Dave Renton, “When We Touched the Sky” – The Anti Nazi League 1977-1981, Autumn 2006 issue of the LSHG Newsletter

We live in a time of revival for the left with new movements finding their way, not least against those who have buckled before Blair, often miserable, seeing it as impossible to win any serious fight, no matter how many are mobilised.

A good moment then to publish a history of the Anti Nazi League, a story of real political courage, of a mass movement that drew hundreds of thousands into activity and did achieve its goal, the destruction of the National Front (NF).  Indeed, with fascism once again a significant element in British politics as also in France, Italy, Austria and elsewhere, there is an obvious need for the left to be clear about what fascism is and how it can be stopped.

Here Renton’s book makes a very valuable contribution. In particular, he takes care to explain details that a younger generation has no memory of. At the same time, it must have taken some courage to write this book as many readers will have memories of their own involvement in the ANL. Rarely can a history have so many potential eye-witness critics!

The homework, however, has certainly been done with scores of participants interviewed. The narrative chapters in the book read well: the battle of Lewisham that triggered the founding of the ANL, the meteoric rise of the ANL in the following months, the giant carnivals of spring and summer 1978, the battle of Southall in April 199 where the police murdered Blair Peach.  Renton spells out how in the aftermath of Lewisham, the ANL was created as a single issue united front, committed to mobilising the largest possible numbers.  This it did, calling protests, large and small, wherever the NF showed its face.  In the process huge numbers were organised, in local groups, in the unions and in affinity groups, such as Skins against the Nazis, School Kids against the Nazis and so on.  Each group identified with its own badge, you couldn’t walk across any sizeable town in Britain without seeing people wearing ANL badges.  Establishing such a mass presence put relentless pressure on the fascists.

The chapter on Rock against Racism, founded a year before the ANL in response to racist remarks made by Eric Clapton, is penned with enthusiasm by Renton, not least as a serious fan of punk music. RAR had an anarchic quality, its impact spread in ways that are hard to trace, through many hundreds of gigs, with a vast array of musicians, some politically excellent, some far less so. With a big presence in the music pres, RAR made an impact on young people that was powerful and in some way new.  How exactly was and still is a constant source of argument  It was never going to be easy to write this chapter., not least as the old joke “If you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there” works with RAR, only more so.  How music and politics relate is always going to be contested.  Nevertheless, Renton does get across clearly the scale of RAR’s impact as an anti-racist force. And, as Renton says, if you want more on RAR, there is always the spectacularly written and produced Beating Time by Dave Widgery.

On the key question of the united front, one which has lost none of its relevance, the arguments are explained well. The ANL was born of a clear understanding of two things. First, the need to prevent the NF having a political presence – on the streets, in public meetings, in the media – and being prepared, where necessary to use physical force to achieve this. Second, the importance of mobilising the largest possible number to stop the fascists. The mobilisations could take many forms: thousands of local people in Lewisham to stop a march, hundreds or more in pickets of NF meetings or a TV station when it allowed an NF speaker. And always looking to gain mass support in workplaces, colleges, unions etc. hence the millions of leaflets and bucket loads of badges. And so it was possible to have carnivals with numbers into the hundreds of thousands, the fullest expression of this commitment to mass mobilisation.

The narrative becomes less sure when looking at the political roots of the ANL. The ANL was a Socialist Workers Party initiative which could only work properly if the much larger Communist Party came on board. It did, despite the CP’s detestation of the SWP, because large chunks of the Labour left and trade union bureaucracy had already decided to support the ANL. To stay out would mean the CP risking political isolation.

Renton’s suggestion that

The Communist Party had the numbers to build the mass movement but many of its activists still believed rock music was a US weapon in the Cold War. The theory of state capitalism protected SWP members from the kind of knee jerk anti Americanism that the CP encouraged.

is off the mark. For one thing, the CP was rightly proud of its anti-racist traditions presented by American singers such as Paul Robeson. For another, more importantly, the difficulty the CP had in mobilising lay in its politics closer to home. It was desperate not to upset any of its friends in parliament and the TUC General Council. As Renton recounts, Michael Foot was only one of a number of leading lefts who denounced the SWP after Lewisham. The CP was increasingly losing its ability to mobilise on the ground, particularly among young people, very few of whom were in the CP.

Renton’s encouragement to those who were involved to record their own memories and add their own perspectives is welcome. There is more to be written. Not least an explanation of how the ANL could be successful at the same time as government and employers were relentlessly rolling back the victories won by workers against the Heath government.  In the big picture, this was the main battle. Renton attempts an explanation but is wrong on some points. He exaggerates the incorporation of radical shop stewards into the bureaucracy and is wrong to imply that the SWP subordinated the industrial struggle to building the ANL.  More importantly, in retrospect we can see that Wilson and Callaghan’s implementation of the IMF’s instructions in 1976 to cut government spending was the beginning of the neo-liberal offensive continued by Thatcher.  The results have decisively shaped the world we live in. We need to be clear about what went wrong.  History from below is not enough.  The context of the ANL’s success has to be got right.  To repeat, there is more to be written and if the lessons are to be learnt properly, it has to be the full picture.

Geoff Brown

ANL organiser, Greater Manchester, 1977-1979

Review of ‘From Dock to Dock’, Albert Jones

Review of ‘From Dock to Dock’, Albert Jones

There aren’t many published memoirs of twentieth century political activists in this area.  I know of three, ‘From Dock to Dock’, Bob Thomas’s ‘Sir Bob and Paul Graney’s ‘One bloke’.    All different, All valuable to historians.  The first two, both written by Labour politicians, have to be read with great care. There are lots of gaps. Some of these may involve a deliberate suppression of the truth. Thomas has structured his memoir carefully, Jones appears to have combined his sometimes valuable personal memories with working through his files chronologically picking up documents one by one.  The result includes lengthy, often tedious, descriptions of factional battles inside Salford Labour Party as well as a few stories of value.

Jones is mostly remembered as the Salford councillor who went to jail in the mid 1960s.  He was aggrieved that he was often accused of taking bribes.  He was correct.  The accusation is false - he did not receive any money - but he was economical with the truth about his case.  What his memoir doesn't make clear is that he pleaded guilty to soliciting bribes.  He did agree to meet Edward Costello early one morning in a local car park. Costello was a local property developer working with local Conservative councillors with whom he set up not-for-profit housing associations which then could dish out profitable contracts. Jones doesn't explain why he agreed to meet Costello who came with £200 in cash and tried to give it to Jones. Jones had definitely been set up, the car had been bugged by the police with a radio transmitter planted in it. What is unclear, because he doesn’t want to discuss it, we don’t know why, is who was behind the set up. 

