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big resolute father figures all ready to stand up for their struggling little clients. Actually they seem to lose heart quicker than a woman cornered by a mouse.”
    “They’re cold-hearted bastards,” said Patrick. “And pretty soon they’re going to be nationalized. It’s high up on the Liberal party programme.” He helped himself to another mouthful of burgundy. “It wasn’t the banks who saved the situation. It was Will Dylan. He was Secretary and Treasurer and practically everything else at ACAT. When things looked grim, he went to the ASIA management and offered them a deal. He guaranteed that the workforce would carry on for two years without asking for any increase in wages. They would even accept a marginal cutting down of numbers, not by sacking men, but by slowing recruitment. He’d worked out that if they did this, added to their cheap sources of supply and power, they could reduce the price of their aluminium ingot to a point where the Americans, who were running into labour problems of their own, simply couldn’t compete. The other side of the bargain was that when the markets had been re-established, they would take a three year rise at the end of the second year. It wasn’t quite as simple as that. There were a lot of special grades and hardship clauses and so on. But that’s what it amounted to. The management listened to him, and did their own sums, and arrived at the same answers.”
    “I can see Dylan convincing the management,” I said. “It must have been a hell of a lot more difficult to swing the men.”
    “It was difficult. His strongest card was that he wasn’t a visiting Union official. He was one of them. He’d worked alongside them in the pot-room. He’d got powdered borax in his hair and liquid aluminium on his boots. No one ever called him anything but Will. He barnstormed up and down the works, talking to men singly and in groups and at mass meetings in the canteen. He talked turkey to them. If the Americans took over, they were going to shut half the pot lines and put the other half on specialized production. Three-quarters of the men would be made redundant. Which did they prefer? To see three-quarters of their mates out of work, or all go on together with a fair chance of coming out square at the end of the day? If the management had said it, the men would have laughed at them and called it a wangle to increase profits. From Will, somehow or other, they took it.”
    “And it worked?”
    “Certainly it worked. As soon as they started making a profit again the banks recovered their nerve, the company was re-capitalized, the workers were properly paid, and Will Dylan became a name of power in the North. I should add that he was just twenty-four at the time.”
    I thought again about the face I had seen on television. I had imagined it, at the time, as being carved out of wood. I realized that I was wrong. It had been carved, by experience, out of some much harder material.
    “He had a number of Union jobs after that. When MGM took over he became their Assistant General Secretary, and was Secretary three years later. He didn’t hit the national headlines until they made him chairman of the tribunal which arbitrated on the metalworkers’ dispute. That was a bloody miracle if you like. No one thought he’d pull it off. The two sides were in entrenched positions, without any apparent room for manoeuvre. Somehow he wheedled and hectored and bluffed them into moving. Someone who was there said it was mass hypnosis. At the end of ten days they were surprised to find they’d climbed out of their trenches and were shaking hands in no man’s land.”
    “It’s a pity,” I said, “that he wasn’t around in 1914. He might have stopped the war.”
    “He stopped a very nasty strike, and became a national figure. Both parties were angling for him. Then the member for West Sheffield broke his neck stepping off a train at what he thought was a station and was really a twenty-foot