Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Even more than Kubrick, Peckinpah took considerable liberties with the source material, Gordon Williams’s novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm. ‘They’ve added a rape scene, an act of buggery and lots of violence that was not in the book,’ complained Williams, though Peckinpah was unrepentant: ‘I think Mr Williams has a penchant for his own work,’ he chuckled. ‘I don’t.’ His gleeful transfer of the Wild West to the West Country was far from everyone’s taste – critic Pauline Kael called it ‘the first American film that is a fascist work of art’ – but Straw Dogs remains a compelling vision of a man driven to extremes by a society that has abandoned order.

  The ultimate theme – that civilization hasn’t obviated the need for violent self-defence, or even simply violence itself – was to become a standard feature of ’70s cinema, from Taxi Driver to Death Wish, the latter neatly reversing the journey of Kubrick and Peckinpah, as British director Michael Winner showed the Americans the horrors of their own society. None, however, made quite the same impact as A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs. After them, mainstream cinema toned down its most violent impulses, but beyond even the sight of extreme horror, the timing was crucial: the two films were released just as Britain began to fear its own disintegration. The buttons they pushed – youth gangs, the besieged middle class, the need for uncompromising measures to deal with decadence – encapsulated so much of the period that their unflinching depiction on a big screen was guaranteed to amplify society’s fears for the worst.

  5

  Unions

  ‘I can ruin the government’s plan’

  Only one thing can threaten our future. That is our continued tragic record of industrial strife. We can’t afford the luxury of tearing ourselves apart any more. This time the strife has got to stop. Only you can stop it.

  Edward Heath (1974)

  Don’t YOU ever feel like shooting a Union Leader?

  George Shipway, The Chilian Club (1971)

  RIGSBY: Don’t you know what’s behind all these strikes? All this political unrest? Russian gold!

  Eric Chappell, Rising Damp (1974)

  ‘This coal strike is the beginning of a revolution,’ warned the foreign secretary; ‘power is passing from the House of Commons to the trade unions.’

  Sir Edward Grey was speaking in 1912, but sixty years later his words would still have found a ready audience. For if there was one theme that dominated politics in the 1970s it was that of the untrammelled power, as it was seen in certain quarters, of the trade unions, and the terrible consequences that would surely result. ‘To some of us, the Shrewsbury pickets had committed the worst of all crimes, worse even than murder, the attempt to achieve an industrial or political objective by criminal violence, the very conduct, in fact, which helped to bring the National Socialist German Workers Party to power in 1933,’ wrote Robert Mark. ‘Conduct of that kind kills freedom, and there are still people who feel that freedom is more important than life itself.’ The fact that one of the Shrewsbury Two – building workers imprisoned in 1972 for ‘conspiracy to intimidate’ on the picket line – later turned out to be the affable, banjo-playing actor Ricky Tomlinson from The Royle Family suggests that Mark may have misplaced his apocalyptic indignation, but his argument was not untypical of its time.

  The popular image of the trade union activist had been fixed as long ago as 1959 with Peter Sellers as Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, forever calling his men out on strike and dreaming of the paradise that was the Soviet Union (‘All them corn fields and ballet in the evening’). His would-be 1970s equivalent was Vic Spanner, the Zapata-moustached shop steward in a lavatory factory, played by Kenneth Cope in Carry On at Your Convenience (1971), an unlovable figure who signally fails to represent his members. ‘All we want is an honest day’s work,’ they plead, to which he responds: ‘Listen, brother, it’s Bolshie talk like that that got this country in the mess it’s in today.’ Similarly, when one of the workers complains about a proposed strike, Spanner replies, ‘If you’ll pardon me, you don’t have a say. This is union business.’ ‘But it is our union, isn’t it?’ protests another worker. ‘Exactly,’ snaps Spanner. ‘And for that reason you’ll do as I bloody told you.’ The tension between leader and led reaches a peak towards the end of the film when Spanner is organizing a picket: ‘All right brothers, we have got to keep a full picket line today because I have heard that some of the men want to come back to work.’ His henchman Bernie Hulke (Bernard Bresslaw) asks: ‘Well, if they want to, how are we going to stop them?’ ‘Force!’ replies Spanner grimly, handing out baseball bats to the picketers.

