The Storytellers (10 page)

“The sentence passed on Lewis Lewis was eventually downgraded to a life of penal servitude in Australia because a soldier testified that he had protected him from the rioters. However, the sentence on Richard Lewis, better known by his local name Dic Penderyn, was upheld even though the people of Merthyr were convinced of his innocence and eleven thousand signed a petition calling for his release.”

“So was he innocent?” asked Mabel.

“It seems he was,” answered Alun. “In 1874, it was discovered that a man called Ianto Parker had stabbed the soldier and then fled to America. It also came to light that James Abbott, who had testified under oath against Penderyn, had been put under pressure by the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, who was adamant that there should be at least one hanging.”

“That's your aristocracy for you, Mabel,” chipped in Stanley.

“Capitalist pig!” hissed Jack.

“So are you saying we should or shouldn't support this Arthur Scargill?” asked Mabel, quite shaken by what she had just heard.

“I am not saying one or the other,” answered Alun. “But what I am suggesting is that confrontation for the sake of confrontation usually ends badly.”

“But if it brings down a rotten system, that's good,” asserted Jack.

“Unless the system that replaces it is even worse,” replied Alun.

“How could it be?” snapped Jack, now regretting he had asked the journalist from the
Merthyr Express
to meet him.

“Very easily,” explained Alun. “You have to see Lord Melbourne's decision in the context of the time. The French Revolution had descended into the murder of an entire class–”

“And a good thing, too,” interrupted Jack.

“Which included, Mr National Organizer, Maximilien de Robespierre, the brilliant young lawyer and passionate advocate of the revolution, who argued that the king must die so that France could live.”

For once Jack Pugh was silent.

“And after that bloodbath,” Alun continued, “France resorted to a military dictatorship. This led to a continental war which took the combined strength of the British and Prussian armies to bring to an end. And that was after Napoleon's ill-fated attack on Russia which resulted in the death of over five hundred thousand men.”

“How interesting!” exclaimed Mabel.

“Haven't we lost sight of Dic Penderyn in all of this, Alun?” asked Davyn, who was more comfortable with the folklore without Alun's extraneous embellishments.

“Perhaps we have,” admitted Alun. “But from the Home Secretary's point of view, restoring order and preventing a repeat of the riots was more important than justice. People had seen what took place in France and did not want to see the same happen here.”

“Of course they didn't,” smirked Jack.

“Oh yes, they kept their heads all right,” chortled Alun. “But we should not see Dic Penderyn as a champion of revolt, but rather as the innocent victim of a clash between the hot-headed and the thick-headed. By all means, follow this Arthur Scargill, but first make sure you understand where he's leading you. King Canute was a wise enough king to know that there were tides he could not turn, however much his enthusiastic followers wished otherwise.”

“Well I'll be!” enthused Mabel, although it was not until some days later, in the public library, that she read how the tenth-century King of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden had made his courtiers place his throne on the beach at low tide to illustrate that there were forces even a great king could not command.

Seeing the fallow ground on which his wisdom would be broadcast, Jack excused himself – ‘Meetings to go to' – taking John Preston with him, but not before Mabel and Stanley had embraced their prodigal. The young man might have been associated with someone Alun Davies considered a hothead, but at least, from Stanley's point of view, his son was now on the right side of the argument. Mabel was just happy to have reclaimed him.

“An insufferable little prick he was,” concluded Alun when the two men were out of earshot. “Where do they find them?”

* * *

During the drive back to the Midlands, Jack Pugh was glum, but Alun Davies's report in the
Merthyr Express
the following day, while not enthusiastic, was factual. The reporter concluded his article by saying that communities were easier to build than dismantle and that if this Arthur Scargill could bring the miners' plight to the attention of the government, that would be no bad thing. But to lose the goodwill of the public, he cautioned, would be folly.