We don’t know whom.  He certainly had enemies.  One possibility is the freemasons - Jones tells us he wasn’t one.  The freemasons did include labour movement figures such as union officials in their membership.  Joe Sheridan, the Manchester NUPBB/SOGAT official was one. Jones, who was nothing if not ambitious, was on as many council committees as he could manage.  One of these was the Watch Committee.  Jones explains that it had very little power. It was meant to decide on senior police appointments but, as Jones describes, the chief constable made the decisions and came to the Watch Committee for a cursory rubber-stamping.  There were, however, perks. Local police would politely acknowledge them when they saw them - Jones quotes James Anderton publicly criticising this ‘pulling the forelock’ and when Jones was once pulled up for speeding, he was let off when the officer saw who he was.

Jones was very status conscious - he loved to list all the positions he held in the council, the Labour Party and his union, the AEU. Whether or not he was legally guilty of corruption, the point is that, bribe or no bribe, he was happy to work with property developers. To quote the police report of what they heard on the radio planted in the car ‘... this [planning application] is a cert as far as I’m concerned. Everything's fixed.’  Costello would find Jones was ‘a very decent fellow to deal with.’  The transcript doesn’t prove he was corrupt, it does show him as part of the local elite, getting there as a Labour Party careerist.

This developed over time. Starting work at 14 in 1932, he did his engineering apprenticeship as a centre lathe turner in Parkinson Cowan, Stretford, well known for manufacturing gas meters.  During the war he worked at the giant Metrovicks, the largest factory on Trafford Park with 30,000 workers helping to build Lancaster bombers. Having joined the Labour League of Youth as a teenager - he went camping with them - he joined the Communist Party in 1943.  At the time the CP was an impressive organisation at Metrovicks. In 1945 it claimed 250 members in a workforce of 30,000 on Trafford Park in 1945.  The convenor was Hugh Scanlon, a CP member.  The CP in Manchester engineering worked closely with the Labour left, a ‘broad left’, and it can’t have been difficult for Jones to drop out of the CP in 1945 while remaining active in the left in his union. Politically he remained on the left.  He was at a meeting in support of the new left publication Socialist Outlook in November 1948 with three local Salford Labour activists Peter Grimshaw, always known as close to the CP, Harry Ratner, an organised Trotskyist, and Frank Allaun, also a former CP member.  He joined the July 1958 CND march from East coast to West coast which held an open-air meeting on the Speaker’s Corner blitz site, corner of Deansgate and St Mary’s Gate and in Eccles Town Hall with Frank Allaun, now MP for Salford East, one of the speakers.

An assiduously hard party worker, his Labour Party career starts well. He gets elected onto Salford Council May 1951 and quickly though without success tries to get himself nominated as the Labour candidate for East Salford.

Consistently active in his union the AEU, he worked in a large number of engineering factories over the years, sometimes a foreman, sometimes a shop steward, Jones understood how intimately the Labour Party was connected with the trade unions. He also knew how to use the rule book to get what he wanted and, when it suited him, to stop an opponent. 

When he came out of prison he fought tenaciously to rebuild his career in the Labour Party.  At one point he succeeded in being elected president of West Salford constituency Labour Party but was later voted out.  Complimented by the Salford City Reporter for his doggedness, he never overcame the opposition inside his local Labour Party. There was no comparable organised hostility in the AEU.  With little difficulty, he got himself nominated for the Manchester district secretary election in 1973. The Broad Left’s domination of Manchester engineering was in crisis.  The near total failure of the Manchester engineering factory occupations in the summer of 1972 to secure the main objective of a shorter working week, led to a sharp reaction against the left. In addition, the union election procedures had changed with the introduction of postal balloting giving the right with its support in the national press a substantial advantage.  John Tocher, recently the national president of the Communist Party, who had led the occupations, only scraped back as Manchester divisional organiser. The district secretary election was a three-cornered race. Jones was standing against the current secretary Bernard Panter, CP member, backed by the Broad Left, and Wally Mather, the candidate of the right.  With 2,750 votes, he came just fifteen votes behind Mather.  Mather went on to defeat Panter in the second round. It seems certain that Jones would have been district secretary if he had had a few more votes in the first round.

For all his quirkiness - he was a cheeky chappy throughout his life - it is hard to see how if he had succeeded in getting elected as an MP or a district secretary he would have been remembered as different from other nonentities.  We can see this in his role on the council as chair of the planning committee.  Here he should be quoted in full

On October 8th Dame Evelyn Sharp [the first woman permanent secretary in Whitehall, working for the minister of housing, Keith Joseph] visited Salford to familiarise herself with the development plan. I well remember our visit to London when we last saw her in the Ministry of Housing in Whitehall. The engineer had already sent her his plans for the development and she talked about Broad Street and Ellor Street and adjoining roads and streets with a familiarity that was uncanny. Salford’s case was presented by our town clerk and engineer with the treasurer ready to answer any questions on costs. The chairman and deputy chairman (myself and councillor Williams) might just as well have not been in the room. It was another ‘first lesson’ in how the top civil servants just tolerate councillors as being people to put up with. However, I thought, ‘I'm not coming to London to say nothing’, so I just said a few words on the importance of this development for Salford. She listened with respectful tolerance and thanked me. It took her about one hour diplomatically, by inference, to reject the engineer’s scheme. As we left her office she had a quiet word with the town clerk, who smiled at something he said. It was a few days later I was with him in his office and asked him about it. He smiled and said, well I will tell you. She said something nice about you. She said ‘Isn't he a dear boy’? So, there you have it, Councillor Albert Jones, chairman of the Salford planning committee, chairman of the city Labour Party, vice chairman of West Salford CLP on all the major committees Just ‘a dear boy’ in the eyes of the permanent secretary to Sir Keith Joseph, minister of housing and local government.

Bob Thomas makes exactly the same point saying that in the meeting with the senior officers discussing plans

I was the only Councillor present at these meetings and I thought I detected a little ’What is he doing here’ attitude from one or two of the officers…

The demolition of the Ellor Street area, better known as Hanky Park, made famous in Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole and its rebuilding as tower blocks, is famous as one of the most callous planning decisions at its time.  Evelyn Sharp, a strong advocate of modernist architecture came to regret her earlier commitment - reference. Jones does not deign to mention the criticism of the decision. He simply accepts it.  That surely is what he should be remembered for.

Organising the rank and file at the ICI Intex factory, Ashton, 1971-1978

Dave Rhodes interview, 23 April 2018

Dave: [00:00:33] I came out of the Army in 1969 and went to an engineering firm two or three months, didn't like it, went to Intex yarns. I got a job crimping and I did that for two or three weeks, didn't like it, told the foreman I were off and he said 'Hang on, there's a job upstairs if you want it on the winding floor.' So, I went up to that job and settled down. It was shift work. We had three shifts at that time, six two, two ten and ten six, rotated. The factory at that stage, we did have, I would say, 50-50, Asians working there, no Asian women at all. They were all men. They tended to be on crimping, one or two on winding, mostly on crimping. Crimping is taking a fibre, it was a fibre and it was used for making things like Pretty Polly tights. These would have been spun on the crimping machines then sent to winding and wound onto bobbins, different qualities, different grades. It was a 24 hour process. As you can imagine, the place was absolutely boiling hot. Summer was horrendous. Lip service was paid to factory regulations. Very, very, very poor.

