Joe’s direction, came lilting ballads, stirring folk songs, a bit of Elvis Presley and a lot of Robbie Burns. Then I was introduced by Joe as a stray Londoner and called upon to contribute to the evening’s merriment. I sang a song I’d heard my father play as my sister and I sat on top of his honky-tonk piano as tiny tots in the early 1950s.
Don’t jump off the roof, Dad,
You’ll make a hole in the yard,
Mother’s just planted petunias,
The weeding and digging was ’ard.
If you must end it all, Dad,
Won’t you please give us a break,
Take a walk to the park, Dad,
And there you can jump in the lake.
It wasn’t the way I’d intended to make my first contribution at conference but it was reasonably well received.
Chapter 13
IF BECOMING BRANCH chairman got me hooked on the union, going to conference reeled me in. I’d found a new world that gave me more fulfilment than promotion within the Post Office ever could. I resigned from the PHG acting list, explaining to Judy that while my union work was financially unrewarding (branch officers received an ‘honorarium’ of £50 a year which we always piously refused to accept), there was no reason why our finances should deteriorate as I would continue to work twenty to thirty hours of overtime every week. When I was away at conferences the union paid subsistence at civil-service rates which meant we weren’t much worse off than if we were at work.
Judy was totally supportive. She knew my strengths and weaknesses better than anyone. Her view was that having joined the Post Office to work outside, unsupervised, it would be a mistake to move to indoor work, which may have been better paid but which I wouldn’t enjoy and which would also prevent me from getting home during the day, as I was able to do as a delivery postman.
Among the weaknesses Judy had been forced to recognize was my lack of ability when it came to any kind of DIY. I may have been the son of a painter and decorator but I hadn’t inherited any of his practical skills. One weekend she’d taken the children to stay with Linda so that I could paint and decorate the living room. I did it so badly that Tony Gabriel from next door had to be brought in to retrieve the situation. While I was away having a good time at my first union conference, Judy completely retiled the bathroom. She claimed that my definition of DIY was Don’t Involve Yourself, which was hurtful but true.
Giving up my postman higher grade role just before the fabulous summer of 1976 was unquestionably the right thing to do. It coincided with another important development in this watershed year. Bill Higginbottom (Ear of the Ear, Nose and Throat trio) took medical retirement, creating a vacancy on the coveted Littleworth Common delivery. There was also to be a complete re-sign under which, every five years or so, every duty would go up on a noticeboard to be signed for. Each postman would be allowed three choices, numbered in order of preference. The duties were then to be allocated according to seniority. In a high-turnover office, with eight years’ service under my belt, I was now reasonably senior. I succeeded in my bid to become a proper rural postman.
Throughout that year my friendship grew with a man who was neither a union rep nor a politician but whose influence on me was significant. Ernie Sheers was another East Ender, a docker all his working life until the docks began to vanish in the early 1970s, taking with them a way of life that had existed for centuries. He’d hated leaving the docks and the tight-knit community that surrounded them. The family had come to the Britwell, moving in a few years after us, because Ernie’s wife Kath was from Slough. They lived with their four beautiful children just down the hill on Wordsworth Road and Ernie had come to work at the Post Office.
Twelve years older than me, Ernie was a fascinating man. He had the dark good looks of one of those matinee idols of the silent movies. If he’d grown a ’tache he’d have looked just like Errol Flynn. His teeth were the whitest I’d ever seen and they were all his own, displayed regularly in a dazzling smile. Ernie was the only person I’ve ever known who spoke cockney rhyming slang completely naturally. I may have been a Londoner through and through but I was west London, not east, and the cockney lingo could be confusing, not least because it generally uses two words to represent one, and it is the second word, the one that is often not spoken, that rhymes. So those dazzling teeth were Hampsteads (Hampstead Heath), a piece of fish would be a Lillian (Lillian Gish) and chips Staffords (Stafford Cripps). The newspaper, or linen (linen draper), was paid for with coins from Ernie’s sky (sky rocket – pocket). Sometimes rhyme begat rhyme so that a trail had to be followed to get to the source. Thus your backside could be either your Aris or your bottle, because the rhyming slang for arse was bottle and glass, and for bottle it was Aristotle, or Aris for short.
