by Andy Beckett
But NAFF did not depart from Willesden in search of a fresh cause. Instead, Gouriet became a regular presence at Fort Grunwick. ‘I spent three days a week in the factory,’ he told me, ‘and I was in touch with Ward by phone every day.’ The press and pickets soon came to recognize him. He walked as if still on a parade ground and wore a tie and pocket handkerchief. In front of the cameras, he smiled confidently and talked to those still working – even to the pickets – a little like a royal visitor. Even thirty years later, Dromey could not conceal his irritation: ‘They parachuted from nowhere, NAFF, with their cut-glass decanter accents. No one knew to start with that they were part of a wider Conservative network. I thought they were cranky at first, but NAFF were very astute tactically.’ In a passage about NAFF in Dromey’s 1978 account of the strike, there is a sudden sense of an era of union supremacy ending:
Every time the union applied the ordinary trade union pressures of blacking and picketing some upper-class twit appeared on the television screen with a court writ in his hand. The NAFF was breaking the ground rules of industrial relations, not ‘playing cricket.’
Winter started, Grunwick’s slow season, and the strikers were still outside the gates of the two Willesden plants. They stood in thin lines, rarely more than a dozen people at each entrance, the Asian women with coats over their saris and small home-made placards, with small numbers of other Grunwick strikers and supporters from other unions reinforcing them. The doggedness of the strike, the growing sense in Willesden and beyond that a pivotal confrontation between the British Left and Right was building up at Grunwick, the relatively novel identity of the strikers – all this continued to attract media attention. ‘I was going on TV, on the radio, to meetings,’ Desai recalled. ‘Grunwick was a test case for everyone. I and my husband were already Labour supporters, but I learned a lot about politics. I thought we could win.’ How did she feel about becoming a public figure? ‘There was no feeling in my mind, “I have to go on television.” In my mind it was all about the struggle – that’s it.’ But a few minutes later, she volunteered, ‘In India – oh my god – a daughter of a friend said, “I saw your picture on a big poster in the station.” She sent me a big cutting from the Indian Times.’
In early 1977, the strikers tried another tactic. Over the autumn, they had written repeatedly to chemists across London, asking them to stop collecting and sending films to Grunwick. Some chemists agreed; from February 1977 those that did not were picketed. ‘In Brent this picketing was very effective,’ wrote Dromey. ‘Of sixteen shops discovered still to be using Grunwick, ten agreed to stop … With the help of trade unionists all over London, coordinated through the Greater London Association of Trades Councils, most of Grunwick’s four hundred outlets … received a visit. The biggest store in Oxford Street, Selfridges, chose to ponder [its attitude to the strike] at first but quickly abandoned Grunwick when Jack Dromey rang up to say that thirty pickets would be arriving the following Saturday.’
Yet the rest of Grunwick’s activities continued virtually uninterrupted. The fact that the company had separate premises several streets apart – the Chapter Road factory even had entrances opening onto two different streets – made it hard to picket. Grunwick’s delivery vans and managers’ cars drove past the strikers, sometimes not bothering to slow down. As the dispute dragged on, the police on duty at the picket appeared to grow impatient with the strikers: in October 1976, they had abruptly announced restrictions on the number of protesters they would allow at the gates. A few days later, nine pickets were arrested and charged with obstructing a public highway. By March 1977, despite the picketing rota and Desai’s rushing back and forth and stirring pep talks from Dromey, the number of strikers was dwindling: ‘Students had left the strike, others had found new jobs,’ he wrote. ‘The strike lost all momentum … The picket lines … on occasion, were non-existent.’
But if the strike was fading in Willesden, its reputation in the labour movement was still growing. The support that resulted revived Desai and her comrades. In April, 1,000 trade unionists from as far away as Wales and Liverpool came to Willesden for the day to march on behalf of the strikers. In May, Shirley Williams and two other government ministers, all three of them APEX members, stood for a symbolic hour on the picket. Desai smiled at the memory. ‘A government minister who was on the picket line that day said to me, “You haven’t eaten, drunk all day. How do you do it?” I said, “I’ve got energy. It comes from flesh and bone, not food.” The minister said, “My wife told me that precious things come in small packets. Now I believe her!”’ And at that Desai’s smile split into a great laugh.
