The Storytellers (3 page)

“Didn't he come to a poor end?” Harvey asked, remembering something he had once read.

“Yes. He was expelled from his country and eventually murdered on Stalin's orders. That was in 1940 I think. He was living in Mexico at the time. A poor end indeed for a man who had once commanded the Red Army.”

Harvey thought his companion almost sounded sorry for the deceased revolutionary.

“Now here is some background material on Longbridge and Cowley,” he said, handing Harvey a folder. “You'll also see something
on a miner we are keeping an eye on, Arthur Scargill. He joined the Young Communist League in 1955 and attended the World Youth Festival in Moscow a couple of years later. Festival!” Peter Betsworth repeated. “As innocent-sounding as an English country fête. He was pretty active in the strike that brought down Heath.”

Harvey accepted the folder, which seemed slim, considering the magnitude of what the agent was telling him. His companion had to be from MI5, he thought, the branch of government concerned with internal security.

“Just background material,” Peter Betsworth advanced, as if reading his mind, doubtless one of his skills.

“And my role?” Harvey asked.

“Just get in there and start reporting. Tell stories. Explain to the public what is really going on. Our country is on the brink of imploding – step two in the communist handbook,” he laughed drily, “after infiltration.”

“People must be persuaded that a new style of leadership is needed,” he continued. “Our democracy depends on it. Now should you need to, call me on the number you were given. Good luck.”

With that, the man who called himself Peter Betsworth peeled off in the direction of Whitehall. Clutching the slim folder, Harvey continued north towards Piccadilly. He thought he might as well take the tube at Green Park and connect with the Central Line east at Holborn.

He hadn't noticed the chill while they'd been talking. But now the frozen landscape seemed anxious to suck the warmth right out of him. Fear and excitement mingled with the outside cold and inside warmth from his over-pumping heart in a sensual congress that stirred him. He walked quicker. A tramp shuffled past from the other direction and mumbled a half-hearted solicitation, which Harvey ignored. On his right, beyond a high hedge, he passed the home of Lord Rothermere. George Gilder had taken him to a reception there once.
The press baron's father, Harold Harmsworth, the first Viscount, had been a hugely successful pioneer of popular journalism and a one-time supporter of the German Nazi Party, until its foul nature became apparent. Harvey wondered if crisis fostered extremes, or if extremes fostered crisis.

‘Someone needs to crack the whip, Harve,' his mother would often say. ‘Too much freedom just leads to trouble.'

Harvey smiled to himself. Harold Harmsworth and Sylvia would have got on. They sang from the same hymn sheet, which was why the tycoon had been so successful. The forces of radical conservatism were stirring from a long slumber. Suddenly it became clear. His job was to help force them wide awake.

C
HAPTER

“T
HAT were great, Mabel.”

Stanley Preston leaned back in his chair and looked across the table towards his wife with obvious pleasure. They'd been married for forty years and he'd never been tempted to stray. The evening meal was a cherished ritual and his home a contented space. The same, however, could not be said for his place of work.

The fields around Longbridge, on the southern outskirts of Birmingham, had been turned over to industry at the end of the nineteenth century. The copper plate printers who had made the move failed and the site was acquired by a Yorkshire man, Herbert Austin, to build cars. Within a few years he was employing over a thousand people. During the First and Second World Wars, his greatly expanded factories were used for the production of munitions. Austin and Morris Motors amalgamated in 1958, becoming the British Motor Corporation, and ten years later, when Harold Wilson's Labour Government arranged for BMC and British Leyland to merge, Longbridge became the largest car plant in the world, employing over 250,000 workers. Rather than leading to efficiencies, as had been intended, this industrial hubris led instead to
an augmentation of government meddling, management weakness and union intransigence.

By 1975, the unwieldy behemoth had run out of money and the government was forced to rescue it, becoming its major shareholder. Two years later, a South African was hired to clear up the mess and Michael Edwards set about his task with gusto. Partnerships with overseas manufacturers were sought, unprofitable parts of the business were earmarked for sale or closure, the senior management structure was streamlined and Edwards began disaggregating the monster into more commercially coherent divisions. With inflation rampant, the government's policy of pay restraint was failing, utterly, and even the union hierarchy had lost control to militant committees on the shop floor. The steady improvement in living standards, which unions had secured for their members at each pay round since the war, was under threat as never before.

