by Alan Johnson
There was another UPW conference at the end of 1976: a three-day rules revision conference in Brighton. I do understand how soporific that must sound but for me it was truly exciting. It was another chance to absorb the cut and thrust as people much like me, doing the same job, got together to debate important issues affecting our lives – although I admit I’d be stretching a long bow to suggest that the union’s rules fell into that category.
Nevertheless, I was keen that the Slough Amalgamated Branch should be participants rather than passive observers in these debates. Lacking the courage to walk to the rostrum myself, I persuaded Joe Payne to speak against a proposed rule change that would have increased subscriptions by a substantial amount. It was designed to help the union recover from the 1971 strike, the financial consequences of which were still being felt. Joe strongly disapproved of the increase. He thought it would lose us members and we would simply end up drawing the same funds from fewer people, leaving us no better off. Eventually, over a few pints, he agreed to prepare a speech and take the rostrum on our behalf.
Joe delivered an impassioned speech in front of around 1,500 people. ‘… And if you carry this rule change, conference,’ he warned as he reached the crux of his peroration, ‘you will desiccate this union.’
There was no open mockery and Joe left the rostrum to a round of applause. I certainly wasn’t going to mention his malapropism. I was enough of a smart-arse not only to know that the word should have been ‘decimate’, but also that it means specifically to reduce by one in ten rather than simply to destroy something, as is commonly supposed. However, it would have been impertinent of me to point this out and, besides, Joe was far wiser than I would ever be. He just hadn’t read as many books.
The subscriptions duly went up but our delegation was proud to have contributed to the debate and resolved to do so again.
The showpiece debate at that conference was an attempt by John Taylor to introduce a rule change compelling the twelve national officers, including the general secretary, to stand for re-election every five years rather than to have them elected for life. This was a reform that would be forced upon unions by one of the Thatcher government’s first Acts of Parliament four or five years later but for now it was an issue for unions to determine themselves. The atmosphere inside the hall was electric as John moved the proposition on behalf of the mighty London District Council. His speech and the motives behind it had nothing to do with attacking Tom Jackson in retaliation for the failure of the strike – as I’ve said, Tom was as secure in his position as he’d ever been and would have cruised through any re-election that was imposed upon him. There was therefore no personal animosity in the debate. It was principally about modernization, about moving with the times. There had just been a US presidential election, won by Jimmy Carter, with which more than one speaker drew parallels.
Listening to John Taylor, I felt that Ernie would have been appreciative of his East End eloquence. After setting out the argument as to why re-election would strengthen the union and the standing of its officers in their dealings with the employer, John ended with a topical flourish: ‘If it’s good enough for the president of the United States of America to be re-elected periodically, it should be good enough for our national officers.’
Speaker after speaker from the floor supported the rule change and when Tom Jackson rose to reply it looked as if he was facing certain defeat. But Tom’s oratorical skills had been honed in this environment and he soon had command of his audience.
Re-election every five years would mean two years learning the job, one year doing it and two years electioneering for the next contest, he pointed out. How would we convince postmen and telephonists with union ambitions to give up a secure job with the Post Office in order to stand for such a precarious position? Presidents of the United States continued to receive substantial remuneration after their period of office ended. Would the union have to provide similar arrangements for national officers? If not, there was no valid comparison. We would be imposing conditions on our officers that we would never accept for our members.
‘You can get rid of me and any other officer through one simple device and you wouldn’t have to wait five years to do it. It’s called a motion of no-confidence. Why inflict an expensive system of re-elections on the union that would damage the ability of your officers to do a proper job and plunge us into a culture of permanent electioneering?’
It was a tour de force, and it won the day. The Oxford Union would have been proud of such a debate – although, as Tom would remind us on a regular basis, the UPW was not a debating society.
By the time I reached my mid-twenties I regretted leaving school at fifteen. For me the prospect of going to university had seemed about as realistic as my chances of visiting the planet Pluto and it had never remotely crossed my mind as achievable. Yet still I thirsted for knowledge. I read constantly, which served only to intensify that thirst rather than quenching it.
Becoming a trade-union official opened up a whole new world of educational opportunity to me. As branch chairman I was eligible to attend a range of UPW training schools. But even more wonderful to me was the cornucopia of TUC correspondence courses available free of charge. The hub for this huge educational operation was Tillicoultry, a small town in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. Even though I’ve never managed a visit to Tillicoultry, for a couple of years in the 1970s it was the centre of my universe. I sent off essays and completed exam papers to my tutors through the post, receiving their comments, criticisms and the occasional commendation by return.
It was done for fun rather than to gain qualifications. My tutors got me thinking, studying and writing. They succeeded in inspiring and encouraging me even though they had to do so without personal contact and from a distance – so much so that I considered taking up one of the many opportunities to study full-time at Ruskin, the trade-union college in Oxford, or one of the other centres around the country offering further education for which modest grants were available, all funded by the trade-union and Labour movement. But with a family to support the finances never worked for me, so I stuck to my correspondence courses, supplemented by evening classes at Slough College, where I reached Grade 2 in piano before overtime and the increasing burden of union work took its toll.
