BOOK 2 -JOURNEYMAN

1 LONGBRIDGE AFTER LORD

THE FACTORY – CHANGING ATTITUDES

After the 1956 strike a new atmosphere entered the factory and while Joe Edwards was now Managing Director at the Pressed Steel Company opposite at Cowley, his legacy carried on at Longbridge. By 1958 my father had moved into number ‘5’ machine shop and although he was still making clutch forks, the ones he now made were fitted to the larger 1500 cc ‘B’ Series engine. The other new feature of his life was a personal telephone situated by his machine and housed in an acoustic head booth to reduce the noise levels of the machine shop. This communications aid represented the seed change in attitudes initiated by Joe Edwards and demonstrated how management had finally recognised the need for a focus figure when dealing with the 39 unions on the site. Although Lord was still there, his role as Chairman and Managing Director of BMC mostly kept him away from day to day routines in the factory as he was also preparing for retirement, an event that occurred at the end of 1961 just after I graduated. Although the antagonisms between him and my father continued, most shop steward contact was now directed through others. However, Dick Etheridge continued to enjoy a high press profile as Lord moved on. Joe Edwards returned to Longbridge after Lord retired and he set about the difficult task of integrating the disparate elements of the corporation.

A spoof article published in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury on Sunday 27th December 1959, (by coincidence my father’s 50th birthday) and written by their staff reporter 'ALERTUS' took the form of a dream Diary for 1960. The spoof article was accompanied by a contrived photograph of Len Lord and my father allegedly having a conversation on the car park outside CAB 1. This was created by pasting pre-cut images of the protagonists onto a photograph of the CAB 1 building, but the limited technology of the time offered an image with poor perspective. Although the original newsprint still exists in a poor quality and badly stained cutting, Emily Rice & Paul Black’s equally contrived representation below shows them standing before an imaginary ‘Kremlin’ office block that captures the essence of the original. Like the original it shows the ‘Cloth capped agitator’ and the ‘Pin striped magnate’ in their traditional roles of ‘Lord and master’, or perhaps that of the classical ‘Master-Servant’ relationship described in modern business texts. A very common early 20th century issue and perhaps more emotionally focussed by Robert Tressel’s working class novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ (21).

The following ‘tongue in cheek’ aside sums up their complex relationship in a most interesting way and carries an element of truth within it. Part of the text is reproduced here: ‘ALERTUS’ is slumbering in a troubled way;

“Outside the Longbridge factory of the British Motor Corporation two figures can be seen strolling on the pavement. One is Sir , the motor magnate. The other is Mr Dick Etheridge, the factory’s Communist Convenor of shop stewards.

Sir L "I asked you out for this little chat, Richard, because sometimes I get a little sneaking feeling that relations between management and men at our little place aren’t always as close as they might be. What do you think?"

Mr E: "Well Len, now that you have been kind enough to bring the matter up I will say that I had intended mentioning it myself"

Sir L: "Don’t you think, Richard that we ought to see how much we can improve matters in 1960?"

Mr E: "As a matter of fact, Len, it is right at the top of my New Year’s Resolutions".

Dreamscape for 1960

Sir L: "Well, that’s fine. By the way, old chap, do you run a car? Always ready to help, you know".

Mr E: "I’m much obliged. By the way, do want sponsoring for the AEU?"

Sir L: (Rather sharply): "Do you think they could get me a five-day week?"

[There is a silence. Then both smile apologetically and shake hands.]

Sir L: "Cheerio, Richard!"

Mr E: "Cheerio, Len!"

[On his way back to his office Sir Leonard confides to me - “Shouldn’t be surprised to see that chap in the New Year’s Honours List one of these years ……"] Who slammed that door? Who woke me up?

Oh well it was a beautiful dream while it lasted. “Nineteen Sixty – here we come!”

My father’s dealings with management after 1960 tended to be either with the works director Bill Davies or George Harriman, Lord’s Deputy. My father’s relationship with George Harriman was one of friendly banter and strict professionalism and Turner (41) records Harriman as saying:

“When I see him, I slap him on the back and say ‘Hello Dick’ how are the kids?"

"We get on fine."

Turner (39) also records that Richard O’Brien, BMC’s Director of Industrial Relations made the following statement sometime in the early 1960’s:

“Certainly things are far better than they were five years ago. We have made a meticulous attempt to improve communications at Austin, the shop stewards get better facilities for meetings and they meet management once a month.”

My father corroborated this at the time when he would say, “Yes, we no longer have to have a strike in order to meet management”. But he believed also that the effectiveness of the BMC Joint Shop Stewards Committee meant the shop stewards were better informed and abler to act in concert when inter-factory disputes occurred. This new approach to solving disputes was demonstrated in practice when workers making components at the Morris Motors, Tractors and Transmissions branch at Washwood Heath in Birmingham went on strike in September 1959; just a month after the car’s launch.