  If none of this sounds typical of the cheerful, saucy spirit of the Carry On movies, that’s probably because it wasn’t; this was a film that took the series into the troubled waters of industrial politics and left the cast floundering out of their depth. It could, though, have been worse. The working title was Carry On Comrade, and in the original cut it also featured Terry Scott in an unsympathetic portrayal of a union boss named Mr Allcock. That character was lost in the editing, which helped tone down the anti-union sentiments, but even so actor Richard O’Callaghan (who played Lewis Boggs, the boss’s son) was unimpressed: ‘I personally was very embarrassed by what I was doing,’ he commented later. ‘It was all so right-wing, presenting the unions as complete asses – when, in fact, the unions were protecting millions of people’s security in this country at the time. I believe the box-office takings reflected this.’ He was quite correct about the takings; in general, the barrel-scraping budget of Carry On meant that a film could recoup its costs in three days at the box office – it took Carry On at Your Convenience nearly five years to do so. It was not much of a surprise that after this disaster, the team scuttled back to safer ground in their next outing, Carry On Matron, the fourth medical setting for the series.

  The problem was that, although they were subsequently adopted as an emblem of British culture, the appeal of the Carry On movies in their own time was strictly to a working-class audience, and Convenience’s middle-class assault on unions was wildly inappropriate. This was, after all, 1971, when Edward Heath’s government was attempting to limit by law the activities of the trade unions, and when the fightback began in earnest.

  The success in 1969 of the trade union leadership in defeating ‘In Place of Strife’ – the Labour plan to impose legal restrictions on union activity – had strengthened the resolve of the Heath government to make changes to legislation; the result was the 1971 Industrial Relations Bill, described by miners’ leader Joe Gormley as the ‘unexpurgated copy’ of ‘In Place of Strife’, which passed through Parliament, but was never fully implemented. And the motivation behind both sets of proposals was the same: a fear of the growing militancy of shop stewards.

  Traditionally, unions were organized on geographical and occupational bases, with a hierarchy of officials at branch, district and national levels. Separate from this structure, though, were the shop stewards, who represented union members within a specific workplace and whose primary job was to liaise between the workforce and management. There were in 1975 an estimated 300,000 shop stewards in Britain. It was this alternative power base that became the preoccupation of industry, and therefore of politicians, as the number of small-scale, unofficial strikes grew steadily through the 1960s. The growing power of the shop stewards was where Tony Benn saw hope for the future of socialism, but for many others, it signified potential peril: Fred Kite, Vic Spanner and their ilk, it was believed, were threatening to wrest control of the union movement from the decent, moderate leaders, who were considered to have been a mostly responsible force, at least since the crushing defeat of the 1926 General Strike. And the elections of left-wingers Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon (‘the terrible twins’, as they were nicknamed) to head the transport and the engineering unions respectively led to fears that the militancy was becoming contagious.

  Certainly, argued sometime employment secretary Norman Tebbit, this was Heath’s misguided view, that the leaders were reas
onable men, while everyone on the shop floor was a rabid militant. And the legislation he brought forward was founded on this belief: a complicated structure of union registration, with unofficial strikes made illegal, and the whole thing to be controlled by the new National Industrial Relations Court. But the TUC, having seen off the Labour government on the issue, was in no mood to submit docilely to the Tories. In September 1971 it voted for a policy of non-cooperation, simply refusing to allow its member unions to enter themselves on the official register, and threatening those which did with expulsion; thirty-two unions, few of even moderate size or strength, were in fact expelled and there seemed no obvious way for the government to compel cooperation on those remaining.