With Max housed at Her Majesty's pleasure, Jack had moved in with John. Ever since Miranda had shown ‘her true capitalist colours,' his interest in Oxford had waned. Besides, with his new national responsibilities, Longbridge was even better placed than Cowley had been. But as they drove through the darkness and away from the South Wales valleys, a thought that had been festering in his head, ever since the debacle at Hunters, finally broke cover.

“Why were you not arrested along with Max and me?” he asked.

“Max was a crazy: had it coming,” John answered, “and you're a big man. I'm nowt.”

That satisfied Jack Pugh entirely.

What John Preston did not say was that he had told Peter Betsworth about his erstwhile flatmate and when the police were informed, his handler made sure John faced no charges.

* * *

Harvey and Alun Davies talked long after the Prestons and Pritchards had left. Y Dic Penderyn was convivial and he found the old Welshman the best of company. Full of the seasoned wisdom that comes from a half-century observing the rich and the poor, the lazy and the diligent, the decent and the dishonest, he considered it essential that the present be set in the context of the past.

“The Spanish-American writer, George Santayana, said it best Harvey: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Our own Robert Owen had true wisdom, but somehow what he said was lost in translation.” He explained how the great Welsh industrialist concluded that men and machines should not compete and that capital and labour should work together for the prosperity of all. For a time, Alun recounted, the model factory Owen built up in Lanark, Scotland, where workers and their families were fairly paid, well housed and properly educated, was much admired.

“The trouble, Harvey,” he bemoaned, “is that his socialistic principles were turned into coercion by ambitious men, hungry for power. Who really wants to live in a world where everything is controlled by some higher authority, however benign? And imagine what they feel when that authority ceases to be benign! A slave is a slave no matter how honourable his master. That left libertarians with Adam Smith's invisible hand. He argued that when each of us pursues his own self-interest within a properly regulated, free-market economy, the well-being of everyone will steadily improve. I suppose we are about to give that a try,” he said. “But I feel for the communities in these valleys. What brought them here is leaching away. If the people of the Nile delta awoke one morning to find that their river no longer flowed, what would they do? They would lavish tribute on their priesthood from their dwindling resources and pray for a miracle.”

* * *

The following day, Harvey struggled with his piece for
The Sentinel
. He wanted to write about the rich culture he had found and how the economic winds that had enabled it to form were now blowing that culture away. Instead he wrote about a looming battle. He predicted that a man called Arthur Scargill would soon lead the miners in a make or break confrontation with the country's democratically elected government. As George Gilder had often told him, newspapers sell on the basis of black and white, not subtlety.

C
HAPTER

L
IKE MOST OF his friends, Ray Gosling was a member of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. But he and his wife, Mary, had grown sick and tired of the stoppages and the damage these were doing to their lives. Mary never did tell her husband about the help she was getting from Mabel Preston, but even with this she was struggling. Both had voted for Mrs Thatcher, although it would be several years before they would admit it, even to each other.

John Preston, Mabel's son, had suggested he vote for Terry Duffy when Hugh Scanlon had retired as union president the previous year, because Duffy was no friend of the communists. Ray would never have thought of doing so otherwise. The favoured candidate was the left-winger, Bob Right, but Duffy had won. Like Ray, many of the younger Leyland workers were growing restless and John Preston was finding ready recruits willing to break the left wing's grip on their union.

No one expected things to change overnight. In fact, the communist shop stewards inside the Transport and General Workers' Union and AUEW had been gearing up for a fight since before the election. Mass action was being planned to keep volume car
production going, even as the Leyland CEO was eliminating loss-making units and laying off workers as fast as the stewards could cry ‘all out!'

The rumour was that Michael Edwards had threatened to wind up the whole company unless the government underwrote redundancy payments for as many as 50,000 of its 165,000 workers. By all accounts, the new Secretary of State for Industry, Keith Joseph, needed little persuading. A passionate believer in the need for productive industries operating in a free market, he had been the intellectual driving force behind the Conservative Party's new hard-edged approach to economic management.