The management were indifferent at best. They behaved towards the workforce polite but in a manner that was medieval, 'the Lord of The Manor'. You did as you were told. They would have been quite happy if you'd have walked round tugging your forelock every time you pass one of them. The main culprit that presided over this fiefdom was a guy called Smith. Now I never got to know his first name because this chap always insisted that everybody referred to him as Major Smith from a former rank he held. I refused to do it point blank. You are Major Smith when you're in the army. When you're not in the Army you're a Mr Smith and we crossed swords quite a few times. I was bloody minded. I wasn't political at all, I had no left-wing leanings or anything.

Anyway, what I discovered in the few years up to the strike was that the only way that you got anything was by fighting because management would never ever concede anything unless you did something. But we didn't do anything serious. There was no 'down tools' or anything like this. It was depending on the trade union which was in there, the National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers. It was very clear from watching what they did when they came in to the factory once a year. No other time, they never came in to represent anybody and, when they did enter the factory, it was to go straight to the management's office. The management would then take them out to the Old Bull or the pub nearby where they would discuss our next pay rise which was absolutely pathetic. We would get a pay rise of something like £1.50 a week. Now this was for shift workers. Textiles have always been badly paid, always, and we were no exception. Very, very badly paid.

Dave: [00:05:01] I'll jump forward a little bit further. We were union members but not everybody in the factory and it was decided at one stage that what we did need was a closed shop and this was resisted enormously by management. No, we're not having a closed shop. Then this chap turned up in the factory, guy called Dave Hallsworth and he went into crimping. We knew nothing about him. To give you a little example, within 12 months of David coming into the factory, a bulletin appeared. This bulletin was a sheet of A4 paper which listed grievances that were happening in the factory and one of them was the persistent attacks on the way that we worked by management. They always wanted more work out of us.

[00:06:06] We had a chap called Zaman. This chap, jumping aside, was one of the elders. What I discovered about the Asians working there - I knew nothing about them - the Asians were incredibly respectful to one another. This was their cement, that was the glue that held them together. The elders were held in very high regard. So, they had their own sort of trade unionism within them, without realising it, that an injury to the elder was an injury to all of them. Management were constantly coming up and they'd seen Zaman as the top man. So, they'd gone for him and they said 'Right from tomorrow night, you'll not be running two CS12 machines - these things were huge, massive things, something like two or three hundred spindles per side. They'd given him a complete, full machine. No work study, nothing. 'You just run it.' Zaman refused. So, they threatened him with the sack and everything else and Zaman had walked out. There were rumblings going on. This is how Dave Hallsworth first came to our attention. He then produced this bulletin which one of these things was listed on it.

Dave: [00:07:37] Now a little story that is not well known but is listed on one of the bulletins if you can ever get hold of them - I used to have all of them. Two or three weeks after the second bulletin had come out this Major Smith sent for me and a lad called Sid Austin. Now Sid was an ex-tank driver, did his National Service. He was a character Sid. My size five foot six, five foot seven, bright ginger red hair. Anything in authority he had utter contempt for. So, Sid and I were sent for with no idea why, taken up to the senior manager's office which was very plush. We were seated in two very nice armchairs and Major Smith was sat there, very, very polite. It was 'Hullo Sid.' And 'Hullo David.' Normally he wouldn't give us time of day. We were puzzled why we were there and then he said 'Look, have you seen these bulletins?' He had two on his desk. So, we said 'Yeah, we've seen them.' 'What do you think?' We said 'Not a great deal, not much.' We weren't into it by then, we'd not grasped what Dave Hallsworth was doing by this bulletin. And he said 'Right lads. We have a communist cell in the factory and you two are ex-servicemen, just as I am.' It was the old boy network. And he said 'What I would like you to do, with our help, is to write a counter bulletin and we will support it and we will guide you through it. Are you willing to do it?' So, I said 'Well let's have a think about it first because I've not read these bulletins properly.' So, he said 'Fine.' We left the office. Now Sid hated officers in uniform. He hated them even more outside in civvy street and he thought that Major Smith using his former rank was a complete and utter plank. So that went down like a lead balloon with Sid, we talked about it and I found where the bulletin had come from, Dave Hallsworth. So, me and Sid went to see Dave and said 'Look, this is what they've just asked us to do. David was delighted and in the next bulletin he blew the whistle on it. So, David was then a force. I became part of the bulletin. Sid came on board but only briefly, he didn't stop there much longer.

Dave: [00:10:32] We then started having sit downs in the canteen. Stupid things that management would do. As a prime example, we'd go in on night shift. By this time, we were on four 12 hour shifts. We'd do 12 hours days, 12 hours, and it used to be four on, three off, three on, four off. And it used to work like that so when we'd done Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, our three days were Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We Were paid weekly in cash in a wage packet and the first real sign of trouble came on Thursday night the foreman would have come round with our wage packets. The foreman at the break time said 'I'm sorry lads, your wage packets have not been done.' So, we said 'What do you mean 'Have not been done'? 'Well, you'll have to come in from tomorrow.' We said 'We've just done 12 hours. We want to go home and go to bed, go to sleep. We've got bills to pay.' We were living weekly. So, they give us the run around 'Well, nothing we can do about it.' So, Dave Hallsworth said. 'I'll tell you what we can do about it. We ain't going back on the machines until you get a manager in here. We sat down in the canteen. That was the very first time we'd disobeyed management en masse because we were right.

Geoff: [00:23:56] How many people would have been on the shift?

Dave: [00:23:59] There'd be 60 or 70 lads, a full shift of crimpers, two floors of crimping which was the full length of a factory. And then half a floor of winding operatives but you would also have about a dozen shift servicemen which serviced the operatives. So, 60 or 70 lads and we all sat there and they sent out for this manager Kevin Maxfield. This would be two o'clock in the morning. So, they dragged this manager in. He was a nasty piece of work. Kevin Maxfield was an ex public schoolboy who thought he was James Bond. A real prig. He turned up and said 'Well I'm sorry but you are not having it.' So, Dave Hallsworth again said 'Well, what is the problem?' He said 'We've got no wage packets and Dave said to him 'I don't give a shit if you put them in toffee bags. We want us wages. Now get it sorted because nobody is leaving this place.' And we were all 'Yeah, we're not doing it, see.' Anyway, he turned round red-faced and he came back about half an hour later. He said 'I will guarantee that every one of you has your wages at seven o'clock in the morning before you leave. So, we all took him at his word. Sure enough, we all got paid on the way out. It was all in plastic bags but what management had actually done is sent out for two of the wage girls, got them in, put all our wages - they had the wages there - into poly bags so that we had us wages when we went out. That was the writing on the wall for two reasons. One, it showed everybody who could fight back and, two, management had identified Dave as the point.

