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.