INTERVIEW WITH FRANK WOOD BY DAVID WELSH AND JAN POLLOCK ON 23 JUNE 2011 FOR BRITAIN AT WORK ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Frank Wood studied for a degree in biochemistry and physiology at North East London Polytechnic in Stratford in the mid-80s. After doing voluntary work at Friends of the Earth on City Road for a year, he began work at Central Middlesex Hospital at Park Royal in west London as a trainee pathology scientist. He became a shop steward and London regional council member of the ASTMS, Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs, which in 1988 became the MSF, Manufacturing, Science and Finance union. He studied for a fellowship in the Institute of Biomedical Scientists and went on to work in the laboratories at Dulwich Hospital and then King’s College Hospital at Denmark Hill in Southwark, where he is now the Chair of the staff committee and on the UNITE executive council.

Interview Dave Welsh and Jan Pollock transcription Tom Vague

DW: This is an interview with Frank Wood on June 23 2011 at King’s College Hospital as part of the Britain at Work project. Frank, I’d like to ask you first about when you started your working career, what led you towards the NHS?

Well, I studied at North East London Polytechnic, Stratford, east London, for a degree in biochemistry and physiology. That was one of the degrees which was specifically aimed towards a career in biomedical science and hospital work. I mean the other career route would have been research anyway and at the time, this being the mid-80s and me being a student, I didn’t want to do animal research especially being a Labour party activist and a leftie.

So I was looking to work in the NHS and it took about a year after I left polytechnic to find a job. There was a lot of competition then for positions in the NHS. Even though it was during the Thatcher period I don’t think it was that they weren’t taking them on. There were certainly a lot of adverts, a lot more than now for positions, but there was a lot of competition. I remember there would be 50 or 60 applying. I would go for quite a few interviews. A lot of the sites I went to the majority of the laboratories were quite ramshackle and under-invested. So when I went to Central Middlesex Hospital it was all new and that was quite impressive.

In the meantime I went to work as a volunteer at Friends of the Earth on City Road. I worked in the post room for about a year, mostly packing things. I remember about Christmas time we were packing toy badgers and baby seals. We had quite a few. We had quite an extensive catalogue range, yeah, they were quite popular. So I was doing that sort of work, which was to improve my CV when I was applying for these things you know. So I went to Central Middlesex, it was quite far. I lived at East Croydon and it was quite a journey to get there but, as you can imagine, I wasn’t going to be fussy you know.

So at the time Central Middlesex Hospital was based in Park Royal industrial estate, which is a huge industrial estate. Even though it said Central Middlesex it was somewhat misleading because it was quite a large industrial estate and there’s about three tube stations near the hospital.

There’s Park Royal, which I think is Piccadilly line, and to go to that way you go past the Guinness Brewery, and at the time the women staff would have a little group that would gather together at a particular time and then walk through the alleyway by the brewery. We had the Central line, which was North Acton tube that turned out by the BBC, and we had the Harlesden station, which is the Bakerloo line, that was nearby.

The hospital was built in about the 60s, one of the few that were built about that time. So it was quite unique in a way because you see a lot of hospitals that are like either very modern, PFI style you know, or that sort of old 19th century buildings. So it’s unusual to see a hospital of that sort of era, and it’s sort of low level because the area wasn’t expensive so they didn’t build up, and it had this long frontage and a side road. You sort of go down this unpresupposing side road and you encounter the special care baby unit on one side and you carry on and pathology was at the back, sort of low level buildings, two storey, very nice, very modern at the time, and they’d only recently just finished it when I started.

And in fact I’d been there about five or six months and Nicholas Ridley came and opened it, you know all the big names. And I think when he left Virginia Bottomley came, but I missed out on Virginia Bottomley. And next door was a separate laboratory for what was called the Public Health Laboratory Service. They had quite a big lab there. I think it was part of an overspill of their labs in North London, and next door to that was a large building which was part of the Secure Mental Unit from Shenley, which is a hospital near there. They had a separate unit for people I suppose who must have needed nearer mental hospital care as well. I can’t recall the building very well but we would occasionally see somebody come hurtling out of there and start running up the road and then they would be pursued by the nurses. It used to be quite entertaining, I was right next door. There was one woman, it used to be quite open you know sort of hospital, it wasn’t like a prison like some mental hospitals, and one woman who was an alcoholic and apparently she was ordering pizza, takeaway pizza and a bottle of wine with it. And they only found out when they found all these pizza boxes.