The way Ray Gosling saw it, an industry unable to sell its products for a profit was unlikely to see him out. He could always find some other work if he had to and a little redundancy money would not go amiss. What he liked about the AUEW's new president was that the man seemed to see things the same way: get the best that was on offer and move on. What the dictatorship of the proletariat actually meant he never rightly knew, and hadn't much liked the sound of it anyway.

* * *

A proposal by the government to fund postal ballots in union elections was at first bitterly opposed by the Trades Union Congress: left-wingers saw it as taking the devil's shilling. However, Duffy's more pragmatic view prevailed. The showdown between the AUEW and its shop stewards came towards the end of the year.

Throughout 1979, the popular press wasted no opportunity to mock the communist stewards and ‘Red Robbo', the name given to Derek Robinson, himself a member of the AUEW, had been the focus of their bile. As the Longbridge convener, Robinson had coordinated a succession of strikes in the forty-two plants over which he had influence and Edwards was determined to get rid of him.

* * *

It was shortly after the election when Jack Pugh found himself bundled into a car and taken to a meeting with a nameless man who had talked to him from behind a wall of reflective glass. How had this voice known about his liaison with Miranda de Coursey? He suspected it had come from Miranda herself. Following the Hunters debacle, she had thrown him out of her room and although they had taken up again, her passion had dulled.

No longer could he rely on a quotation from the great Vladimir Ilyich Lenin – ‘People always have been the foolish victims of deception and they always will be. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.' – to cause her ecstasy.

There was even the copy of a passionate letter he'd written to this daughter of a capitalist laid out on the table in front of him. How would it look to his communist brothers should it fall into their hands, the voice had asked? His assured ‘They'd think it a fabrication' convinced neither him nor his interrogator. He knew how jumpy the brothers were.

He'd been given a simple choice. Leave here and become a marked man who might have his kneecaps shot out at any time, by goodness knows who, or continue with his revolutionary life and the admiration it brought him in return for a little information. The voice knew the brothers intended to close down the entire automobile industry and that a meeting was planned to coordinate the action. A copy of the minutes of this meeting would be appreciated.

When the brothers met to finalize strategy, the meeting had been electric. As a trusted organizer, Jack had, of course, been present. He made a passionate speech about this being the moment when the capitalist edifice would crumble and a new breed of leader would take
over, which had gone down well. The contents of a pamphlet were agreed and he'd even managed to have it hardened by quoting from Lenin, his intellectual mentor – ‘You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.'

The minutes of the meeting were thorough. The brothers regarded themselves as nothing if not professional. As he walked to the post box he felt strangely elated. He, Jack Pugh, was at the centre of great events, exactly where he had always wanted to be.

* * *

When the stewards' pamphlet was circulated with Robinson's name on it, criticizing management and calling for mass action, Edwards saw his chance. The convener was called in and asked to withdraw his name. He refused and was fired. Another name on the pamphlet, belonging to a member of the TGWU, was ignored.

The Longbridge plant stopped work immediately in defence of its convener. The Birmingham East District Committee called upon the AUEW executive to declare an official strike. The TGWU executive met and agreed to call an official strike if the AUEW would do so also. Five days after the sacking, the unofficial walkout was still holding and several thousand assembled in the Town Hall, but the AUEW executive did not show up. Its representatives were meeting with Edwards in a nearby hotel.

There the AUEW offered to set up a Committee of Enquiry into the sacking, a proposal the Leyland management were happy to accept as long as Robinson was only in receipt of an ex-gratia payment, in lieu of his salary, while the committee deliberated – and if the committee's deliberations were ‘thorough', so much the better. With this deal done, the men had little option but to return to work. Edwards didn't even have to make public the minutes of the mass-action planning meeting which had come into his hands.

When the AUEW finally did consult its members about whether to strike on behalf of Derek Robinson, some 14,000 votes were cast against strike action with only 600 in favour. Ray Gosling was relieved to find himself in the majority.