This unofficial strike by 120 hourly paid workers mostly belonging to the AEU but with a handful from the T&GWU, was essentially over a 6d (2.5 p) an hour day work claim which the company refused to acknowledge. After a week the entire production of the Mini at Cowley was threatened and nearly 3000 operatives were laid off at Longbridge and Cowley. The AEU national officers had instructed the strikers to return to work but they had received only a derisory and noisy response from the men. The Birmingham District Committee (AEU) had subsequently asked the strikers to meet a three-man delegation led by my father to seek to arbitrate on the matter to which the strikers eventually agreed and the trio met them in private on Wednesday 23Rd September 1959. The striker’s mood was rebellious as they thought the national officers had let them down by taking the side of management, but after some tough talking by my father and after the arbitrators had left the room the strikers continued the meeting where they ultimately agreed to return to work. Their conditions for a return were that the company agree to meet their shop stewards in order to negotiate their claim. My father was able to assure them that the company would agree to meet their representatives within 24 hours of a return to work. The Daily Mail published an interview with my father in the following day’s edition and an extract is given below:

“Mr Etheridge has led many battles against the BMC management, but yesterday he and his team were nicknamed ‘The Olive Branch Boys’. Later Mr Etheridge told me ‘I certainly do not think it is odd for a Communist like myself to help end a strike. In this case I asked for permission to leave the factory and go to the meeting about 11 miles away. They gave me permission and offered me a car and driver to get me there. They did not ask me whether I was going to support the strike or to help to stop it – so I didn’t tell them. But I refused the lift and drove myself in my A 35”.

As I was still living at home at this time I can remember quite clearly his view that this was a breakthrough in industrial relations at BMC because management had acknowledged for the first time that the joint shop steward’s movement was more useful in settling disputes within the company because they were closer to the shop floor mood than the national officers. He was heavily critical of the AEU national officers and the manner in which they had handled the dispute, but he blamed the right wing extremists of the AEU’s executive whom he accused of being politically motivated and out of touch with reality. He also firmly believed that some senior officers such as Bill Carron (a prominent Catholic activist and recently Knighted by the Pope) were more wedded to the anti-Communist cause than seeing peace in the industry.

The successful resolution of this particular dispute added to his belief that there should be a national automotive worker’s union. Of course Bill Carron who was by then President of the AEU was totally opposed to the idea of industrial unions and when he found out that my father and his colleagues were meeting at about this time to extend the activities of the Motor Industry Combined Shop Stewards Group he declared their meeting illegal and ordered AEU shop Stewards not to attend. However, the meeting was held and amongst its objectives was one to explore ways in which the shop stewards might act together on key issues affecting the industry, particularly wage negotiations. This was to infuriate Bill Carron and he continued to organise campaigns to undermine the shop stewards combined activities and on many occasions threatened sanctions against my father in particular and others in the Labour Party whom he dubbed ‘Fellow Travellers’. There was no doubt in my father’s mind that there was a Vatican conspiracy operating in the Eastern block to undermine Communist governments and also in the West to prevent known Left Wingers from gaining official positions in the larger trade unions. He said at the time that there was firm evidence of lists being circulated within Catholic Church communities that indicated voting preferences at AEU meetings and in elections for paid officials. The Catholic Herald for 6Th July 1956 makes no bones about its anti-Communist position when it printed a front page article reporting the successful election of Bill Carron to be President of the AEU’ in which it said:

“The defeat by Mr. W. J. Carron, a Catholic, of Mr. Reg. Birch in the fight for the presidency of the 950,000 strong Amalgamated Engineering Union has administered a rebuff—though not an unexpected one—to the Communists. But it does not mean that their hopes of capturing the leadership of Britain's second largest union are ended. When Mr. Carron takes over the presidency from Mr. Openshaw in September the fight to keep the union out of Communist hands will be in full swing. Standing for the general secretaryship, which was made vacant by the death of Mr. Ben Gardner, is Mr. Joe Scott, who is probably the most popular, forceful and efficient Communist among those prominent in the union”.

These political campaigns within the trade union movement were to lead to plots and counter plots that culminated in the conspiracy and corruption charges laid against the communist leadership of the ETU. This atmosphere also led to a famous decision by the AEU National Committee to vote both ways on nuclear disarmament in 1960 during Bill Carron’s Presidency. My father at first refused to believe the accusations of ballot rigging and corruption (1961) levelled at Frank Foulkes (whom he knew well) and who was one of the senior full time officers of the ETU, so he dismissed such accusations as yet another part of the conspiracy to undermine the good name of prominent communist figures. But when the charges were proved true, and with a later hindsight, he condemned the two officers concerned for bringing the party and the trade union movement into disrepute. He also said their activities had delivered an important union into the hands of right wing extremists who sought to disbar all communists from TU membership across the TUC, as they had in fact done within the ETU itself. He despised its new General Secretary, Frank Chappell who was the architect of these acts that so disrupted the principles of unity he fervently believed in. He also said that it created further problems within the factory because of the organised antagonisms within the shop steward’s committee emanating from this particular source.