While Ernie wouldn’t have described himself as a mathematician, he was a modest gambler on the horses and could work out winnings from odds almost instantaneously. Calculating an each-way treble took only a little longer.
My new friend was a deep thinker; an observer of life rather than a reader of books. He took pride in never pushing himself to the front, keeping out of the spotlight. Instead he watched from life’s shadows. An only son brought up with three sisters, Ernie had grown up believing he’d been a profound disappointment to his father and as our bond strengthened he began to talk to me about long-buried emotions concerning their relationship. My use of the word ‘bond’ to describe our friendship is no exaggeration. We became as close as brothers.
Ernie’s views about unions were ambivalent. Basically he was a union man who voted Labour and, like me, wanted to see society rebalanced in favour of the disadvantaged and tilted away from the rich and powerful. He attended union meetings religiously but hardly ever spoke. Ernie hadn’t joined the Post Office until after the 1971 strike but, if he’d been around at the time, he’d unquestionably have been one of those men ready to sell his house rather than give in; but his loyalty was to the collective struggle rather than to individual leaders. He had a firmly rooted distrust of demi-goddery and a built-in bullshit detector of which I (as an occasional bullshitter) had to be wary. He’d been unimpressed by Jack Dash, the radical unofficial East End dockers’ leader, and he was to be equally unimpressed by Arthur Scargill.
Ernie had a faith in God that had nothing to do with organized religion, which he distrusted. When I got to know him well, he told me about the force somewhere in the stratosphere that would compel him, at odd moments, to clasp his hands together with his thumbs interlinked in the sign of the cross. Whatever he was doing at the time, he felt he had to stop and pray, quietly and inwardly, and to seek forgiveness from his personal God.
Lest I paint too sombre a portrait of this handsome buccaneer I should add that he also had an engaging sense of humour, an infectious laugh and an extraordinary ability to get himself into unbelievable scrapes. Ernie’s delivery was in Farnham Royal, where his customers loved him (they called him the fastest postman in the west after his milkman namesake in Benny Hill’s novelty hit record). He annoyed the union puritans by coming into work before his official starting time to ensure that he got the mail to its destination as early as possible. On one occasion, deli
vering to a school during the holidays, he found his entry barred by the iron gates to the premises. Ernie was a one-man Wells Fargo: the mail must get through was his motto. He decided to climb over the gates but, having completed his ascent, and just as he was shifting his weight to bestride the pinnacle of these 9ft monstrosities, the gate on which he was balancing precariously slowly began to open. They hadn’t been locked, as he had assumed, just shut, and now, at 6.30am, Ernie was adrift on a moving gate with no way of getting down. Eventually the caretaker came to the rescue, woken by Ernie’s laughter.
Another morning, in teeming rain, Ernie’s bike got a puncture and he decided to abandon it and walk the four miles back to the office. In the mêlée of the snarled traffic at Crown Point a car tooted. Ernie thought he recognized the driver as a PHG from Slough and jumped into the front passenger seat, throwing his soaking-wet delivery sack on the beautifully carpeted footwell where it sat in a puddle, oozing like a bath sponge. As Ernie, drenched and dripping over the upholstery, chatted away to the driver, en route, he assumed, to the sorting office, he noticed that his companion’s responses were unusually reticent. It slowly dawned on him that, having glimpsed the man in profile, he’d jumped into the car of a complete stranger who had been tooting not at Ernie, but at another car which had cut in ahead of him. Now he was sitting there terrified, convinced that he’d been hijacked by a demented postman.
One day Ernie and I took a day off work to drive to the East End, where I met his friends and family. On the way back we stopped at St Katharine Dock, close to Tower Bridge, where Ernie stood for a long time surveying the site that, within a few years, would become the docklands development. For the moment it was eerily silent. For miles around all that could be seen was a bleak, empty landscape where once a thriving industry had sustained a community with all its history, traditions and culture. Ernie was deeply affected. As I drove us back to Slough in silence, I noticed that his hands were clasped together, thumbs intertwined in the shape of a cross.