I doubted if any correspondence course could equip me for one of my principal functions as a union official: to hold the attention of an audience through the power of oration. I wanted to develop the confidence and skills that would enable me at the very least to persuade and engage my members in Slough on the matters affecting us most directly, but more than this I wanted to do what I’d seen John Taylor and others do: to speak convincingly to an audience of over a thousand from the rostrum at conference.
In the end it was an issue I cared about passionately that motivated me and led me to jump in at the deep end for the first time, with no training or tuition. That issue was South Africa. Ever since my schooldays, when Mr Smith had used every religious education lesson to acquaint us with the injustice and cruelty of apartheid, I’d been aware of the grievous injury inflicted on native South Africans. Mr Smith had been something of a voice in the wilderness then, but by the mid-1970s opposition to apartheid had become a cause célèbre. Following the shooting in Soweto in the summer of 1976 of hundreds of black schoolchildren demonstrating against a dictum requiring them to be taught in Afrikaans, the UPW declared that, as part of a co-ordinated international boycott, its members would refuse to handle mail or connect calls to or from South Africa during a week of protest beginning on 7 January 1977.
The boycott was elevated to the front pages of the newspapers by the activities of a shady, right-wing organization in the UK called the National Association for Freedom, which strongly supported the liberty of South African policemen to shoot black schoolchildren. They secured an injunction to stop the industrial action going ahead. During the public debate, the right of the UPW executive council to impose such a boycott was called into q
uestion.
At the time all this was going on I was away for a week at a union induction school in Bournemouth. I had already arranged a branch meeting for the Sunday following my return, but when I got back to the office that Friday, five days after the boycott had begun, I found that Joe Payne, besieged by disgruntled members, had tried to take the heat out of the situation by inviting them to record their views, either for or against the boycott, in a book made available for the purpose in the union room. A glance at the book revealed a long list of opponents and just three or four members (including Joe) in support.
I could understand how Joe had been forced into taking this action but, as I pointed out to him, it was a meaningless list and the place to decide such issues was at a properly constituted branch meeting, where the arguments could be debated.
There was a bigger attendance than usual that Sunday morning. When the contentious item on the agenda was reached I sought permission to leave the chair because I wanted to contribute to the debate (I was following the advice given by Citrine’s ABC of Chairmanship). The canteen on the top floor of Slough sorting office hadn’t been designed for public speaking. There were no microphones and the acoustics were dreadful. Words ricocheted off the big plate-glass windows and landed somewhere around the metal shutters of the serving hatch.
Nor was my audience sitting in ordered rows, lost in rapt contemplation of the profound points I was making. The members were grouped around the canteen tables, some with their backs to me. A couple of guys didn’t even look up from their Sunday papers, lying open on the tables in front of them.
Cicero may well have struggled in such an environment – and my speech was certainly not Ciceronian. To ensure that I presented my thoughts logically and that I wouldn’t dry up I’d written it all out in advance, but I soon realized that reading a prepared argument wasn’t going to work so I ditched it and simply spoke from the heart. I spent ten minutes describing the evils of apartheid, the repressive nature of the South African state, the need to uphold the values of the trade-union movement. I talked of my pride in a union that was showing solidarity with black South African workers. While others paid lip service to the cause, Tom Jackson had shown leadership in deciding to back words with action.
When I sat down I received a round of applause before the meeting voted narrowly to reject my arguments and censure the executive council for its actions over South Africa.
Engaging though I found union work, I would define it as an interest, something that added another dimension to my work, not as a passion. The passions of my life remained music, books and football. As well as writing songs, now with my new Eko guitar, I was broadening the range of the music I listened to. Judy was far more knowledgeable about classical music than I was. She helped me track down a piece that had fascinated me since I was a child, when I’d caught a snatch of it by chance while turning the Bakelite switch that controlled the trio of stations on our hired radio. It was the most majestic piece of music I’d ever heard, but I didn’t know what it was called or who had composed it. This nugget turned out to be from the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. I bought a recording of it, a purchase that started a collection of classical LPs, which could be bought much more cheaply than rock albums.
My workmates in the sorting office included more lovers of literature than I’ve ever worked among since. There was ‘Jock’ Hastie (I’m afraid there were a few Jocks, Paddys and Taffs whose parents would have been mortified at how their carefully chosen Christian names had been lost to the English custom of affixing such generic labels to men of Celtic origin), who gave me an ‘introduction to Shakespeare’ lesson by reciting Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice on the quality of mercy not being strained one afternoon over a cup of tea in the canteen. Jock was also a talented illustrator. He produced a weekly cartoon for a local paper in Windsor and was happy to sketch a workmate on request for a quid a time.
Des O’Callaghan, who worked with Ernie Sheers on the Farnham Royal deliveries, was a devoted poetry enthusiast. Judy had bought me The Oxford Book of English Verse one Christmas and when I mentioned this to Des as we sorted letters next to one another early in the New Year he exposed his secret passion, reeling off the first two verses of ‘Naming of Parts’ by Henry Reed. Des recommended Yeats and Auden and Philip Larkin, and insisted I bring my book into the office for him to flag up his favourite poems for me.
