by Alan Johnson
I can still recall those damned factors. For every 1 per cent variation in traffic compared with the baseline, hours had to vary by 0.2 per cent on ‘outdoor’ hours (delivering mail, collecting from pillarboxes) and 0.7 per cent for ‘indoor’ (sorting for dispatch or delivery). The baseline was set using figures for traffic and hours from the year before the scheme began and mail volumes needed to be constantly measured to provide accurate information about how many letters an office was handling (something that had only previously been assessed in a one-off ‘annual count’). Unfortunately, I was no mathematical genius.
When Linda, as my teenage guardian, used to go to my school on parents’ evenings she’d urge poor Mr Jacobs, my maths teacher, to try harder to instil in me the skills I’d need when I left school. (While I enjoyed the subjects that interested me, I’d shown a tendency not to bother too much about those that didn’t.) I could add, subtract, divide and multiply adequately. I had known all that before leaving primary school. It was equations and percentages, anything beyond the basics, really, with which I’d declined to engage at school. The arrival of the calculator was a great help to people like me but I needed to understand the formulae, not just press buttons. My salvation came from a TUC booklet I came across entitled Working with Figures, which gave clear explanations of how to calculate all manner of things, particularly percentages.
John Taylor and Derek Walsh had actually formulated and negotiated the introduction of the scheme but, having established the basic outline, they never went on to deal with the reams of paperwork necessary to set it up in a sorting office as I had done in Slough. And for the calculations they did make they had relied on the genius of a man named Derek Saunders, the union rep in the Notting Hill delivery office.
Derek was a fascinating if little-known part of the IWM story. A secondary-modern pupil who’d left school at fifteen to become a telegram boy, he’d been crippled by what I took to have been polio. With his shuffling gait, large frame and long, greasy hair, he looked like Ian Dury, of Blockheads fame, with undertones of Bill Sykes. Now middle-aged, his face had been etched by every painful day of his illness.
When I’d first got to know John Taylor and told him I was from Notting Hill (the place where I’d grown up had been known as North Kensington but I’d given up trying to make the distinction, for the uninitiated, between London W10 and W11), he had insisted on introducing me to Derek Saunders – ‘an ugly bastard but a fuckin’ genius with numbers’. Derek was indeed a brilliant mathematician who was a huge asset to the union (and indeed the Post Office, which also prized his skills) in London.
Like Ernie Sheers with his treble accumulators, Derek had become interested in mathematics as an adult, finding practical expressions for calculations that for most people were abstract. He carried no trace of his wisdom in his personality. I suspect that polite society would have been repelled by the way he looked and the difficulty he had in talking without spittle running down his badly shaved chin. But inside that battered shell was a lovely man. Ernie used to tell me that if Jesus came back to earth he wouldn’t descend into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. He’d be poor and probably infirm. I often thought about that in my dealings with Derek Saunders.
While John and Derek Walsh were the face of IWM to the London membership and, in the main, admired for the way they’d helped defend the service from the threat of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, Derek Saunders was unknown to all but a handful of LDC activists. He died in harness about five years after the IWM scheme was introduced, his pain ended and his contribution largely unrecognized.
So, with the help of the TUC booklet and Derek Saunders, I suppose I became the one-eyed man in the country of the blind to whom Tom had referred. Most new EC members didn’t get the opportunities I had to visit the branches. It was the senior figures who’d been around for a while who were most in demand. Of course, there were those who preferred life in the comfort zone of UCW House, chairing committees or working in the backwaters of the organizing, editorial or legal and medical departments. Exposure to the membership was double-edged. Success boosted your vote and guaranteed re-election; failure could have the opposite effect. The least dangerous option was to stay out of any disputes; to march away from the sound of gunfire.
During my enforced absence from UCW House, a national dispute was brewing. It had been ten years since the great strike, a period during which a repeat was never even remotely contemplated.
Yet as I sat in plastered isolation on the Britwell, a strange series of events was driving us towards just such a destination. It all seems faintly ridiculous now, but this is the gist of what happened.
One of the most important delivery offices in London was the WDO, or Western District Office, in Rathbone Place, which covered the W1 postal district – the West End. The branch secretary was an Ashanti from Ghana, Frank Osei-Tutu. The UCW was proud of Frank. He’d become a major figure in London by fighting off an attempt by the National Front to unseat him in the 1970s. The fascists were outraged that a black man could be elected to lead such a prominent branch. Frank would eventually become a colleague on the executive council, where I was able to admire his Cecil Gee suits and beautiful silk ties at closer quarters.
Frank’s branch chairman and ally in the battle with the NF was Bill Willoughby. Politically well to the left of Frank, Bill was a constant critic of the leadership in general and Tom Jackson in particular. During the course of his union duties he had become embroiled in a dispute with the canteen manager at WDO for reasons I cannot recall. During the course of a heated argument Bill Willoughby swore at the manager and banged his fist aggressively on a table, as a result of which offence the Post Office gave him notice of dismissal.
