by Alan Johnson
Earth, receive an honoured guest,
Andrew Wiltshire is laid to rest.
All through the funeral I kept thinking of the Blue Anchor in Tring High Street, where the three of us used to meet: Andrew, Mike and me. I promised myself that one day I’d go back there, stand in our place at the corner of the bar, and drink to their memory.
I never have.
Chapter 22
BY THE MID-1980S I was spending more and more time living out of a suitcase. I would be away from home for at least eight complete weeks a year at conferences or the union residential schools where I tutored. In addition, I was travelling abroad as a fraternal delegate to the conferences of sister unions or as a delegate to the international posts and telecoms organizations, the PTTI.
Other trips were arranged by the secretary of the UCW’s organizing department, Ivan Rowley – an urbane, handsome former postman from Derby who looked like a cross between Richard Harris and Bryan Ferry – who insisted that lay members of the executive undertook a kind of ‘meet the members’ exercise whereby one of us would visit, along with a district organizer, every Post Office establishment on his or her patch, whether they be sorting offices, parcels depots or, most frequently, small delivery offices, of which there were thousands across the country.
The first (and most memorable) such mission I undertook was to the far north of Scotland, journeying by sleeper to Inverness. The voluminous book of internal rules governing the executive council allowed lay members to travel first class only if they were with a national officer (who went first class as a matter of course) or on a sleeper, where travelling standard meant sharing a compartment with a stranger.
It was a thrilling rail trip, with the train setting off from King’s Cross late at night. I settled into my little compartment with its tartan blanket and comforting depiction of a Highland scene on the wall, a brief consultation with the steward having ensured that a cup of tea would come with my wake-up call at 7am. I had no trouble at all sleeping, soothed by the rattle of the rails.
I awoke on that bright morning in 1984 to an unforgettable sight, lifting the blind after my mobile slumber to be greeted by a vista of sunlit streams falling through mountain crags and verdant hills. There was even a stag crossing a brook, as if magically transposed from the print on the wall of my compartment. I gazed in wonder at this breathtaking scenery all the rest of the way to Inverness.
The district organizer who met me off the train was a man named Simpson Barclay, who might sound like a character out of Dr Finlay’s Casebook but was actually a postal clerk from Fort William. Simpson soon made it clear that my frenetic London ways would have to be adapted to my new environment. We would meet plenty of UCW members but in batches between long periods of travel. We didn’t so much drive between venues as meander, with Simpson rarely approaching 30mph, a speed he seemed to regard as a threat to the sound barrier.
We stopped one early evening, at a deserted pub beside Loch Ness where I was served by a barmaid with an English accent who, upon inquiry, told me she came from the Britwell estate in Slough. We went by ferry to the Isle of Skye, where I passed an enchanting hour in Portree sorting office as a PHG described, in his beautiful local lilt, how integral postal services were to the Highlands and islands.
At Thurso we missed the ferry to Orkney and were forced to spend the evening in a hostelry where an elderly gentleman sang Scottish folk songs to the roaring accompaniment of everybody in the hotel bar. On Orkney I learned that there were no traffic lights on the island and that some residents had lived their entire lives without seeing a train. Simpson and I, as outsiders, were referred to as ‘ferrylopers’. One of the postmen I met there told me he’d come over from Wick thirty years previously and still warranted this description.
Judy’s brother Richard, who’d been brought up with her other brother, Micky, in a children’s home, had settled in Thurso with his Scottish wife after leaving the army. I paid him a surprise visit after which a reunion with Judy was arranged, re-establishing a bond that had been broken in childhood.
Whether meeting the members in this way was any good for them or the union, those summer days in Scotland with Simpson were certainly an enriching experience for me. Ivan Rowley wanted me to do more of these exercises but I was heavily committed to the kind of ‘front-line’ activities on which Tom Jackson had advised me to concentrate, and the organizing department was well to the rear of the front line.
