AS I LEFT the King’s Head in Clapham one warm evening in mid-July 1981, the tension in the summer air was palpable. Shop fronts were boarded up and there were fewer cars than usual driving along Acre Lane, the road that ran alongside the pub and up towards Brixton.
A couple of months earlier, in May, I’d been elected to the Executive Council of my union, by now renamed the Union of Communication Workers to recognise the fact that British Telecom was no longer part of the Post Office. My life had changed profoundly. Although I was still employed as a postman, now that I was a lay member of the governing body of the union I was signed off on special leave for virtually 365 days a year. I was paid by the Post Office but worked for the union.
My Royal Mail uniform had been permanently replaced by a suit and tie and my workplace was no longer the sorting office at Slough but UCW House, the headquarters purpose built for the union in 1933 in Crescent Lane, Clapham, London SW4.
Jim Callaghan’s gamble of postponing a general election until 1979 had failed spectacularly and Britain had its first woman prime minister. As was so often the case throughout the twentieth century, a Labour government had proved to be a brief interlude in a long era of Conservative rule. And although we didn’t know it at the time, no institution would suffer more in terms of loss of membership and influence than the trade-union movement.
By 1981 the number of people out of work was at the previously unimaginable level of 2.5 million. Incredibly, it would rise to beyond 3 million as Labour remained unable to dislodge the Tories. In Brixton, in south-west London, the unemployment figure was higher than average, and among ethnic minorities it was higher still. Around 55 per cent of the Afro-Caribbean youth of Brixton were out of work. The area, which had been getting more decrepit for years, was blighted by poor housing and soaring crime rates. As the Scarman Report was to conclude later in the year, there had been ‘disproportionate and indiscriminate use of “stop and search” against the black community’ by the Metropolitan Police, supplemented by the notorious Special Patrol Group, the unit dedicated to combating serious public disorder and related crime.
In January, at a house party in New Cross, three or four miles east of Brixton, thirteen black youngsters had died in a fire and the belief that it had been started deliberately by white supremacists, while unsubstantiated, had become entrenched among local black people. The community was outraged by what they saw as indifference on the part of the authorities and the press and some 15,000 protesters marched in central London calling for action.
This toxic mix of deprivation, suspicion, grievance and discrimination culminated in the Brixton riots that had erupted between 10 and 12 April and involved as many as five thousand people. Now, in July, the country had seen riots breaking out in Southall in west London, Toxteth (Liverpool), Handsworth (Birmingham), Chapeltown (Leeds) and Moss Side (Manchester). Brixton, inevitably another potential flashpoint, remained eerily quiet but volatile, like dry tinder needing only a spark to burst into flames.
I’d gone to the King’s Head with some of the staff from UCW House who lived nearby, many in Brixton itself. We all left the pub after one drink. Nobody wanted to be going home after the sun went down, when the risk of trouble rose dramatically. While my workmates were heading into the heart of the tension I was driving away from it, west along the M4, which took me out of London and home to the Britwell estate. As I drove, the car radio played the hit that had been at Number 1 for weeks: ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials.
Rarely has a pop record so accurately reflected the mood of the moment. This was astute social observation with a reggae beat. The Specials’ hypnotic song, written by the band’s keyboard player, Jerry Dammers, and released on the 2 Tone label, fully deserved all the accolades it was to receive. Two-tone, the music genre that fused ska and reggae with echoes of punk, originated in the Specials’ home town of Coventry. Characterised by mixed-race bands and black-and-white garb teamed with pork pie hats, it was a musical metaphor for racial harmony.
There were no riots in Slough. While the town itself was racially diverse, the Britwell was almost totally populated by white working-class families. Labour had held the constituency (which went under the splendid title of Eton and Slough) in 1979 but Joan Lestor, our wonderful MP, would be defeated at the next election.
Although the high levels of unemployment affected people of all ethnicities, Slough fared better than many towns owing to its location in the prosperous Thames Valley. Its trading estate had been generating jobs since the 1930s. So my thirty-mile journey from Clapham took me into a much more serene landscape, free of the pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness and despair that was emanating from Brixton and Toxteth.
