by Alan Johnson
Linda and Chas planned to move with all six children (Nicky, Linda’s foster son, had by now left care) but then Cindy got married, Ricky met a girl and Eddie said that if Cindy and Ricky weren’t going, neither would he. They were in their late teens and twenties by this time and old enough to live independently.
Linda insisted that they travel by ship as she was afraid of flying. And so, on 28 May 1983, my sister, Chas, Renay, Tara and Dean sailed away on a ship bound for Perth, Australia, via Bangkok.
They came to stay with us on the Britwell the weekend before they left, full of excitement about the new life that awaited them. Given all Linda had been through, I desperately hoped that the gamble would pay off. She had been there for me my whole life and her departure was going to be a wrench. But what was certain was that the bond between us couldn’t be broken by the 10,000 miles that would separate us.
When the family arrived in Perth they were met by some friends of Linda’s who’d lived in Tring and emigrated some years earlier. They looked after the children for a night while Linda and Chas went to a motel. Chas was in bed, leafing through the real-estate pages of a local paper borrowed from their friends, when he came across a childcare centre for sale in Armadale, a suburb of Perth. The property consisted of three-bedroomed living accommodation above a nursery – a house and business all rolled into one. To maintain and run the nursery the successful buyer would need to have the correct childcare qualifications. That was no problem: Linda’s Nursery Nurse Examination Board (NNEB) certification was universally recognized.
At ten the next morning Chas and Linda were in Armadale speaking to the owners, who had a caravan parked outside the property waiting to take them on a retirement trip round Australia. The centre had been up for sale for eighteen months with no takers. Linda was convinced that fate had a hand in holding it back for her. Chas made an offer. It was accepted on the spot.
They’d been in Australia for just thirteen and a half hours. When Linda walked out on to the balcony of what was now her new home she noticed that Armadale was surrounded by hills.
Just as Mick Pearson had predicted in our kitchen debate about the sell-off of council houses, Labour lost Slough in 1983. Joan Lestor’s local popularity counted for little when set against the twin Conservative advantages of victory in the Falklands War and Labour’s longest suicide note in history. And the right to buy council houses was undoubtedly responsible for turning both halves of the Britwell blue.
I was on the southern regional executive of the Labour party when the Thatcher government won its second term in power. In our region the SDP-Liberal Alliance had beaten us into third place. By this time, being part of the trade-union movement felt like being under siege. The government wanted free, independent trade-unionism – but only in Poland, where Solidarity was challenging the totalitarian regime. In Britain all the structures of consultation with the TUC had been abandoned. Alan Tuffin told me that when he’d gone with the general council to make representation to the Treasury, the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had pulled a nail-clipper from the pocket of his colourful waistcoat and rocked back and forth on his chair manicuring his nails while Norman Willis, the TUC general secretary, made his presentation.
Alan was having a rough ride. At conference in 1983, for the first time in the union’s history a motion of no-confidence had been carried against a national officer, poor assistant secretary Harry Jones. I had stupidly urged the postal executive to resign and walk off the platform on the basis that Harry shouldn’t be left to take the rap alone. The issue upon which the motion was carried was an esoteric matter affecting a handful of members who sorted overseas mail. But it was the postal executive to which Harry reported, so the vote of no-confidence was against us collectively, despite the wording referring only to Harry.
Fortunately, calmer voices prevailed. As I stood pontificating among my colleagues, Alan Tuffin pointed out that the results of the ballot for that year’s executive, due to be announced the following day, would be decisive in terms of whether the membership had any confidence in us. He was right. As things turned out, the activists carried a motion of no-confidence and re-elected us at the same time.
Harry Jones, though, was inconsolable. He’d never before experienced viciousness of the kind that was creeping into our proceedings. And our union was a model of courteous behaviour compared with some others, where factional dog fights reduced conferences to little more than five days of ritual humiliation for the leadership.
Alan Tuffin dealt with the increasingly fractious mood with calm equanimity. He knew he had none of Tom’s skill at oratory but his patent decency and honesty were powerful defences and his boxer’s sense of ringcraft saved the UCW from being pulled on to the punches that were landing heavily on other unions. He had a good relationship with the avuncular and shrewd chairman of the Post Office, Ron Dearing. They had a shared objective, which was to ensure that a great public institution continued to be relevant in an era of declining social mail where the fax machine – believe it or not – was seen as a serious threat to our future.
Dearing and his personnel director, Ken Young, were still keen to work with a strong union and to develop the close relationship they saw as essential in a labour-intensive sector with a long history of dedication to public service and a limited monopoly. Other senior managers, however, scented blood and were urging Dearing to take a stronger line in order to break the union’s influence while he had the support of a sympathetic government.
I decided to stand in the election to replace Maurice Styles as outdoor secretary in 1983. I had no expectations of succeeding. My friend John Taylor, who’d had his sights trained on the post, was a shoo-in, and eminently qualified for it after his years of experience leading 60,000 London postmen and women. But Maurice told me that the very act of standing for the job, the most difficult in the union apart from general secretary, would do me no harm, irrespective of how badly I fared in the election.