The union saw this as blatant victimization of an effective union representative. Bill had been wrong to swear and act aggressively but his actions did not warrant dismissal. With no previous disciplinary offences and twenty years of unblemished service, the most severe punishment he could have expected was a written warning. It looked like the canteen manager had given as good as he got. The fact that many in the union considered Mr Willoughby to be a pain in the arse was neither here nor there: his treatment was unjust.
This was the kind of dispute that bubbled up periodically and was generally dealt with sensibly at district council level. However, the LDC had failed to make any headway with the director of postal services, Bill Cockburn (‘Bilco’, who’d led for the Post Office in the IWM negotiations), and to everybody’s astonishment Tom Jackson ended up getting personally involved.
It was no secret that Bill Willoughby was Tom’s bête noire. So why didn’t Tom leave this to be handled by his national officers or his deputy, Alan Tuffin? I was out of the loop but it seemed that Tom regarded this action against a senior branch official as a personal affront to his authority and a serious attack on the union as a whole.
He seemed genuinely offended that, after all his attempts to establish a better climate of industrial relations, his successful if highly controversial efforts to improve productivity through IWM and his contribution to keeping the Post Office free of involvement in the Winter of Discontent, he was now being humiliated by an upstart district manager – Bill Cockburn – who was confident that the union had been rendered industrially impotent by the 1971 strike.
All this culminated in a special meeting of the executive council being called for a Wednesday evening in October. All EC members were urged to attend. By then I could get about with the assistance of a pair of crutches and a large metal support under the sole of my plastered left foot. I certainly couldn’t drive, but Dave Stock offered to give me a lift to Clapham, wait for me and bring me back. Joe Payne came along for the ride. He and Dave went to the King’s Head round the corner from UCW House to wait. At 8pm I hobbled into the magnificent oak-panelled boardroom at UCW House and sat in my usual position at the round, glass-topped table.
Upon arrival we were given a confidential paper setting out the strategy fo
r a series of national strikes in support of Bill Willoughby and a transcript of the argument that our general secretary had put to Willoughby’s final disciplinary hearing the previous day. A decision by the disciplinary panel was expected within the next couple of days. I have a clear memory of Tom’s statement: it was the first time I’d seen the phrase ‘lingua franca’, which he’d employed to describe how normal it was for swearwords to be used when managers and union officials met at WDO.
The atmosphere in the boardroom was tense. We were being asked to press the union’s nuclear button in the event that the appeal was lost. We’d gone on strike in far more benign circumstances, and with a better case affecting all our members, a decade earlier and been defeated. To do so now, in defiance of an anti-union government that had already presided over the separation of posts from telecoms and was champing at the bit to dilute the monopoly, seemed reckless, to say the least. Furthermore, Willoughby wasn’t exactly Mr Popular with members of the executive council.
Mingled with the tension was a tingle of excitement. We were involved in an historic event for the union which could have far-reaching consequences. As Tom came into the boardroom, his assistant handed round sealed envelopes. Each had a separate number and such was their sensitivity, we were informed by the chair, they would need to be taken back after we’d had ten minutes to read the document inside.
It contained the shocking news that Tom Jackson was to take early retirement. The reason for all the secrecy was that Tom wanted the executive council to know he’d already made the decision before we embarked on an industrial dispute the outcome of which might be wrongly perceived as the reason for his retirement. If, as seemed likely, we were going to take to the battlefield, we would have to do so with our troops unaware that their commanding officer intended to leave the army.
The union’s rule book insisted that all national officers retire at the age of sixty and allowed those appointed before a certain date (which included Tom) to go with a full pension at fifty-five. Tom was exhausted. The cancer that had claimed his eye had also diminished what was left of his enthusiasm for a job that was as demanding as any Cabinet minister’s – and he’d been doing it for fourteen years rather than the two or three years a Cabinet minister might expect to remain in post.
In truth he was also despondent about trying to lead union activists who were increasingly reluctant to be led. He’d had one wage deal overwhelmingly rejected in 1979 and had suffered the humiliation of a vote of censure being carried against him at a subsequent conference.
To understand the shock of the announcement that night it’s important to appreciate the particular regard in which this great public figure was held. I yielded to no one in my respect and affection for Tom, the man who’d singled me out to advise, encourage and cajole into standing for national office and who’d become my mentor and guide. I limped round to the pub afterwards to find Dave and Joe with a heavy heart to go with the plastered foot. I couldn’t say anything to them as the executive was sworn to secrecy about Tom’s announcement.
We had agreed a strategy for a national dispute that, thankfully, never took place (Bill Willoughby was eventually reinstated) and an election timetable for a general secretary vacancy that wasn’t supposed to have occurred for another four years.
Chapter 20
AS I WAS elected to the executive council, the effects of the Thatcher government’s policies were starting to be felt across the country. On the Britwell the opportunity presented to council tenants to purchase their homes with the help of a government subsidy was a perfect example of a political decision having a direct and significant impact on people’s lives.
Giving council tenants the right to buy their houses wasn’t a new or even an exclusively Conservative policy. Local authorities had always had the ability to allow such a transfer of ownership and a national extension of that policy had been part of Labour’s 1959 election manifesto. But when the Thatcher administration introduced the Housing Act 1980, the policy became mandatory nationwide, irrespective of the view or circumstances of the council to which the houses belonged.
