IT COULD BE said that I was involved in the negotiations which took Britain into what was then the European Community (and what would become the European Union). This may be a slight exaggeration, but it happened like this.
I had been elected to the Postmen’s Committee of the Slough Amalgamated Branch of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) in 1974, only to find that I was a member of a committee that never met. The names of the ten members, including mine, were displayed on the UPW noticeboard in the sorting office so that the members who’d ostensibly elected us could seek our assistance in resolving whatever workplace problem they wanted a union representative to assist them with. In reality it was a rarity for any election to take place, the committee usually consisting of the last men to back away when volunteers were called for.
In the run-up to the great referendum that would decide whether Britain would remain in the European Community it had only recently joined, to be held on 5 June 1975, I was working on ‘the rurals’. This was a corner of the vast sorting office from which the deliveries for Slough’s surrounding villages were prepared and dispatched. Pottering around the Bucks and Berks countryside in a Royal Mail van conferred a status and a job satisfaction that couldn’t be achieved by pedalling a bike on the town deliveries, and the men on these ‘walks’ formed a senior elite who’d spurned promotion in favour of using their seniority to secure the most desirable routes in the more attractive locations.
As yet no PHG vacancies had come up for me, and with seven years’ service I had enough seniority to get on to a Farnham Common rural delivery temporarily while I was waiting.
One morning in May we arrived at work to find stacks of unaddressed leaflets piled high on the racks above our delivery frames. The supervisors told us that these were circulars setting out the case for and against remaining in the European Community. Others would follow, including one from Her Majesty’s government. We were to integrate these handouts with our normal stamped mail over the next couple of weeks. So as not to incur any overtime, the supervisors exhorted us to ‘take them where you’re going’, in other words, to those addresses for which there was already a stamped letter to deliver. They were making the reasonable assumption that every address would meet this criterion at least once over the next fortnight.
The reaction among the rural men was mutinous. This was akin to ordering an elite company of Roman legionnaires to do a spot of knitting.
We were postmen paid to deliver the Queen’s mail, not distributors of leaflets. That was women’s work. It would be fair to say that by the time I arrived at the office, half an hour late, as usual, the dudgeon in which I found the men was extremely high.
I had received no training in any aspect of being a union rep, let alone in what to do in a situation such as this, where the supervisors were insisting that the leaflets must be delivered and the men were adamantly refusing. The branch secretary, who was the chief local negotiator, was on office hours. By the time he arrived at work, the men might have walked out or been suspended from duty, such was the strength of feeling.
I swallowed hard, demanded to see the senior office manager on duty and was ushered into the presence of a meticulously groomed former sergeant-major by the name of Frank Taylor. Frank, like everyone in management, had once been a postman himself. He asked me what credentials I had to represent the rural postmen. I referred him to the list of committee members on the UPW noticeboard, which seemed to satisfy him. He sat me down in his office and closed the door. Frank was twice my age and had the thinnest of moustaches to match his military bearing. There was a twinkle in his eye as he gazed upon the innocent novice who’d entered his lair.
‘Now, Alan, perhaps you’d explain why the rurals, who all have the luxury of a van to carry the mail, are so outraged when the town men, who have to carry theirs on a bike, seem perfectly content to take these leaflets where they are going,’ he said.
I’d anticipated this distinction being commented on, and by the time Mr Taylor and I met at 6am, the two hundred or so town postmen had been stirred into a similar state of outrage.
‘I am here on behalf of all the delivery staff, Mr Taylor,’ I replied nervously, ‘and none of them, town or rural, is satisfied with this “take them where you’re going” instruction.’
As it was essential that these things were delivered well before the 5 June referendum, I knew I had a strong hand to play. Furthermore, since Post Office wages in the booming Thames Valley were uncompetitive and Slough was always short of staff, the goodwill of the men was a crucial component of getting through each working day.