Ivan was due to retire in 1986. The favourite to replace him was a postman named Derek Hodgson, a thick-set ball of energy from Cardiff. Although he was ten years older than me, Derek was thought of as one of the young Turks and a man with a great future in the union. He’d got on to the executive a year or two before me and made no secret of his determination to become general secretary. Married to a senior Post Office manager, he had strong links with the business and worked hard to establish a good reputation with the members. His main focus was the organizing department, where he and Ivan had become good friends.
We got on OK with one another, but it wasn’t exactly a warm friendship. I certainly sensed that he saw me as a rival for the top job but at that stage not exactly a threat. His main competitor was John Taylor.
And John was struggling – not because he was unable to handle the job of outdoor secretary per se but because it was becoming increasingly obvious that he had a serious drink problem. The job was getting harder now that local managers were empowered to extract the maximum efficiency savings out of the major national agreement Alan Tuffin had secured. It may have carried the grand title of Safeguarding the Future of the Mails Business (SFMB) and earned the support of our activists at conference, but the Post Office knew that it was one thing to secure a national agreement and quite another to get it implemented in the innumerable workplaces where managers and staff interacted at all hours of day and night.
Bill Cockburn was now running the mails business with great energy and enthusiasm but also a ruthless focus on the reforms that, not unreasonably, he considered necessary and which were licensed by the agreement we’d reached. I always found Bilco to be a hard but fair negotiator. Others on the executive council, including Derek Hodgson, saw him as the Antichrist. He eventually became a hate figure for activists across the country – a pantomime villain whose very name provoked a chorus of boos at our conference. Those of us who actually dealt with him (including John Taylor and Derek Walsh, with whom he’d negotiated IWM) pointed out that the union calling for his blood served only to enhance his reputation and that if he went it was unlikely that he’d be replaced by Mother Teresa.
There were more and more spontaneous walk-outs – unballoted industrial action which by now was illegal – and John, Derek Walsh and I found ourselves firefighting across the country.
At Prestwick in Ayrshire, Derek Walsh and I had to spend three days at the office dealing with dismissal notices against a third of the staff. They’d been handed out like confetti by a young, inexperienced manager who’d been over-promoted but under-provided with sense or sensibility.
While it was true that there were some equally inexperienced union reps whose only response to a problem was to lead a walk-out – like pilots who knew how to take off but who’d never been taught to land – some of this ‘spontaneous action’ was unstoppable.
A particular dispute at Preston springs to mind. A PHG by the name of Bill Sprake was sorting holiday brochures on a packet frame. The brochures were in clear plastic envelopes with a press-stud fastener that could be clicked open and shut. Having noticed a brochure for a resort he and his wife were thinking of visiting, he clicked open the envelope and flicked through it, in full view of his colleagues, before slipping it back in its envelope and sending it on its way.
A few minutes later four officers from the investigation division, who’d been observing from behind the two-way mirrors in the watching gallery, appeared and frogmarched Bill away.
Bill Sprake was a decorated war hero, now in his sixtie
s, a palpably decent man with an unblemished record of service to the Post Office. What he did may have been a mild disciplinary offence, although most of the staff, managers included, would have done something similarly harmless during their careers. Yet it was treated not as a disciplinary case but as a criminal offence. He was taken to a police station and, for the first time in a life of service to Queen and country, placed in a prison cell.
Every postal worker in Preston walked out and no force on earth would have stopped them. I told Bill Cockburn later that if he’d been a postman at Preston that day, he’d have walked out as well.
The fact that Bill happened to be the elder brother of Gary Sprake, the Leeds United and Wales goalkeeper, brought additional attention to the case. (Since Gary was famous for some spectacular blunders on the pitch, I joked that, given his family connections, it was a wonder Bill had held on to the brochure long enough to read it.) Soon workers in other offices in the north-west, including the mighty Manchester branch, had either walked out or had been suspended for refusing to handle Preston’s mail. My contact at mails HQ was Brian Thomson, a Geordie of around my own age who was one of a growing number of managers to have come to us from other industries. Brian had been in shipbuilding before joining the Post Office a couple of years earlier. John Taylor dealt with him a lot and liked him, at the same time acknowledging that Brian was one of the toughest negotiators he had to deal with.
