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