In June, APEX decided to mobilize the whole pro-strike coalition on the streets of Willesden by calling a mass picket. ‘Apart from Russian tanks and sex education there was nothing in the 1970s which frightened the right more,’ wrote Dromey with nice wit later, ‘than the dreaded “mass picket”.’ One precedent from earlier in the decade would soon be in the minds of the Right and Left alike at Grunwick. Dromey spelled it out: ‘the “Battle of Saltley Gates”.’
At 6 a.m. on 13 June, two hours before the remaining Grunwick staff were expected to start arriving for work, the first members of the first mass picket emerged from Dollis Hill station and lined up in front of the Chapter Road gates. Many of the pickets were women: the Communist Party Women’s Group had suggested at a recent meeting of British feminist organizations that women should show their support for the strikers on 13 June, and the strike committee had agreed. ‘Its members considered that the presence of a large number of women would emphasize the peaceful intention of the picket,’ wrote Dromey, ‘and have a restraining influence on the police.’ By breakfast time, there were about 700 pickets, spread between the two entrances to the Chapter Road plant and the two entrances to the Cobbold Road plant, and about 300 policemen, many of them sitting in police buses parked along the main road that separated the factories. Ward watched through the net curtains of his first-floor office, which faced down Chapter Road and was right next to the most heavily picketed gates.
It was there that trouble started. According to Dromey, ‘The “loyal” workers … passing [on foot] through the gates were shouted at and called “scabs” but got into work with relative ease.’ Ward’s account differs: ‘Every time one of our employees got near the gates, moving through the gap in the picket lines that the police were struggling to keep open, toughs would surge forward in an effort to get to him; there would be three or four arrests required in order to get a single worker through to the plant.’ Both accounts agree, however, that relations between the police and some of the pickets quickly degenerated into shoving and grappling. By the end of the morning, eighty-four pickets, many of them women, had been arrested, most of them for obstruction. Plenty of the television and newspaper reporters present were taken aback by the aggression of the police. The London Evening Standard, usually no friend of left-wing protesters, recorded: ‘One demonstrator was dragged to a police van by his hair and several others were clearly punched during the arrests.’
The next morning, faced with another mass picket, Ward’s workers unexpectedly arrived by bus. Malcolm Alden, the fierce young Grunwick manager who had helped provoke the strike in the first place, had discovered, in a moment of ingenuity worthy of Ward or Gouriet, that you could drive a bus with an ordinary car licence as long as you owned it and did not collect fares. Alden’s son had recently been driven to a school camp in an old red single-decker; the school, Ward wrote, ‘let us borrow it for a while’. When the loan expired, the company bought several double-deckers – despite the strike Grunwick still had the spare funds – to create a strike-breaking fleet that would allow for maintenance and breakdowns. On a double-decker, its staff would also be a safer distance from the boiling crowd.
That morning, and each weekday during the rest of June, the Grunwick ritual was played out. Shortly after dawn, the pickets would come: the ease of the journey from other parts of London and the brevity of the
confrontation with that day’s bus meant that the protest could be fitted into busy diaries. ‘I used to take the kids to school, then go to the picket,’ a mild, middle-aged woman who had been in the International Socialists told me at a celebration of the strike’s thirtieth anniversary. Left-wing barristers came on their way to court: John Platts Mills QC, president of the Socialist Lawyers’ Society, dressed in a bowler hat and suit, hectored the police through a megaphone for their alleged pro-Ward bias. Radical actors came on their way to rehearsals – and were too tired out by the early rise and the picketing to rehearse properly afterwards. Trade unionists from across the capital came before going to work.
