by Alan Johnson
When Len took me to one side to tell me he would be retiring he offered me a final piece of advice. I should become honorary president of the branch and cease any local involvement. Otherwise I would be expected to do the chairman’s job in the way I used to at the same time as having to travel up and down the country in my new capacity. I told him I’d think about it but I never did. My feeling was that branch involvement helped me to do my national job properly. I believed I needed the Slough Amalgamated Branch more than they needed me.
Len was due to be given honorary membership of the District Council and that gave me an idea. I would ask Tom Jackson to present Len with this honour as part of the round of farewells he was undertaking in the run-up to our 1982 conference, at which he would formally hand over the reins to his successor, Alan Tuffin.
Alan had been elected from five candidates for this job. These had included Kim McKinley but not John Taylor, who had focused his ambitions on replacing Maurice Styles as outdoor secretary when Maurice retired the following year. His aim was then to use that position as his launch pad for the top job. Alan Tuffin was due to retire in ten years, by which time John would be in his early fifties and perfectly placed for the succession.
My plan to bring together Tom and Len, for me the two figureheads of the 1971 strike, met with everyone’s approval. The date was cleared with Tom but his attendance would be kept a closely guarded secret. Len was not to find out until Tom stepped into the hotel conference room in Ascot where the presentation was to be made.
As Tom couldn’t drive it was agreed that I would take him to and from the venue. When Tom had been elected general secretary in 1967 he had inherited a union car, a Humber Snipe. Since this big, sleek, luxury motor did not come with a chauffeur it wasn’t much use to Tom. One of his first acts was to get rid of it via a raffle among the union’s membership. Which is how it ended up in the proud possession of a postman from Newcastle.
Dispensing with this status symbol went down well with the members in the increasingly egalitarian 1960s. Tom never went out of his way to explain that he couldn’t actually drive.
Maurice Styles told me a funny story about that Humber Snipe, its previous driver and his communist ally, Dickie Lawlor. Tom’s predecessor, Ron Smith, had a designated parking place for his Humber at the front of union headquarters. It was visible from his top-floor office where, when in contemplative mood, he would often stand gazing out of the window. One morning, surveying the car park as he marshalled his thoughts, Ron saw Dickie Lawlor chugging into view on an old Velocette motorcycle. To Ron’s consternation, Dickie leaned his motorbike up against the highly polished flank of the Humber Snipe.
Ron, who left the union to become the personnel director of British Steel in 1966, was an imperious man who could, I’m told, be extremely self-important. He and Dickie were sworn enemies. A tannoy message went out for Dickie Lawlor to report to the general secretary’s office. When Dickie was ushered in Ron Smith was standing, hands behind his back, looking out on the offending scene of bike on car below.
‘Mr Lawlor,’ he said, without turning round. ‘Is that your motorbike leaning against my car?’
‘No,’ replied Dickie.
Ron Smith whirled round, eyes blazing. ‘Mr Lawlor, are you denying that Velocette is your bike?’
‘No,’ said Dickie cheerfully. ‘It’s my bike, all right. But it’s not your car, it’s our car.’
By 1982 I’d traded in my Hillman Avenger for a Mark IV Cortina, which was to be Tom’s conveyance from Clapham to Ascot. The journey there and back gave us around two and a half hours to talk. Despite not being able to drive, Tom had an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s streets. He could have been a black-cab driver if he’d actually been able to drive. He showed me back streets I didn’t know existed which avoided the South Circular and all the obvious routes between Clapham and the M4.
As we drove I asked him what he planned to do on his retirement. Tom told me that he’d turned down a knighthood and rejected a seat in the House of Lords. A publisher had offered a significant advance for his memoirs but it was on the understanding that he’d dish some dirt on the Labour party and trade-union movement, which he wasn’t prepared to do.
With his handlebar moustache and moderate politics, Tom was a particular target for Militant and their ilk. Yet the man who was said to be lusting after grandeur as a peer of the realm was refusing all such blandishments, in marked contrast to some of his critics, who made passionate speeches against the second chamber but subsequently succumbed readily to the lure of ermine.
I also discovered on that journey that Tom had a passion for books. He was an antiquarian book collector, specializing in boys’ fiction, writers like R. M. Ballantyne and G. A. Henty, and cookery books (particularly Mrs Beeton). As I’d learned from watching Nationwide during the 1971 strike, he was an enthusiastic cook himself and was looking forward to having more time to indulge his culinary skills.
He’d sold his terraced house in Tulse Hill (to the leader of the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone) and intended to move with his partner, Kate, back to his native Yorkshire, where they planned to buy and sell books through mail order. He had no interest in playing any further role in public affairs.
At the union event in Ascot, Len and his wife, Elsie, were delighted when I turned up with Tom Jackson. I looked on as two men who had dedicated their working lives to the union met for the first and only time – Len, a reluctant retiree; Tom, worn down by the grinding responsibility of leadership, an enthusiastic one.
On the way back to London Tom and I talked about my future. He convinced me to aim for general secretary. I needed to become a national officer first, he said – nobody ever went from lay member of the executive to general secretary in one step. He advised me to stay in the front line because the activists respected those who took on the hardest jobs. Some EC members did as little as possible, the theory being that the less they did the fewer mistakes they’d make. Get out there, work hard and stay focused was Tom’s succinct advice.