John Taylor saw it differently. He understood my wish to make a point, but he felt that any votes that I attracted would be at his expense. If no candidate received more than 50 per cent of the vote a second ballot would take place between the two with the highest number of votes. John was concerned that I might draw enough votes to force him into a second round.
I heard that Maurice was quietly recommending me as his successor but whether or not that was true it was irrelevant. I didn’t do as badly as I’d thought I might, coming third out of five nominees and gaining a respectable number of votes. No candidate attracted over 50 per cent of the vote but John came through the second ballot as the clear victor.
Derek Walsh was also on the executive council by this time. He told me that he saw it as his mission to keep John on the straight and narrow. John, now married with two small daughters, was taking on family responsibilities for the first time in his mid-forties. It was hoped this would encourage him to put the brakes on his drinking.
The backdrop to everything that was happening in the trade-union movement in the mid-1980s was the miners’ strike. The defeat of the NUM encouraged Rupert Murdoch’s News International to take on the print unions in the move from Fleet Street to Wapping. The entire period between 1984 and 1987 was dominated by tumultuous conflicts.
Unions in our sector had already been roundly defeated on BT privatization, with UCW members happily accepting the shares that we urged them to reject. In the Labour party, Neil Kinnock had begun the long march back to electability. At Labour party conference we working-class trade-unionists wore suits, because the culture on our side of the class divide was that you dressed smartly to represent your members. Perversely, this seemed to attract derision. We felt like aristocrats caught up in the storming of the Bastille.
We’d be surrounded by scruffs, usually well-spoken, their denim jackets weighed down with badges proclaiming opinions on every subject under the sun. To get to conference delegates had to pass through a mob of competing factions handing out flyers, most of them
insultingly hostile to the leadership. Inside the hall the first hour or so of every conference day was spent dealing with points of order as a long queue of delegates snaked towards the rostrum, each one keen to shout loudly into the microphone about some awful perceived injustice being perpetrated by the leadership or, more likely, those dastardly bastards on the conference arrangements committee. The culture of betrayal seeped into every aspect of our deliberations.
Before the miners’ strike, during it and for long after it had finished, when Arthur Scargill was called to the rostrum there would be a standing ovation which continued intermittently throughout his five minutes of finger-jabbing and accompanied him all the way back to his seat.
It happened at the TUC as well, and the applause seemed to get greater as the NUM delegation got smaller. In the main, we in the UCW avoided this hero-worship. I knew Mick McGahey, the former NUM vice-president, a bit, and Jack Taylor, the leader of the Yorkshire miners, whom I was asked to host when he came to address our conference during the strike. They were both incredibly loyal and while they never said anything uncomradely, their demeanour whenever the strike was discussed suggested that they were far from happy about the cult of personality that had grown up around their leader. At one conference the NUM delegation was seated in the row behind us. As Arthur fulminated at the rostrum we heard one of their senior figures exclaim to his colleagues, ‘Listen to him, all “I, me, mine”, never “we, us, ours”.’
As for Scargill’s insistence that he’d been right about the Coal Board’s plans to close pits: as somebody once said, the job of the trade-union leader isn’t to predict rain, it’s to build the bloody ark.
The government’s programme of privatization was accelerating apace, with gas, aerospace, petroleum and ferries all in the firing line and union opposition brushed aside. The Post Office appeared to be safe from this onslaught but, as a public corporation in an era when ‘private sector good, public sector bad’ appeared to be the mantra, we in the UCW understood that either we solved our own problems or we’d have them solved for us. Privatization had never been specifically ruled out by the government and the substantial reorganization of the Post Office into four separate businesses – mails, parcels, counters and Girobank – looked like the first phase of a move to sell off the mails business. In fact it was Girobank that would eventually be sold, so cheaply that it might as well have been on offer at a car boot sale.
The Post Office was among the few postal services around the world providing a handsome return on capital and contributing positively to the exchequer, but this public-sector success made it even more attractive to the privatization zealots in Whitehall. The resulting speculation about impending privatization was actually a helpful context in which to formulate the wide-ranging agreement Alan Tuffin and Ken Young set out to achieve. It focused the minds of our activists on the possible consequences of failing to find a way through the maze of interlocking issues that were holding the business back.
I was grateful for Alan’s insistence that I accompany him not only to pay negotiations but also to the most important set of discussions with the Post Office in a generation: Safeguarding the Future of the Mails Business, as the agreement finally reached was rather grandly entitled.
Alan taught me so much about the art of negotiation: the need to earn the respect of the person on the other side of the table; to be patient, to listen carefully (a surprisingly rare talent) and to use adjournments as an alternative to making an immediate response to an important offer. He would use his glasses as a tactical prop, polishing the lenses slowly when he was playing for time, more rapidly as a prelude to a little speech about how close the negotiations were to breakdown. He would suck a temple tip thoughtfully as he ruminated on what the other side had said, or wag the spectacles up and down to emphasize a point. It was so effective it made me wish I wore glasses.
