by Andy Beckett
… There were smiles at the request and someone murmured that they were not going to stop coffins. So the company representative, who had been waiting outside in the corridor, was brought in … He was very polite, as were the committee, and he appeared nervous and watchful. He sat before the table as before a tribunal and answered questions … It was suggested that some of the load of boards might in fact be a little short for coffins … But no, coffins came in all sizes. Smiles. The request was granted in principle, but the man was told to return later to finalize details …
… Back came the coffin man. He was told: ‘We would like you to make arrangements to move the load, and we would like … you to ask [your driver] if he would be prepared to donate money to the widow of the picket who died in Aberdeen [when a strike-breaker ran him over].’ The arrangement was agreed, the dispensations signed and stamped.
The committee kept a record of their decisions and the names and vehicle number plates of those concerned. They also kept a log of any TGWU lorry drivers who broke the strike, so that action could be taken against them when the dispute was over. The bureaucratic fussiness of it all, the determined good manners, the mugs of tea – there was an old-fashioned quality and an Englishness to the workings of the committee that defused its tensions. But only partly. ‘Some of the gaffers took it personal,’ Beach said. ‘The effing! The “what they were going to do to us”. Twenty years later, I was in a drivers’ room, and there was a lad in the doorway with a camel coat on. Filled the doorway. He gave me a threatening nod. I said, “Yeah?” And he said, “You are the person that humiliated my father.”’
As in any revolution, scores were settled and a rough class justice imposed. ‘A lot of these gaffers were out and out bandits,’ said Beach. ‘They’d tell you black was white. This fellow, we’d stopped his transport for some reason. His transport manager was making a fuss, telling us his boss was hard up. Afterwards, we were having a meeting. Tap on the door. It’s the boss, with a suntan. He had been on holiday in Barbados. But he can’t give his drivers a rise!’
In Whitehall, there was horror at what the lorry drivers were doing across Britain. ‘Pickets were blocking materials for the manufacture of penicillin; preventing the collection of propane gas required to de-freeze railway points; and refusing to allow the movement of chlorine for water purification,’ recalled the transport secretary Bill Rodgers in his memoirs. No government or modern society could let the movement by road of such essential supplies be interrupted for long. Rodgers, moreover, was not the sort of Labour politician to be even secretly excited by the class warfare being waged by Fred Beach and his comrades. He was a donnish, slightly pained figure on the right of the party who was already sceptical about unions and would soon leave Labour to help found the SDP. He particularly distrusted the TGWU. ‘Moss Evans was a slippery character,’ Rodgers told me. ‘He wasn’t in control of his own union.’
But as long as the Road Haulage Association was unable to put together a pay deal that would satisfy the lorry drivers, the TGWU leadership offered Rodgers and the government their only chance of at least keeping the strike within certain bounds. So pressure was applied to the union. On 12 January, Alex Kitson, the TGWU official coordinating the strike, sent a telex to the union’s regional offices advising them that in order ‘to prevent intervention of emergency powers and calling in of troops’, a list of ‘priority’ items drawn up by the government should be allowed free passage through picket lines. A week later – the delay showed the weakness of the government’s leverage – the TGWU issued a ‘Charter for Pickets’:
Pickets should not try to prevent, hinder or delay vehicles carrying the following priority goods:
Supplies … for the production etc of food and animal feeding stuffs.
Supplies for medical and pharmaceutical products …
Fuel … for the heating of schools.
Materials essential for gritting or snow clearing.
‘Union officials’, the document went on, ‘will decide where pickets should operate. They will also fix the number for each picket. Pickets will be told to wear identifiable armbands and have a responsible leader …’ To make sure that these rather optimistic instructions were being followed, Kitson and Eric Hammond, another national TGWU official, were to hold daily meetings with senior members of the Civil Contingencies Unit, including Clive Rose, who had come back from the Caribbean with Callaghan. Such close cooperation between a striking union and the British government was unprecedented – it was like a last-ditch version of the social contract – but in practice, predictably, the alliance was a flaky one. ‘We would meet early every morning’, Rose remembered, ‘and pick up the places where the rules were not being observed. Then I would say to the union, “Call off your dogs.” I found Hammond reliable, a first-class chap. I was never sure with Kitson how effective he would be – or try to be.’