So there was a team of about, I think there was a team of about 30 of us in pathology, because there was histopathology and us and quite a specialist haematology department in the main building. That was because the hospital had quite a large population with sickle cell. There was quite a large, good service that was run by this quite fearsome senior chief Medical laboratory scientific officer. A friend of mine Grant Webb, he was the chief scientist and he was an expert in sickle cell blood transfusion. And next door to us, right at the back was the social club, which actually served alcohol. And if you worked the night you could go there and have a drink with the other night staff. It was quite a large old site and I think behind it is allotments and then there’s the canal. I’m not sure which canal it would be, would it be the Grand Union probably?

I went there in 87, and what happened was I joined the union, at that time we were called ASTMS, Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs, which was a merger between Data and the Association of Scientific Workers, that was before my time.

DW: That goes back a bit.

Yeah, in those days we used acronyms, not names, you know. So I joined the ASTMS and there was about 30 members, because we didn’t have a lot of professionals, we only had like really pathology, and speech and language therapists, and some technicians, there wasn’t a lot of members there. I don’t think it’s a huge hospital now, it wasn’t a huge hospital then. None of the trade unions were that numerous you know.

So I joined and it wasn’t really many activists. There was myself, who was quite keen, and a bloke, a gentleman called Jonathan Phil Ebosie. A really nice West Indian chap and he worked for the PHLS. So just us two really, although he was a steward he wasn’t really a hospital employee but he sort of looked after the ASTMS as well.

JP: Can you remember what you got paid in those days?

Oh yeah, yeah, I can recall that, bearing in mind when I was a student I got, this was when we got a full grant you know, I got about £700 a term. My rent for the polytechnic (there were two buildings that got knocked down as part of the Olympics site, two short towerblocks and a travellers site by the freight terminal, I stayed there the first term) and was £24 a week. There’s a building now at the Elephant and Castle that costs 10 times as much. So even then I mean, and I came out of 3 years education with debts of £150, I did. I talk to some of the management students and they can’t believe it. But I got paid my first month £320, and I thought fantastic, £320, what every month?

We were PTB B, Professional and Technical B, but we were not in the pay review body. We were not in the pay review body because way back in the past we’d taken industrial action and they removed our right to be in the pay review body. So we got different pay awards to the nurses and the doctors. So we’d started to lag behind. Our pay having initially been quite reasonable, being scientific staff, degree entry and stuff, had been falling behind a bit. But even so I mean it was considered sort of semi-reasonable pay at the time. And I remember that first year, because I was in the union then, there was a bloke called Ian Rez who worked at the North Middlesex, he’s died since but he was the secretary of our Regional Health Service Advisory Committee at the time, and he sent out a leaflet saying “12.5%, that’s your lot” you know. I can’t believe it, they’ve only offered us 12.5%, bloody Conservatives!

So you can imagine if your pay didn’t match the inflation that you’ve got, the job dropped quite quickly behind. So yeah, at the time I thought it was quite a good salary I must admit. You know, it was like it seemed good at the time. But what happened was a year after that the Conservatives, as well as the pay squeeze, what they did was basically say that all the nursing grades and various sort of scientific grades needed being done again. Maybe there were too many grades or they needed to reorganise it, so all the nurses were going through a re-grading exercise and it went on quite a long time. So by about 1988 it had become a major issue, the nurses were very upset and there was a walkout in Manchester and then all the nurses started coming out. At the time they organised a rally in London and a day of action in the NHS. And this was 1988 that we got the leaflet saying ‘Out to the gate in 88’, you know, it rhymed. DW: That’s a good slogan.

But of course we weren’t being re-graded at that time. I think we were re-graded later after that, and so ASTMS, about four of us came out with leaflets saying we supported them. And it was really only a token demonstration in a way, but the post vans would never go past anything, even a token one, so they turned back, and so bearing in mind that we’re in the middle of an industrial estate. So there was like a group outside, I was working in a hot lab at the time, which is where you do emergency samples, it was a little lab in the main building. So I had my bleep in case any samples arrived, they’d bleep me so I’d know if any were there. So I was able to put my coat on and go outside with my bleep and be out there as much as possible on the picket. And then if I got bleeped I’d have to go back in and do the test and go out again.