There was at this time a general view within the British media that subscribed to the conspiracy theory of international Communism and of their being wedded to a policy of undermining western capitalism by a process of fostering industrial unrest. They further postulated that such disruption was organised by each country’s indigenous Communist Parties directly acting under instruction from the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). And although the WFTU was a mature organisation by the 1960’s, embryonic rifts provoked by the developing ‘Cold War’ were threatening its wider internationalism by this time. The WFTU had been founded in Paris in October 1945 by the US, European and Soviet Trade Union Congresses' acting under the Chairmanship of Sir Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the British TUC, but Its very existence was under continuing attack from the start by prominent right wing figures; and on the 19th January 1949, Arthur Deakin presented a letter on behalf of the British TUC demanding the suspension of all WFTU activities for a year and stated that if this were not accepted, then the British TUC would withdraw from membership. James B Carey of the USA bluntly said, “It’s no use pretending that the WFTU is anything but a corpse – let’s bury it”. After this event when Deakin, Carey and Kupers (Netherlands) walked out of this Paris meeting, most of the Western right wing trade union leaders pledged themselves to the formation of a break away organisation called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). U.S. and Western European Finance largely supported the ICFTU. Although the Communist based French and Italian trade unions continued to subscribe to the WFTU, the major British unions almost as an act of faith, did not. These activities split the British trade union movement at the time and led to internecine struggles between the right and left factions throughout the last decades of the second half of the 20th century. Both organisations still exist and as recently as 2002 Bill Jordan, the then prominent Blairite’ President of the AEEU, was General Secretary of ICFTU.

The British shop steward’s movement, however, almost certainly used the WFTU as a foil to be used against Right wing leaders such as Carron and Deakin, who themselves sought to defend their power base by virulently opposing the development of Industrial Unions and internationalism on a truly worldwide scale. This state of affairs led the British press and the cold war protagonists to declare the WFTU a Soviet satellite organisation committed to a conspiracy to undermine democratic organisations in the West. It was shortly after this (1950) that my father was physically assaulted in the factory and removed from the office of Convenor for a period of 9 months by means of a ‘putsch’ led by right wing activists operating within the factory. The new regime soon quarrelled amongst themselves and after a bitter dispute within the shop steward’s committee over the alleged misuse of funds by the new Convenor, my father was approached by the majority of shop stewards and asked to return as Convenor. He was subsequently re- elected to the office every year thereafter until he retired in 1974. These events occurred during the early months of the Korean War (1950-1953) when rightist chauvinism was running high, and while equally voluble factions’ criticised government policy, particularly the use of conscript soldiers in Korea and in other spiralling colonial wars in Africa and East Asia. Novelist Lesly Thomas gives a fairly colourful account of such Colonial Wars in his novel ‘The Virgin Soldiers’. (55). Conscription was finally abandoned in 1960 and the last serving conscripts demobilised in 1963.

This period of conflict in the early 1950’s and other ‘Cold War’ events right up to the early 1960’s also led to a press campaign against known Communists in the British motor industry where they were labelled as wreckers working under the direct instructions of the ‘Soviet controlled WFTU’. The Economic League (recently reported to be a security service front organisation) avidly supported these campaigns and they dedicated themselves to pillorying left wing political activists such as my father. In the Economic League Bulletin, No. 33 of March 1959 they made a spirited attack on his attendance at the St. Ouen, meeting of the Combine Shop Stewards that year (where the EL alleged the meeting was conceived and sponsored by the WFTU) and they went even further by accusing my father of leading the 1953 NUVB strike, which was Black Propaganda and a complete travesty of the facts. My father was to comment further on this deliberate lie in press interviews many years later. However, The Sunday People just after this time went on to publish a series of articles where they published the names of British trade unionists who they claimed were “The focus of a conspiracy organised by the WFTU and the biggest menace operating inside Britain today”. My father (BMC Longbridge), Peter Nicolas () and Les Gurl (BMC Cowley) were identified by name. Although the accused took legal advice from a leading QC, his legal opinion at the time stated that the newspaper had seriously libelled them all, but he doubted whether a case could be sustained or even paltry damages secured owing to the political climate of the times; a worrying indictment of the justice system in such a prejudiced era. (See ‘www.graham.stevenson.me.uk’ under the sections dealing with the general paranoia in the British establishment and governments during the period between 1948 and 1964).