Rose and Rodgers were stuck in London for most of the Winter of Discontent, partly because of the pressure of work and partly through political caution. ‘I don’t think I went outside London,’ Rodgers recalled, as we talked in his drawing room in Highgate, with its art books and busts. ‘It would’ve been provocative. What you saw of the pickets was on television, of course …’ In Hull, I asked Fred Beach what he had thought of the ‘Charter for Pickets’. He looked at me blankly. ‘If headquarters did send one to us,’ he said, ‘nobody took any notice.’
Instead, the strike committee was lost in the struggle. They worked eighteen-hour days: eight and a half hours at the dispensation committee, and hours more spent planning, talking to the press and checking on the pickets. ‘Sometimes … men came in from the cold’, wrote Nicholas Roe in the Sunday Telegraph after watching the pickets come and go from Bevin House, ‘like troopers from the Eastern Front with real snow on their boots, to say hello, warm up, or seek advice …’ Some Hull residents had less empathy with the strikers. A local farmer dumped the carcasses of animals, which he said had starved to death because the lorry drivers were stopping his supply of feed, on the pavement in front of Bevin House. On 10 February, a more famous Hull citizen, Philip Larkin, wrote about the Winter of Discontent to his friend Kingsley Amis:
Yes, it’s all very interesting, isn’t it. Up to a century ago, if you wanted more money you just worked harder or longer or more cleverly; now you stop work altogether. This is much nicer, and anyone can do it. In fact, the lower-class bastards can no more stop going on strike now than a laboratory rat … can stop jumping on a switch to give itself an orgasm … It’s a funny old world for an old man … ‘I want to see them starving, the so-called working class, Their wages yearly halving, Their women stewing grass …’ I sing my dreary little hymn quite a lot these days …
By then, the lorry drivers’ dispute was finally over. From late January, one by one, the haulage firms agreed to give the truckers a pay rise of 22 per cent. The government reluctantly accepted the surrender. ‘When cabinet was over,’ wrote Rodgers afterwards, ‘I sent my official car away and walked back from Number 10 … through St James’s Park. I summoned my Private Secretary … and telephoned [my wife] Silvia. “I’m about to resign,” I announced.’
But he didn’t. ‘The practical problems of dealing with [the aftermath of] the strike were too absorbing … It was very exciting… In the cabinet we got past the time where you had to be friendly. Once I threw some papers across the cabinet table to Callaghan and said, “That’s what has to be done.”’
In the second half of February, the strike wave began to subside. On Valentine’s Day, a loosely worded ‘concordat’ on pay was announced between the TUC and the government. The gravediggers went back to work in mid-month, after a fortnight on strike, with a 14 per cent pay rise. The binmen went back later in February with 11 per cent. Ministers, worn down and thinking increasingly about ending the strikes relevant to their departments rather than about the government’s position as a whole, let employers hand out whatever pay rises were necessary to end strikes; or, in the
case of public-sector workers, acted as beaten employers themselves. Even so, other stoppages flared up or continued until the middle of March.
And all the while the prime minister seemed becalmed. ‘In February, Bernard [Donoughue] and I went to Jim’, said Tom McNally, ‘with about eight initiatives … and he said, “No, we’ll just go on.” A bit of the fight had gone.’ At Downing Street, Callaghan spent increasing amounts of time alone in his study. There he read official papers and, he told his close colleagues, ‘fiddled around with this and that’. Speeches for him to make criticizing the unions’ behaviour were written, but not given. He did not go on television to make great appeals to the nation. When he did appear, even after the Winter of Discontent was finally over, he seemed alternately exasperated and distracted. Asked about the recent strikes on the BBC’s current-affairs programme Nationwide on 27 April, his answer wandered from a nostalgic digression about ‘the old Department of Labour Gazette’ and the supposedly benign unions of his youth, to a finger-pointing denunciation of the modern union attitude to pay – ‘There’s so much sloppy thinking about in this country!’ – that was too fleeting to have much force.
