Some Conservative MPs did indeed manage to keep smiling. Vice-Admiral John Hughes Hallett, MP for Croydon East, had planned and commanded naval raids across the English Channel during the Second World War, and he welcomed the “shift of expenditure from the tail to the teeth of the Royal Navy”. Sir Frederick Burden, the Conservative member for Gillingham, emphasised the relief felt in the Medway towns at the announcement that the dockyard at Chatham would not be closed as rumour had suggested — even though the closure of the torpedo depot and the gunwharf workshops, the transfer of the mechanical training establishment and the Admiralty’s withdrawal from the town’s Royal Naval Hospital seemed elsewhere to justify the headline “Navy leaving Medway Towns”.4
The Labour Party showed more vigour. Mr Thomas Steele, Labour MP for Dunbartonshire West, on the Clyde outside Glasgow, suspected an unstated political motive. He pointed out that, while virtually no new shipbuilding was going on the naval dockyards, the private yards, with which the Clyde was well supplied, had “full order books, and are finding difficulty in meeting their commitments”. And what might come from the promised “consultation” with the President of the Board of Trade and the Minister of Labour given “the numbers affected, particularly in Sheerness, where no alternative employment is available?” Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough, a senior Co-operative and Labour Party politician who was now leader of the Labour opposition in the House of Lords, informed his fellow peers. “I know of a co-operative society that was founded by the first naval dockyard employees in 1815 and which is now an enormous establishment in the Island of Sheerness”. It was, so this geographically confused fellow concluded, “an exceedingly grave and difficult situation for these people to face” and it may be necessary to consider “whether Sheerness should be made a special area. Except for some agriculture, the whole area lives on the dockyard”.
Emanuel Shinwell, the seventy-two-year-old MP for Easington, Durham, was among the Labour doubters. After serving as both Secretary of State for War and Minister of Defence in Atlee’s post-war Labour government, this erstwhile Glaswegian revolutionary had opposed the deployment of American nuclear weapons on British soil and he was not much inclined to lament the passing of one of the naval dockyards from which Britain’s own first atom bomb had been shipped to the Montebello islands off Australia, where it was detonated in October 1952, irradiating large numbers of onlookers. Shinwell applauded the government’s effort to reduce “public expenditure”. He also sought reassurance that “appropriate measures” would be put in place to find “other occupations” for the dockyard’s displaced workers, not just the “established” but more casually employed as well.5 That question was also emphasised by the Labour MP for Faversham, Mr Percy Wells. Having informed the Commons that the decision would be “received with dismay in Sheerness, and with a feeling of callous betrayal”, he too moved on quickly to ask what the Government would be doing “to prevent the Isle of Sheppey becoming a distressed area”.
The Sheerness Times Guardian’s reporter was in London to put the first question to Lord Selkirk at the press conference following the announcements in Parliament. He wanted to know why Sheerness had not been treated like Malta, where the Admiralty was reportedly already receiving offers from commercial firms interested in the dockyard, no longer required by Britain now that the American fleet was becoming the commanding presence in the Mediterranean. Selkirk explained that no such interest could be sought before the decision had been presented to Parliament, but that new employers would be vigorously pursued over the two years leading to the closure. Indeed, as Lord Mountbatten added, the Admiralty had written to the Shipbuilding Conference that very morning.6 The Sheerness reporter was also informed that the rapid pace of technological change had helped dictate the decision. Selkirk pointed out that even “visual firing — above or below water — is ceasing”. Lord Mountbatten, who believed the Admiralty was presiding over “the rebirth of the navy”, admitted grievous losses were entailed but then went on to talk about himself: “what we are doing in the Chatham area sent a shiver down my spine”, he said, adding, “It was very painful for me, as the last three ships I commanded were all Chatham ships”.
While the decision was under discussion in Westminster it was also being communicated in Sheerness. Notices were posted and the officer in charge of the dockyard, Captain P.M.B. Chavasse, broke the news to the Dockyard Whitley Committee (a joint industrial council in which both trade unions and employers were represented). Chavasse also met the Chairman of the Sheerness Urban Council, Mr W.C. Butterworth, to convey his personal regret that “this drastic step” had been considered necessary.
At a council meeting held a few hours later, Butterworth named the day “Black Tuesday”, while others anticipated that the town would be “callously left to rot”. The wider implications of the decision were already crashing into view: the baleful prospect faced by the Sheerness and District Co-operative Society, which reckoned 50% of its business was directly connected to the dockyard; the likely closure of the technical college; the halting of the council’s long promised redevelopment (largely conceived as a bulldozing exercise in “slum-clearance”) of Blue Town; the dismal implications for the island’s school-leavers. The Water Board’s plan to get a supply from the mainland suddenly seemed threatened, and there were concerns, too, about the Sheerness & Gillingham Building Society, which had helped many dockyard workers buy houses in Sheerness, and would soon be placing advertisements reassuring depositors that it had long been diversifying its asset base and that only 20% of its properties were now on the Isle of Sheppey.7 “We must go on living”, said one councillor, as the air was sucked from his lungs.