I had a proposition ready to resolve the situation and Frank and I did a deal of which I like to think the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who had been engaged in negotiations in Brussels to improve the terms of British membership prior to the referendum, would have approved. Each complete leaflet delivery would attract an overtime payment of three hours, irrespective of whether or not the hours were worked.
I think there were four of these handouts in total: a ‘yes’ leaflet, a ‘no’ leaflet, the government’s recommendation and one from the opposition Conservative party, whose new leader, Margaret Thatcher, was fiercely in favour of Britain’s membership. (The governing Labour party was split on the issue and had decided not to campaign.)
This meant that twelve hours’ overtime were available to every postman as a boost to his weekly wages in exchange for delivering the extra items within normal duty hours. In putting forward this offer, I described it as a ‘productivity bonus’. I’d asked for four hours and allowed Frank to bargain me down to the three I wanted.
Thirty minutes later, the matter was settled. I returned to the ‘rurals’ like Lech Walesa returning to the shipyards of Gdansk having secured victory over a totalitarian regime.
One of my colleagues as a rural postman was Brian Tidman, a wryly humorous man about a decade older than me. Brian was a fellow music enthusiast and always seemed to be one step ahead of me in his familiarity with the latest rock sensation from America. He it was who introduced me to the Eagles (I had a lot of time for the Eagles, but I could never match his devotion to the band because their albums featured so many make-weight tracks that were utter dross).
In 1975 he lent me a record by a US artist who almost justified the incredible hype that surrounded him. Apparently, Columbia Records spent a quarter of a million dollars promoting Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. This seemed plausible: long before I’d heard any of Springsteen’s music, I’d read articles in the music press, and even in Sunday newspaper supplements, hailing him as the ‘new Bob Dylan’ and, somewhat bizarrely, ‘the future of rock’.
Brian wanted us to go with our wives when Bruce and the E Street Band played the Hammersmith Odeon, but for some reason I declined. It was a decision I came to regret because when I saw footage of Springsteen’s concerts later, it became clear that I’d missed an opportunity to experience a show by one of the greatest live performers in rock history. Bruce Springsteen wasn’t the future of rock but, in my view, he was and remains one of its greatest practitioners. And at a time when music was drifting towards elaborate over-production, he represented a return to its raw and exciting past.
Unfortunately Springsteen didn’t make it to Slough, but the biggest British pop group of the era did – to the Holiday Inn on the London Road, Langley. I’m not sure why the Bay City Rollers came to my town. They certainly weren’t performing there. Slough didn’t have a venue big enough to accommodate the Rollers. Most likely they were staying there overnight before an early-morning flight from Heathrow.
Pundits claimed that the Bay City Rollers were responsible for a 1970s version of Beatlemania but this was a specious comparison. A more accurate one would have been with the Monkees, the manufactured sixties band who had their hits written for them and appealed almost exclusively to a very young female audience.
That’s not to decry either the Rollers or the Monkees. They were both authentic pop phenomena who sold an extraordinary number of records (120 million in the case of the Bay City Rollers). But pop music aficionados grew weary of the constant predictions that every successful band that came along was going to be bigger than the Beatles. Such a band never materialised.
In the spring of 1975 the boys with the calf-length tartan-edged trousers and tartan scarves were carrying all before them. They were Number 1 in the charts with the old Four Seasons hit ‘Bye Bye Baby’, they had their own television programme (called Shang-a-Lang) and were conquering countries all around the globe.
I seem to remember that their stay at the Holiday Inn was meant to be a secret but it seemed a chambermaid couldn’t resist telling her friends. Despite the absence of social media in those far-off days, this kind of news always spread faster than a virulent epidemic.
My colleagues in the sorting office reported seeing legions of young girls gravitating towards and congregating outside the newly built hotel. I had a direct interest in this intelligence as I was scheduled to do the Langley collection that evening, and one of the pillarboxes I had to clear was only a few metres from the hotel.