I had to deal with him now over this dispute and, while Brian agreed that the Post Office had been heavy-handed (he had a gift for understatement), he couldn’t simply reinstate Bill Sprake with a click of his fingers. It would be too much of a humiliation for local management at Preston. We agreed, though, that this was a disciplinary case and that no criminality had been involved.
In the end it was settled that Bill Sprake would be restored to normal duties immediately and that I would personally represent him at a subsequent disciplinary hearing.
While this was enough to get everyone back to work I couldn’t reveal the assurance I’d sought and received from Brian: the outcome of the disciplinary appeal would be that no action would be taken against Bill Sprake. There was nothing in writing and it would have been easy for Brian to escape this commitment, but he kept his word. A bond of trust was thereby established between manager and trade-union representative, which is by far the most important element of industrial relations.
Within the union, there certainly wasn’t a bond of trust between me and Derek Hodgson, particularly when I decided to stand for the position of organizing secretary after Ivan Rowley retired. It was the kind of quiet backwater job that at one time would have represented the full extent of my ambition. But that was before the car journey I’d shared with Tom Jackson in 1982. Since then I’d been aiming higher: for the very top. I was determined to become general secretary. However, as Tom had counselled, to have any chance of succeeding Alan Tuffin when he retired in 1992, I had to become a national officer first. This vacancy had come up at a time when I was flavour of the month in the union, having topped the ballots for EC, TUC and Labour party delegations. I was perfectly placed to become the next organizing secretary.
Or so I thought. Derek Hodgson inflicted upon me an even more resounding defeat than the one to which I’d been subjected in 1983 when Maurice Styles retired. It gave Derek an understandable sense of satisfaction which he found difficult to hide.
I was at the 1985 Labour party conference in Bournemouth when Neil Kinnock made his dramatic speech denouncing Militant. His bravery can only be fully appreciated by those in the party who’d witnessed the madness inflicted by those ‘far-fetched resolutions – pickled into a rigid dogma – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant’ to which Neil referred.
Slough had its Militant caucus, which soured our Labour party meetings, but we weren’t as badly affected as many other local parties were. At that time any Labour party member with a Scouse accent was assumed to be Militant.
In the union, Billy Hayes, the young Liverpudlian who’d been instrumental in bringing Tony Benn to our conference, was becoming an increasingly important figure and constantly had to deal with such misconceptions. Billy wasn’t, and never had been, part of this faction and to be a young union activist in Liverpool resistant to Militant didn’t make for an easy life in the city in the 1980s. But the opposite of ‘militant’ is ‘moderate’, and Billy would certainly have been equally eager to repudiate any attempt to place him on the right of the political spectrum.
I wouldn’t have accepted such a label either, but by this time I saw sweet moderation not in terms of right or left but in terms of right and wrong. If anything I was a militant moderate. I saw more of the delegates to our conference on their own territory than anybody else on the executive. It was so often the case that those who postured and posed on the rostrum were the least effective in their branch. With no rostrum to shout from and no gallery to play to, when called upon to act as advocate or negotiator with the job of bringing round the person opposite to their opinion, many of them were incapable of protecting their members or advancing their cause.
It was the Billy Fairs and the Joe Paynes who I admired; the men and women who quietly got on with the difficult job of providing an eloquent, thoughtful and intelligent voice for those they represented with no concept of themselves as working-class heroes and no desire to use their members as weapons in some kind of political crusade.