The council went on to organise the public meeting attended by Percy Wells and representatives of all Sheppey’s three councils. Intended to unite “all the island” behind a deputation that would ask to see the Prime Minister, the meeting was announced for the following Sunday afternoon (28 February 1958). Held with Essoldo’s permission in Sheerness’s Argosy Cinema on the Broadway, it was attended by nearly one thousand people, many of them “standing at the back”.
Speakers were asked to avoid party political argument in the name of the common interest. That was understood by the first speaker, Percy Wells MP, who had held the “weathervane” constituency of Faversham for Labour for thirteen years. Born in Kent in 1891, he had left school at sixteen to serve in the Royal Navy for three years. He had refused conscription in April 1917, and been imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector.8 He had moved to Gillingham in 1923 to take up his duties as District Organiser for the Transport and General Workers Union, an organisation that later appointed him General Secretary for Kent. He had confronted the Mayor of Dover during the General Strike of 1926,9 and worked closely with agricultural labourers (“Farmers, as a class, were very pessimistic people”, he told a village gathering in 1935, “and always thought themselves worse off than they actually were”).10 He had served as a local Labour Party activist in the county for some twenty-five years before winning Faversham in the Labour landslide of 1945. Wells was “one of us”, so his election leaflet for 1959 would proclaim, and certainly not one of the “Here to-day and gone to-morrow” types his visiting Conservative rivals had proved to be over the previous four elections.
Even while acting as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Wells had remained conscientiously opposed to warfare: he was among the Labour MPs who voted against Attlee’s “conscription” bill in 1947,11 and he had a lot of history in common with Emanuel Shinwell too. He had, however, fought hard for Sheerness over the naval dockyard, even while gearing up for the wider general election campaign in which he would promise that Labour would increase the state pension, repeal the Rent Act, “slash” purchase tax on clothes and household goods, create full employment and a fairer distribution of wealth while also providing schools with smaller classes, more teachers and cancellation of the hated Eleven-plus exam. Unlike some
of Sheppey’s more recent Labour MPs, Wells was a Kentish man of the people who travelled up to London to attend the House of Commons, and definitely not a Londoner coming “down” from the capital to visit his constituency.
Percy Wells, MP for Faversham. c. 1960
At the meeting in the Argosy Cinema, Wells began by defending himself and the local council from the suggestion that they had not yielded sufficient ground to prevent this dire outcome: they had both, he said, loudly resisted any “whittling away” of functions carried out at the dockyard, knowing that successive small reductions would make it much harder to defend the place if and when the threat of total closure loomed.12 He saw no economy in the plan to transfer a thousand men — the “established” workers to whom the Admiralty had obligations — to Chatham, and nor did he accept that the government’s habit of giving naval work to private dockyards was genuinely motivated by economic considerations. In a move that must have been tough for a man of pacifist sympathies, he invoked the name of Sir William Penney, the Director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment who had earlier overseen the test explosion of Britain’s atom bomb at the Montebello islands in 1952. Penney had grown up in Sheppey and got his educational start just across the Broadway from the Argosy at the Sheerness Technical School for Boys. Was it really a fair tribute, asked Wells, that “as a result of his efforts his native Island should be economically murdered?”
Wells was swimming with the local current, as were most of the speakers who followed him. As the only dockyard man on Sheerness Council, Cllr. J.G. Ward placed his own situation before the meeting: after forty years of working as an “established” man at the dockyard, he must either transfer to Chatham, paying his own travel or relocation costs, or surrender both his job and his pension rights. While he would share that prospect with other members of the “established” staff, he pointed out that the closure also represented a “breach of faith” with the “non-established” workers, who had built up a skill “peculiar to Admiralty employment”, which the government appeared to have neither the means nor the will to replace. “They haven’t one idea for bringing work on the Isle of Sheppey but they have carefully planned to run down the dockyard”. The British people, in whose name the decision had been made, would surely not choose to “have it on their conscience that Sheppey should be reduced to a Jarrow, Durham or distressed area of Wales”. John Coppins, who was Secretary of the Sheppey Trades Council and chairman of the trade unionists on the Dockyard Whitley Committee, had no trouble convincing the meeting that it should stiffen the proposed motion and demand, not just a delay in closure while alternative employment was established, but a straightforward reversal of the Admiralty decision and the retention of the dockyard as a going concern — a motion that was passed unanimously.