It was back in 1934, at the age of sixteen, when Stanley had joined Austin as an apprentice. Four years later, he and Mabel were married and when he went off to war, she entered the factory to help the war effort by making armour-piercing shells. Their three sons, Billy, John and Joseph, named after the Soviet leader, were minded by her mother for the duration. Stanley had become a member of the Communist Party soon after joining Austin, not on account of any strong ideological convictions, but because that was what most of the lads did. At the start of the war, the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact caused him and several of his friends to question their allegiance, but by the end, what he came to think of as little more than a misstep could be forgotten. An alliance that was good enough for Mr Churchill was good enough for him.

Billy, their oldest, had left home at sixteen ‘to see the world' and now worked for an oil company in Texas. John still worked at Longbridge, although he did not share his father's deep faith in the union and they had grown apart. Joseph had surprised everyone, becoming a chef
in London and Stanley looked forward to his youngest son's visits with unexpected hunger. The factory, the union, the
Daily Worker
, or
Morning Star
as it became, were his world. Incidental news from the centre of capitalist power proved to be a guilty pleasure for both him and Mabel, especially as Joseph, unlike John, displayed little interest in politics.

“Will you be going to the institute?” Mabel asked, the name given to the canteen where shop stewards and workers congregated to socialize, hold meetings and generally put the world to rights, a world which had become excessively wrong of late, in all their eyes.

“Yes. Derek wants us out.”

“That'll be the second time this month,” she said. “What's it this time?”

“Management's trying to cut overtime again,” he told her.

“Well, if cars aren't selling,” she proffered hesitantly but thought better of continuing along that line and changed tack. “These stoppages are costing us, Stan. Just think what it's doing to families with children.”

“Aye. It's hard. But if we lose this one, Mabel, we'll lose everything.”

Mabel Preston knew better than to argue. She'd said her piece. Now it was down to her to manage the household finances as best she could. She just wished she had some of the magic on show in the parable of the five loaves and two fish. Especially as she was buying a little extra each week to share with the young family next door who were being hit hard by the frequent disruption in earnings. When all was said and done, they had to stick together. She knew that. Solidarity was their only strength.

* * *

The institute was full, as it tended to be before a vote. Peter Farris was in the chair with Derek Robinson on his left. The shop
steward had laid out the position. A minimum level of overtime had been negotiated three years earlier when production was in high gear and now that sales had stalled, management wanted to break the agreement.

‘If agreements can be entered into when convenient and dropped when not, they are not agreements,' the steward had declared to the general satisfaction of everyone in the room. ‘This is our factory,' he claimed, ‘and we must be consulted.'

The room, with windows bolted shut against the outside cold, possessed the moist warmth of a womb. Secure, they felt comforted by each other, packed inside. Like the prisoners of Plato's cave, their assertions seemed real, even though they were merely shadows of reality projected through the lens of Marxist-Leninist theory poorly understood.

“Delegates,” Peter Farris announced from the chair after the minutes of the previous meeting had been read. “I have asked Jack Pugh from our sister plant in Cowley to say a few words. As you know, Cowley has been in the vanguard of our struggle and Jack one of its leading lights. Jack.”

A wiry, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties, with a clipped goatee beard and piercing green eyes, rose from one of the plastic chairs in the front row which were normally stacked against the back wall to make way for the snooker table now pushed tight into one corner. Even in this simple act of rising to address the crowd, the Cowley delegate radiated a pulse of electric energy that caused the room to fall silent and its occupants, many pressed standing against the walls, to fix on him in anticipation.

“Brothers!” Jack Pugh's greeting was delivered loudly in his shrill voice as a consecration of the faithful. “It is our task,” he urged. “No, it is our sacred
duty
,” he qualified, in a tone worthy of the most forceful proselytizer, firing the word ‘duty' into the hearts of his listeners like a trained marksman, “to tear down a capitalist structure
that can upset our lives as easily as a ledger entry. It is our sacred duty, brothers, to reclaim that power which is rightly ours, and which resides here, inside these factories, not in some distant counting house operated for the benefit of people who neither know about us, nor care.

“In light of the hardships you are being asked to bear, it is important that you understand the heroic process you are part of. Many here will already know what this is, but some of you will not, so let me explain.” Jack Pugh looked pensive, drawing his hands up to his lips, as if in prayer.

“When the French Revolution brought an end to feudal society in that country,” he continued, “which Oliver Cromwell had already achieved here, the working man ceased to be a chattel, the property of another. However, these revolutions were not revolutions of the workers, or proletariat, but of the middle class, or bourgeoisie, who attained the freedom to compete for positions of authority. This was possible because money came to determine the flow of relationships within society, rather than birth or blood lines.