Chief among the restrictions hampering the business was the union’s aversion to recruiting part-time staff. With most part-timers being women, some of this antipathy was rooted in an outdated, male-orientated view of the world in which women worked for ‘pin-money’. There was a still a sense, which was by no means exclusive to the Post Office, that part-time workers were a lower form of workplace life. This was reflected in our union’s rule book, where they were categorized as Class B members (full-timers, of course, were Class A).
But there was also a valid fear that our industry could easily be casualized; that the Post Office, which seemed incapable of completely resolving its recruitment problem even at times of soaring unemployment, would move towards bringing in a predominantly part-time workforce.
What the Post Office told us they wanted was a more dependable evening shift for the four hours between 5pm and 9pm when the vast majority of mail was posted, collected, sorted and dispatched. This couldn’t be achieved while we relied so heavily on overtime to cover this period. The rest of the agenda included making IWM compulsory, extending machine-sorting to inward letters and experimenting with a time-and-motion study in mail processing.
The negotiations lasted for months and while they were on the brink of collapse a couple of times, those most accomplished in brinkmanship never go over the edge and Alan Tuffin never did. We concluded our negotiations with two clever innovations.
Alan came up with the idea that part-timers should be classed as associate grades, with their hourly pay pegged to that of full-time staff. Terminology is important in industrial relations and this simple change in nomenclature helped to remove concerns about casualization.
Secondly, in collaboration with a brilliant young Post Office manager called Jerry Cope, I worked up an idea to give IWM a new element whereby replacing overtime with full- or part-time jobs generated an additional bonus. I was very satisfied with this innovation. It meant that IWM now paid a bonus not only for cutting hours but also for creating jobs. It was another feather in my cap and I felt that I’d now completed my apprenticeship.
Through all the changes in our lives, my boyhood best friend Andrew Wiltshire and I remained in touch. Before I was elected on to the executive council, he would meet up with Ernie and me in the Crown at Farnham Royal, which was on his circuit as a salesman for McCain’s frozen chips. It was a relief to me that Ernie and Andrew got on, as they were very different men. Ernie was profound and occasionally funny, while Andrew was funny and occasionally profound. But I thought so much of them both it would have been a setback if they hadn’t.
After I started working at union headquarters and travelling frequently with my job, Andrew and I would talk on the phone every couple of months. By this time he and Ann and their three sons had moved to Hastings. We drove down to see them there. Our children were teenagers by now and playing together meant records and cassettes rather than toys. Andrew’s son Toby and my son Jamie were already learning to play instruments, just as Andrew and I had done, in their case the saxophone and guitar respectively,
I’d bought Jamie a Westone electric guitar and a Billy Bragg songbook and instruction manual (with cassette, in that post-vinyl, pre-CD period). It was the 1980s equivalent of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day, with which I’d grappled twenty-five years before.
The Wiltshires had at last fulfilled their ambition to own their own home. They loved being by the sea and intended to remain in Hastings permanently, even if Andrew had to commute to London to earn a living. I’m not sure how much my work with the UCW meant to my old friend. He was vaguely pro-union but when all was said and done I was still a postman, whereas he’d left that behind years before. I think he pitied me for having stayed in the same job for so long. Having left McCain’s and dabbled in computers he was now working for a vending-machine company. Andrew always planned ahead and he set out for me his vision for the future: he wanted to get back into computers while he still had the advantage of acquiring programming skills early in their evolution.
A few months later, when I rang for a chat, Ann told me that Andrew had been taken ill. He’d been dia
gnosed with a brain tumour and was due to have an operation in the next few days.
We went to Hastings to see him after he came out of hospital. He was wheelchair-bound but perfectly compos mentis. I pushed my friend down to the seafront and we sat there looking at the waves, much as we had watched the Thames flow beneath us from Hammersmith Bridge when we’d been postmen together. Postmen together, at Tesco together, together in the Area, when we’d thought it would be only a matter of time before we’d be storming the charts. Together at school, when our futures lay before us like sunlit highways.
Andrew hadn’t lost his sense of humour, remarking, on seeing that The King and I was coming to a local theatre, that his bald scalp would help him get a job as a Yul Brynner double. When I misjudged a gap while pushing his wheelchair through a narrow opening, he offered to introduce me to his specialist, telling me his tumour had only been discovered when he’d started to find it impossible to judge distances and angles. He’d apparently reversed his company car into a lamppost when there was an acre of space to park it in.
Andrew hated me wheeling him around – I could tell. When we were fifteen we’d regularly walk from the Marquee club in Wardour Street all the way back to the flat I shared with my sister. From Soho to Battersea. But I feared we’d never walk anywhere together again. I would have pushed that wheelchair to Land’s End if it would have made Andrew better.
Not long afterwards Judy and I received the news that he’d died. He was thirty-three years of age. I was desperate to put some meaningful words on the flowers that we took to the funeral. I consulted The Oxford Book of English Verse and, in the end, plumped for paraphrasing the lines W. H. Auden wrote for his friend W. B. Yeats: