Always a Layman

Foreward

“There is a destiny which shapes our end, rough hew it as we may ”

Let me start this story of my life with the end as well as a beginning.

In Wordsworth Street, Hove, a family of three young women in their early thirties were living with their mother who was a widow. The only son of that family was married and lived quite close in Suffolk Street, Hove. He had two children when this story starts, another had died at the age of one year.

On Sunday the 22nd January, 1905, midday one of the young women said to her mother and sisters, “I am going to Fred’s to see if the baby has arrived.” She was quite excited at the prospect of being an aunt! If only she had known what the future held for her arising from the childbirth she was anticipating!

When she went in everything was bustling and expectant and the event took place. Lo and behold, it was twins, a boy and a girl, to be named John and Joan later. That was the start of my life and my twin sister’s, also the interest of the new aunt’s. She ran home and said to her mother (now my grandmother), “Mum, it’s twins!” The immediate and very earnest reply by my new grandmother was, “My poor George, (her son) whatever will he do?”

When you reach the end of my story you will meditate, I hope, on the beginning. The birth of a child has a profound effect on so many people.

At that moment of time, Sunday 22nd January 1905, when I was born, I was destined to be writing this story when I am seventy-one years of age. My twin sister was destined to hospital life for thirty seven years, my aunt, who was so excited that day, was destined to be our Guardian when we were nine years old and to live to the age of ninety three and die in hospital with a fractured thigh.

Gallery

1. My Childhood

I was born, one of twins, on the 22nd January, 1905. My father was a carpenter and by 1913 we were in a dire position. My mother had died when I was five years old and there was no work about. Men were walking the streets, led by a band and going about begging for pennies to keep themselves going. My father was out of work for a very long time and we had to go to the Poor Law to get coupons for the necessities of life. I used to queue up at the Corporation Soup Kitchen with a big jug, like you used to have in bedrooms and get it filled up with really delicious hot soup for a penny. Although they thought they were giving us all the old rubbish that was thrown away by the trades people – the odds and ends that came off carcasses for instance – it was really good and nutritious. I remember one day in particular, I was wearing boots given to me by the school (we used to walk about bare footed from the spring to the late autumn, not because we liked it, but because we couldn’t buy boots). I went as usual with my jug and waited two or three hours for the soup to be cooked and when I came out with my jug full of boiling soup, I slipped down and poured it all over my head. In those days our families weren’t educated in how to deal with an accident and my older sister poured oil over it and it was terrifying. I had a dreadful head as a result of that. My head was covered with a bandage and every night my father used to get a bowl of water, soak the bandage and take it off. The last part was stuck and he used to say “Hold tight!” and snatch it off.

Also in those days, because people had nothing – nothing at all – you never knew when your next door neighbour was going to commit suicide. People would be unable to pay their rent, which would only be five shillings for a house, and that shared with two or three families, living in slum conditions, not dirty, but crowded because there was not enough money. You would suddenly find that a neighbour two doors away had drowned themselves or thrown themselves over the cliffs because the burden of life was intolerable, and that was at a time when you could buy a newspaper for a halfpenny. We used to do errands for people and were rewarded with a farthing, quarter of a penny. You could buy two boxes of matches (50 in a box) for a farthing. Newspapers a halfpenny; I was very shocked to read the news at times such as the Titanic disaster – Scott at the Pole – Someone being hung for murder – Mrs. Pankhurst in trouble with police and things like these made a great impression on me. There were no school meals in those days, I used to have bread and dripping for dinner and some boiled rice – no milk – but brown sugar which was very cheap. There used to be several kinds of sugar, loaf white, Demerara, brown, sand sugar (the last of the refining process) and icing sugar. Margarine was lovely to us, (made from peanuts), Maypole specialised in these items.

My home was very miserable, but it was not the fault of the family, it was the system. We had to beg for tickets for food and tickets to get blankets and things like that from the church. If we were ill, we had to go begging round ladies’ houses to get certificates, which they paid for, worth perhaps five or ten shillings, and collect them together. If you had to have an operation you might be lucky and they would recommend you to other ladies until you had collected sufficient certificates to pay for the operation.

When my father was alive, we rarely had fires. If we did it was two pennyworth of coal in a bucket from the shop and it was good coal too. When he was working, we used to sneak into his workshop and pick up all the little pieces of wood and shavings, we used to slide in and just filch it away, because he was in fear of getting the sack.

My mother started me at school when I was four and I remember standing on the doorstep messing my trousers the first time she said goodbye and how unhappy I was, but I loved school and I never stayed away from it for a single day. I loved it so much that when I was older, I used to go and meet the teacher at dinner time and worry her to let me go back and ring the bell. That was the start of my bell ringing. I used to get a certificate every three months for regular attendance and when the School Board Examiner used to come round, I often got an odd ha’penny. The School Mistress, Miss Herriott, thought so much of us twins that she used to invite us to her house for tea once a month and I have never forgotten the lovely home-made sponge sandwiches and the large slices she would cut for us. The school I went to was Aldrington Mixed School, Portland Road, Hove. On religious festivals we used to march down to St, Philip’s Church, and that is how I got to know the Church Calendar. If there was an eclipse of the sun we were given a piece of smoked glass to look at it in the playground. Near the school was the rubbish tip – and this was out of bounds – but we were always searching around to see what we could find. It is now a nice recreation ground and I was there the day it was opened, about 1912.

My mother played the organ at a church and she also started me at Sunday School before she died. Church with its bright lights and cheerful atmosphere was a great attraction to me, not like our home which due to poverty was bare and lit only by candles which threw shadows which were absolutely terrifying to me as a child. I remember that I woke up one Christmas Eve and cried so much that my father brought me downstairs. My mother came in the door with some Christmas presents and to pacify me, she gave me my presents there and then. I knew from that moment that there was no Father Christmas and I must have ruined thousands of children’s Christmases from then on, as I was such a clever little stick that I had to tell them that there was no Father Christmas. It was not until I was grown up that I realised how wonderful it was to believe in Father Christmas, even if the present you received was just a stocking with an orange, a few nuts and sweets in it. At church we also got tit bits, cakes and drinks, things we never had normally, and prizes for attending, which I never went without. I used to go there as much as I could, morning, noon and night, to get away from the gloom at home. The Sunday School developed a ‘Band of Hope’ and my twin sister and I were encouraged to perform at this, though we did not realise that that was what we were doing. We used to act little plays and sing duets like ‘Home Sweet Home’ and people absolutely loved it and kept making us do it and the more we did it the more we liked it. I signed the pledge when I was five years old, with no real understanding of what it was, though they taught us how terrible drink was and we were surrounded by the bad effects of it. Fighting in the streets, women too and their husbands coming home drunk, which was why they had so many children. It was irresponsible but it was the only outlet they had and beer was cheap. A person could get drunk on a penny or three-ha’pence, so they went and did it, right left and centre. As soon as they got a few coppers they went and got drunk and there was fighting in the streets at weekends as regular as clockwork. Outside Hove Station was a place known as ‘The Blood Hole’ where there used to be literally hundreds of fights. In those days women used to wear caps and aprons, you weren’t respectable if you went out without them, but you would see them fighting with their caps on.

When I was nine years old, my father died and the authorities wanted to put us into a Doctor Barnardo’s Home, I was to go in one and my sister into another, but my father’s sister would not have that, “I am not going to have my brother’s children put into a home, I’ll have them, I’ll look after them,” and she brought us into Brighton to live with her. That was a big change in our life. I then came into a home with a person who took the place of a guardian, who wanted her own independence and who had to work hard for it. No more begging for coupons, from that moment onwards all that side of my childhood was finished, I came into a new childhood then. She was a wonderful woman with a terrific Victorian attitude to life. Her idea was always to give, never to take, rather to starve, to go without. She would never buy anything unless she had the money to pay for it. When she was in service as a cook, she used to save bits other people didn’t want and she would make bread pudding with bits of dripping and the rubbish that was left, but it was an absolute beanfeast to us when we got those extras. She brought us up to do jobs in the house and learn to look after ourselves and that is how I have always been, capable of looking after myself. When it came to it, I looked after her and never deserted her for one day until she was 93. That was a return for her kindness in taking me in as a child.

They were sleepy lazy days when we were kids. They were the days of the horse cart and flint roads and in the summer a water cart used to go round the streets and we used to follow the cart and have a bathe. We thoroughly enjoyed that. Of course, the noise of the carriages on the flints was dreadful and if anybody was ill they used to lay straw all along the road, so that you could not hear the wheels of the carriages, especially if the person was important. Working class people couldn’t afford that of course, but they used to tie up the knockers on the doors so that there was only a subdued knock. I once went to visit a workmate who had been ill for some time and I could not make him hear, so I banged the knocker so hard that being made of cast iron, it snapped in half.

There was a marvellous neighbourly spirit in those years. If you were ill, the whole street was concerned and wanted to do something about it and they did. They took it in turns to make milk puddings and custards out of their little money. Anything they could do to help.

The concern was the same if you did not behave yourself. People used to come up and down outside your house with dustbin lids, banging them to shame you, if you were living with another man or woman, that sort of thing. You had to behave yourself. Mind you we did get up to boys’ games, tying a bit of string to the lamp-post or knocker, knocking people’s hats off and putting cheap rockets through their front doors at rocket time.

If you were keeping up with the Joneses, you had a piano and you had your front door open so that people could hear.

In those days there was very little money about. Up until 1912 there was no unemployment benefit or sickness pay and you used to put up with all sorts of things just to keep your job. People saved up through church groups to have some money when they were sick. One of the main things that people saved for was to have a proper funeral when they died, because that meant a lot to them. All my family managed by hard work to have enough put by for that.

At May time, we used to have all kinds of dressing up, going round the streets and the bigger boys used to bully us, put us on their backs and give us what they called a belly jerk and things of that description. Christmas was the best time though, we used to go round all the shops getting Christmas boxes. It was the custom for shopkeepers to give all their customers a Christmas box, even if they only spent pennies with them. You would get oranges and nuts from the greengrocer, biscuits from the grocer and cigars from the barber, no matter what your age, shopkeepers had to give a Christmas Box back.

Most sweet shops only sold boiled sweets and the average price was 4 pence (old money) per pound so we could buy one ounce for a farthing. Cloves, mints, humbugs, nut rock, coconut ice candy, barley twist and so on. I used to queue up early morning to buy stale bread and if lucky, stale cakes – but the bakers usually made the cakes into a pudding and put a layer of coloured icing on the top, cut into squares. The cottage loaf was super – if you pulled the top off you could pick a layer off and eat it without anyone noticing it. Flead cakes were like that and only 1/2 pence each. Fishermen used to come round the street with local caught herring or mackerel 24 for 1 shilling, the only chance we had for a good meal.

Another thing we really enjoyed was when the circuses came. My goodness, I used to bob in under the canvas every chance I got. If we got copped, we used to say “Well let us do a job” and they would let us do some work. The first thing I had to do, with another boy, was to carry this big bucket of water and put it down in front of the elephant. We went round to the back and twisted its tail and it gave us the bucket of water straight back. They were lovely circuses, really mammoth with hundreds of horses and everything else you can think of under the sun, and out at Hove Station they used to have funfares, with roundabouts, swings and coconut shies. Coconut shies were our main recreation. For a penny you could go on the pier and firework displays used to be given there and on the front and in the parks. On Saturday afternoons we used to go to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin and that cost a penny. I have been to see the same film seven times in a week. You know what kids are like when they get really fond of something. There also used to be lovely horse shows along the front. (I recently saw a photograph of my sister and myself taken at a horse show in 1912).

Naturally it was all horses then, the Fire Brigade for instance, only used horses and they could be saddled and out of the Fire Station just as quickly as any motor can today. For some years they had a dog who used to run in front of the Fire Engine and when they eventually did away with the old engine, the dog was put down and then stuffed so that they could keep him. There used to be terrific fires, especially in the big houses because instead of a lamp standing on the table like poor people, the well to do folk had their oil lamps hanging from the ceiling and over a period they would work loose and fall, causing the house to catch fire. The man I worked with was a part time fireman, as they all were then and they were paid a nominal sum for being on duty and then paid properly if they had to go out to a fire for the time that they were there, perhaps eight or ten hours. They used to like that, not because they wanted fires, but that it meant extra money to them for being on duty. Although the Fire Brigade was run by the Council, it was not one big one, as it is today, but a lot of small units in all the different districts, so when an alarm went, the men in the nearest district would run to where the barrow was stored with all the equipment on it and then go to the fire. The main Fire Station was at Duke Street with quite a nice one at Preston Circus.

At the age of thirteen, having progressed very well at school I was in the Ex-seventh and I was the headmaster’s monitor and I couldn’t go any further. Strange as it may seem, I got paid half-a-crown a month for being a monitor, though I don’t know whether it was official or not. It may have come out of the headmaster’s pocket; anyway every time I forgot to do something like changing his pen nib in his study, he would fine me threepence but at the end of the month I’d still get my money. By this time I had come to hate school. I had to stand up in front of the class and keep control of them, which I had to do as monitor every time the teacher left the classroom. I could not wait to get out to work. I had to pass a special test, called the Industrial Examination, to enable me to leave school. I did pass it, so the headmaster called me into his study and said “Well John, would you like to be a trainee teacher?” So I said “Oh for God’s sake no.” “Well why’s that?” “Oh, I could never stand in front of a glass and look at those faces all day.” So he said “I know what you want to do, you want to go on the railways, where your mates are,” and he was right.

I was tiny, which you would expect from the way we had been brought up. Strangely enough my father was short but my mother was over six feet tall. She died when she was about thirty one. Although I had the confidence of my Aunt, who brought me up, inasmuch as she would talk to me a lot, she would never tell me real things in an out-spoken manner. She told me that my mother died of a perforated bowel. I don’t know what that really meant, but I do know this, that every time a child was born it was a tragedy, owing to the poverty, and when we were born, my sister and I, twins, there was a double tragedy. Whether another one came after that and caused her death, I do not know. But in those days it was a rife thing to go to certain women and have the baby done away with. In other words to have an abortion using knitting needles. They died terrible deaths. Whether my mother was a victim of that I do not know. When we were born, in the shock of having had twins, my mother made a fuss over me and put my sister on one side. Years later my twin sister (who grew into a beautiful woman) had a breakdown which lasted 37 years and I visited her in hospital, never less than once a week, sometimes four times a week. My aunt did the same. Yet I have never had a day in bed (for which I have always been thankful). Did that first attention have any bearing on it? In the end, my sister walked out of hospital, laid in a field and was found dead from exposure after ten days.

2. My Apprenticeship

When I went to work on the railways I had no idea what the conditions would be like, but I’ve never regretted it.

They put me in the office the first day and I had to walk backwards and forwards across the tracks to Brighton Station with messages. There was death on every track I crossed, but I had to go even though I was so small. They said, “This is too dangerous for you. You’d better go in the shop.” They could see the risk and danger, so they took me out of the office. There must have been some personal attachment from the old management, then. Today there’s no such thing. It’s quite the reverse, I believe.

In the Carriage and Wagon Department, Brighton Works, from 1918 onwards, the Works Band (a brass band) used to play for fifteen minutes on Friday, when we got paid. There was an Annual Dinner at the Labour Club for all the regular customers at the Lancing Works Canteen. This was paid for out of the profits. The manager was always invited and he used to outline what work we would be doing the following year. If it was good, we all clapped. We had summer sports in the field round Lancing Works. I entered the Apprentices’ Hundred Yards Race, and came in First. My prize – a pipe lighter – made from a cord through a tube, which smouldered. I was only thirteen and being so small the manager said to me, “Where do you work? How old are you? Who gave you a job?”

My aunt had bought me a pair of short knickers and a navy blue jersey for work, because I was still a schoolboy really. I was as pleased as punch. When they sent me to work in the shop they put me with an elderly man. He was a volunteer fireman and turned out to be a good man to me. He said, “Here you can’t come to work like that, boy” and he gave me half-a-crown to go and buy a pair of overalls. (You couldn’t buy them for three pounds now.) And so I bought my first pair of overalls. You never thought of having them washed. You wore them until they could stand up by themselves and then you threw them away.

When I was in my teens I had a friend who was a printer. He earned good money and always had notes in his wallet. I only had shillings and pence in my pocket. One weekend in the summer, he came round to go out with me, dressed in a new suit, silk shirt, velour hat with a feather on the side, silk socks, smart brown shoes, brand new camera slung on his shoulder. A proper swank. He said, “Let us go to the Bramber and have a boat on the river.” So off we went by train and hired a boat. We went upstream to the bridge. He said, “We will pull in and I will go to the bridge and take a photo of you in the boat.” We pulled into the bank: he stood up, took hold of the rope to cast it round the mooring post, pulled hard, went straight over the back into the water. He had not allowed for the coil. His hat floated on top, and he came up, bobble – bobble – bobble. I went into hysterics, to see him in such a mess after being so dressed up, and I laughed and laughed, until all of a sudden I was in danger myself. He was trying to get back in the boat from the side and it was only half an inch from the water. I shouted and told him to go to the back. What a day!

I started in a First Aid class at the railway when I was 14 years old. The doctor who lectured spoke very quietly and when it came to bleeding I could see it all happening, so I fainted along with four policemen who trained with us. It was because of listening so intently. I spent many years on First Aid and then it led me into becoming a Blood Donor, I gave 43 donations, then they wouldn’t take any more because of my age. One of the things my aunt used to say was, “Never have any fear of illness or diseases, don’t be afraid to mix with people who have infectious diseases and help them when you can. You would never have doctors and nurses if they were afraid.” I have always lived that way. When I was young T.B. was rife (poverty again), and we were forbidden to mix. Death was inevitable, but I always mixed and was never afraid. Today it does not mean a thing due to progress in treatment and a better start in life which all children get. They look wonderful today. Where we had fear, they have confidence.

When I started at work, I was so tiny that I was called Little Tich. I had an argument and a fight with a chap in my workshop over who was smaller. I could walk straight under a railway carriage door without touching it. He was so small that he gave up working on the railway and became a jockey. He started putting information back to us boys in the workshop about what was going to win, and all about racing. Then one day he was put on a red hot favourite and he pulled it and lost the race, and so he never rode another horse.

My family never gambled, but the men in the works used to gamble. The man I worked with was a gambler, but a very discriminating gambler, perhaps one bet in a week or fortnight. If he fancied a horse he would put say five shillings on it, as against the other men who would bet sixpence. That was a nominal bet then. We used to have the bookmakers’ runners in amongst us, taking the bets at our place of work. When the Grand National was run, he asked me to take his bet to a runner, and being curious, I had a look at it and decided to put sixpence each way on it – and it was Sergeant Murphy, which won at 100 to 6. Of course I thought that was great fun, because I only had a shilling a week pocket money and now I’d got the extra money, a hundred pence and twenty-five pence for the place. I was well away.

Betting got so rife that the C.I.D. used to raid the works. They would get permission to come in to search the men. They knew who they wanted. I never forgot one man. He was a hardened runner. He was sewing up a slash in one of the cushions you rest back on, in a compartment. He’d got a bag full of these papers. The warning went up all round the shop, “Tecs”. So he calmly put the bag in the hole, and he was sewing this cushion up when they came and searched him, and they couldn’t find anything. He’d sewn it up in the cushion and of course he could just undo it again afterwards.

When I went into the workshop the lighting was long stems, with little tiny gas mantles all the way round the workshop. It was a huge workshop. It’s still there in Brighton, up the Old Shoreham Road. You could get fifteen long coaches on each road and there were fifteen roads across the shop. You can imagine how many trains you could get in the shop, lit only with little gas mantles. We talk about the bad children today, but then we used to run round the shop with a lump of putty that you used when painting, and try to knock the mantles off.

I started there on the 21st June 1918. It was the longest day of my life. The working hours were fifty-four a week. I had to get up at five o’clock to start work at six. It was six to a quarter past eight, breakfast from quarter past eight till nine, then nine till one, and two till half past five. We also had to work from six to half past twelve on Saturday. That was part of the working week. If you were late in the morning you were shut out till breakfast time, and if you were late then you were shut out for the rest of the day. There was very severe discipline in those days. The management were autocrats and they pushed it on to the foremen and clerks, and they in turn made life for the men on the floor misery. Life was absolute misery.

Eventually the day came when they put electric light in. I thought it was Blackpool. It was a marvellous sight. We used to get up on the roofs of the carriages and sit and look at all these lights around the shop.

From the point of view of industrial organisation, they put one man with a boy, to make it cheap. You were down for seven years’ apprenticeship to learn the trade. I served the seven years, and then I had to go eighteen months as a journeyman, which meant I was an ‘improver’. Only then would they pay you the full rate for the job. That meant that I went not only from thirteen to fourteen when I started the real apprenticeship, but from fourteen to twenty-one, and then from twenty-one to twenty-two and a half. It was a very long time, nine years to learn the trade, from the bare wood to the finishing coat varnish. But in 1945 if a man came back from the War and learnt to do the same job as me, in six months, I insisted that he have the same money as me. This was union principle.

The first man I worked with was an outcast because he was a socialist. He was called a Bolshevik and he was a terrible man as far as the workshop and the management were concerned. But he was a man I loved. He used to kick me and smack me round the chops for not doing my work right, but I don’t think I ever loved a man more because he taught me my trade, and he taught me how to live too. He was a rank socialist. How he became one I don’t know. He told me to start reading the Daily Herald. He used to say, “Sit down and read that before you start work.” That was at six o’clock in the morning. You couldn’t get on with your work because there was no light at that time in the morning. So I used to read the paper and then he used to have his read. He made me a socialist. He used to tell me two of the very important things. One was that Russia would be the salvation of the world. The other was that the Co-op movement would help towards the salvation of the world. If we developed co-operation internationally within the socialist movement, everything would work out and the evolution of socialism would come right in the end. The reason he said that Russia would save the world was that Russia had two crops of wheat a year, so in a time of famine everybody would be dependent on them. He was the one who really started me off being a socialist which I have never got out of, because the more I got involved, the more I grew until I was on every committee I could be.

Anyrate, I loved my job, and if I went over my time again I’d do the same job. My first job as a painter was doing the inside of horse boxes. Owners had their own private horse boxes, all different colours, with the trainer’s name written on the outside. You could get three horses in the box, and the compartment at the back end of the box. It was single sided so that the stable lad could stand by the hangers (there were three of them) and feed or water the horses. Straw was put all over the floor. When we opened the box it was generally very unpleasant, dirty and smelling. Now they are taken by road, because it became too expensive for the railways.

I then progressed to the inside of vans, called brakes because the guard rode in these and he could operate the brake when necessary. Later I was put on carriage roofs and this was a dangerous job. At that time the coaches were forty-eight feet long and eight feet across, painted with white lead paint. You climbed up the end, painted along the width, then turned around and painted the other half, kneeling on a cushion all the time. If you were quick you could do it in about six hours and we were paid 1/6 for the effort. I led a strike against this price (with the other lads) and got it raised to 3/6. We had to put three coats on, but before we got the increase we used to dodge a coat – two instead of three.

Then I progressed to the outside of coaches, and eventually to Pullman cars, The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway had a contract with the Pullman Car Company to do everything. Painting, polishing, upholstery, electricity and lighting, gas etc. The L.B.S.C. paid for all painting, the Pullman Car Company for everything inside.

In the end I could do anything there is in the coach building trade, from the bare metal to the complete finish. The work was done really beautifully. Everything was thorough. Before we went on to the job, the carpenters and body coachmakers had done their work. Everything was lined up perfectly, all the panels and the mouldings. Everything was smooth. You weren’t allowed to touch it until one of the foremen had passed the work as fit to start on. The Pullman cars used to have cream tops and brown bottoms, and all the mouldings were brown. It was like Ann Hathaway’s cottage with the oak beams. After you’d put the thick broad lines across, you edged them with gold leaf lining. Then you put all the decorations on, and a name, and put in a panel. Everything was done beautifully. It used to take a man and a boy exactly one month to do one Pullman car. But when that was done it was so good that it would last ten years, and all it required was washing. During the War, the stress was so great that they decided not to do any more painting at all.

The job that I had to do in the end was totally different. We were told no more hand brushing – you had to use a spray gun. It looked reasonable when it was done, and for three months afterwards, and then it would look as if it had never been done. Is that progress? The job that I originally did, I took pride in. I used to watch it go out, I was so proud of it. The job that I ended up doing, I didn’t care whether I saw it go out or not. It never entered my head. But at first if I had a blemish in my work, I was worried sick in case the foreman went for me the next day. I ate and slept with it. But with the new method I never worried about it nor thought about it, even if it was a mess of faults. A totally different attitude. So my pride was gone.

At that time the railways were run by private companies. I worked for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, but there were also the South Eastern and Central Railway, and the London and South Western Railway in this area alone. They were all different private companies, but there was government money always behind railways. They paid dividend on money that was invested in them, Every time they couldn’t pay the dividend because things hadn’t gone right, they used to put us on short time. They would knock us off Saturdays and Mondays, so we worked a four day week. At one stage they put us on three days a week, and we were able to go to the unemployment exchange and draw three days’ unemployment benefit. That was when it first came out. It didn’t last long, but long enough to cripple us, because we were never out of debt.

The labourers used to go in on Saturday afternoons. Their money was so low that they were allowed to work then to clean the works up. They used hose pipes because it was all stone flooring. The heating was whacking great steam pipes. We had no heat before breakfast. It used to be murder to go to work. You can’t imagine winters at work. We had those little gas jets, so we had to carry a little oil lamp with a reflector on so that we could see the side of the coach we were working on. Those were the days when lead paint was real lead paint mixed with linseed oil. We used to plaster all the coaches with stop-ping in all the bad places preparatory to rubbing them down. They used to give us glass paper to rub them down, We used to be rubbing down all day with this glass paper until we were like white men. We didn’t realise that it was white-lead and that all the chappies in those days used to suffer from lead poisoning, This was called painter’s cholic. It got so bad in factories that the government brought out a law that in future everything had to be done wet. I used to love it because it was sweet. I never had any idea of any harm or damage, and it never did do me any harm. The people who didn’t work with it suffered worse than those who did. The men who worked round you, the coach trimmers, the body makers, the French polishers, the electricians, and all those people, used to get the cholic although they weren’t using it, strange as it may seem, Yet I didn’t get it although I used to be white from head to foot. My hair was white, and yet I had black hair. All my family had jet black hair. Mine pretty soon went white, I might tell you.

When I first started, the majority of railway carriages that you travelled in were only twenty eight or thirty feet long, and there were only five or six compartments. There were no corridor trains. They were all individual compartments. Then they were developed into forty-eight foot lengths, by putting some of them together and building them by contract. Some of them were first–class compartments, some second-class and some third-class with three different prices for tickets. There was a terrific fight to eliminate the classes from the travelling public and the Unions. Second class they thought outrageous. But as far as first class was concerned the argument went against them, because people were supplying money for their upkeep by paying a higher fare. They were beautifully done, the first-class compartments, beautifully done. So second-class got eliminated but first and third remained.