For Judy and me and our neighbours and friends, the debate over the right-to-buy scheme wasn’t some dry, academic discussion of political pros and cons. We were the council tenants government ministers were talking about when they spoke of the transfer of capital wealth from the state to the people. It was undoubtedly a political masterstroke for the Conservatives, one that resonated with people more profoundly than almost any aspect of government policy I could remember.
The effect around our small corner of the Britwell was immediate. Martin and Karen next door were the first to take advantage of the scheme. They sold their former council house very quickly after buying it, moving to a house near Swindon where Martin had acquired a car-spares business. Indeed, they sold up so speedily that I suspect they had to pay back some of the discount that was contingent on the purchasing tenants continuing to occupy the property for a certain period of time. A young couple moved in next door – first-time buyers and the very first exclusively private home-owners round the green.
They would be free from the rules stipulating that no private hedge could be higher than 3ft 6ins and that your front door had to be a certain colour. They could paint their front door any colour they liked. They could change the door altogether if they wanted. Any improvements they made to their house would not have to be ripped out when they moved on, which was what happened to the properties owned by the council, the aim being to ensure that no tenant was given an unfair advantage.
In fact, while I do remember the privet-hedge rule, I’m not sure if the colour of the paintwork was actually centrally dictated or whether it was just that when the doors were repainted on change of tenancy they were returned to their original colour. Either way, we all believed it was a rule, so all our doors had been the same. Now the mock-Georgian doors with fanlights that were popular at the time began to spring up round the estate.
I recall one passionate discussion at one of our neighbourhood parties, which had become less frequent by then and were no longer financed by subscription. My friend Mick Pearson, who’d joined the Labour party with me, argued fiercely in favour of the scheme. I can picture us now, standing in Robert and Kathleen Metcalfe’s small kitchen, Mick in a vest (a brief summer fashion) with an earring in his left ear (he had been one of the first to participate in the masculinization of the earring, a physical intrusion I refused to countenance), his gin and tonic stacked with accumulated slices of lemon, wiping the floor with my carefully constructed argument that this was a bad policy that would have serious consequences for future generations.
Why should we spend the rest of our lives paying rent that would eventually exceed the value of the house, only to see the home we’d cherished through the decades handed on to someone else after we’d popped our clogs? he argued. Labour was wrong to oppose what Mrs Thatcher was doing. It would cost us votes and lose us the next election.
It was a good-natured debate and, while I lost the argument in Robert’s kitchen, we all had to make our own decisions about whether or not to buy. Mick and Susan took the plunge and within three years they had gone. The Metcalfes and Gabriels had also become home-owners by the end of 1981.
For Judy and me the advantages of participating in the scheme were clear. To buy a house privately would require a hefty deposit. While we earned enough money to live reasonably comfortably with no debts, a car and a holiday every year in Cornwall or Devon, we had little in the way of savings.
As tenants for over ten years we’d qualify for a discount on the value of the house of over a third. It was a cut-price bargain that was difficult to resist. But resist it we did. I felt no piety about bucking the trend among our neighbours and our decision certainly had nothing to do with Labour party policy (which speedily changed in favour of council house sales anyway). I didn’t feel in any way morally superior to the people desperate to own their own homes who saw Mrs Thatcher as a liberat
or.
The cost and responsibility of maintaining the house was a factor for Judy and me, particularly as I was so useless at anything calling for DIY skills and would struggle to carry out the simplest of repairs. But what convinced us in the end was remembering how lucky we felt to have been allocated a council house. When I argued with Mick that we had an obligation not to deny future generations that lifeline, it wasn’t mere rhetoric. I meant it. My mother’s dream of having her own front door, of whatever colour, could only have been made a reality through social housing. Hers was an ultimately futile desire; ours had been fulfilled. If our financial situation improved to the extent that we could afford a deposit we should, like many before us – including our friends Fred (the BBC scene-shifter) and Barbara – buy a house away from the Britwell and pass on what we’d been fortunate enough to acquire to another family who had no prospect of buying any kind of house. We declined to take advantage of the bargain offer and remained council tenants.
In 1982, in addition to Tom Jackson, another doyen of the union was preparing to retire, albeit one whose light had shone only in our small corner of the country. Len Rigby had now reached the age of sixty-five. Since becoming branch chairman five years earlier I’d tried to discourage Len from criticizing Joe Payne, his chosen successor as branch secretary, and he’d rightly refused to take any role in the union beyond attending branch meetings, where he’d sit on the periphery, legs crossed, holding his cigarette theatrically while contemplating the ceiling. Still Nöel Coward, but now Nöel Coward watching a rehearsal for one of his plays as opposed to taking centre stage.
The only more regular attendee at our Slough branch meetings was Ernie Sheers who, like Len, observed but said nothing. Ernie would castigate anyone he heard moaning about the union if they couldn’t be bothered to attend our gatherings and make their point there. He wasn’t uncritical himself, warning me about what was happening in my absence on executive-council business. I was like a cricketer, he remarked, called up to represent England but still attached to his county side.