But then towards the end of the afternoon all the nurses, they got on a coach and they went into London. I’m not sure which building it was, it might have been Conway Hall. It was certainly quite a large building, they went in and I think they had a march and there was a bit of action on the march as well. And then I went into central London for the rally, which was quite enormous. I remember it particularly because John Chowcat, who was our assistant general secretary of ASTMS, since left in disgrace, he was speaking from the TUC and all the leftists were booing him for not having a general strike.

DW: Sounds familiar.

And so they were booing him, boo like that, and I was thinking oh that’s terrible, he’s the ASTMS bloke you know and I felt sort of like don’t tell them you’re ASTMS then.

DW: And would most of the nurses been in the Royal College of Nursing?

Yeah, they would at the time because that was when there wasn’t UNISON, there was NUPE, COHSE and NALGO, so they would have three times, well not three times as many stewards but there would be more organisations then, and as you say because they hadn’t outsourced very much at all, there were building services and UCATT and all those things would be there. We even had people you don’t see now. We would have a gardener, so there’s somebody who was the gardener and there was this guy who did the furnace. I remember because we used to have to drop off Radioactive Waste for incineration. I don’t think you’re allowed to do it any more. We’d have to stay there to watch him put it in, that was what we were required to do you know, and he had a very tanned face, like a glassblower’s sort of face, and spoke in an obscure Irish accent I remember, there were quite a few characters there, because they’d been there for a while, there was quite a big group of Irish nurses anyway.

DW: And so the unions compared to now, was there more organisation would you say?

Well, we didn’t have much to talk about you see because it was mostly national bargaining you know. There were meetings because they wanted to develop the site and when they wanted to become an NHS Trust. It was first initially called that and then the NHS Trust would be some fancy thing. All trusts are NHS trusts now, and they became able by selling off some land and stuff I think they were developing round at the back, that they would be able to raise some money and to rebuild the hospital a bit. But we never really had any proper meetings. I mean we didn’t have staff committee meetings like we encounter now at King’s, or you know with bargaining or anything like that. The major bargaining we did, which we recruited for, was when they then came to change medical and laboratory scientific officers’ grades, so we went through re-grading.

I was signing people up to the union and the guy who was our regional officer was called Cyril Carter, who was a big chap and in those days they all looked like they stepped out of ‘Life on Mars’ you know, that was the uniform for regional officers. I imagine if I’d applied for the job I’d have to gain some weight first right and look like you’ve lived a bit. But he used to always come down from United Biscuits first, because we’ve got members at United Biscuits, which is just up the road isn’t it from Central Middlesex Hospital. So he always came down from United Biscuits first and I thought we went to the meeting to discuss this re-grading and it had been agreed by national ballot that this re-grading it would be a minor pay increase or whatever and I thought well the regional officer don’t come down here, he’s going to be like you know aggressive and so I can be more placatory.

Well he came down from United Biscuits and it was all very friendly and I thought he’s being friendly and so I started to be really aggressive in the meeting, saying we never voted for this you know, it’s a national deal. We never voted for it, we don’t want it, and you shouldn’t take advantage of the membership by giving them a low grade, because what we said was the cunning plan we had was to go for a higher grade. And what there was, there existed something else which was you’d be on the same grade but they’d give you a few little points, or special points as a reward for doing extra little things. And we said don’t go for the special points, don’t go for the discretionary points, and they got everybody to sign, they gave everybody their contracts and they were planning to see them all the next week and have them sign on one by one.

So I sent out a notice, literally I used a felt tip pen to write it out because we didn’t have word processors, and I sent it out saying don’t sign the contract, wait until we’ve had our meeting and sent it out to everyone on my membership list including the senior chief. She went bonkers but they all held on to their contracts, so they went into this meeting but I was off that day, I don’t know why. Why would I be off on the very day of the most important meeting! So I was off and apparently what they did was they all got together and somebody said, well they offered me some discretionary points, and anyway they all suddenly decided they wanted these discretionary points. So it all kicked off with them all demanding discretionary points, which wasn’t our policy. We got through it though. I don’t think anybody had any particular drops in pay but it did feel that our profession, we had been gradually toning down when we should have been going up a notch you know.

JP: Can you remember what year that was?

