Family Britain, 1951-1957 Read Online Free PDF Page B

had left it to the undertaker to point out the grave to the widow and daughter-in-law. This the undertaker had done, and during the six weeks he was away – every Sunday – the women had placed flowers on the grave. When the son returned he, too, went to the grave, and found that they had been placing the flowers on the wrong grave.’ It was an episode that had, in Hopkins’s words, ‘caused considerable distress’. However, the fact of an all-male funeral was, in this part of south Wales at least, taken for granted.
    Clive Jenkins, the son of a railway worker, had grown up in Port Talbot. ‘He was a precocious child,’ noted an obituary, ‘and seemed set for a good schooling when his father died and he was obliged to go to work at 14. This disappointment had much to do with his future attitudes.’ Now, in the summer of 1951, at the age of 25, he was a member of the Communist Party and a full-time official for the Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians (ASSET), with particular responsibility for organising workers at London (Heathrow) Airport, where he was rapidly increasing union membership. Shortly after his hometown’s hour in the sun, he was at the centre of the civil aviation industry’s first significant dispute, causing the state-owned British European Airways (BEA) to cancel more than 800 fully booked services. ‘Angry passengers “squatted” at Kensington Air Station this morning, waiting to be flown to Nice,’ reported the
Daily Mail
at the height of the dispute. ‘They had been told that the Argonaut plane chartered for last night’s flight in the B.E.A. cheap-rate service was not available . . . Passengers cried “Iniquitous!” and “What about our bookings?”.’ Soon afterwards, a ministerial intervention by another self-confident operator, Alfred Robens, settled the matter, very much in favour of the white-collar supervisors and technicians whom the already deeply ambitious Jenkins represented. ‘This was my first major national dispute and gave me my first sense of real satisfaction as a collective bargainer,’ Jenkins recalled. ‘Deeply influenced by this set of events, I learned that it was possible to have disputes which were immensely interesting to the public as well as being attractive to potential members as long as they were in high-technology industries.’7
    The major industrial strike of the summer, though, was at the Austin Motor Company’s works at Longbridge, Birmingham. Eventually involving more than 10,000 workers, it was called on Wednesday, 20 June by shop stewards after management had dismissed (and, despite an existing agreement, refused to redeploy) seven men, including Sid Pegg, who was not only an Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward but also Secretary of the Communist Party’s Longbridge branch. Pegg’s close colleague, Dick Etheridge, works convener and himself an active CP member, insisted to the
Birmingham Post
that he ‘had proof’ of ‘blacklisting’, adding: ‘We are not silly over redundancies. Shop stewards have not said that they will not accept redundancy in any circumstances.’ It was, in other words, a case of victimisation – which it undoubtedly was. Nevertheless, another prominent shop steward, John McHugh, was adamant that it was not a political dispute, asserting that of the 350 stewards at the meeting that had decided on strike action, only 50 had ‘Communist sympathies’. The crunch came with a mass meeting at Cofton Hackett Park (next to the works) on Monday the 25th. It was, reported the not entirely objective
Post
, a ‘stormy’ affair:
    Part of the uproar was due to a denunciation by Mr [Dick] Nester, chairman of No 5 Machine Shop stewards, of Communist activity in the factory, which, he said, he had watched for 18 months. Communist propaganda went on daily, he added.
    As he went on to describe the events which led up to the stoppage there were shouts of ‘Take him off!’ and the microphone