The overconfident Callaghan of the Caribbean trip, of the postponed general election, of the 5 per cent pay guideline; the bold and competent Callaghan of the IMF crisis, of the break with Keynesianism, of the seemingly effortless Commons victories over Margaret Thatcher – these versions of the prime minister had been replaced by a new one: the worn-out and disillusioned veteran. There was even a touch of the seventies Wilson about him. He was almost sixty-seven. It was half a century since he had first joined a trade union, and now the unions had probably destroyed his premiership. In his autobiography, with its fatalistic title Time and Chance, the section on the Winter of Discontent is strikingly brief and flat:
The only redeeming features that I could discern throughout the whole affair were the remarkable ingenuity with which those affected set about improvising arrangements to beat its adverse effects, and the stoicism with which the general public met the hardship … Ministers considered whether we should declare a state of emergency. My instinct was in favour … but it was argued that it was very uncertain whether a declaration would do much practical good. The Conservative Government of 1970–74 had declared five such states of emergency, and it was pointed out that none of them had made any significant difference. After a time signs began to appear that the fever was running its course …
Of the mood in the government in March 1979, he writes:
For three years we had believed in ourselves and in our capacity to govern and to win, despite all the odds against us. Now I sensed this was no longer true. Nearly thirty years earlier, as a Junior Minister in the Attlee Government, I had watched demoralisation set in and a thick pall of self-doubt begin to envelop Ministers as they and the increasingly paralysed Government Departments and Civil Service waited for the inevitable election …
Apart from Rodgers and a few other ministers who relished taking on the unions – and who were effectively thinking their way out of the Labour Party – the Winter of Discontent was as miserable an experience for the Cabinet as it was for Callaghan. In late January, Donoughue writes,
There was a deathly calm in No. 10, a sort of quiet despair. No papers were being circulated through Whitehall apart from the depressing minutes of … an ever longer list of pay negotiations … Moving among [ministers] as they gathered for Cabinet in the hallway … their sense of collective and individual depression was overwhelming. There was none of the usual buzz and banter … Many of them, especially Michael Foot, appeared genuinely
puzzled. Denis Healey was very tired … puffy and florid … David Ennals was at times slightly emotional. It was felt that one or two Ministers, particularly Tony Benn … were playing at politics in advance of a future party leadership contest. Others were clearly inhibited by their membership of … the unions most damagingly involved in the current strikes.
The Winter of Discontent did not quite lead to national catastrophe. The food shortages caused by the lorry drivers’ dispute remained local and brief. Other feared walkouts never happened. Clive Rose remembered: ‘The two strikes that never materialized, that we were terrified of, that could have brought the country really to a halt, were the electrical power workers and the water workers. We had contingency plans but we knew they’d be fairly ineffective. Only palliatives.’ Power stations and sewage plants were too complicated for soldiers to operate, and much of the British army was stationed in Germany and would take weeks to redeploy in a civilian role in Britain. Or at least this was what its high command told ministers. For all the talk of the army ‘taking over’ in Britain in the seventies, with all the shades of meaning that implied, when it came to the decade’s climactic crisis, the army, already stretched by the Cold War and Ulster, was keen to stay in its barracks. Rose recalled: ‘I was terrified of the PM saying, “I want the army to take over gravedigging.” I called the chief of general staff early one morning to test the waters. His reaction was an expletive. I said, “Thank you. You’ve given me my brief.”’
Some senior Labour figures felt that when the Winter of Discontent was at its iciest, the civil service, too, was not as cooperative as it might have been. On 18 January, Donoughue wrote in his diary, ‘Whitehall has come to a total halt while they wait to see which way the cat will jump politically.’ In 2008, when I interviewed him again, with another Labour government apparently entering its terminal phase, he recalled of the Callaghan administration’s worst days: ‘It was like being on a liner in mid-ocean when all the engines have stopped. Just drifting silently. The civil service just backs off. If they thought Gordon Brown was going to lose power imminently, that would happen again.’