I respected these people whatever their politics. Some far to the left of me met this criterion. Billy Hayes was one; so was Mike Hogan, a former Glasgow telegram boy who’d transferred to London and was by now rising through the ranks of the London District Council. Mike was totally unclubbable and could appear gruff and offhand. But he possessed a phenomenal ability to advocate and negotiate. Like so many people I met in the union, Mike’s intellect could have taken him a long way in any career – medicine, the judiciary or the military. But he’d left school at fifteen and joined the Post Office, where there were no outlets for his considerable talents other than union work. He became a close ally and lifelong friend.
As trade unions struggled to ride the wave of rancour that swept towards them from Whitehall, we in the UCW tried to use our imaginations to turn government legislation to our advantage. For instance, we harnessed the much-maligned Youth Training Scheme to strike a deal with the Post Office which, in effect, reintroduced the telegram boy, albeit with no telegrams to deliver or requirement to be a boy.
The Postal Cadet Scheme would bring in sixteen-year-olds, providing them with a guaranteed job at the end of their two-year, YTS-funded apprenticeship. It was very unpopular with our members, who’d heard numerous stories of exploitation occurring elsewhere under the YTS banner. The hostile environment created by the post-miners’ strike mood among trade-union activists, particularly in the north, further hindered the union’s ability to get the scheme up and running.
Les Hewitt, as the officer responsible for the postal cadet agreement, wanted me to go to branch meetings around the country to help local officials to get the scheme accepted by their members. I duly obliged.
Imprinted on my memory is a brilliant, if painfully pithy speech denouncing me and the agreement delivered by an ex-miner in Wigan. It was made at an evening meeting in a room above a pub with about sixty members in attendance. I had given what I considered to be an excellent presentation on how the union had used a questionable scheme to provide an unquestionable advantage in developing proper jobs for unemployed youngsters.
The audience sat grim-faced and unconvinced. The ex-miner was called on to speak. He stood up and in a broad Lancashire accent, said: ‘Tha’s coom oop ’ere t’explain t’scheme and for that ah thank yee. If tha wants to fight for these kids’ future I’ll be there, stripped t’waist fighting wi-yer. But if tha expects us t’accept Thatcher’s YTS, tha can fook off back t’London and take yer scheme wiv yer.’
I fooked off back to London and found Derek Walsh in despair over our mutual friend John Taylor, w
hose drinking was by now completely out of control. He’d start the day with a pint of lager and progress to his favoured whisky by mid-morning. If he was working at the office he’d be at the King’s Head as soon as the pubs opened, coming back drunk in the afternoon and holding court in his office for anyone who fancied a drink. Once he returned from the pub perched next to a totter on a horse and cart he’d commandeered for £20, asking to be taken up Crescent Lane and round the driveway of UCW House, where everybody could see him, red-faced, puffing on a cigar and milking the applause.
I didn’t applaud or find John’s efforts to ‘’ave a larf’ remotely humorous. What had happened to Mike had removed any levity I might once have felt about people I cared for getting drunk.
John hated being behind a desk and would use the slightest pretext to go on the road to deal with issues that should have been handled by EC members or local officials. On arriving at the trouble spot he’d establish his headquarters at a pub or club and, more often than not, end up exacerbating the dispute rather than resolving it.
Alan Tuffin had taken enormous trouble to get John’s alcoholism treated, arranging for him to have time off to attend a specialist clinic to dry out. For a while it worked – and John reclaimed from alcohol was a completely different man. On a trip to Cardiff together when he was on the wagon he told me he was reading again, painting watercolours (a talent he hadn’t pursued for years) and eating properly for the first time in ages. He looked clear-eyed and fit. But in the pub to which the branch officials took us that lunchtime John ordered a half of lager, telling me that it was like lemonade to him and the time to worry was if he went back on the whisky. I knew enough by then to understand that a recovering alcoholic can never touch alcohol of any description – ever. Sure enough, before long he was back to his old ways and the John Taylor I was with on the trip to Cardiff vanished again, along with the books and the watercolours.