“But this put ultimate power in the hands of the owners of capital, who were happy to employ the bourgeoisie as their placemen, leaving the proletariat to fight between themselves for the crumbs. And crumbs, brothers, are exactly what we would have got had we not organized. And it is crumbs, good people of Longbridge, we will get again, if management gets its way now.”

It was already dark outside. The windows were steamed and one or two inside the institute were getting restless. Two late arrivals let a welcome blast of cold air into the room, and the distraction allowed everyone to alter their positions. Delegate Pugh tried not to appear irritated as the arriving men searched for somewhere to stand and polite suggestions were made from various quarters, but to no avail, leaving them squeezed just inside the door.

Picking up more or less where he had left off, Jack Pugh gave
them a warning. “Do not imagine,” he said, “that the Labour Party is your friend. Members of the Labour Party will make comforting noises, certainly, but in the end, they are bourgeois, jealous of their advantages and will never fundamentally change a system that benefits them. That is why, brothers, we must continue the struggle until property and privilege, however bestowed, are eradicated.”

The applause he received was solid and might have been more so had his flow not been punctured. In any event, the membership had never fully embraced the hard left ideology which permeated Cowley, although there was a vocal minority of Longbridge workers who wished it had. This included Harry Blodget, an unmarried, middle-aged fitter, who rose to his feet and clapped keenly but failed to stimulate a standing ovation.

Peter Farris thanked the delegate from Cowley for his insights and opened the floor for questions to either their own steward or their guest, with the proviso that as it was getting late and they still needed to vote, “Could members keep it short and not go over old ground.”

He must have known, from chairing past meetings, that this was a forlorn hope and the room immediately exploded into a starburst of questions, statements and accusations. Members did not come to institute meetings to remain silent.

“Some order, please. One at a time and through the chair.” His repeated pleas were quickly lost in the raucous noise from the room which only died down when the pressure vessel had released its steam and the membership grew tired of hearing its own conflated sound.

“Ray, yes, you have a question?” The chairman repeated his invitation several times before the room fell quiet and Ray Gosling, a twenty-nine-year-old machinist with a wife and three small children, felt able to speak.

“Yes, this is for Derek, I guess,” the young man said nervously.

Derek Robinson, a large man with an open, kind face, but
combustible temper, looked benignly at his questioner from the end of the hall, eager to put him at ease. These last months had been a trial for him. His members were hurting. Inflation was eroding every pay increase they secured. Militancy was growing. The national union had effectively told the plants and every department in every plant that they were on their own. It was up to the shop stewards to strike whatever deal they could. Anarchy was the only word for it. With rumours of cuts and closures swirling through the ranks, the mood was fissile. Stewards were being driven into taking action and making demands by a competitive frenzy. Over the last twelve months there had been over two hundred stoppages in his plant alone. He wasn't sleeping well.

“Don't hold back, son,” urged Mark Grass, a spray painter of thirty years whose function would soon be taken over by a robot. “We are all family here.”

“Well, it's about family really,” the young man advanced. “These stoppages are making it hard to keep up with the payments. The young 'uns need feeding and clothing. The wife's struggling. She keeps asking me what all these stoppages are for.”

“Sacrifices must be made,” proffered Harry Blodget. “The women need to know that.”

“That's grand coming from you, Harry,” his neighbour chided. “You haven't got one!”

A ripple of laughter spread around the room. There couldn't have been a married man amongst them who hadn't been on the wrong end of his wife's tongue at one time or another.

“You surely have a hardship fund?” Jack Pugh asked, looking sternly across at the shop steward. Everyone was supposed to put a small amount each week into a kitty, which was matched from central union funds, for the use of members in serious trouble.

“Of course we do,” the steward retorted. “But it doesn't amount ter much and besides, I've only had one request for assistance in
twelve month and that from a widow needing help to cover her man's funeral expenses.”

“That's the sum of it,” exclaimed the young man, anxious to get back into his own conversation. “Apart from the rent, the food and the clothing, I have furniture to pay off and there's the car. But how can I claim hardship? All that's just life, isn't it? Oh, and there's the gas and the electricity,” he added. It was his wife who kept the accounts.

The murmur of sympathy which the machinist's comments attracted was only too audible, especially from the younger members.