Dave: [00:25:21] We had a few other little victories. Now then, we had a charge hand there called Jimmy Dean. Jimmy and I used to be good friends at one time, we used to play chess together, little story in with that. Jimmy got chargehand's job. You know, the jacket went on. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. He became an absolute shit. He hated Dave Hallsworth. Dave was far brighter than he was. Now then, how the strike came about was very, very simple. Jimmy Dean had decided he was going to emigrate to Australia. We all knew about it, I knew about it. He'd spoken to me. By this time, him and I had drifted apart considerably. How David  (Hallsworth) got sacked: David had two of these big CS12 machines. Now these would be spinning yarn from the base of the machine to the top of the machine running through something called a spinner, a very complicated thing. If so much as the temperature altered, you could lose a complete machine. All the yarn threads would break while the machine was running at a tremendous speed.  This meant much time was needed to stop each spindle individually and then re-tie the yarn. The spindle (bobbin) was no longer a ‘pure’ run with no breaks.  Every knot on it had to be recorded and this devalued the product.

Because we were the only factory in the whole of Europe that provided Pretty Polly with the yarn for their tights, it was critical that machines were kept running. So, you were on the machine all the time and the only time you went off the machine was when you went for your lunch break, two o'clock to quarter to three in the morning. David was a good worker. He kept all the ends running. One golden rule that all the militants in the factory had: we were the best time keepers, we were the best workers, we never give management the opening to come back to us. We stuck by that rule, we were very reasonable. If they wanted something doing and it was within the factory we would do it. We'd do overtime if they asked us to. It was when they started demanding what we considered to be unfair that we...

Anyway, it started off very simple. David would go down for his break, come back and, if you can imagine there's like 60 of these machines on the floor, every end on his machine would be broken. No other machine, none at all. So that told us it wasn't a temperature fluctuation, it was sabotage. This happened three or four times. The way that the system would work by then, we had got a closed shop and how the system worked was that David would get a verbal warning. Then, a couple of days later, the same thing would happen again, he would get another verbal warning. Then he'd get a written warning. And we started to say 'All right, we'll beat them on this, we'll put somebody on his machine, guarding it. That individual was chased off by the foreman and various threats were made and Daves's machine went down again. He was called in and it was said that he was no good at the job and they were dismissing him. So, they sacked him. David went out. The Asian lads were very upset about it. We had a mass meeting and we all walked out. And that was the beginning of the strike. It was simple.

I know for a fact that Jimmy Dean was the one that was breaking the ends of the machine. His brother-in-law was Cliff Antill, the miner I was just telling you about, my other mate. This is how we all knew each other. Cliff's wife was Jimmy Dean's sister, very close. She'd been told all sorts. Cliff was quite a handy lad so she didn't tell Cliff too much till many years afterwards. But it was Jimmy Dean's idea to sabotage the machine. He went to management with it and he said if I get caught, it's just me because I don't like him. He said 'And I'm going anyway so if you give me a verbal warning or a written warning, it's irrelevant. It doesn't come back on the management.'  It was Cliff that said that Jimmy got a 'pay off’ from ICI,  that the money that Jimmy got for starting a taxi business up in Australia when he got there came from ICI. He was paid.

What they didn't expect was a strike of the magnitude, although Jimmy Dean had been round. While the machine was being sabotaged, he said to the Asian lads and Zaman 'There's going to be a white man's strike. Don't get involved with it and management will look after you.' This is the sort of thing, I've told you before about what management was doing when the Indo-Pakistani war was on [1971]. They were putting newspaper cuttings and notices up on the notice board saying, for example, 'Five Indian tanks were knocked out today by Pakistani forces. Three aircraft were shot down. 72 Pakistani soldiers...' And it was driving a wedge between the Indian and the Pakistani lads. You could see it on the shop floor. During this time a lot of the Indian and Pakistani lads went back to their respective countries. These were ex-servicemen that had gone back to fight.

And that is when I told you about big Mian Khan. He got up on the stage in the canteen and made a point of insisting that the two foremen and all the charge hands on that night shift remain in the canteen with the rest of us while he spelled it out and warned management that if they didn't stop doing this...   They were then TOLD to pass the message  onto management in the morning.  Not asked but told to do it. And they did!

This was long before, so the militancy was there ... three years before the strike but this is what management were like in the factory. Absolute bastards the way they behaved. I don't know if I told you the tale about Cliff Binns, the manager. There's lots I've not told you. But going back to the strike then, I have a friend that comes every Wednesday night, John Wilkes, an arch Tory. So right wing he makes Adolf Hitler look like a communist but we are the best of pals and we've been the best of pals for 40 odd years. John was a friend during the strike and we've been friends ever since. We accommodate one another. John's job was a manager at Ordsall dole office. His forte was finding jobs for disabled people. That's what he did.

Anyway, coming away from that, one of the managers that we had at Intex yearns. To give you the idea of the mentality of how they believed that this was normal behaviour. The factory consisted of families, like most textile firms. Father, mother, two sons, daughters, brother in law. We were no different. We operated on that basis. Now, on the winding floor, which was the fourth floor, the other half of the floor was packing where all the women worked and it was a joy to work in winding during the day because the women were singing all day. There were of a lovely bunch of lasses you know. You could hear them singing above the noise and laughing.

This particular day Cliff Binns had come down onto the floor, looking for something, to see several of the areas where they should have been packing, the girls were missing. Considering there were like 70 girls that should be there, six missing was no big deal. And he said to the forelady 'Where are they?' She said 'They're in the toilet. They've gone to the loo.' 'What all six of them?' Cliff Binns did no more than march directly into the women's toilets and banged on all the toilet doors. 'Let's have you out!' It was a gift. I was on the winding floor at the time and we got everybody in the factory down into the canteen. We stopped everything immediately. I mean the husbands of these women were going to tear his head off. But we got everybody down in the canteen and demanded that Cliff Binns came down. He duly came down, very arrogant, and he said 'What's all this about?' Myself, I forget.... I think I think it might have been Johnny Charnley  the other one, certainly Bob Ryder and we said 'What do you think you're playing at, going into the women's toilets? Have you no respect? We made him get up on the stage because we said nobody's going back to work until you get there and you apologise to them women and you apologise to the families of them women. And you give an assurance that you will never do anything like it again. He was absolutely livid. But he stood there and he apologised. And that was war between me and him after that. It became a personal thing. Anyway, that was one of the little battles.

About six years later, after Intex Yarns had shut down, my mate John was at ICI, trying to get disabled people jobs  there. One of the perks of the job for John was wherever he went he was usually either taken out to lunch or taken to the boardroom for dinner. He said 'And I was in the boardroom, having a lovely meal, about 18 managers round the table, all pleasantly chatting away, and I've got this chap sat across from me, just talking to him and [John] said 'Have you always worked at ICI? He said 'No, I was in textiles for a long time.' John said 'Oh, where?' 'Place called Ashton under Lyne.' John said 'I know it well. What factory were you at? He said 'Intex Yarns.' John said. 'Really, you probably know a good friend of mine. 'Who's that?' John said 'Dave Rhodes.' He said 'That bastard!' The conversations round the table absolutely stopped while they looked at him. He said 'What's he doing these days?' John said 'Window cleaner now.' 'I hope he falls off his *** ladder.' That gives you the mentality of the management. That was normal to them to walk into women's toilets and demand that they go out. Not send a chargehand in. They thought they could do anything they wanted.