That was about 88, 89, it takes about 6 or 7 months to do things like that, going through all the job descriptions. It wasn’t like the system we have now which is due for a change, where there’s actually a very obvious system. What we had was a load of descriptive paragraphs about the job. So there would literally be about five or six lines and you’d have to interpret that. So with experts on semantics going through it, that was the idea, you know to try and go through it, what does that mean? You know, I think, oh I definitely do that because, you know. So that’s what we did in terms of that. But it went through I mean apart from the liveliness over the discretionary points and a few appeals on that, that went through reasonably calmly. See, we always expected this, for a start everybody expected the site to be closed, for some reason, I mean that you’ve seen anyway, the earlier stuff, nobody seemed to expect the site to be closed.

Every now and again St Mary’s would send you something because we were still in the health authority, and we were part of St Mary’s. I think that’s another reason why there wasn’t that much bargaining. I think a lot of the bargaining was the health authority. So there would have been somebody from our site but certainly not ASTMS would have been on the health authority joint negotiating committee. Every now and again we’d go down to St Mary’s and we’d have a lively meeting and then somebody would stand up and say hey, they’re closing Central Middlesex and you’d go oh are they? And they’d tell you, they’d send you a poster saying you’re being closed, and it’s still open I think, so it was the wrong time, any minute now. But I think apart from that we didn’t really have anything particularly during those three years.

DW: And what was your position? Were you a steward?

Yeah, I was a steward but the ASTMS steward at a district general hospital. So we had I think in the end we had about 50 members, 50 or 60 by the time I left and we were, well we still are a very large work place, so very large branches which cover loads of work places, so my branch was at Northwick Park Hospital, because obviously coming from, travelling from southwest London it was a bit alarming that to go to my branch meeting I had to go all the way past I think it was Kempton I got off at, at Northwick Park. It’s a large site, it’s a very large site, it’s sort of almost in a park. And we were, we would meet in a little room in the Medical Research Council who were based there. I think it was some sort of, at the time I think it was something to do with the Olympics, sort of sport science and stuff and that. And I would go along and there would be about 4 or 5 blokes from the medical research council wearing the obligatory V-neck jumpers and casual trousers and an activist called Hugh Lowe, who is still going I think, he’s a pensioner activist. And so we were the Northwest London Health branch.

JP: That’s part of the National Pensions Convention.

It’s still going, it’s tough in the ASTMS.

DW: So was this a monthly meeting?

Yeah, once a month, yeah, John might go with me occasionally as well, but it wasn’t a hugely attended meeting. And I’d always in those days you always had to take your membership forms, which would be signed by two members. So if you wanted to join the ASTMS, you’re asked to join or we might ask you to join and then you’d get your membership form, it had to be signed by two members and taken to the branch and then they would agree it or not. It had to be stamped to go through, yeah. Somebody might go well I don’t know about that person, you know I think they were in NUPE, oh NUPE. But normally we’d agree everything, “6 members, great!” They put me on regional council, bearing in mind I’m like 24 or 25 I think at the time, and they sent me off to the regional council, ASTMS regional council which is still old Stalinists and that was complete chaos, because about 1988, we became MSF.

And I don’t know if you remember it was launched as the new wave union, and we had a big wave to prove it, that was our symbol, a big wave, and we were merged. We were a merger between TASS, who escaped the AEU, and ASTMS. And so we got, in one fell swoop Ken Gill and Clive Jenkins and with a big office at Camden, which I think we’ve sold now, huge, huge building at Camden.

DW: On the corner.

Yeah, and so they had the election and they elected Roger Lyons as General Secretary designate. I was terribly surprised it was Roger Lyons that got elected, who nobody had ever heard of. So there was quite a bit of toing and froing at regional council because of these new unions coming together. I think it gave us, it was Manufacturing, Science and Finance, and were the science bit you know, and I’m not sure where the finance came from.

We had a few staff associations and stuff. But Clive Jenkins was knitting groups together, he’d find a little group and put them in, because we gained the CMA as well.

DW: The CMA?

The Communications Managers Association from the Post Office.

DW:That’s one I’ve not heard of before.

Yeah, so we gained all these little groups.

DW: So you were the kind of the beginning of the new wave I suppose?

The following year we start getting all the other mergers don’t we,

DW: COHSE and NUPE.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

JP: Did it feel new?