While the pickets were massing, chatting and standing around, the bus would be kept carefully out of sight. ‘My husband found it in a side street once,’ the woman at the anniversary remembered with a smile. ‘He put sugar in the petrol tank.’ Then, often driven by Alden, and with Gouriet on board to gee up the strike-breakers, it would zig-zag a dozen miles across north London, picking up workers at pre-arranged points. At the last rendezvous, a journalist from The Times travelling on the bus reported on 24 June, ‘Two or three special patrol group [SPG] police vans start following close behind. The driver confers with the police, who are in radio contact with the commander at the scene [outside the Chapter Road factory]. It is then decided which is the best route and whether to use the back or front gates.’
Finally, the bus would make its approach. Often this was down the straight stretch of Chapter Road. The tight tree-lined pavements would be crammed with pickets and banners. The road itself would be screened off by policemen. The police would lock arms, and the more aggressive pickets at the front of the crowd, always a minority, would stop chatting and push inwards, onto the roadway, into the path of the bus. The bus, if it could, drove fast, and the pickets had to get out of the way; if it could not, it had to inch through the crowd. ‘Scabs! Scabs! Scabs!’ went the chant. There was banging on the windows, furious faces up against the glass. But the bus usually got through. It would stop as close to the gates as it could, and the workers would hurry out. The gates would be quickly opened to let them in, and then shut. Alden would dismount from the cab and have a fag.
In many ways, the whole televised routine was indeed reminiscent of the confrontation between trucks and pickets at Saltley five years earlier. But two things had changed. After Saltley, where the police had been outmanoeuvred and outnumbered, and so publicly humiliated, there had been a rethink of their approach to mass pickets. Police commanders in such situations were now encouraged to use cat-and-mouse tactics – suddenly closing off roads, switching the entrances used by picketed factories – to throw the blockading crowds off balance. And the police began to use a degree of intimidation.
During the dock strike of the summer of 1972, a river wharf in the Midlands had been besieged by pickets. ‘Our lot were really struggling,’ an anonymous chief inspector told the police sociologist Roger Geary. Then, the chief inspector continued, ‘More officers drove [onto the wharf] in a bus and got out … They were all six foot men and they marched up and they changed the whole complexion of the situation.’ Here, as at Saltley and Grunwick, the police did not use truncheons or riot shields, but they were much more ready to make arrests. In New Society on 30 June 1977, the left-wing writer and activist Stuart Weir produced a convincing eyewitness account of a day at Grunwick, during which ‘two phalanxes of police’ made ‘a series of charges’ against the crowd and ‘dragged pickets out one by one’. Most of the part-time pickets in Willesden were keen to avoid physical confrontations, but more arrests were made on the first day of the Grunwick mass picket than in the whole week-long ‘battle’ at Saltley.
On occasions at Grunwick, the police were pelted with flour and eggs, cans and paper cups. Dromey and most of the pickets disapproved of such behaviour, but they did regard the police as a less than neutral presence. ‘George Ward’s rent-a-mob’ went one of the picket-line chants, and Dromey alleged in his book that there was a ‘special relationship’ between the company and the police. Grunwick’s personnel manager in the summer of 1977 had previously been a Brent policeman, and Scotland Yard used the company to process crime-scene photographs. No collusion was ever proved, but Ward was certainly happy with what he called ‘the courage and efficiency of the police’ during the mass pickets. Gouriet felt the same: ‘The policing was terrific, absolutely terrific,’ he told me. ‘Beyond the call of duty.’
On 23 June, the police made an arrest at Grunwick to gladden any British right-winger’s heart. Earlier that month, Jayaben Desai had decided to recruit further supporters. ‘I went to Yorkshire without telling my husband,’ she recalled with one of her big white smiles. ‘To see Arthur Scargill.’
Scargill was now president of Yorkshire NUM. ‘Mrs Desai and members of the strike committee accompanied by Jack Dromey came to my house unexpectedly on a Sunday afternoon,’ he told a BBC documentary in 2002. ‘Mrs Desai said, “We’ve had all the messages of support that you can think of. The problem is that no one’s coming to really help us.” I said that we would.’ During the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes, for the first time, the overwhelmingly white NUM had received generous donations and support from black and Asian trade unionists and members of the public. Scargill had woken up to the political potential of ethnic-minority Britons – and to the potential for alliances with them in the future. Now, in late June 1977, Desai’s request and the possibility that Grunwick might be another Saltley was too good to resist. On the evening of the 22nd, Scargill and two coaches of miners set off from Barnsley and drove through the night to Willesden.