  In 1972 it was the turn of the NIRC to face – and fail – its first great test. Two companies running container depots found their premises being picketed by dockers, concerned at the loss of jobs that would be caused by containerization of the ports; the firms applied to the NIRC for an injunction against such action, and the court found in their favour, ordering the arrest of five of the pickets. Vic Feather, the general secretary of the TUC, had predicted that ‘as soon as the first trade unionist goes to prison, all hell will be let loose’, and he was to be proved right; the Pentonville Five (that being the jail in which the dockers were imprisoned) became an instant cause célèbre, ‘like modern-day Tolpuddle Martyrs’. The TUC voted to stage a one-day general strike, but it didn’t prove necessary in the face of a vacillating government. A hastily called protest march on Pentonville took on something of the air of a triumphal procession, so certain were its participants of victory: ‘I can still feel the electricity going through my body,’ remembered Dennis Skinner, the only MP on the demonstration, thirty-five years later. ‘I’d been on many marches, but I could see this was something different.’ And indeed the show of strength proved sufficient; the next day a very questionable legal loophole was uncovered that allowed the release of the five men, a move that effectively ended the possibility that the Act was ever to be of any use. While the government claimed to have had no involvement in the legal arguments, it was widely considered to have been behind the Five’s release, choosing to run rather than fight and lose; ‘Their protests were not credible,’ insisted another Labour left-winger, Eric Heffer. ‘Working-class solidarity had inflicted its first major defeat on the Heath government. It was not long before it struck again.’

  The Act was to be repealed by the next Labour government in 1974, and its ignominious ending ensured that there would be no further legal moves to limit union activity until the Thatcherite onslaught of the early 1980s. Public concern, however, showed no signs of abating. As the dust settled on the traumatic events of 1971–72, when the miners and the Pentonville Five had won broad support and sympathy, the sober realization began to dawn that there was a force in the land capable of inflicting serious policy defeats on democratically elected governments of either colour. Henceforth union leaders were almost invariably referred to in the press as trade union barons, evoking images of medieval struggles between rival power bases, though, as Tony Benn pointed out, the terminology was inaccurate: ‘Barons aren’t elected’.

  Although the likes of Feather, Gormley, Jones and Scanlon became household names, the most commonly depicted union figure in popular culture remained the shop steward. Following on from Fred Kite, the BBC sitcom The Rag Trade (1961–63) established a basic workplace format with Peter Jones, as the eponymous boss of Fenner Fashions, engaged in a war of attrition with the shop steward, Paddy (Miriam Karlin). It enjoyed enormous success – twenty-five years later The Listener was to refer to it as ‘the most popular TV series of all time’ – and the template was copied by several subsequent sitcoms including On the House and Up the Workers. The original was even revived itself on ITV in 1977, after a proposed spin-off movie – The Rag Trade Goes Mod – had failed to get off the drawing board at Hammer Films.

  What was noticeable in all these blue-collar workplace sitcoms was their lack of engagement in political argument. The one major exception was The Dustbinmen, created by Jack Rosenthal. Here the central character, Cheese and Egg (Bryan Pringle), is not a shop steward, but rather a highly articulate barrack-room lawyer with anarchist inclinations, more used to ducking and diving than he is to organizing; essentially he is the descendant of Alfred Doolittle, as portrayed by Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, with a strong side helping of Sgt. Bilko, though the class politics were much sharper than anywhere else in the TV comedy of the time. A 1970 episode revealed a binman from another team in the depot to be a Tory voter (‘You can get ten years for that!’), and in the resultant argument Cheese and Egg lambasts the members of his own crew: ‘There’s always been thick buttocks like you, full of gripe and argument, but not prepared to do anything,’ he rages. ‘I reckon I know how the Tolpuddle Martyrs felt, shipped abroad like convicts because unions were illegal in those days. And now you’ve got the benefit. So next time, don’t blame the government, don’t blame the bosses, because it’s your own pigging fault.’

  That episode came from the third, and final, series of The Dustbinmen, broadcast just before the 1970 dirty jobs strike that brought refuse collection so sharply into the public domain. According to an official in NUPE (the union that was primarily involved) that was in fact the deliberate intention of the action: to make people aware ‘of dirt below the surface’. The public, he pointed out, ‘don’t want to know about hospital porters having to take arms and legs from operating theatres to the furnaces, or crematoria workers having to put burnt bones into grinding machines, or gravediggers, or what it’s like down the sewers’.