Well, I was lucky enough at the time because when I went to a meeting on I think it was on trusts or cuts, basically on the Conservative health plan and private sector and all this sort of stuff. And Frank Dobson was speaking, and I went and that’s where I met Ian Rez and it was he that told me which my branch was, we didn’t have the internet in those days.

And I met a long-time friend of mine now, a man called David Eastham, and he was on the executive council. He’d just got elected to the executive council of the new union, the MSF, and he was on it for quite a few years. So he was able to sort of like orientate me a bit and guide me through all the ins and outs. But it was a strange thing because all of our executive council delegates were elected regionally, it wasn’t at all you know like Unite. It was by shear accident or fate you had quite a lot of people on from the NHS, you know who said I’ll vote for them, they’re NHS and that’s a good thing you know, I knew quite a lot of the NHS. In the end I knew quite a few from the executive council but I don’t think I got to know a lot of people when I was at Central Middlesex Hospital because it was just a district general hospital, looking after quite a small membership.

It’s only really since when I came to King’s and then started doing stuff, with King’s being a much larger site, that I started just through real activity going through the regional council structure and ending up at the executive council. But at the time it was really just gaining some idea and experience. I think I was probably absolutely bloody awful then, as you can imagine.

DW: Why do you say that?

Well, because between 23 and 24 you want a bit of excitement, don’t you? We never really had much when we were representing ASTMS scientific and technical staff, most of the time we never did anything very exciting, or much at all. We didn’t really get any cases you know, and apart from the re-grading there wasn’t that much going on. You know we were looking for cuts, waiting for privatisation, there wasn’t a huge amount that was going on then.

DW: And did you have meetings on site of your own members, you would have had meetings?

Very occasionally, yeah, like I say only occasionally if there was something to discuss, we had that, and we had a little group of officers. But we didn’t really meet on that basis, we had the branch meetings which as I say were not very well attended.

DW: And everybody in your section would have been MSF members? Like the equivalent of a closed shop I suppose? Would everybody doing your job would they all have been union members, was it very natural?

No, I don’t think they were. No, I mean I think that’s what the aim of ASTMS was. ASTMS aim was that a lot of jobs were going to become professional. You know now people who did jobs manual and physical were all disappearing to be replaced by intelligent design and stuff, and that all of us would be white collar and what you needed was a union that appealed to white collar workers and their aims and aspirations, so that was the idea.

JP: So that was what the new wave of thinking was?

Yes, that’s what it was, yeah, the right-wing alternative to NUPE you know. It was I mean like we stressed things about professionalism and we would make you know modern sounding noises and stuff, but the idea was that you were looking to recruit amongst that particular range?

And so for example if in a pathology lab the medical secretary says oh yours is a fine looking union, can I join? I’d say no, you can’t, you haven’t got a degree have you, you’re not professional at all, you should join NUPE. And so that’s what, and we still have stewards with that attitude now and they’re the bane of my life, they won’t represent porters and are appalled that somebody let them join and stuff, and you just tell them that’s not what we’re doing now you know in general but at ASTMS that was the idea. Because if we let anybody in, who would want to join? You know that’s clear isn’t it.

DW: There was NUPE yes or COHSE I suppose.

Yeah, but when I arrived there wasn’t really much activity for a NHS steward NHS really, it wasn’t that it wasn’t high density at all in the mid-80s so you expect it to be reasonably good. So, you still had to wait. You’d still encounter people who were against trade unions and would remember that recently at that time, you know 1979, 1978 or whatever that we’d taken industrial action and therefore were evil so, you still encountered them. It was a good entry experience in a way to try being a steward.

DW: Could I just take you back to the stage where you yourself joined the trade union and why was that?

Well, I was a socialist then. I was in the Labour club at polytechnic and in the Labour party, and my dad worked in engineering and was in one of the predecessors of the GMB though he was in Derbyshire NUM before that. So it was quite natural to look to join the union straight away. The usual thing even then was that the number of science graduates from a working class background was still appallingly low. I was one of the few scientists from a working class background, it was like you’ll be the trade union, you’re working class you’ll be the shop steward. But it was good, it was a good introduction. The other officers were I think, because I was like 23, 24, the other officers were very much older you know and I think they didn’t really involve me very much at all, because the ASTMS was seen as small and I don’t know maybe weren’t seen as relevant or maybe were seen as right wing I don’t know. But it wasn’t a particularly very inclusive staff committee. The only two officers I can recall was the RCN who was a middle-aged woman and Sam, who was the NUPE steward and he was a West Indian middle-aged and known to be quite religious. HR was quite a small bunch, we didn’t really deal with Human Resources that much. I think they didn’t have such professional HR organisation as they have now, huge networking teams.