Charlie Markham, a tiny bespectacled PHG who looked like the Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey, once quoted the whole of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night …’), learned by rote and recited by heart as we distributed pillarbox keys together.
In fact the Slough sorting office was like a Royal Mail university, such was the erudition of the postmen alongside whom I worked. The vice-chancellor was George Sirpal, a fresh-faced PHG from Delhi. Unlike the Scots, Welsh and Irish, whose birth names were jettisoned wholesale and replaced by national identifiers, the Asian guys were given anglicized versions of their real names, or nicknames that sounded vaguely like them but were easier to pronounce. So there was K. K. Sharma, for example, Tiger Singh, Charlie Gopal, Peter Saroan. Curiously, while the Londoners in particular seemed to find names difficult they were perfectly capable of picking up snatches of conversational Urdu and Hindi. Greetings and farewells would be exchanged in such dialects regardless of whether the speaker was from Bombay or Bermondsey.
During my acting PHG phase, George Sirpal had seen me engrossed in a book during a quiet period in the inquiry office, where members of the public called to pick up undelivered mail or to lodge complaints. George had studied English literature at university in India and his speciality was Thomas Hardy. He lent me his favourite Hardy novel, Return of the Native, and urged me to read Hardy’s poetry.
The dark beauty of Hardy’s prose had me under its spell within a couple of pages and I went on to devour nearly every novel he wrote, regretting that he hadn’t written more. Poems such as ‘Afterwards’ and ‘The Ruined Maid’ became friends for life. George Sirpal never knew what a significant contribution he’d made to my happiness.
Chapter 14
AS 1976 HAD Drawn to a close we’d spent Christmas with Linda and Mike. They had left Tring for a five-bedroom house in Stopsley near Luton, at the end of a row of houses down a long country lane and surrounded by fields. They needed the space: their family of five had almost doubled in size with the arrival of four foster children.
Linda had always possessed a protective streak, from which I had benefited as a child, and she’d always loved kids. She was extraordinarily patient and genuinely absorbed in their games and their stories. Every evening, without fail, she’d read to all seven children, separately allowing each one to choose the story he or she wanted to hear.
They had also acquired a big van for transporting their enlarged family and a menagerie of pets, including a white-haired mongrel named Shandy. Walking to school every morning with seven children and a dog, Linda sought to impress the other mothers with the firm control she had over the animal. As they approached the kerb to cross the road, she would instruct the dog: ‘Sit, Shandy!’ in a commanding voice. Her voice was indeed commanding, and very loud, one morning when she fluffed her lines, shouting instead the order ‘Shit, Sandy!’ which suggested a level of control over her dog that must have really impressed her audience.
Mike fully supported Linda in her desire to foster. They had undergone the arduous process of becoming approved as foster parents while still living in Tring. It was their success in looking after their first two foster sons, Nicky and Eugene, that had led to their decision to buy the bigger house in Stopsley.
Nicky and Eugene, seven and six when they came to Linda and Mike, were half-brothers. They were being fostered long-term, having suffered terribly at home. Nicky had been taken into care at eighteen months after being badly beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, Eugene’s father. His skull had been fractured, his arm and
leg broken. An attempt had been made to reunite the children with their parents a couple of years later but further violence erupted. Eugene’s little body still carried the marks of the buckle of the belt with which he was beaten regularly.
After the move to Stopsley, a friend of Linda’s, a social worker, rang with a problem. Two other little boys in her care had been placed with a childless couple with a view to adoption but now the wife had asked for them to be taken back as she could not muster any maternal feelings towards them. Linda’s friend was desperate that they shouldn’t be returned to a children’s home. She asked Linda if she could take them in temporarily until a permanent placement could be found. The mere mention of a children’s home was all it took. It had been Linda’s biggest fear when we were children, during our mother’s illness and after her death, that we would be forced into such an institution and despite her tender years she succeeded in keeping us together and out of ‘the system’. Ricky and Murray, aged five and three respectively, arrived shortly afterwards.
Earlier that year the local newspaper had chosen Linda as their ‘Luton Supermum’, an accolade for which she had been nominated by her two eldest children, Renay and Tara, with the help of their father. With seven kids between the ages of three and nine, she was beyond question a supermum. When Judy and I arrived with our three, aged ten, eight and almost six, we spent that Christmas with ten children which, as I remarked to Linda, in some parts of rural England and on a few Scottish islands would have been a schoolful.
That year we had told Natalie about Beppe, her Italian father, who had never sought contact or even been in touch, and I had begun the process of adopting her officially. We said that it would be OK for her to look for Beppe, if she wanted to, when she was older, but reassured her that I was her father in all the ways that were important. ‘I wasn’t the one who planted the seed that made you,’ I explained to her. ‘But I’m the one who loves you and who wanted to be your daddy.’