Family Britain, 1951-1957 (103 page)

On Saturday, 28 July, the American writer (and chronicler of the Soviet revolution) Edmund Wilson docked at Liverpool. ‘Arriving in England is always relaxing,’ he reflected. ‘In spite of the developments since the last war, the social system is still largely taken for granted, and it is soothing for an American to arrive in a place where everybody accepts his function, along with his social status, and everything operates smoothly – officers on the boat, officials at the customs, conductor on the train, taxi drivers . . .’ Not far from Liverpool, at Old Trafford, England were playing Australia with the series still poised. ‘A brighter morning and we chanced a day at Westcliff, taking the portable wireless for the Test Match,’ noted Judy Haines on the final day, Tuesday the 31st. ‘Thought the weather might make the result a draw, but it stayed bright and we won the match! [  John Arlott commentating at the last] and therefore retained the Ashes.’ Remarkably, the Surrey and England off-spinner Jim Laker had taken a world-record 19 wickets. ‘Much jubilation by the men in this office who can talk about nothing else,’ recorded Florence Turtle the same day. ‘I said it was as bad as when the General Election was on. They said “Surely you realise a test match is far more important.” I am afraid many of the English people do think that way!’ That evening, Laker made his non-motorway back to London, stopping off at a pub in Lichfield for a beer and sandwich. Because everyone was watching the television, showing highlights of the day’s play, no one recognised him.6

‘At Longbridge on the outskirts of Birmingham the bus passed one of the motor factories where a big strike started today,’ recorded Henry St John on Monday, 23 July 1956, eight days before Laker’s triumph, as he travelled from Great Malvern during a touring holiday. ‘A lot of men were hanging about (12.25 pm), and some 9 or 10 police, but lights blazed in the building although I saw no one actually working.’ A big strike was indeed starting at the Austin plant (part of the British Motor Corporation), and it came at a time when the trade unions were ever more continuously – and controversially – centre-stage.

This new phase had begun the previous autumn, fuelled by inflation running at an unacceptable 3.5 per cent a year and wage increases at 4.5 per cent. First the British Employers’ Confederation, then the Federation of British Industries (precursor of the CBI), called on the government to get the unions to exercise wage restraint. The unions themselves were the subject in early 1956 of a lengthy
Sunday Times
‘exposure’ of restrictive practices, while Macmillan’s credit squeeze in February reinforced middle-class suspicions that they were paying an unfairly heavy price for the irresponsible behaviour of organised labour. Eventually, in March, the government produced its White Paper entitled
The Economic Implication of Full Employment
– ‘an undistinguished document, full of platitudes and generalisations’, recalled the leading industrial correspondent Geoffrey Goodman of a paper that steered clear of seeking to interfere with the well-established system of free collective bargaining, but did implicitly accept that, as wage claims continued to spiral, the free-market approach could no longer guarantee full employment. The political temperature continued to rise. ‘The proletarian peril is back with us again,’ noted Tom Burns in early April in the
New Statesman
, citing a recent
Punch
cartoon about how the working class appeared through middle-class eyes: ‘Irrational, hostile, nihilistic, getting more and doing less, making each wage increase the preface to a wage demand, refusing to accept the need for higher production, breaking agreements, flouting the law, rejecting elected leaders, enjoying the benefits of full employment and housing subsidies and health services, and threatening the economic system from which the benefits derive.’ The same month, on the other side of the fence, the announcement by Standard Motors in Coventry of large-scale redundancies as a result of automation in its tractor factory not only provoked a lengthy strike, but heightened employee anxieties generally, with ‘automation’ rapidly becoming a bogey word.

At a lunch hosted by Macmillan on 3 May, Lady Violet Bonham Carter sat next to the Treasury’s Sir Leslie Rowan, and they agreed that the ‘real seat of power’ had passed from Parliament to the trade unions, with Rowan ‘full of apprehension about the industrial future’. Eden on the 9th personally urged the union leaders to tone down their wage claims, but that evening Woodrow Wyatt (a Labour MP) exposed on
Panorama
the undue influence being exercised by the Communist minority that dominated the Electrical Trades Union, in turn provoking claims of malicious interference in union affairs. ‘Well, I feel that this is not only a trades union matter but it is a matter of common political or national interest,’ commented Lady Isobel Barnett (of
What’s My Line?
fame) on the next
Any Questions?
. ‘Call the House of Commons out and I don’t really think we’d notice it for quite a long time,’ Leicester’s former Mayoress added to laughter, ‘call the AEU [Amalgamated Engineering Union] out, in even only one section, and at once redundancy becomes obvious in other industries, people are thrown out of work in an ever-increasing spiral, and the consumer, which is you and I, is affected vitally where it hurts most.’ On the 25th, Macmillan made a major speech at Newcastle, in effect blaming the unions for inflation and calling on them to behave more responsibly – a speech altogether more measured in tone than the rhetoric of the People’s League for the Defence of Freedom, a spiky pressure group formed in June that had the unions squarely in its sights and for a time seriously worried Tory high command about its potential for splitting the right-wing middle-class vote.7