Dave: [3340161:24:40] To the strike itself. Yeah, we all downed tools and came out. It was the shift workers that came out. The fitters only worked days. The packing department, downstairs cleaning bobbies, they worked days so you'd got two different workforces. The workforce that were actually running the machines, they were the shift workers and it was the ones that were running the machines that came out. Now it wasn't 100 percent because there were still those that, for their own reasons, went in. But en masse the factory almost shut. Management, being management, kept people going in. I sent you one [email] this morning about my mum. My mum was slowly poisoning management. While she was in there, she was feeding us all sorts of snippets of information. She was a cook in the canteen, and all the lads on the picket line out of respect for me would not only cease shouting “Scab” at the top of their voices but would actually say to her “Morning Lizzie how is it going in there”. She had fed most of them and they knew her quite well. Me being on strike put her in a difficult position but she fought our corner on the inside and put funny things in the managers cooked meals. They had a room set aside with linen and the table set every day, polished glasses and jugs of water etc. They were waited on, if only they knew!!!! It is what i call little victories.

The strike itself was incredibly violent. Elsie had alluded to the National Front. They were okay from their perspective as long as they could do nothing. They were never a serious threat. They never grew in numbers from above six. Ronnie Pike was the big mouth. They were a tiny, tiny clique. They'd come round and pin a Union Jack up and NF on the toilet walls. It was irritating. But they were warned off and as soon as they saw the belligerence of the Asians they backed off at a rapid rate of knots. Elsie thought that during the strike there was one particular lad, a Scottish lad, I can't remember his name, but he was very, very badly beaten and his face had been slashed with a cheese grater, both cheeks. He was an absolute mess. And everybody thought... he did nothing to tell us that it wasn't the National Front or it wasn't an anti-strike group. We knew there were groups on the periphery at the time. Do you know yourself Special Branch were involved in it? And everybody thought...We didn't realise at the time that this guy was heavily in debt... and because he was on strike his wages were stopped.  This guy had been attacked by thugs that wanted money often. They were loan sharks. It was nothing more.

 We got a tiny amount of strike pay, two or three pounds, depending on personal circumstances.  A lot of Asian lads and a few white lads would not take it as they had family members working.   Not a single penny from the NUDBTW, they were on the management's side, all gifts were from fellow trade unionists, including building site workers at Pochins and from students.

Dave: [3340161:26:24] Elsie says there was a meeting and everybody went back. What actually did happen: the strike was coming up to Christmas. It actually lasted 13 weeks in total. As it came out to Christmas, a lot of the English lads, the Christian lads if you like, started drifting back. Christmas didn't have the same impact for the Muslim lads or the Hindu lads. What I found personally was that always the lads would come up and say 'I'm sorry Dave.' Or 'I'm sorry Bob. We've got to go back in. I've no more money. My wife is on my back.' We said 'Fine, you've done your best.' And we never held it against them. That stood us in good stead later on. Because they had done their best. We all have a breaking point and we got through Christmas and there was me Bob Ryder, Johnny Charnley, Dennis Bridge, Cliff Antill, Lawrence Worrell - he's in one of the pictures. Lawrence or Laurie as we knew him. There were six of us left and w had meeting outside the gates on the Monday morning and we said 'What we doing? Are we jackin' in? Or are we walking?' So, we said 'Walk in' and we went in and soon as we started going up towards security, oh the panic! 'Jesus what are they up to now?' They really did. So, security stood in front of us 'What do you want?' We said 'Get management. We want to talk to the management now.' 'What's it about?' 'Nowt to do with you.' They didn't come out on strike, so they were nonentities. So, these two managers came down. One 'Jones the fibre' -that was the nickname Dave gave to him. He came down and he said 'What's this about?' We said 'We're coming back into work tomorrow. The strike's over.' He just looked baffled and said 'Right’.  What could they do to us?

I think all of us were bloody minded. And what could they do to us? They could only turn round and say 'Sod off. You're not coming in.' So anyway, we went back into work but we'd really had our cards marked. The foremen and charge hands had been told that anything we did, anything at all, verbal written warnings. They wanted us out. As I said, we were the best time keepers, the best workers they could never pin us down. Plus we knew what the rules were now. You didn't leave your machine unguarded. Somebody else looked after it for you. So, we started then doing what we always did. The breaktime would be two o'clock while quarter to three and all the lads will set off from the machines. You'd get all your ends running, everything was all right. At five to two you'd set off. Every single one of us who'd just come in was stopped 'Where you going Rhodes? 'I'm going down for my break.' 'Not two o'clock yet.' And I'd say ' Fine', turn round, go back to machine. Dead on two o'clock, I could go down from my break. It took you five, ten minutes to get down there. They did it with all of us so we had a meeting 'How can we deal with this?' Well, we dealt with it. I'm not going to put it on tape how we dealt with it but it cost management a lot of money. What I will say - the guy's dead now - Cliff Antill pulled a blinder after one particular night where these foremen and chargehands had been particularly nasty. Cliff, at 2 o'clock whilst the foreman was watching me, sidled off, went up top end of the factory. Cliff was built like a tank. And the next minute everything shut down. All the lights went, All the machines went. Everything was pitch black. So, nobody knows who's done what. Cliff had gone down to the buzz bars at the electrical points downstairs and switched everything off. There were big clamps, he just shut them down. And it must have cost them forty grand because all the ends dropped on the machines, everything stopped and there was mayhem, 'Who's done that?' Nobody was admitting to it. One of the foremen said 'It were you Rhodes.' And I said to Dave Marriott 'Where were I when that went down?' They were watching the wrong people.   Marriott was my foreman, a real shit, a spineless bastard who hid behind his green foreman’s jacket.  He would tell me, out of the earshot of the other lads, that my kids were ‘mongs’ and that someone was shagging my missus while I was on nights and she was being a slut having it all.  The idea was I would lose control and deck him.  Not only would I be sacked but, without doubt, the police would have been involved.  Dennis Bridge and myself totally disarmed the guy and he came over to our side.  We did something he never expected in a million years, we showed him compassion and kindness when he was at a very low ebb instead of kicking him when he was down.  More than one way to skin a cat!!!

