God Is an Englishman Read Online Free PDF Page B

derision, and naked fear, but also a certain awe that one man, and him a widower without sons or local background, could have acquired so much power so quickly, and exercise it with such damnable attention to detail.
    For although Sam Rawlinson rarely appeared on the factory floor he gave ample evidence of knowing everything that happened down there, and every word spoken that was relevant to his concerns. He might, indeed, have been watching them individually from the mo ment they arrived at six-thirty a.m., until they trooped out twelve to fourteen hours later. He knew when one of them was a minute late in arriving, or ten seconds early in shutting down. He knew to a fibre how much wastage occurred every day, how many breaks were detected on a particular machine every hour, and often such irrelevant data as which unwed operative was pregnant and who was the likely father. They hated his powers of concentration, and they hated his unrelenting grasp of their personal lives, but almost all of them, deep down, regarded him as a reliable provider, particularly after Seddon Moss had ridden out the last slump without resorting to short time, as had a majority of mills in the area.
    Perhaps it was this certitude of regular employment that kept them so long from mutiny, and helped them to resist the exhortations of men like Cromaty and McShane to bluff the Gaffer into increas ing the overtime rate by one penny an hour, and authorise a relief system for the ten-minute breakfast break, at present spent standing beside the chattering machines. In the end, however, the persuasions of a hard core of rebels prevailed and there was a ten-day walkout. Sam’s reply had been a nine-week lockout, that had now lasted from May into July.
    GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 17
    3/27/09 5:13:09 PM

    1 8 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N
    Sam Rawlinson’s obstinacy seemed likely to outlast the heatwave. Indeed, its breaking-strain was linked to the thermometer for he reasoned that, whereas seven hundred operatives might well feel the pinch of privation in high summer, the nerve centre of his unruly mob would not be touched until rain fell on their slate-loose hovels, an earnest of what was in store for them in November and December.
    He was now losing, at his own calculation, about a hundred pounds a week and that apart from orders that were going elsewhere, but although this appalling price exasperated him it did not daunt him. For one thing he could afford it. An overall loss of, say, two thousand pounds, would make no more than a dent in his invested capital. For another his commonsense, which he thought of himself as posses sing in abundance, told him that in the long run the lockout would show a profit, for once the mill was working full-time again no man or group of men would dare to challenge him in the future. There would still be strikes and stoppages at neighbouring factories, so long as employers turned a blind eye to the engagement of men with truculent records, (a policy he consistently opposed at local federation meetings), but there would be no more penny-an-hour or breakfast-break deputations waiting upon him. Whenever the whisper circulated that one was about to assemble, the single men and girls would remember the penniless summer of ’58, and the mar ried men would heed wives with half-a-dozen bellies to fill. To walk through his mill now, to contemplate ten thousand pounds’
    worth of modern machinery as idle as his hands, was a depressing experience to a man who, in his teens, had worked a sixteen-hour-day for four teen shillings a week. He found it, however, less irksome than living under the threat of extortion from troublemakers like Cromaty and McShane, both of whom, he noted, had absented themselves from the deputation that had trudged out here two days ago, begging him to reopen on any terms short of a cutback in daily rates.
    He knew millworkers, and he flattered himself that he knew Sam Rawlinson.
    Under present circumstances