That year was a strange mixture of riots and royalty. It was only a couple of weeks after the worst of the unrest that Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer and we all got a day off to celebrate. It was hoped that the occasion would boost public morale, if only for a day or two. The extent of the government’s concern that the wedding would be marred by violence in the streets was revealed only thirty years later with the release of official files that detailed how Mrs Thatcher wanted to arm the police and equip them with water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets (plans resisted by senior police officers).
It is interesting that, just as in the twenty-first century blame for unrest is often laid at the door of social media, in 1981 the government appeared to be pointing the finger at the influence of television. As it turned out, calm was restored by the day of the royal wedding, but only just: a second wave of rioting in Toxteth ended only the day before.
My three children were becoming more and more interested in music and the artists who made it. Natalie was devoted to Haircut 100, Emma to Bucks Fizz (who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1981 with ‘Making Your Mind Up’), and ten-year-old Jamie, who’d begun to apply himself seriously to the acoustic guitar we’d bought him a few years earlier, still idolised the Police. He also had a special fondness for the Kim Wilde single ‘Kids in America’.
And we all liked Adam and the Ants, whose songs and videos were such fun. By now, with technology enabling video recording and editing to be done quickly and cheaply, the pop video was beginning to play an important part in the marketing of music and becoming a significant factor in the success of any record. Gone were the days of artists simply miming to their hits on Top of the Pops. This was the year when the video channel MTV was launched in the States, heralding the era of round-the-clock music on television.
Adam and the Ants were among the artists to capitalise on the growing popularity of the promotional video by producing creative little films to enhance their appeal. The video for their single ‘Prince Charming’, in which Diana Dors – the 1950s starlet once touted as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe and something of a national institution – appeared as the Fairy Godmother, was the best thing on telly for a while. Not that I saw much TV. My new life was peripatetic. When I wasn’t driving up to Clapham, I was touring the country trying to sort out disputes and tutoring at the union’s educational weekend schools.
In August my new role took me abroad for the first time since that childhood holiday in Denmark for London’s inner-city kids. It wasn’t the first time I’d been on a plane – I’d completed my maiden flight, or flights, only two months earlier aboard the 4.30pm ‘shuttle’ from Heathrow to Manchester and a tiny twenty-seater onward to Dundee, where there had been a disagreement to settle.
Now, at the dubiously youthful age of thirty-one, I was leading a UCW delegation to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) Youth Conference in Seville. If I was expecting to live the high life in Spain, I was soon disappointed.
On our arrival, in searing heat, our delegation of eight was shown to a tent that would be our home for ten days. Inside was nothing but grass which grew rough and spiky. There was no groundsheet, or indeed anything else, in the tent, apart from an ants’ nest in the middle. We eventually got hold of some polythene sheets to sleep on. A thousand delegates from all over the world were to live in similar accommodation in this tent city, with rudimentary toilet facilities and about fifty cold-water showers, at the hottest time of the year, when temperatures were topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Within a week I was in the camp hospital with suspected dysentery. An outbreak spreading through the camp was so severe that the West German authorities sent their own doctors to Seville to treat their delegation and make sure they didn’t bring the disease home with them.
Fortunately, it transpired that I didn’t have dysentery, but I was very poorly all the same. Never had I been so pleased to be ill. It meant I was able to spend the last few days of the conference in the relative luxury of the camp hospital rather than sweltering in the sparsely equipped tent. From my bed on the top floor of the four-storey medical centre, I could hear the music from the nightly open-air concerts, provided by a different country every evening. There was Spanish dancing, South American musical theatre and traditional Indian music, all very highbrow and cultural.
On the last night it was evidently the turn of the Brits. All I could hear from what sounded like a combined choir of British, Irish and Australian piss artists was a ragged, impromptu performance of Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddap You Face’.
It wasn’t my favourite record of the year but the song title would certainly have been been the first to spring to mind as a suitable response if anyone ever again asked me to attend a ICFTU World Youth Conference.