Oh, we did all sorts to them. Irritating things that used to irritate management. Do you remember the flag the Queen's Award to Industry? We turned up one day and they'd got this flying from the factory mast on the top of the factory and we said 'What's that for?' 'It's an excellence record for no injuries.' We said 'you're bleeding joking.' There were fitters losing fingers and all sorts. So, Cliff said to me one night 'Don't go down in your break tonight Dave.' So, I said 'Why not?' A clever lad Cliff. He said 'Come with me.' At two o'clock on the Sunday night, as we were off on the Monday, we went through the factory at breaktime instead of going to break, went up through the big cooling tower on the top of the factory which was a big tower with a flag pole on and an iron railing round it. The roof of the factory was flat with a fire escape all the way down. So, we climbed up on the inside of the tower. Cliff gets to the top. There's a wooden hatch on top. We get up and get onto it. The first thing that Cliff did was pull out this big hammer and half a dozen six inch nails and nailed it shut. I said it 'What you done that for?' He said 'We're all right. I've got my rope.' 'What do you mean your rope?' It was the height of this house this tower. He said 'We'll be all right, Dave.' Like I said, he was an old miner. He wrapped the rope round this balustrade that went round it, dropped it over the side. We then pulled the flag down -I've still got it upstairs in the loft, this huge sheet of red cloth because we used to have samples - pulled the huge red flag up and then nailed it to the flagpole. Cliff said 'Right, come on.' He climbed over the side, abseiled down this rope to the bottom. I thought 'Well, if he's gone down, he's heavier than me, he's all right.' I went down. He just went [tugging motion], pulled it. He knew exactly how to do it. He's been down pit. He puts a rope round himself, went down the fire escape. We never said anything to the lads. Come seven o'clock in the morning, it's a grey day like this. Seven o'clock in the morning we're all coming out. Cliff said 'Hang on a minute, before you go, just have a look up there.' A howl of laughter. There was a huge red flag flying over Intex Yarns, ready for management when they came in in the morning. It sounds daft but it was our way of sticking two fingers up at them. 'No matter what you do, we will somehow get past you.'

Geoff: [3340161:31:18] It is a way of teaching them respect.

Dave: [3340161:31:18] No respect or regard for the workforce. None at all. I mean the wages themselves, like I said in the email to you, I did four twelve hour shifts, 48 hours and I came out with 48 pounds. I kid you not. It was like £48 17s. In fact, when the factory closed down, we all want for a pint at the little club at the end of the street and the guy behind the bar was saying 'You lot are sick now, them wages you won't be getting. We said 'What you on about?' He just could not believe the wages that we were paid when we told him. He thought we were on over a hundred quid a week.

Dave: [3340161:31:46] Going back to the strike. The one thing about the Asian lads - you were asking about were there ex-servicemen. The discipline with the Asians came from respect for each other. It was this traditional family respect that they had and I saw it time after time. The elders were respected. I still speak a little bit of Urdu. You learned it, you called Zaman 'Chacha', Uncle, in Urdu because that's what they all called him. They'd go up to him and say 'Excuse me Chacha' even though he wasn't their uncle It was this respect thing that they all had for each other. I learned a lot from the Asians. I knew nothing. Like I said, I'd come out of a three-year military background. I'd been in Aden in [19]67. It was fighting against Muslims. I was learning but I was like a sponge. I always have been. I'll absorb everything. These guys taught me. They were saying about borrowing money and I said 'How would you manage to buy all these shops?' He said 'Profit from another human being for us is abhorrent. He said if you come to me as my brother and say 'Abdul, can you lend me five thousand pounds?' 'What do you want it for?' 'I want to open a shop.' Or 'I need a new car to start a taxi business.' He said 'I will lend it you... You are duty bound to pay me back as soon as you can. But not five thousand five hundred, it's the five thousand pound that I lent you...' But, by the same rule, if I come to you and ask for help, you are duty bound to help me. He said 'We're all like that.' And what I loved about the Muslims, the Asians there was the way they treated their elders. You didn't get old people jammed into these homes. They were part of the family and they remained a part of the family until they took their last breath...' We have a lot to learn. It's daft that we as 'white, western civilization' have nothing to learn. Of course, we do. It's all about integrity and you look at these people and even in a little mud hut in a village somewhere they've got more integrity than a lot of people that live on this street.

Dave: [3340161:33:39] ... The one thing that I learned about the Asians then, they were grafters. They came here to work and they worked. You'd see the same faces again and again. They do a 12 hour shift and one of the habits that management had at Intex Yarns, or the foremen'd have, in order to keep these machines running all the time, was they didn't know when they would need cover, somebody hadn't turned up, until that very morning or that very night. Many a time you'd get an Asian lad, he would go off at 10 o'clock at night. And you'd see him back in at quarter to 12. He's gone home, had a wash. Somebody had phoned him 'Can you come back in?' And they'd be back in and do another 10 or 11 hours.

Dave: [3340161:34:17] ... Dave could be very abrasive.... One of Dave's problems was if you were not totally au fait with what he was trying to do, he would discount you. His favorite was 'They're a weak bastard.'... He was impatient with people that didn't grasp his concepts as quick as what he thought they should. And it was like me. What Dave was talking about was totally alien and I was simply bloody minded. I've always been anti-authoritarian. It is instinctive in me. I'm convinced this is genetic. My old fella buggered off when I was seven year old and I never got in contact with him again until I was well into my thirties and we started talking. I've never lost the left wing politics as Jane will tell you, I'm getting worse the more I see on there [points to TV]. And when I was talking to my old man I knew nothing about him. He was an absolute bastard anyway. But I knew nothing about him but I had my eyes opened because we were talking one day about something and he said 'Oh, I were reading Karl Marx when I was seventeen.' I said 'You were?' 'Yeah, he said 'I used to go to Ashton Library and get leftwing books out. He was a member of the Labour Party but a left-winger... I do think it's genetic. I'd love to go through the family. Great grandfather was killed in 1918 and in the newspaper it said he was well known in Ashton town. Well how? I've got something here that he was something to do with trade unionism.

Geoff: [3340161:35:34] Can you say something about Cliff  Antill?

Dave: [3340161:35:34] Cliff, as I said, was an ex coal miner spent most of his life working at Snipe pit. He wasn't what I would call political. He had a strong sense of what was right and wrong and he knew when management were treating us badly. Cliff would point things out. Incredible guy insofar as he would see things that I wouldn't. I was naive at the time. He would plant a seed and let me work it out for myself rather than trying to tell me. The idea was that I would get the answer from my own experience rather from his experience. He was an excellent mentor.

Dave: [3340161:36:11] ... The other thing that all miners learned and I think this is where Cliff came across very, very strongly was that you looked one another. It was essential that you looked after one another and Cliff imbued that into me.

 As I said, when we went back into the factory after the strike, Cliff came in with us. This foreman made my life a misery, an absolute misery or attempted to, let's put it that way. I couldn't do anything. On this particular day he'd been giving me some grief. The foreman had a little office, right at the end of the factory floor, which was about 25/30 feet from where I was working and he would sit in this office with glass windows all round, just peering at me. This particular day he’d said something like and I were really angry and I was in a mood to punch his lights out and Cliff said to me 'What's up?' And I said 'He's said such and such a thing.' They'd make snide remarks about your family to get a response from you. Nasty stuff, you know, about your wife or your kids or something, 'Your kids are thick' goading you to punch them. You're out the door you see. Result. So, Cliff did no more. We used to have what were called bobbins and they'd be about 18 inches long. And they were hollow but made of steel and would have a plastic sheath over the top of them that the yarn was wound round and, after the yarn had been taken off, these would be dropped into a large tub at the end of the machine and I watched Cliff just look at David Marriott, reach into a bin, pick one of these steel tubes up, walk down right in front of his office window, grasp it in both hands, put it on the top of his head and bent it in half. And with utter contempt he just threw it on the floor, looked at David Marriott, turned round and walked off. I got no trouble after that. The message was absolutely clear. You know you are a little man, you carry on like this and you'll end up in hospital. That were my mate, I've told Jane. She knew nothing of this. I've always loved Cliff. He were like a big brother to me. He kept an allotment. Typical miner. Behind St. John's where he kept geese, grew all sorts. He made his own long bows and used to say to me, show me a man that hasn't got a hobby and I will show you a boring bastard. He was very blunt like that. He would make long bows and make his own arrows and they were beautiful plus they were built in order to fire them. Oh incredible. He collected records, had tropical fish. He read books, played darts for the local pub. He was into everything. I learned a lot from him, a hell of a lot, just by being around him you know. We went to his funeral. I went to pay my respects.