Rose denied that the civil service’s motives in early 1979 were so political and self-preserving. At the time, he remembered, ‘Rodgers said to me, “Your job is to make sure the government’s policies are carried out, to keep the government in office.” I felt my role in these circumstances was slightly wider. I said, “My job is to save the country’s bacon, to see the country isn’t destabilized.”’ Rose also had a testy late-night meeting at the House of Commons with the home secretary Merlyn Rees and the abrasive junior minister Gerald Kaufman. ‘At the end, Rees said to me, “Clive, we found your advice helpful, as usual. The usual soft-soaping stuff. Now what advice would you have given if I’d been a Conservative minister?” I said, “Exactly the same.” It wasn’t the answer he expected.’
Rose gave a small satisfied smile. He was long retired from Whitehall now, to a peach-coloured house in a Suffolk tourist town, but his desire to seem even-handed politically had not left him. ‘I had great respect for Callaghan,’ he assured me early on, as we talked in his spotless drawing room. ‘There was relief in the civil service when Callaghan replaced Wilson.’ But British prime ministers aged fast in the seventies. At the end of the interview, Rose delicately suggested that by 1979 it was perhaps time for the Callaghan administration to make way for something different. ‘Callaghan wasn’t exactly the best dresser,’ Rose volunteered, immaculate on a scorching day in pressed caramel trousers, red socks and a pink shirt in a tiny check. ‘His suit was usually a bit crumpled. He used to slump a bit in his chair.’ Rose said he also remembered watching Shirley Williams arrive for Cabinet, usually out of breath, with things spilling out of her handbag. Then the faint look of contempt in his cool eyes turned to one of admiration. ‘Margaret Thatcher,’ he said, ‘at her first Cabinet meeting, was wearing what looked like a brand-new Chanel suit. Amazing hairdo. It felt like a change.’
19
Last-ditch Days
In March 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s adviser John Hosykns noticed that senior Conservatives were finally assuming they would win the general election. They were worrying instead about how they would govern. But when would the election actually happen? Before the Winter of Discontent, Callaghan’s preference had been for April, and what he had been through over the w
inter had not increased his appetite for hanging on much longer, let alone until the last possible election date in November. ‘I did not wish’, he wrote later, ‘to drag out the next few months, surviving only by wheeling and dealing.’
Yet to other members of his administration ‘surviving by wheeling and dealing’ was what the Callaghan government had always been about; in fact, it was the central task of politics – especially in difficult times. As long as there was a chance that the Conservatives, so divided and unpopular only months before, would self-destruct – and even if there was none – this Labour rearguard wanted to hold on to power for as long as it could, because that was what democratically elected governments did until the voters told them otherwise.
Walter Harrison was one of the diehards. The Labour deputy chief whip had been in the party since 1936. He was a terse Yorkshireman who had been coaxing and frightening MPs into line since the mid- sixties. By 1979, with the Lib–Lab pact over and Labour’s Commons majority long gone, he was known as a worker of parliamentary miracles, ‘a genius’, in Callaghan’s estimation, ‘at conjuring majorities out of thin air’. By 2006, he was eighty-five, and sounded frail on the phone. But he gave me directions to his house outside Wakefield. ‘I like to navigate by pubs,’ he said, momentarily brightening. Then his voice hardened: ‘What books have you read? Who have you seen?’
I went to meet him a week before I met Sir Clive Rose, on a day forecast to be the hottest ever in England. South of Wakefield the train stopped for a long time without explanation. Outside the windows the former Yorkshire coalfield was hummocky, yellow-green in the heat. ‘KILL THATCHER’ said some ghostly old graffiti on a bridge. Harrison’s house was in the last street of a country suburb, with a corn field at the end of the garden and, beyond that, a ruined castle. When I knocked on his door, it was early afternoon but all the curtains were drawn. For a few minutes no one came. In the porch I could see two new-looking Labour placards propped against a wall. The sun hammered down. Then Harrison appeared and led me bonily to a dark sitting room, where trade union journals and House of Commons magazines were piled and a creaking fan turned slowly, back and forth.