Graham Turner a prominent journalist working for ‘The Sunday Times’ and author of the previously referenced book, 'The Car Makers' (39) also developed a similar argument and concluded that prominent communists in the British car industry were organised wreckers operating via the WFTU. Interestingly enough his principal witnesses were disaffected former communist party members, but he failed to offer even the most cursory right of reply to the accused. My father later dismissed these insinuations in a review of this book for the Daily Worker (42) and he maintained that Turner understood nothing of the reality of industrial relations within car making or engineering. He maintained that the root cause of dissent within the industry was the political manipulation of the industry by governments of all kinds; the rapid introduction of automation without consultation or negotiation; the payment systems; and the bitter opposition to organised labour by managers such as Leonard Lord. He also said on many occasions when given the opportunity, “The most militant shop floor workers were working-class Tories with few principles other than those of the trough”. He was also very critical of the various splinter movements within the British Labour Party (Trotskyites in particular) whom he believed had little regard for reaching or adopting agreements with the company. He was also very suspicious of their political agenda as they provoked dissent within the ranks of the shop steward’s movement as well. Throughout his working career, his proudest boast was, “I have stopped more strikes than I have started, but on important points of principle I am always ready for a row in defence of my fellow workers’ interests and welfare”. This statement was regularly quoted in the press both nationally and locally.

This particular array of issues and problems gave him a high profile within local, national and even the international press and in due course it was to establish him as an elder statesman to whom the press and other forms of media turned when they wanted an informed internal voice on IR from within the motor industry. His growing celebrity status was demonstrated when in December 1962 the Sunday Mercury published the personal ambitions of 12 people for the coming year; people that its reporter Anthony Hancox described as local celebrities. These included:

Lady Docker (controversial society wife of Sir Bernard Docker of BSA Ltd.),

Frank Ifield (crooner and popular singer),

Sir Alfred Owen (Chairman of Rubery Owen Ltd.),

The actress Valery Hobson,

And rather surprisingly my father, described as:

Dick Etheridge (The Longbridge Shop Steward Convenor who makes no secret of his communist affiliations).

My father’s particular response was reported as follows:

'I find it difficult to answer because I am not an ambitious man’ Mr Etheridge said. But to paraphrase Shakespeare, some people are born to greatness like Queen Victoria, some achieve it like Sir Leonard Lord (now Lord Lambury of Northfield) and others have it thrust upon them – like me.’

‘But my dream for 1963 would be for the British Motor Corporation to be outstandingly successful, make a record profit, and for us to take it all away from them in the form of increased wages and improved conditions’. ‘I reckon that would be good for everybody’.

And something just for himself? I asked;

‘Nothing more than the usual caravan holiday in Wales in the summer. I love a bit of peace, but this ambition may be hard to achieve’. You see I am always ready for a row. There are bound to be some in 1963 – and you can bet your life there will be some car workers down in Wales ready to talk about it!’

This ‘tongue in cheek’ understatement was typical of his wry sense of humour, and it would be highlighted yet again later that year (1963) when his own political philosophy was published in a newspaper interview with Arthur Steele of the Birmingham Mail. The full interview is included as an appendix to Book 2 – Journeyman.

I am sure it was this type of media coverage that gave him the high profile that led to his election to the 40 strong National Executive of the British Communist Party at its congress in the spring of 1961. He polled 412 votes and entered the list (as a new member) within the top 10 that included such high profile veteran executive members as; West Fife Communist MP Willie Gallagher and Bill Alexander the former commander of the British Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. As I had by now graduated, I was coming to the end of my various apprenticeships and was entering a brave new world as a Journeyman and so faced a new and challenging ‘rite of passage’ as a graduate production development engineer. So on September 1St 1961 I entered the BMC Production Development Department at Longbridge as a Junior Manager investigating and introducing automation technologies onto the shop floor. Technologies my father was opposed to, unless accompanied by negotiations for a solution that recognised displaced skills and offered higher pay for the skilled trades that worked within their orbit. Management consistently refused to negotiate on these issues.

Several years later I would be inexorably launched towards academia as my ultimate destiny whilst Longbridge would be heading into new ownership in 1968, just two years after I entered Aston University as a Lecturer in Production Technology. Meanwhile, my father would continue to grow in stature and celebrity, before emerging as an elder statesman much in demand with the wider media and the new order of management under the banner. So much so, that Lord Stokes, Managing Director of the British Leyland empire, was to say in front of assembled senior directors of B.L. attending my father’s company sponsored retirement dinner:

“To Dick, a man who has contributed so much more to Industrial good will than most people in this country appreciate”.