As soon as a train came into a station and was berthed, twenty or thirty men came along to clean that train. The sweepers would go in and sweep it, the girls would go in and dust it, and change the napkins on the backs of the seats. It didn’t matter whether they were clean or dirty. And men with brass polish would clean the handles, those that were on the side, and the ones you turned. If anybody got any dirt on their gloves, especially in the first class, they would go and see the Railway Company for compensation. The trains were washed down properly with sponges and leather, no mops. The majority of cleaners were men, until all the men to the age of fifty were called up, in the First World War, and we finished up with all women working. When I started, there were only old men left in the works. I was started because there was a shortage. If there hadn’t been I would never have got onto the railway, because I didn’t have anyone in front of me. Most man and boy teams were father and son, But I left school because I wanted to be independent and start work when I was only thirteen. It took me seven weeks to persecute the foreman until he gave me a job.

At one time there were two thousand people working in Brighton works, Two thousand: Today there are four hundred. It was one of the finest works that ever existed for making engines. The full carriage works was on one side of Old Shoreham Road. It’s now the electric running shed. The other side was the locomotive works and the engineers’ department. We used to have an hour for lunch, and they put on special trams running on lines in the road with an overhead trolley, to take the workers home to dinner. They were only for the railway chaps. They used to run down the road like a lot of hungry lions, dash and get on the trams, and come all the way up Elm Grove. You could get off anywhere. It was only a penny. The trams used to take them back and bring them home again at tea time.

Lots of workers used to live in streets off New England Street in St. Peter’s Ward. There used to be hundreds of houses where the factories are now, all built for railwaymen, right the way up New England Street, backing up against the high wall of the railway bank, and where the coal yard is now. Those streets were highly respectable. They were really well kept houses, rented from the Railway Company. Of course eventually they went into the hands of private enterprise. Boston Street was the only one left that belonged to the Railway Company.

The trams weren’t thought to be a specially good part of the job. They were an arrangement with Brighton Corporation to make trade really. The railwaymen kept the town going. They were the biggest asset in the town. There was a terrible to do when they moved our carriage side to Lancing, in about 1921 or 22. They moved the whole of the Old Shoreham Road carriage works to Lancing and that meant that there were eight or nine hundred men fewer in Brighton, working in Lancing. It made Lancing into a town. Houses were being sold there for £500 and they came round and pleaded with men to go. If a railwayman was going to buy a house he only had to make a deposit of £25. Those houses are probably worth £12,000 now. The only people who made a fight out of the move were the shop-keepers because it meant they wouldn’t be able to sell their cigarettes and newspapers. Later the men who were taken backwards and forwards from Brighton to work there had a strike over whether they should be paid for their travelling time.

The pub used to be open in the early mornings. You could go into a pub before breakfast. If they had the money, people would go into the pub and never reach work. At work they used to have raids to stop men taking things home with them – stealing. When they had a raid, you used to have to go down a flight of stairs to the Tecs at dinner time. The chaps used to empty their pockets as they went down, so there were all sorts of things on the stairs. They picked them all up when the men had gone, and after dinner they’d all be laid out along the benches at the bottom of the shop. The manager would order the bell to be rung and everybody had to go down the shop to see all the stuff. The upholstery used to be made of a lovely blue cloth in the first class compartments. Men used to get yards of that, and wind it round their bodies, walk out, and have a suit made of it. That was the only chance they had of getting a suit. It was downright stealing though. The man I worked with was a shareholder. He only had a few pounds shares, but if ever he was caught stealing they never did anything with him because he was a shareholder. He said he only picked up what was thrown away, screws off the floor. We used to throw hundreds of screws on the floor. Being a shareholder he wanted to save them.

We always did piece-work. I have never worked a day’s day-work in my life. I’ve always been a piece-worker. The man who trained me to become a Socialist told me as a youngster that piece-work was the wickedest thing that ever was brought into being. He said, “The more you earn, my son, the more you make a rod for your own back.” That was the teaching that I received when I was quite a kid. As I grew older and became responsible for myself, I never used to book in high piece-work from his training. I deprived myself of a lot of money like that. I might just as well have gone for the money, because that was what other people were doing, and in the end I had to pay the price. I used to put the work into the job because the more incentive work you did, the worse was the quality of the work. Piece-work was our life blood in that it gave us a bit extra. We used to save it up for Christmas. We would go without for several weeks so we could have a little bit extra at Christmas. Other workers knew that it was done on principle and they respected it. But the management used to fix the piece-work rates so that you never earned your money. In the end they used to present you with a bill to show that you were so much in debt. That was the cruel system, and that was one of the main things the Union fought against. The prices for piece-work were the thing. The prices were so bad in some of the loco shops that workers were always in debt. It built itself up until there was fifty pounds, sixty pounds owing.

Even though they were working as hard as they could go to earn the piece-work, they were getting into debt because the prices were so bad. We in the carriage shops were only allowed to earn time and a quarter. If your base rate was 1 pound you were allowed to earn another 5s.0d. a week for doing that amount of work, according to the prices you got for your job.

3. N.U.R. in Brighton

When I was fourteen I was asked to join the Union. I thought it was a jolly good idea, so I joined the Union. I started attending the branch meetings. One week we used to have a business meeting, and the next we had a talk or lecture, given by the Workers’ Educational Association. They used to send us speakers and make up a syllabus so that they dealt with all the different aspects of economics, money, and crises and that sort of thing. The subjects that we discussed were terrific. I got really fascinated by them, and the speakers were so good that I never missed a week. I went as regular as clockwork. I could read a newspaper much better after going to these classes. I could see behind what they were trying to pump into me.

The other week was the business meeting for branch business and men’s complaints. Men came to both sorts of meeting. Branches were packed to capacity. Meetings used to be red hot, because we were fighting for our very existence. It was really serious. Men used to fight and even hit one another in branch meetings, arguing a point, and when it came to election of officers there used to be terrific competition, and squabbling, and power movements, because everybody was on the floor and they were all trying to raise themselves up. It was a terrible thing, wicked, because they were really nasty to one another. But it was a wonderful thing too, when you compare it with today, when your branch room is empty. Today they’ve progressed to the extent that they are apathetic. The Union’s become an insurance policy rather than the way to get all the wonderful ideals that we started with that are laid down in our rule books – about raising the working man up, and educating him and making his life bearable. I suppose that we’ve made so much progress in our working conditions that instead of men attending branch meetings, they drive off in their motor cars to the theatre and enjoy life. “I’m all right Jack.” When I first went the branch was packed out. Eighty to one hundred men would attend a branch meeting, out of a membership of about nine hundred. After the last War when things settled down we had a good average attendance of between forty and fifty. Then as the years went on and we began to get the things we’d been fighting for, it got less and less, until ultimately it got to the stage when you couldn’t even hold a meeting, because you couldn’t get a quorum. So the officers were doing the work. This is the transformation from the time when you couldn’t hold a meeting because you weren’t allowed to! You couldn’t hold meetings in your workshops. You couldn’t even be a member of a trade union openly. Everything had to be done undercover, joining the union and everything. But the spirit was good in those days when we were fighting to achieve the very basic things. Now the responsibility has been taken away from the union members. They leave their executives or officers to do all the business. They’ve stopped thinking for themselves. The officers have great power in their hands, which the men don’t realize. The officers know that the members are too apathetic to tell them exactly the progress that they want to see made. Do you think the officers are thinking about socialisation and the development of the men? They’re not taking any notice. The first thing they arrange is a rise for themselves, in proportion to what the men have got. But if the management had their way, the workers could jolly well lose what they’ve gained. They could go back. And it would be worse to fall than it was to climb up.

The man that I took over from as secretary of the branch was one of the biggest fighters that ever any bunch of workers had. His name was George Rayner and a photograph of him was put up in the Labour Club. He was a fighter and he didn’t care if he had no money at all as long as he was fighting for the workers. He never allowed anything to go by, no matter what it was. Any time of the day, 11 o’clock in the morning or 11 o’clock at night, if a man got into trouble for something outside the railway works and he was being victimised, he would say to all his workmates in the shop, “Come on, down to the Town Hall boys, we’ll have this one out with them.” He would take the men out of the works and down to the Town Hall and see that the man got some support down there.

George Rayner led no end of disputes about piece work. The management locked them out, but they couldn’t sack Rayner because he was too strong. He got into trouble, but he got out of trouble too, because the men were behind him. George Rayner was a great man. He was branch secretary and also worked in the Loco shop making chains. He believed in his fellow man. His brain was active all the time. He gave his life, really, to improve things. His health was very poor and he was likely to pass out at any moment by the end of the 1930’s, so he was most anxious to coach me, as assistant secretary, to take over as secretary. He couldn’t have been a better teacher. I learnt every part of the business. In 1940 I was elected secretary. There was fierce competition and it was very tough going. At that time there was a branch of about 1500.

When I used to go to Conferences I had to fill in expenses forms. The secretary would say to me, “Just put on there exactly what you spent.” I’d go two days on a conference, Saturday and Sunday, all day working hard, and my maximum allowance was about 25 shillings. After I had been secretary for three years I was told by my members that you had to have a proper price for what you did. It was a totally different atmosphere. I still liked to be strict about it. In the end they said, “You’re not relaxed enough. It’s got to be quite different.”

As branch secretary I did all kinds of things. Eventually we had to join up with the other branch, so I had to retire, which I gladly did. There used to be three branches of the N.U.R. in Brighton. There was a small branch that dealt with traffic grades, in the main. There was a fairly big branch that dealt with locomotives. And there was my branch that dealt completely with shopmen. We were able to deal with our problems well within our own branch. Then one of the branches ceased to exist so there were two branches. Then my branch ceased to exist and we all became one branch. It was logical, but none of the members felt they were getting a square deal. The guard doesn’t understand the fitter’s job, in the shop, and the fitter doesn’t understand the guard’s or the driver’s job. The union leaders thought it would be better if we were all united together instead of being organised on the basis of our jobs. But the men haven’t got the patience to listen to the other man’s case. The signalman can’t begin to understand what it’s like to worry about a carriage inspection. He’s only thinking about signalmen.

There’s no one who wants to take office today. You can’t get anybody to serve. You get money too easily elsewhere. The hours and hours I spent on doing branch work, when I could work whole nights of overtime, or go home and leave my tools behind, forget all about work!

The Union seems to me to be aiming at the wrong thing these days. They are aiming too high, and as a result they are going to wreck everything. When I retired about seven years ago, I said to my mates, “One of these days you’re going to walk out of here with a bag full of paper that’s worth nothing, just because you want more money. What you should go for is the value of the money you have already got, and to get the value of that you must do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, not keep watching the clock and not doing the work, but really working.” It behoves everybody to work for their money.

Which reminds me again, I wrote about twelve foolscap pages to Lansbury when he was prominent in the Labour Government 1929-31 on being unemployed and how terrible it was to have men walking about and doing nothing, when they should be producing something. And he said it was far too long for him to deal with and so he sent it back. But to me, my mind was working very much then on the idiocy of things that they do.

It’s idiocy now that the unemployment problem should be like it is. Paying out the money that they do pay out, and saying that they haven’t got the production, because they could have the production if they wanted it, but they just cannot get away, the leopard cannot change its spots. They think that by creating a huge army of unemployed they will get men to take jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise take, and that they’d put more work into it when they were working, instead of idling at work. But the more progress you make in your welfare, so you break down the very wish to create work for yourself, you see you lose the impetus to do it, because life becomes more easy. It should become more easy, but nevertheless whether you’re Labour or Conservative or Liberal or Communist (of course the Communists demand it, and I don’t think they’re wrong in demanding that) you should always give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, you should never dodge your job. I work as hard today as I’ve ever worked in my life, and I still take a pleasure in doing it. I’ve been blessed with good health, and that is a wonderful thing, considering the poor childhood I had, but it just shows you that the hard childhood need not wreck you. Here’s a living example of it. I suppose one of the things is you learn to fight. That’s one of the things that arises from being down-trodden by other people.

After fifty-three and a half years on the railway the pension they gave me was £2-32 per week, and I had paid for it ever since I was eighteen. It is now £4-65. Now when that pension started it was a good pension, because the wages were only twenty-five shillings a week. And the pension was a pound less tuppence – nineteen shillings and tenpence a week. And we paid tenpence a week out of our wages for that, which was hard going. But a pound a week out of twenty-five shillings wages was a good pension, relatively, see the point? The idea was good but it’s never changed from that day to this. Now when I got married rent was a pound a week for a house, and I could manage quite nicely. 1939 was a jolly good year. I could afford to buy a suit every year, before 1939, out of the lower wages. I can’t afford to buy a suit at all now. I never think of buying a suit. It’s out of reach. One year I might get a pair of trousers, next year a sport’s coat, and so on and so on, backwards and forwards from one thing to the other. That’s how it is now. But I keep my head above water, I’m all right, I can manage.

Conditions of working can be made better. I never had the pleasure of being in a modern workshop. Mine was always the other thing. But there’s nothing better than modern workshops, where they have colour schemes and everything else. It’s better to get to know the job from start to finish as we did when I started, too, rather than have it broken up.

People in motor car factories must find their jobs terrible, absolute sheer boredom. They’ve told me that they have to change the workers after being in the press shop in a motor car factory for so long, because they just can’t stand it, the noise of the press stamping out the whole body is so bad. A man told me once, what good money he was earning in a car factory, “But I’ve finished that,” he said, “I’m getting half the money on a farm. The relief is terrific. I’m living now, where I haven’t lived before.” I went into a shoe factory in Northampton. The conditions they work under are dreadful, even in these days. They produce beautiful things that you never see in the shops, beautiful, like fairy land, ladies’ shoes, done on contract for sending abroad. But they work in such a narrow space that you could hardly walk round. They have a belt system, and they have to go through a number of procedures, perhaps thirty to forty operations for one shoe or slipper. Each part’s done by different people on different machines. The hides are all raw at first, then they are dyed and this bit’s sewn and that bit’s sewn. Then when you think they are nicely finished, they are inspected and if there are any flaws a great chalk cross is put on them, and they go back to the chap to have it put right. Four or five floors of them work in terrible conditions, not in modern workshops at all.

Another problem is bonus schemes. The Union, as a point of principle, has always thought that there should be a proper basic, and no extras. Every man should have a proper living. They shouldn’t have to depend on piece-work and bonus schemes. The Union in its logic has been trying for years to get men to stop all the incentive work and get down to a proper basic pay, but the men defeat themselves. They can earn so much in some sections, where the management are only too pleased to give them almost anything to get the jobs done, so they can puff themselves up as being good management, that they won’t give it up. Yet some get very poor pay on a bonus system, where they’ve got the management that know how to work the thing. So in one case a man will work hard, really hard, and get two or three pound bonus and another man can be working only reasonably and wasting a lot of time, and getting ten to twelve pound a week bonus, and they don’t want to see a twenty-five pound a week basic when they’ve been getting over thirty. But the man on twenty wants to see twenty-five.

At first we never got paid for holidays. Ten days in August and four days each ordinary holidays, and not a penny piece for it. Not a thing to spend. We were in debt for six or eight weeks after it. But when the Union got us the first week’s paid holiday, that was a wonderful thing. The forty hour week was the greatest thing, and the first week’s paid holiday was the next most marvellous thing, The Union went on fighting and got the paid holiday increased to two weeks, and the strange part about it is that where you so much enjoyed the first week’s holiday, as soon as you got two weeks you were so short of money that it spoilt the pleasure of the two weeks. Some used to have to get a job for the second week in order to get enough money to live on. If we had, say, ten pounds a week normal working wages, plus five pounds piece-work, that was fifteen pounds a week. When you went on holiday, bonus schemes were stopped so you only got ten pounds. The time when you wanted to spend money, you only got the ten pounds instead of the fifteen you wanted. It’s now a case of thirty-five pounds and you only get twenty-five for your basic, and they think they’ve given you all the world. You spend fifty pound when you’re on holiday, don’t you! The further you go with holidays under this system, the worse you get. Yet the men want the bonus schemes. The management select what they think are the intelligent men in the shop. They say, “You go and work a bonus scheme in.” They send them on a training course for six months, or twelve months, and then they come back and time you at your jobs. These are the same men that you worked with, men who were trying to improve conditions. But you’re worse off than you were. These men become aristocrats. Men we worked with for many years came back to time jobs, and wouldn’t even speak to us if they could avoid it.

It’s all so contradictory. The working class has become educated. They can read the financial news in the newspaper, if they want to, and understand it. They wouldn’t be able to get involved in it, but they could see which way the wind’s blowing. They should know whether they’re being done or not. Before, I suppose, when we didn’t have the knowledge we had to go to our meetings and our branches, to learn about what was happening. Today, they’ve made us so mobile that we have an hour’s journey to get to work everyday, so we read the newspapers going to work. We’ve assimilated all the news of the day and when we get to work it’s “Have you seen so-and-so?” All the different newspapers, all the different opinions, all of us talking together about them, and understanding the different things. We’re more knowledgeable by the very fact that we’re working in a different way. We’re more aware of the craftiness of things today than we were before. They could pull the wool over our eyes before, but they can’t now. Yet that mobility that helps us to get more knowledgeable, is something we hate. Twelve hours a day, through travelling to do eight hours’ work – millions are putting up with that, because they’re forced to. It makes no sense. It’s added completely to the cost of everything. It’s pigheadedness on the part of the management, taking them as they do from Brighton to London. They pay for it – the workers shouldn’t have to. But why the hell shouldn’t the work be brought to the worker instead of the worker taken to the work?

It’s a very false position. Everything’s false. There’s no stability in anything. There’s international finance at the back of it. I often wonder living in this terrible world of financial jugglery. What happens in Russia? There must be some system of big finance, and juggling, just the same. I have always looked forward to the day when there would be open trade with Russia. Not a limited thing, but everything open, backwards and forwards, free as fresh air. But it isn’t like that is it? If we could get to that stage we would be socialists, wouldn’t we?

I was made a life member of the Trades Council because I’d been a delegate to it for so long. The Trades Council used to be a very virile body of people. Meetings were packed to capacity, choc-a-bloc, and we used to have all kinds of debates. We’d got nothing and we were trying to get something. Everybody was fighting for their living. When a union wanted to get workers at any particular works to join, they would tell us on the Trades Council who the non-unionists were, and we used to go round to their houses and speak to them individually. We never handed out leaflets telling them to come to a meeting. We used to go round and see them personally. That was hard work. They were men and women who had no rights, in a factory somewhere, or a brewery, or nurses at a hospital. We had terrible arguments on their own doorsteps, in their own homes, and got sent away too, without any song and dance. But men would give up their spare time to go recruiting for the unions. We wanted to do something then. We had May Day processions. All the banners came out, everything polished up. What enthusiasm! When we had a one-day strike in Brighton, I had to make an application to the Chief of Council for the right to march. He said “How many?” I said, “Five or six hundred.” I never dreamt the response would be as spontaneous as it was – nearly two thousand – and as we walked along the streets other people joined in.

4. Strikes

In 1919 the miners went on strike and we gave them our support. I was made a member of the union in January, as an apprentice. The secretary, doing his normal job, didn’t ask whether you wanted to do picket duty. He simply went down the list of names and numbers and put you on picket duty. So I found myself at the age of fourteen at five o’clock in the morning on picket duty outside the works at Brighton, with policemen all round the gate and everything.

In 1921 we were on strike again over the travelling time of the men who had to go from Brighton to Lancing to work. They were claiming that they should be paid for travelling in the train. I was working in Brighton then, and we went on strike to support them over it. It came to nothing though of course. The management had the free transport arguments on their side.

But 1926 was different. That was a ruthless strike, absolutely ruthless. The strange part about it, what wasn’t realised, was the strength of the trade union movement. It was so strong that it overwhelmed us. Everybody was coming out, our foreman, everybody in authority came out with us, so long as they were on a wage basis. We stopped everything, we were so powerful. And yet we weren’t prepared to govern with it. We couldn’t, because we didn’t have the organisational ability to manoevre all that great power. There was terrific enthusiasm for it. It was remorseless. It was so remorseless that it got serious. There was civil strife everywhere. Even in Brighton, which at one time had a hundred thousand majority for a Conservative, we were up in arms attacking blackleg transport, and the police. They came out on their horses with whacking long sticks, and they were smashing people down in the streets, I went to a meeting and the policeman walked all along the road at the side kicking my feet, trying to make me fall down, so that I should only just clutch hold of him. Then I could be had for obstructing the police. But I never did clutch hold of him, I went home, and I was frightened to death, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was just going to an ordinary meeting.