As I dropped him off he had one last message for me. ‘Watch your back,’ he warned. ‘There are colleagues who see you as a threat. Their knives are being sharpened even as we speak.’
For my thirty-second birthday, which fell at my first conference as an EC member in 1982, wine buff Les Hewitt presented me with two bottles of a very nice red, telling me it was good for the libido. It was virtually the first time I’d drunk vin rouge. It tasted much better than Black Tower.
The drinking culture around work was widespread in the 1980s across many industries and businesses. The trade-union movement was no exception, though it was not an extreme example. We in the UCW were probably at the mild end of the scale. I was fortunate in that driving into the office every day (when I wasn’t travelling around the country) instilled a routine and discipline that excluded excess alcohol – and an excuse not to get drawn into the boozing that usually began after working hours, when EC members from Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool or Penzance, for instance, had little else to do before bedding down in their sleeping quarters.
As I became involved in national talks alongside Maurice and Harry I found that the drinks cabinet was a feature of every senior manager’s office, the contents considered a necessity for oiling the negotiating machine. There would be a bottle of whisky plonked on the table to seal a deal at the end of a successful negotiation; informal discussions would take place over a wine-fuelled lunch or a few pints in the pub. For most of the participants it made the process more relaxed and less arduous, but for a few, including John Taylor, it became the process itself. Through the 1980s it became clear that John’s engine couldn’t function without its wheels being oiled.
With my contribution to Britain’s literary canon, The Step-by-Step Guide to IWM, in wide circulation within the union, more offices joined the scheme and the demand for my services increased. Apart from London, where Derek Saunders was resident consultant, I went everywhere.
; To Newton Abbot in Devon, where a wag turned up to the meeting bedecked with boxes of Paxo and the protest message ‘Stuff IWM’.
To Perth, where ‘Big Joe’ Menzies, my host at the Scottish cultural evening during my first conference, asked for assistance. Such was my fondness for Joe and Perth that I probably nursed the scheme more closely than was strictly necessary, visiting the office on numerous occasions.
To Glasgow, our second-biggest branch and one usually hostile to any HQ involvement in its affairs. They were originally dead set against IWM but eventually decided to enter and sought my involvement.
To Tenby, Southend, Swindon, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Burnley, Blackburn, Preston, Leicester, Coventry, Birmingham, Accrington, Whitby, Sheffield, Bangor, Holyhead; to all points north, south, east and west.
In Liverpool I ran a weekend seminar beginning on a Saturday lunchtime. The reps on the course had to take their calculators home with them and bring them back the next morning. One young postman, having been out on the town on Saturday night, came out of his house on Sunday with the television remote control instead of his calculator. Such was his hangover that he only became aware of his mistake after several attempts to calculate a percentage on it.
The union had purchased a hotel in Bournemouth at which I conducted a school for all postal EC members so that they could be trained up to cope themselves with the growing demand for IWM. But for some reason most of them were reluctant to engage with this work and, happily for me, like the Post Office, I retained a limited monopoly.
It was hard work but invariably I arrived in an office with more expertise than the managers and left the local membership with a pay increase and sometimes a substantial lump sum to be paid in arrears. There was no other sphere of EC work where a visit could lead to such tangible and almost universally positive results. So it is perhaps hardly surprising that within a couple of years I was topping the poll in the annual EC elections and also in the election for delegates to the TUC and Labour party conferences.
I attended my first Labour conference in 1982, when Michael Foot was leader. I was an admirer of Foot’s, and particularly of his masterly biography of Nye Bevan, but he couldn’t command a party that was increasingly losing touch with reality. By coincidence Jamie met Foot that year – while doing his paper round. In the run-up to a by-election in Beaconsfield, the safe Tory seat that embraced a third of the Britwell, Jamie came running home one day, breathless, to tell us that he’d seen Michael Foot in Wentworth Avenue and he’d said hello. Foot had been with the Labour candidate. Jamie couldn’t remember his name but he, too, had said hello. That candidate’s name would become rather better known. It was Tony Blair. Long before I did, my son met the man who would turn the Britwell back from blue to red fifteen years later.
My first-ever flight, to Dundee, was followed quickly by many more – to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Belfast. It was handy that I lived only one junction on the M4 away from Heathrow. Dave Stock was a huge support, running me to the airport and back. Once, as I took off – blasé enough by then to handle a window seat – I spotted a familiar Slough landmark, traced the road that connected it with the Britwell and managed to pick out our house on the green on Long Furlong Drive. It was an incredible experience to look down on my home, and its green dot of a garden, from thousands of feet up in the air.
It was my trips to Northern Ireland that were the most memorable. With the Troubles still raging, security was such an issue that no EC member was allowed to go there without the specific permission of the general secretary. The Northern Ireland District Council covered all six counties and invited me to weekend schools and seminars across the province. I became close friends with the assistant district organizer, Tommy McCready, a sandy-haired clerical officer with bags of ability whose only ambition was to serve his members in Northern Ireland. It was, needless to say, a more difficult job than anywhere else in the country.