By the time I reached the London Road at about 6.15pm there was a police cordon outside the hotel and the multitude of girls being penned back into the area around my pillarbox must have numbered a couple of thousand. The crowd was dense and boisterous. There was even a girl sitting on top of the pillarbox. The main road had been reduced to a single lane and I couldn’t get my van anywhere near the box. Pushing through this throng with my sack and big bunch of keys would have been hard enough; the chances of opening the box, clearing the mail and getting back to the van were more or less zero. I calculated that to attempt it would have constituted a risk to life and limb.
As this was the final port of call on my collection, I turned the van round and headed straight back to the sorting office, leaving the pillarbox unopened. The supervisor in charge that evening was Lenny Hayes, a big, rollicking Cockney who fully justified the over-used accolade ‘larger than life’. Len was an avid Arsenal supporter who had a unique matchday quirk which I discovered when he came to QPR with me for (I think) an FA Cup replay. Len would light a cigarette immediately the game kicked off and smoke continuously throughout the match. As the final whistle blew, he would stub out his latest fag, irrespective of how far through smoking it he was, and not touch another one until the start of the next game, when the whole business would be repeated.
As he was an Arsenal season-ticket-holder and attended many away matches as well, this was not an inexpensive habit. I calculated that even if each cigarette took as long as five minutes to smoke, he’d be getting through a packet of twenty at every game. I thought that perhaps he was a former smoker who’d given up but couldn’t help backsliding during an absorbing match, but Len told me he had never smoked in his life, except at the football. He claimed it helped him cope with the stress.
When I reported my inability to get to the London Road pillarbox, Len’s response was theatrical. Sounding like Sir Laurence Olivier in Henry V, he held court loudly in the middle of the sorting-office floor, railing against the army of girls who were preventing the Queen’s mail from getting through (which was inaccurate in any case, since the mail was being prevented from coming out, not getting through) and pledging to rectify the situation personally. If there had been a horse nearby, I’m sure Len would have leaped upon it. As it was, he collared me to drive back out to the Holiday Inn with him on board, loins girded for the struggle ahead.
When he saw the crowd, which had swelled even further since my last visit, Len sat back in the passenger seat, swearing softly to himself. It looked as if every girl under sixteen from Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex was outside that hotel. Len didn’t lack courage. Taking a deep breath, he jumped out of the van, in his shirtsleeves and tie, and plunged into the throng, singling out the big metal key from the bunch he held in one giant paw and clutching a dusty grey post sack in the other.
I waited in the van with the engine running, watching Big Lenny’s head bobbing around. Then it disappeared from view. Ten minutes later he returned, shirt rumpled, tie askew and mail sack still empty. As I turned the van round and headed back to the sorting office, he recounted dejectedly how, as he’d inched his way towards the pillarbox through a mass of humanity denser than any he’d ever experienced at a football match, a girl shouted that she thought she’d caught sight of Woody, the Rollers’ guitarist, on the balcony of one of the rooms. The crowd surged, the screaming rose in pitch and volume and Lenny, carried away from the pillarbox on the tide, made the sensible decision that he’d like to see his wife and kids again. He deserted the battlefield, mission aborted.
Len was unusually quiet during the drive. I lit a cigarette and asked him if he wanted one. To my amazement, he accepted. Rollermania must have been the only thing Len Hayes ever experienced that was more stressful than watching Arsenal.
Later in the year, in the inauspicious surroundings of the Scout hut on Long Furlong Drive, where Judy had organised a fund-raising disco for her playgroup, I first heard one of the most remarkable singles in pop history.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ sounded like three or four different songs thrown together by someone who’d forgotten to add a chorus. I was never that bothered whether Scaramouche did the fandango or not, and found Queen’s greatest hit easy to admire but difficult to love. However, there was no denying the record’s profound impact, or its innovativeness; like ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, it was destined from the start to be played for as long as records are listened to.
It was, though, prog rock’s last stand, the epitome of the grandeur and pretentiousness of a genre that led almost directly to the rise of its antithesis – punk rock, and its new model army of followers.