  Less spectacular strikes, especially those concentrated on a single small employer, generally went unrecorded, but could still cause huge distress to those concerned, and cumulatively offered little hope for the future of British industry. ‘The funeral will take place on November 10 of Tina Transport which died of strangulation by the Transport & General Workers Union,’ read a bitterly ironic notice issued by a Norfolk haulage company, closing down after a seven-month dispute. ‘The immediate mourners are Miss Christine Brown, aged 11, and Miss Beverley Brown, aged 3, whose future depended on Tina Transport. The TGWU choir will render “The fight is o’er, the battle won”.’

  Pop music too was touched, even if only peripherally, by the upheavals of the time. In 1974 Alan Price, formerly of Newcastle band the Animals, scored a top 10 hit with ‘The Jarrow Song’, inspired by the great crusade of the unemployed in 1936, and taken from his album Between Today and Yesterday:

  My name is little Billy White,

  and I know what’s wrong and I know what’s right,

  and the wife says ‘Geordie, go to London Town!

  And if they don’t give us a couple of bob,

  won’t even give you a decent job,

  then Geordie, with my blessings, burn them down.’

  The parallels with the contemporary situation were made explicit in the bridge passage: ‘I can see them, I can feel them, and I’m thinking nothing’s changed much today.’ Diametrically opposed to Price’s supportive stance, and even more successful and enduring, was ‘Part of the Union’, a hit for the Strawbs in early 1973:

  So though I’m a working man,

  I can ruin the government’s plan;

  Though I’m not too hard, the sight of my card

  Makes me some kind of superman.

  Clearly intended as a parody of union power, the piece has enjoyed a chequered life, surely the only song to have been covered both by comedian Jim Davidson (as the B-side to his hagiographic 1985 single ‘Maggie’) and, at a 2006 gig, by New York poet-rocker Patti Smith. Most notable has been its unusual drift across the political spectrum from right to left. The tub-thumping, singalong chorus ensured that, despite the ironic tone of the lyrics, the song was soon to be annexed by those it was satirizing; barely a year after its release, it was to be heard pumping out of loudspeakers mounted on the car of the future Labour leader Neil Kinnock, as
he toured his South Wales constituency during the first election of 1974. Thirty years later it was to be played at the funeral of the militant Nottinghamshire miner Keith Frogson, its status as a workers’ anthem seemingly assured.

  The humour of the Strawbs’ single was not unrelated to the curious relationship that rock stars enjoyed with the rules of their own organization, the Musicians’ Union. All fans knew – or thought they knew – that when appearing on TV shows such as Top of the Pops the artists mimed to their hit records, but in fact this wasn’t quite the case; as Don Smith, then the sessions organizer of the MU, explained, the actual rule was that ‘no records could be used as the basis of a mimed performance’. If a band was asked to appear on Top of the Pops, therefore, it was given a three-hour studio session, in which to re-record the relevant song, and it was this tape to which the group would then mime on television. (The time limit was fixed by the BBC, and reflected the fact that the Corporation had to pay the musicians, even if only at the standard union rate.) The intention was that musicians wouldn’t lose work through gramophone records being broadcast on TV, when their members could have been playing live, and the result was supposed to be that the people you saw on your screen were the actual people who made the music, even if it had been pre-recorded a few hours, or even a few weeks, earlier. It was, though, a system that was widely abused, with producers pretending to make a new recording, whilst actually using a tape of the original single. As Chris Redburn, formerly of the band Kenny, recalled: ‘There was a famous MU guy – Dr Death, they used to call him – who would come to the studio to watch you record, and they’d get him wrecked. He was pissed as a newt by the end of it, and they used to switch the tapes. It was ridiculous, a real farce.’ Even so, there were bands prepared to take the proposition seriously; Smith was present at a session in which Queen knocked out a version of the ferociously complex ‘Killer Queen’ in under three hours.