It was on this thoroughly combustible scene that Frank Cousins now made his presence felt. ‘His commanding physique added to the power of his forceful argument, augmenting an unusual arrogance of manner and style that sometimes made him appear more angry and formidable than he intended,’ wrote Goodman (his largely admiring biographer) about his habitual aggression as a rising trade-union official. ‘The belligerence was also a reflection of his boundless conviction that
he
was correct, even where he acknowledged that there were, perhaps, some merits in an opposing view.’ The union was the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Britain’s biggest, and the left-wing, 51-year-old Cousins (from a Yorkshire mining background) became its General Secretary in May 1956, after the early death of Arthur Deakin’s successor. ‘There must be no dubiety as to where we stand as a union,’ Cousins had recently written in the T&G’s magazine. ‘While prices rise wages must rise with them. In other words, wage increases that result from rising output are the workers’ share of the extra wealth they are helping to create.’ In short: ‘We are not prepared that our members should stand still whilst the Government continually hand out largesse to those who are more favourably placed.’ Unsurprisingly, the new General Secretary gave a dusty response to Macmillan’s Newcastle démarche. ‘We are not very impressed by his telling us that if there are no wage increases for twelve months everything will be all right,’ he told a union rally next day in Coventry, while soon afterwards, reporting to his executive on the economic situation, he observed that ‘hardly a word is directed towards the employing interests and the higher income groups except the customary half-hearted appeal’, so that ‘once again, apparently, it is the workers who are to stand still while the cost of living continues to rise’. It was a long time since a major union leader had spoken, publicly and personally, in such uncompromisingly strident tones – a cause of consternation to the TUC hierarchy as much as to Tory ministers (with Iain Macleod by now at the Ministry of Labour) and to the middle class at large.

Then came the BMC strike, as witnessed through a bus window by St John. Its cause was the shock announcement in late June that the company was sacking, with immediate effect, 6,000 out of a total workforce of 55,000, with the rest to switch to a three- or four-day working week. Everyone knew that demand for motor cars was in a temporary slough, but this was still completely out of the blue – without warning, without consultation and almost certainly the direct work of the autocratic, bullying chairman, Leonard Lord. ‘Of course, one has great sympathy for the workers,’ privately reflected Macmillan at the start of July, while Macleod in the Commons carefully distanced himself from the BMC management. Half the redundancies were at Longbridge, whose leading shop steward, Dick Etheridge, scribbled some speaking notes before a meeting on the 7th of Birmingham shop stewards in the motor-car and ancillary industries:

Short time started early JAN

Since then have met management several times who state redundancy never being discussed

TYPICAL LORD CONDUCT

NUMBER SACKED TOO GREAT

HUMAN TRAGEDIES ARISING

Eventually, in a decision involving 15 unions, but with Cousins to the fore, strike action was called for the 23rd. Results were mixed. Almost half the workforce went on working – involving some roughhouse scenes at Longbridge – but enough disruption was caused for Macleod to get talks started by the end of the month, in due course leading to a full resumption of work on 13 August.

The press, while critical of Lord, was generally unsympathetic to the unions. ‘This strike was not only ill-conceived, it was ill-timed,’ wrote Fyfe Robertson in
Picture Post
at the start of August, and he was particularly critical of Cousins, who had taken the T&G ‘into the first big official strike since the war, only to find that a showdown designed to tighten trade union solidarity has dealt it a grave blow’. Or, as he put it with apparent glee, ‘Is Frank Cousins’ face red!’ In fact, the unions did wrest two significant, unprecedented concessions out of BMC: compensation (though not very much) for the dismissed workers and, crucially, a commitment to consult the unions prior to any further redundancies. ‘The thing was that it got our toe in the door over redundancy,’ recalled Les Gurl (the equivalent at Morris Motors in Cowley of Etheridge at Austin in Longbridge) with satisfaction in the 1970s. But at the time, he was so disenchanted by the lack of rank-and-file support for the strike (particularly marked at Cowley) that he turned in his shop steward’s card and told his ‘shop’ that he did not want to represent them any more, before then changing his mind. As for the motor industry more generally, the strike’s legacy was one of deep, mutual mistrust between employers and employees – a legacy especially damaging at a time when the competition from foreign car manufacturers was becoming increasingly keen, not least in the lucrative European market.8 Their way, based largely on co-operation, was not on the whole the British way.

What, the Tory government continued to ponder, was to be done about the unions? ‘Legislation to make all strikes illegal unless preceded by a secret ballot would be practically impossible to enforce,’ Eden privately conceded shortly after the BMC strike. ‘You could not fine or imprison large numbers of workers for coming out on strike without having voted to do so.’ Macleod agreed, though addressing the party conference in October he gave a different reason why he ruled this out: ‘The idea, of course, is that the workers are less militant than their leaders. All I can tell you, speaking frankly, is that this is not my experience, nor is it the experience of any Minister of Labour.’ And he added that this view had been the Churchill/Monckton one, so that ‘if I am wrong I am in good company’. Arguably, though, it was no longer such a surefire assumption that the rank-and-file was to the left of the leadership – and that, specifically, the advent of Cousins was changing the equation. When the TUC gathered at Brighton in early September, he made a belligerent speech, pouring scorn on Macmillan’s offer to come to Brighton to explain government policy (‘What does he think it is – a film festival?’) and uttered a sentiment that was not quickly forgotten: ‘In a period of freedom for all we are part of the all.’ It was a speech that alarmed Crossman – ‘Mr Cousins is a pretty rough customer and pretty dangerous’ – while Macmillan reflected that in electoral terms ‘this outburst will frighten and annoy the “middle of the road” characters’. A few weeks later, at the Labour conference in Blackpool, Cousins made a deliberately more restrained speech, welcomed by the Labour leadership, though with Gaitskell noting privately that ‘intellectually, it seemed to me to be pretty poor stuff’.

Significantly, despite all that had been going on, the trade unions were still broadly seen, by the population as a whole, as ‘a good thing’ – by 61 per cent, according to Gallup in August, though that was 6 per cent down on a year earlier. Soon afterwards, a recently elected left-wing Labour MP, Frank Allaun, described a talk he had just given on trade unionism to the sixth form of a grammar school. Most of the questions, he related, had been hostile, and he gave examples:

Do trade unionists who go on strike realise the implications of their actions?

Was it fair to ‘victimise’ a man who would not join the union?