Tommy was a Catholic and the district organizer, Jack Hassard, a Protestant. They forged a formidable partnership. Jack was rumoured to carry a gun for self-protection, having been criticized by loyalist paramilitaries for his non-sectarian approach to union work. It was a rarely acknowledged fact that the trade-union movement was often the only non-sectarian institution capable of wielding a positive influence on events in Northern Ireland. Tommy was called into one office to resolve a dispute caused by a Catholic supervisor being appointed to a predominantly Protestant office. Somehow he found a resolution.
Jack’s and Tommy’s jobs were frequently dangerous and sometimes impossible. A common ploy used by terrorist factions was to hold the families of a postal worker hostage to force him or her to drive a Royal Mail van packed with explosives to a location dictated by the captors. These proxy bombings took place on a regular basis. Because they were constantly out on the streets, postal workers were particularly vulnerable. Many were killed in the course of their duties; some were specifically targeted for assassination. For a while the postal workers who transported money between post offices were declared a legitimate target by one terrorist group after thwarting a raid.
The sorting office in Derry had to be relocated six times because of explosions. And yet there was no trace of animosity or inhumanity in the wonderful people I met in Northern Ireland, least of all the union representatives who volunteered for the thankless task of trying to uphold the principles of solidarity, tolerance and compassion in that divided society.
One night I stayed with Tommy McCready, his wife Margaret and their children at their house in Belfast. As we walked to the social club that evening, one of Tommy’s young sons skipped along in front of us. I saw him freeze as the sound of flutes floated towards us on the air. As the source of the music was revealed – a couple of teenagers appeared from round a corner, both playing flutes – I watched this nine-year-old-boy’s expression change from cheerfulness to wariness: all within two bars of a piece of music. Tommy took his son’s hand and continued his conversation with me as if nothing had happened. And it hadn’t: the two lads passed by and we carried on walking. Tommy McCready never mentioned the incident and neither did I but, from the reaction of one small child to music that intimidated him, I learned more about the situation in Northern Ireland, and the realities of living within the climate of fear it created, than from any amount of media reporting.
Back at headquarters, Alan Tuffin was struggling to raise his profile to the level of his predecessor’s as Mrs Thatcher’s government formulated legislation to outlaw the closed shop, to make ballots before industrial action compulsory and to force trade-union general secretaries to stand for election every five years. These were measures that trade unions should have agreed with previous Labour governments but had refused to consider.
Far more important to the working lives of UCW members was the announcement in July 1982 that British Telecom would be privatized. The duopoly created by splitting British Telecom from the Post Office had already been introduced as the first phase of liberating telecommunications from state ownership. Whereas postal services were highly regarded by the public, the same could not be said for telephones. The long wait for installation and repair, plus the lack of choice of handsets and so forth, contributed to the unpopularity of the status quo.
It was clear that if the Conservatives were re-elected in 1983 nothing could stop the sell-off.
At the Post Office, a more forceful management style, geared to higher productivity and less consultation, had blown away the consensual approach to industrial relations that had existed since the war. Alan Tuffin had taken office in a climate so far removed from the one in which Tom Jackson had operated that he might have been doing a completely different job. When Tom had handed over responsibility to Alan he’d pointed to a second telephone on his desk. It was white and not the same model as the normal office phones. Tom told Alan that this was a hotline the number of which was known only to certain government ministers and senior civil servants.
‘When that phon
e rings,’ Tom said, ‘it will be to consult you on matters of state. Industrial matters, certainly, but your opinion will also be gauged on wider political issues such as the economy or overseas trade.’
When Alan retired ten years later he told me wistfully that during his entire decade as general secretary the white phone had rung only once. The caller had been a woman asking if this was Sainsbury’s.
Chapter 21
JUST BEFORE MRS THATCHER swept to her second election victory, my sister and her husband decided to emigrate to Australia.
I’ve no idea how this decision was reached. Although Chas had been to lots of places around the world, singing in hotels and on cruise ships, Linda, now thirty-six years old, had never been abroad in her life, never mind to the other side of the globe, and it was unlike her to make such a leap in the dark.
I remembered our mother, at probably exactly the same age, staring dreamily at a poster offering ‘a better life’ in Australia for just £10 in the housing trust offices in Portobello Road as we queued to pay the rent. Linda and I had quickly scotched any notion she may have had of us becoming Ten Pound Poms. We were Londoners through and through and to us North Kensington was the centre of the universe.
However the decision was reached, once it had been made it was firm and Linda and Chas were soon making all the arrangements. They would sell the Hockley house with most of its contents and take practically nothing with them apart from Chas’s car, which was a Mercedes and might help him find work as a salesman. With no house to go to, let alone a job, the project was a big risk as well as an adventure. Linda went to a fortune-teller about a month before they left, paying £10 (the same sum it would have cost our mother to emigrate in the mid-1950s) to hear the predictions of Gypsy Rose someone or other. She was told that she’d be moving to a house surrounded by hills. Linda replied that she was certainly moving, but to Australia which, as far as she knew, was not famous for its hills.