DW: Could you describe for us laypeople what your job was? What was your say a typical day?

Well, my main job initially, for the first two years my main job was to learn to be a biomedical scientist, and so do all this stuff, that involved blood testing, diagnosis, therapy and monitoring treatment. So we had really quite broad protocol of different tests that the clinician may request and at the time there was very little automation. So it wasn’t what we did mostly was manual assays, preparing water baths, all that sort of stuff, quite limited.

JP: Bunsen burners.

We’d just about gotten away from Bunsen burners, we did have a Bunsen burner it’s true. We’d sort of gotten away from there but not much. Some of the early equipment was just on the way out. But I think we were second stage, we were second generation by the time I came in and that was quite rigid.

So as I was saying, most of it at that time was quite manual, and there were several reasons for that, one because the cost of the equipment, of developing the equipment was, is quite a lot, you know to get the new grades of equipment and test it and automating but also because what we didn’t really have at that time was what we have now which is computers. We had computers but we didn’t really call them computers, we called them Central Processing Units and they would be attached to a machine and there was a large machine, which was based in hospitals like King’s, which was an analyser which was reported to look the same as an early computer and they actually put it with computer you know to impress us. The computer we had next to all the major filing for the results was the size of a large fridge-freezer and it carried a tape unit, which was about, the tapes were these big discs about two foot across and you would load them in each night about midnight we had to do it, we had to come across from our hall? We were on call to do it.

But I think that’s why we didn’t particularly have huge great automated systems because what we normally had was an analyser that printed out results and we’d write them down using a pen. You know that’s what we did, we’d write down lists of things and then we’d enter them into the big computer. That would print them out on these huge file sheets, you know the ones with the nice stripes across, those big brief? You never see them any more, and then we’d deliver that as a book to the junior doctors’ mess. And say if a doctor wanted their results of their patient at nighttime they’d look through the book. It wouldn’t be like now where they’d log on to the patient’s record. So it wasn’t as sophisticated you know what I mean, but I’ll show you what we do now, it’s completely different in terms of science? We did about 120 samples a day on the main analyser and we would do that and we have a single track which we do now at King’s, which takes samples and we load those again and again twenty four seven.

What we did then was very, very small in terms of numbers and a lot of the assays took quite a while. The hot lab which was a lab in the hospital that we did on call, we had a little room only about this size which is about 10 metres by 5, and we had loads of small pieces of equipment and we used to use that to do a range of emergency tests for casualty. And it was reasonably quiet at Central Middlesex, so if they called you, you wandered down to casualty to pick up your sample and then come back and run the tests and then phone the doctor, and usually you slept about 4 or 5 hours during the night, you weren’t up all night. And it was set up for the junior doctors room, and we slept there in a room off where the junior doctors were. It depended, if the haematologist was like a friend, then sometimes he’d phone you about 8 or 9 O’clock and you’d go over to the social club.

If the doctors called Grant he could explain to the doctors that they didn’t really need that test urgently, then they could wait, then he could enjoy his pint better, you know than had he been interrupted. But being new I would just sprint across and do my work, because it was quite a sizable estate, you had to jog to the social club to do the hot lab tests. So there wasn’t anything like, there wasn’t any concepts like 24/7 working or automation in those days particularly you know. But we did have a specialist unit which did gastrointestinal work, but I don’t know why but there was a gastroenterology clinic there, and we did some specialist work for them. So we got an unusually large amount of shit, literally, that was the only major thing.

DW: So you were doing a lot of unsocial hours yourself, you did shift patterns?

No, we didn’t do shifts, no, it was obscene hours. We would start at 9am, bearing in mind I’ve travelled two hours to get there. So you start at 9am, then you worked through to 5.30 and then they give you the bleep and then you went over and did the hot lab work and as I say you probably would have been working occasionally up until about midnight and then maybe doing one or two tests during the night. So you slept about 3 or 4 hours and then you started work again at 9 O’clock and you finished at 5.30. So you did 32½ hours and then you went home, and that was the norm then. Like you did that and if you wanted a bank holiday then you worked 24 hours rather than 32½, you didn’t do the next day, being a day off. But yeah we routinely did 32½ hours, plus because you didn’t get many calls, you got paid per call, because we didn’t get many calls, so we didn’t really get paid that much for it. It was part of the job that you covered that service. Whereas in a busy hospital you’d have got far more calls and so made a lot more money, but you’d have been working harder you know.