‘Almost from the first day, we had been waiting for the miners,’ wrote Stuart Weir in his account of his time with the mass picket. On the morning of the 23rd, they appeared: ‘Eight abreast, below broad scarlet and red banners, [they] seemed to fill the road.’ Dromey described the arrival of a bigger contingent of miners three weeks later in even more heroic terms:
Women with shopping baskets and local workers out for a lunch-time stroll stared in silence as the miners’ delegation approached. They marched in grey and brown working clothes … not in groups, but in a solid line of powerful arms that stretched from pavement to pavement without a break. There were no placards … no hurry … They made no noise and sang no songs but just occasionally as they rounded a bend permitted themselves a deep growling chant in thick Yorkshire: ‘Easy! Easy!’ and ‘We’ll be back! We’ll be back!’
The police were less awestruck. After the miners’ march-past on the 23rd, Scargill joined a knot of pickets in Cooper Road, outside the back entrance to the Chapter Road plant. The strike-breakers’ bus approached, and the police began to shove the pickets back. Scargill, wearing a tie under his donkey jacket and his usual shiny black shoes, was first caught in the middle of the crush of pickets, and then thrown forward, open-mouthed. He gulped, stumbled, looked round to see who had pushed him, and then braced himself with a slightly tentative hand against the back of a policeman. A second or two passed. Then another officer, helmetless and much taller than Scargill, came lunging in at him from the side and seized his arm. In one well-honed movement, this policeman, an SPG man, pinned Scargill’s arm behind his back, yanked him round, and with two other officers pushed him towards a police bus and bundled him in. BBC television news filmed it all; and then they filmed the feared union militant sitting behind a barred window on the police bus, looking pale. Scargill gave a pained wink to the cameras. Then he looked straight ahead.
The fact that this new picket-challenging policing could occur under a Labour government was a source of frustration and disbelief to the Grunwick strikers and their allies. Since the party had returned to power in 1974, the unions had gained a great deal: the repeal of Heath’s Industrial Relations Act, the establishment of ACAS, the almost daily influence over government policy provided by the social contract. And yet, as Grunwick would vividly demonstrate, union strikers and pickets had done less well out of the g
overnment. They were still required to act ‘peacefully’ – an adverb which gave a great deal of leeway to watching policemen. And when the unions lobbied hard during 1974 and 1975 for pickets to be given the right to detain vehicles, a power which could have proved decisive at Grunwick, the police and the home secretary Roy Jenkins, the latter concerned about the implications for the liberty of individuals, successfully blocked the proposal. In the second half of the seventies, the trade union dictatorship envisaged by some on the British right and left was not quite at hand.
Nonetheless, for the residents of Willesden during the Grunwick mass pickets it sometimes felt like that. In 2006, I followed the route that many of the pickets took to get there. The tube journey from central London was barely a quarter of an hour. At Dollis Hill station, the nearest to the site of the Chapter Road plant, I got off the train and walked up a short exit tunnel. The gates of the old Chapter Road plant were right in front of me.
They were padlocked and rusted in places, and beyond them were weeds and an abandoned fridge in the factory courtyard. But the street outside the gates seemed much as it had been in the seventies: narrow and residential, with small terraced houses behind tiny front gardens. There was little through traffic, a newsagent, a slight air of transience and tattiness – here and there a dumped sofa beside a doorstep. I asked the newsagent, a middle-aged Asian man, if he remembered the strike. He shook his head. He’d never even heard of Ward’s company. He nodded across the road at the Chapter Road site. ‘It used to be an Indian catering firm a few years ago,’ he said. ‘And then it was an old people’s day centre.’