Geoff: [3340161:38:17] My view is that kind of working class existence based on a pit or a mill is something which was incredibly strong and it has disappeared very quickly. I don't know how much is made in Ashton but I ask people to name one thing is made in Manchester these days and people struggle. This thing about workers looking after each other. It's hard to imagine in an office. I can see how a group of nurses on a ward under real pressure might look after each other. I'm not saying it has disappeared. For men it's a problem really. You don't have that sort of capacity to lean on others and support others at the same time.

Dave: [3340161:38:36] It's like I said right at the beginning, and I mean this, I am eternally grateful to the management at Intex Yarns. They taught me my politics. They taught it, cause and effect. They were the cause. My politics are the effect.

Geoff: [3340161:38:48] I sent you those pictures from Socialist Worker of the occupation of the union headquarters in Bradford.

Dave: [3340161:38:48] Superb. Do you want to know the story? Several of us, we were on the branch, we used to hold meetings in the Halfway House and several of us sat down and said 'Righto, we're sick of these lousy wages and these secret deals that our union were making with management over pay rises.' So, we said put forward a motion that all union officials are paid the average wage of the workers they represent. They'd have been on pennies. It's like Cliff had said about the union officials, living in a posh house next door to the manager of the factory. Our idea was 'Let's alter that. You'd be fighting for your own wages as well as ours if you were on the same money as us.' And, within a week, the union official - I can see his face, I can't remember his name

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Include the description of Brian Leech  a slime ball as in Dave's letter

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- came into the factory and told management he wanted to see us. So, we all went down and he said 'There you are.' and he gave us a letter each. The letter said 'You have been expelled from the Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers.' No reason was given, just 'anti-union activities.' At this stage we were all Socialist Worker members. Anyway, you know what it's like with Socialist Worker behind us, some very, very clever people work for it. The inference was, by us being kicked out of the union, and it being a closed shop, we were fair game for management. They could've turned round and said 'You're out, you're sacked.' And what could we have done about it? I mean it was a farce. That told everybody that management and the union were in cahoots. Somebody in Socialist Worker fixed us up with this barrister on Deansgate. So, we all trooped down to see him, took the union rulebook with us and explained. And I remember what this chap did. He just looked at the union rulebook and threw it across the room into a bin. We were dumbfounded. We were expecting words of wisdom off this guy. He said 'That's where this belongs.' And he said something I've never forgot. I've a good memory for things like this. He said 'There are rules in that which are completely illegal. Let me simplify it for you. No one, no group, no company has a right to make a law that is above the law of the land. And that's exactly what they have done. They've set themselves up to be judge and jury and everything else. So, he said 'Leave it with us.' And we heard very little from him. Apparently, it went to the Court of Justice in London or somewhere. The next thing we knew - it made us laugh - management didn't dare touch us because we'd let it be known that this was in the hands of the legal people now, so management backed right off and thought 'Not touching this.' We got a letter to go down and see this chap. We Went down and he said 'Well lads, you've won.' We said 'What do mean we've won?' He said 'You've been reinstated into the union. No conditions, nothing. It's all been put back in. It's all sorted and, by the way, you don't owe us any money.' We'd never thought about money. We just knew that Socialist Worker lads had got this like-minded barrister and, as it turned out, we'd been awarded fifteen thousand pound each, five of us, in damages. And, he said, your bill actually comes to a little bit more than that but I'll waive that. So, we came away. We weren't bothered. Not in the least. The union had been given a kicking which backed them off. That was the first start. It was during the strike that the union offices were occupied but that this is again to reinforce how bent our union was. It was decided that during the strike - it was only the Asians that actually came up with it, the head office was in Bradford. Denis was one of the architects of it. Brilliant lad, been a copper. He knew the law, what we could do, what you couldn't do. But during the period of the occupation we had not yet been reinstated into the union. So, the five of us could not take part in occupying the union headquarters. We went in, in 'mufti', and it was a fantastic thing. The Asian lads that did it with half a dozen white lads, walked into the offices and just said to the girls on the front desk 'Get your handbags, love.' 'What?' You're going home. Full pay, you're out', walked upstairs, said to all the union officials up there. And there was one union official that stood by them, a guy called Claude Lavender. He was an ex-coal miner and he was a socialist and he fought our corner. They expelled him as well! But they threw all the union officials out, very gently but made sure they all went out of the offices, then barricaded the front door and they said 'We're occupying the office.' 'You can't do that.' 'We can. Our money pays for this. We are union members.' Anyway, after it had been going on for about a week or two, the Asian community in Bradford, because you know yourself the Asians have family all over. And the food that was coming in was fabulous. It was absolutely fabulous. We only went up for one night, just to see for ourselves what were happening. And we were fed like kings. But that was an absolute classic. The only way they got the Asian lads out... The police came up with that they had information that a bomb had been planted. They said you're going to have to leave the building and union officials scurried back in and locked all the doors and that was it. It was demonstrating quite clearly that the whole thing operated as one: management, union, police. It was the establishment against the workers.

Dave: [3340161:42:30] Something that we were talking about before when the Plug Riots took place round here, when people came out - we've got a friend called Joan, she's a Methodist, and socialism sprang from Methodism ... It was a socialist organisation. And we were talking about this the other day. When you were saying that the people came out of the factories, the problem that we have now we have succumbed to the way things are wrong by management. We must have people above us, this union official who then has somebody above them and then there's the executive and as each one gets higher, he must be paid more because he has more responsibility. When the Plug Riots took place, there was none of this. So, there was no chance of the management buying them off. Once they started climbing the greasy pole they were open to bribery. This is what happened to the Labour Party politicians, something I alluded to before when we were talking about this prat from Stalybridge.

Dave: [3340161:43:17] I've said for years, as the newspapers have been saying 'All the left have been infiltrating the Labour Party', the right has been infiltrating the Labour Party for the past 40 years.  The right in the Parliamentary Labour Party are in reality Pale Pink Tories, career politicians with no interest in bettering the conditions of the working class. Blair is the classic example.  The proof is there for anybody. Sit down and say 'Righto, have a look at the MPs. What do they do when they leave office?' They go on the board of North West Water etc. They've done their job as far as the establishment goes.