I did 24 hours once on a bank holiday and got 4 calls, which worked out about, that came out to about £40 or 50 for 24 hours work, I thought well this is ridiculous you know, what a waste of a day, that was how it was. They then stopped doing that because people started saying that people were falling asleep to be honest at the bench and stuff, leaning forward like that. And so they started taking, they started saying well I don’t feel very well but they’d come into start work the next day say I don’t feel very well, I didn’t get much sleep and so they’d send them home. And that’s what we started doing, we started taking the next day off and in the end they agreed to do that routinely. Ironically I think what really prompted that was after I’d left what particularly prompted it was the senior chief of biochemistry who was always insistent that he do things that nobody else could, and he’d do the test in half hour and on the way home, he was on his motorbike and fell asleep on his motorbike and went in the back of a truck, and we thought good for you, you know, he broke his leg and so then he realised that it wasn’t actually very safe doing it like that.

DW: I was going to ask, although we’re concentrating on west London, I want to ask you about why you left that particular hospital and when you came to King’s what happened?

Yeah, well, I finished my stay of registration, I did my two years and got state registered and I was studying for a fellowship in the Institute of Biomedical Scientists, which is what we did then, which is a two year study, and I’d finished that and I was looking to, the next one that you would be looking to do is a masters degree in clinical chemistry. So I was looking to do that but to do a masters degree you really need to be in a lab in a larger hospital, so that you’ve got access to all the people doing that work. You know there’s no point discussing patients you’re never going to see at a district general hospital, so you really do have to go to a larger site.

The senior chief was very keen to write me a good reference, to get the trade union steward promoted. I mean bearing in mind that I was travelling like two hours anyway, and so I applied for the job when it came up at King’s and this ironically bearing in mind all the trouble I was getting in the trainee job I was the only person who was being interviewed on the day you know. So as long as I wasn’t likely to kill anybody I think I was a shoe in to get the job you know. If I hadn’t got that job I don’t know what I would have done? But the job I got here. I did the rotation and then we used to have a hospital lab at Dulwich, a little hospital, it’s still there, the building. But I got a job as the senior in that lab, so I was there, after about two or three years at King’s. I finished my masters degree and became a trade union steward again and joined Tony Anthrobus and various other people on the staff committee. But I was able to do a lot of the work at Dulwich and then come over here if I had any meetings here. But yeah, so I’ve been here for 21 years now.

DW: And could you try to say something about the changes, I mean I don’t know where we could start?

JP: The lack of Bunsen burners.

No, well, the labs have been massively reinvested, the labs are bloody enormous, we’ve got like 250 lab staff at King’s in pathology. The Trust when I joined it had about 3½ thousand staff and now it’s 7,200. And most of the estate has been redeveloped. It’s just chalk and cheese in terms of where it is now and of course for me as a trade union steward most of my members, when we merged with T&G, we now have over 500 members, it’s ten times more members now than it was at Central Middlesex Hospital. The majority of them have access to email, we use email, we use this office, we use all modern stuff. We get sent off for training and you know when you’ve got enough members you know you don’t really see the regional officers, we’ve got 15 stewards.

It’s completely different in terms of what we were doing and of course in terms of bargaining almost the entire agenda is local, almost all bargaining.

DW: That’s the big change.

Bargaining is various but what we’re negotiating is so much more.

DW: It’s come down to this level.

Yeah, it’s absolutely at this level and then which means that the expertise in terms of human resources as at that level as well, in terms of managers, in terms of executives, I’m on the board of governors at the moment of the foundation trust. In terms of all that you know the level of joint- working and the level of inter-penetration of the trade unions in terms of what we’re doing is so much different to what we were doing at Central Middlesex Hospital. We always felt we were you know obviously you were mainly defensive organisations, I think that’s what we felt like at Central Middlesex Hospital that, it was more there were two camps I think. There’s still two camps here but it’s our camp. We’ve been here longer, we did it by right of occupation.