The citizens of Sheerness may have felt stunned by the government’s announcement, but many at the meeting still managed to rise up furiously against the Conservative candidate for Faversham. Mrs Elsie S. Olsen was a self-described housewife and mother of four who would be running neck-to-neck against Wells in the general election to be held in October the following year. She had already campaigned unsuccessfully as the first woman candidate for Edmonton in 1951 and again in 1954, a year in which she had also come to wider public notice by asking the National Liberal Minister for Food, Major Gwilym Lloyd George, “what’s happened to the lard?” at a meeting of Conservative women concerned with the easing of rationing.13
It was brave of this Conservative doctor’s wife to turn up at the Argosy Cinema that afternoon, and her speech did not go at all well. She opened by declaring her sympathy for the stricken townspeople: “I felt I had to tell you that I am with you heart and soul in your great sorrow”. Ignoring the rude fellow who shouted from the balcony “What do you know about it?”14 and the hundreds who were already “on their feet, booing and jeering”, she went on to express her hope that new forms of employment would soon be found and then started walking out along a plank of her own choosing, questioning whether the Labour Party really was putting the “well-being” of the community above party politics as the meeting’s organisers had demanded. She took aim less at Wells than at Labour’s former Secretary of State for War Emanuel Shinwell. He wasn’t at the meeting, but Mrs. Olsen still tried to read from his apparently pacifist contribution to the Commons debate of 18 February, in which he had given the government’s reduction of the armed forces his approval on the grounds that the decision was in accordance with Labour Party policy. She insisted that Shinwell had gone on to say, “We do not think the Government has gone far enough and we shall welcome further steps in this direction”.15
Mrs. Elsie S. Olsen having a picnic lunch with her doctor husband before tackling an afternoon canvassing session in Sheerness, 6 October 1959
By this time, though, Mrs Olsen was being booed, jeered and slow-handclapped: “five hundred men stood and hooted and howled. ‘Go back to your Tory tea-party’, they bellowed. ‘There are crumpets for tea today — it’s Sunday’”. Faced with this mocking hostility, Olsen was quickly reduced to muttering about fair play and good manners before making her escape through a side entrance. And there we will leave her. She may have been the first woman candidate ever to have stood for Edmonton in 1954, but she was no Margaret Thatcher in the making. She would be beaten by Wells in the general election twenty months thence, albeit not before shrinking the Labour majority in the “knife-edge” constituency of Faversham by fifty-nine votes to 253, and then be finally seen off by the Labour successor, Terry Boston, at the by-election following Wells’ death in 1964 — despite, it was reported, having worn a different hat on each day of her eighteen-day campaign.16 According to the Sheerness Times Guardian, Mrs Olsen’s primary offence at the “Black Tuesday” meeting, apart from being a representative of the party that was closing the dockyard, was to have “introduced politics” when the common interest of the stricken community demanded “united effort”. After her hasty retreat, Percy Wells, who had shared Shinwell’s pacifist views during the First World War, pointed out that the former Glaswegian firebrand had also demanded that the government do something to create alternative employment for the redundant workers of Sheerness: he reiterated that this was hardly the occasion at which to start “fishing for votes” as Mrs Olsen had done.
Percy Wells also summarised his thoughts about the Argosy Cinema meeting the next day in the House of Commons. It was a debate about unemployment, in which various Conservative MPs expressed confidence that, despite the looming signs of a global recession, redundant servicemen and civilian workers could be absorbed into the civilian economy. Wells spoke directly after Hugh Fraser, Tory MP for Stafford and Stone, who had described the decline of the Royal Ordnance factories in Swynnerton as if their journey into “desuetude” had been a gentle and largely pain-free process. Referring to the previous night’s meeting in Sheerness, he declared that had he called such a meeting in his constituency to discuss unemployment a week earlier, he would have been lucky if fifty had attended. As it was, he claimed that more than two thousand had shown up the night before, with many being turned away at the door: “These people see their jobs disappearing by 1960. It was that disclosure which had brought them there to protest against an action which they felt was absolutely unwise and unjustified”.17
And that was how it went — the yard closed, as did the garrison and the Royal Navy’s Nore Command. Many of the associated industries struggled and died as the ships melted away, and the people learned to get by in a town full of seafaring memories that may still have counted for something in the “well-stocked” public library, where Elisabeth Johnson would go, one day in 1976, to borrow a novel by Joseph Conrad. Discovering that all but three copies of the collected edition were out on loan, she was informed by the librarian that recent BBC films — both Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent had been broadcast in 1975 — had piqued local interest in this great Anglo-Polish novelist of the sea. Perhaps, as Uwe Johnson suggested to Siegfried Unse
ld, the readers of Sheerness were unusually well-placed to appreciate Conrad not just as “the creator of a world seen through a temperament” but also as one with a “special knowledge of his consumers”.18
19. FIRST MOVES ON THE AFTERLIFE: THE MODERNIST CHAIR COMES TO SHEERNESS
Though sparsely furnished, the Johnsons’s house did contain a couple of striking lounge chairs constructed of “three elegant slabs of wood and leather” and designed by the famous American modernist Charles Eames. Johnson had feared for the future of one of these prized possessions after it collapsed beneath him, but local friends put out the call, and along came “Tony”, a former guest or resident on the island and “probably the most skilled carpenter you could find”, who drove off with the chair in pieces saying that he would “at least attempt” its restoration.1
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 28