Geoff: [3340161:43:37] You used the word 'university' talking to John Pearson 'Two months on strike was like going to university.' How would you explain that to a young person now?

Dave: [3340161:43:38] The learning curve was incredibly fast. Every day you learn something else. You learn things about yourself that you never knew you, your capacity to understand. I always thought that politics was beyond me. Politics was for politicians. And no, it isn't. Jane's has had exactly the same learning curve as I had. Because, when we got together, Jane understood nothing about politics or she said she didn't. My argument is this. Everybody who lives, breathes politics daily. They just don't see it as politics. They don't see it. The very fact that you're struggling to have an existence, making a wage, getting through life, is politics. You are fighting against the conditions that you're living under. ... In its simplest terms, it's all about what is right and what is wrong. And Jane understands this perfectly clearly. She'll look at something on television and she is way ahead of me sometimes. You cannot read it from a book. Conditions dictate thought.

Dave: [3340161:45:27] There's something I learnt again off Cliff, the little things he used to throw at me. He used to say 'What have you got?' I'd say 'What do you mean - what have I got?' He said 'To sell.' 'I don't know what you mean, Cliff.' He said 'That guy over there wants to pay you a wage, what you're selling him is them.' [Shows hands] Again I say 'I don't understand Cliff.' He said 'There are two things here. He wants you to work 24 hours a day for nothing. That's the bottom line. You want to work one hour a day for a thousand pounds. You meet somewhere in the middle.' And it was that little lesson. He said 'Where you meet in the middle depends on how much you're willing to give him and how much he's going to demand off you. Simple and this is where it all comes about. If you're not happy with what he's giving you, you stop working for him. You either get another job or you down tools. It was simplicity, the absolute simplicity. My claim to fame is stuffing the head man at ICI on work study, absolute claim to fame, a true story. I refused to let work study come onto winding. They wanted to study it all. I want none of it. My attitude is I'm not a machine. I'm a human being. I have vagaries sometimes I'm poorly, sometimes I can work. They got this guy in, very imposing chap from ICI, sent for me down in the offices. I remember the guy was sat there, woolen worsted three piece suit, and he had a watch and chain, very, very nice man. He said 'Hullo David, I'm such and such a body from ICI. I understand that you don't want to have any truck with work study.' I said 'No.' 'Why not?' Very blunt, I said 'It's crap.' So, he said 'It's not crap, it's a scientific process. So, I said 'It's crap.' So, he said 'No, we will work things out.' He were very eloquent, went through it. 'We will time the machine and how many of these you can do.' I said 'I don't care. It's bobbins and I can prove it's bobbins.' And he said 'Really?' I said 'Yeah. You and I can walk down Stamford Street now, today. You take one side of Stamford Street and I'll take the other side of Stamford Street. And every bloke we bump into we'll measure him up for a suit. We'll get all these measurements. And then we'll add them and divide them by the number of people that we've measured. I said and then we will go into Burton's at the top of Stamford Street and produce twenty or thirty suits and it won't fit one of them. So, he said 'Your point is...? I said 'What you're trying to do to make that suit fit all of us.' I said 'I wear a suit that fits my measurements, not the bloke working next to me or the bloke further down. That's why work study is crap. I work to my speed, he works to his speed. 'It's been nice to know you David.' And we never had work study. We were the only department in Intex that never had work study. Just said 'You're not coming in.' .... Once you've sold everything you have nothing to bargain with.' I said to him 'You're not measuring me, you're measuring the machine.' The machine runs at a certain speed. It doesn't need to go to the toilet, it doesn't need a drink, doesn't need a brew, a sandwich or anything like that.

Dave: [3340161:47:20] ...You do get a reaction as you saw at Intex Yarns. You get a reaction. You treat people badly and think that you can treat them that way and they will accept it. History teaches us we kick over the traces every now and again and, every now and again, we get us own back. All right, it might be a little thing like Intex Yarns but then it's a big thing like 1917 in Russia.

Geoff: [3340161:47:34] Yes, you do have the revolution and we still need that revolution. I think the importance of Intex is that it was the first significant strike which combines the black workers and the white workers in a factory where there is a demonstrable record of the employer trying to use every trick to play every group off against each other.

Dave: [3340161:47:35] The one word that I would use against the management at Intex Yarns for all the time I worked there, they were destructive. They had the potential - because I can see the other side of the coin - they had the potential at Intex Yarns to outproduce any other factory. If they had paid decent wages and looked after the workforce the classic in this area was ICI and Patrios that made cigarettes. It was a known fact that to get a job at either one of those places, somebody had to die because the management was so forward thinking, so enlightened that they paid good wages, had sick pay, bonus schemes, social clubs. This sort of thing. But then you get the greedy sod at the top says 'Hang on a minute, that's taken a tenth of my profit. I want that tenth as numbers in a bank account, doing nothing. It is this mentality. You get the best out of people by kindness, by being polite.

Geoff: [3340161:48:16] Respect.

Dave: [3340161:48:16] Fair is another one.

Geoff: [3340161:48:16] I'd struggle to find an employer that fits that description.

Dave: [3340161:48:16] There's none.

Geoff: [3340161:48:16] There are some differences, some are better than others, there's not a lot in it.

Dave: [3340161:48:19] The problem is they are all profit driven.

Geoff: [3340161:48:20] That's the system.

Dave: [3340161:48:21] It's exactly as Cliff pointed out to me. The two things, what he wants and what you want, are diametrically opposed. He wants exactly the opposite to what you want. There's no meeting in the middle.

Postscript

Dave: Finally, Intex yarns on the last day of the factory after we had all been given our redundancies. We had to go into the factory to be interviewed by folk from the Job Centre and to receive our final pay. B shift en masse trooped in and up to the fourth floor where arrangements had been made to sort us out on a conveyor type basis. As each lad had his interview and got his final pay he was supposed to leave. The lads just hung about talking to each other and waiting for their mates to be processed. It was at this stage that John Jones, the senior manager (Jones the fibre) called me to one side. Very slyly he said to me, ‘You’, emphasising the ‘You’,  ‘have caused us a lot of problems and the factory is now closing, so what are you going to do now?’

I simply answered ‘Get another job!’  He looked at me and said the following, I have never forgot it. He said ‘I am on the Manchester Board of Trade or Commerce and I have an enormous amount of influence and I shall make certain that no one in the Manchester area will ever give you a job.’ My reply gave him the blue shits. I just said to him, ‘That’s fine, we haven’t left the factory yet and we may just occupy it now.’ His face was a picture and within minutes Security were all over the place ushering the lads out into the car park.  Even in the last hours we managed to terrify them.

Incidentally i had work within two days, did it for a couple of months with a small firm as a graphic artist but eventually set up as a one man band window cleaning and did that for 30 years. So I can claim to be among those like Ricky Tomlinson who were ‘Blacklisted’ but I even managed to stuff them on that one as well.

Would I do what we did at Intex yarns again? In a heartbeat.

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