I was working with the man who was a shareholder. He was against the General Strike. So when they called us out on strike, I stayed on working with him. I was still quite young. I carried on working there for an hour or two. Then a message was sent in by somebody in the works, “If you don’t come out on strike with your mates, we’ll put you in the horse-trough.” They used to have troughs filled with water in the streets for the horses. There was one outside the works. It didn’t take me long to get out after that. Then Sir John Simon gave the word that the General Strike was against the law, and everybody suddenly became frightened and wanted to go back to work. It was the most amazing transformation I’ve ever known in my life. It was only because he gave the official announcement, as a law man, that it was against the law, that everybody thought, “Oh crumbs, what’s going to happen? We’re going to lose our jobs.” So it was back to work. But the movement should never have collapsed under it. We had the power then, and we should have gone on, but it was too much for us. The power was too big. We couldn’t grasp it – it was like going to the moon.

5. The Two World Wars

In the 1914-18 war, all the men were called up even if they were over fifty. They weren’t only called up, they went voluntarily, with all the enthusiasm one could ever imagine. They thought they were really fighting for England. There were only old men left to work in the factories, and women. The women were putting their heart and soul into it. This was the first stage of the emancipation of women, because they had to pay them good money, and for the first time they were able to buy luxuries that they’d never seen before, despite the fact that it was wartime.

During the first war we had as many women members as we had men in our branch. Our membership grew to about fifteen hundred. You couldn’t hold branch meetings then, so they weren’t well attended. We had to hold them at different times – Sunday mornings or Sunday afternoons – because the fact of being at war disrupted everything. By the end of the second war the workshops were full of women. Then as the men started coming back we pushed them out, because the men had the guarantee of having their jobs back. It was a hell of a job getting rid of the women though. Some of the men who had worked with them during the war put up a fight on their behalf. They were very good and served a useful purpose, and learnt to stand on their own feet. But we had to have the jobs back for the men. No skilled work was done during the wars. The atmosphere of the works changed completely when we switched over to war work, even though the railways had to be kept running.

The second war was very different from the first. The first was just cruel and wicked – far worse than the second. It was static warfare. The men were in the trenches without coming out, There wasn’t one man who could say he was fit coming back from the first war. They were suffering from shell shock. They were suffering from gas. They were suffering from trench feet. They were suffering from every damn thing that was possible. They were absolute wrecks. But in the second war, through it being mobile and properly organised, they came back fitter than they were when they went. They came back with bouncing health. They had food, whereas they had no food in the first war. We were starved then. In 1917 all I had for Christmas dinner was a piece of corned beef, and I was jolly lucky to get it, because they had been sinking our ships wholesale. We were starving, and we were very near to giving up. We had to queue for everything. I queued three hours to get two pounds of potatoes or a pound of sugar or a little bit of marge. The rationing that was started in the last war gave everyone a share, it was a marvellous thing.

In the last war there was dilution, and women went on the machines. They did nearly everything. They were trained, and trained very well. The nervous tension was so great in factories, that for the first time they broke the rule of not smoking. Up till then you weren’t allowed to smoke at all in the workshop, but owing to the strain they made it permissible provided you stopped smoking one hour before the works closed, to make sure there was no fire. No-one put up any barriers against women in the last war. They did a good job of work. But at the end we wanted them out of it just the same, and they had to go again because it was regularised, and the men were guaranteed their jobs as they came out of the services. This applied to the jobs that women didn’t normally do. In many railway works, they have bands of women who have always been there, doing the upholstery and the polishing. There was no question of them losing their jobs. But in my carriage works, the women came in and took over the men’s jobs, so they had to go when the men came back. We worked it all out and there was no quarrelling. It all happened in an orderly manner. The branch was slack again in the second war. We had to change our times and again we went for Sundays and week day evenings, so not many people attended. Mostly we would have meetings outside, but you could get permission to have meetings in management time in the second war. Permission was given if it was the kind of thing that did not displease the management. Otherwise, when there was a dispute and we would get a good branch meeting anyway, we would have them outside.

We had a lot of meetings about the defence of the works in the last war, and sleeping accommodation for Fire Wardens. We had to have anti-aircraft guns in the works and men on spotter duty all the time. We had to make rosters for that and for fire duty. A lot of men were involved, and it meant a lot of trouble in relation to blankets and fleas and all kinds of problems, like catering in the canteen, and rationing, and allowances for the rationing. Everybody had to have a duty. Mine was to bury the dead. We had to build trenches and when the sirens went at first we went down into them, and stayed there perhaps six hours. But nothing was happening, so we got to the state in the end, where it didn’t matter if they were overhead. You simply went on working. A bomb was dropped on us, we were lucky. Although they were overhead all the time it seemed that they wanted to preserve the works. They went for the gun, and they killed the man on that. There weren’t any arguments between men and women over grades. We were all treated with equality. There were only arguments between men and women. When they had been upgraded through training they wanted to stay at that level and not to go back to what they had been doing before, as the wartime jobs became unnecessary. Then they would fight one another to keep the positions they had got to. Their disputes would come first to the branch meetings, then if we couldn’t settle it, they went to the Works Committee. We had very strong works committees in the war.

I think the War was the greatest teacher of all. The last war certainly sent the working class rocketing, as far as education is concerned. By education I mean that the war opened their eyes wide about what they were entitled to, which they had never had. A lot of things were achieved under pressure of war, and then the Labour Government of 1945 got through a titanic job in those five years.

I can never understand the Russians. After the Revolution I had great hopes for Russia. I thought that as it developed and the people became educated, evolution would take place, and they would change their political system. As you get higher in the world you change your opinions, from anarchist to communist, from communist to red socialist, from socialist into liberal, and from liberal into conservative. So why haven’t the Russians reached the freedom of socialism? Why is it that they tolerate the restraint they’ve got, as they become more and more educated? I just don’t understand it. I should want to burst my bonds. If I suddenly found a hundred pounds, I wouldn’t be a miser and save it, I’d go out and see what I could spend it on. So, why when you’re educated, don’t you get some benefit from your education? Why is Russia so enclosed? Yet when the German Moloch came through, the great iron warhead that started to wipe them out, and they could have gone to the Germans and surrendered, what did they do? Despite the terrific hardships of the labour camps, and exile to Siberia, they burnt down their own damned houses, under the scorched earth policy, so that the Germans shouldn’t have them. That was at a time when they could have done the reverse. That shows there’s something in communism, if a person’s going to burn down his own house in defence of it. It’s no use us condemning it, is it?, even though I don’t want communism. I want freedom, it’s the most precious thing in life, freedom. But I’ll never be able to understand them not making the change when they had the chance.

They had all those centuries of tyrants, the Czars, hadn’t they? So I suppose it was a similar position to us when we had the General Strike. It’s not something that happens in a day, but an accumulation of things over the years. It builds itself up, then something causes the explosion that has to come. And when the explosion happens you don’t achieve what everybody wants, through your organisations, over night. Individuals seek power. You lose the collective power, like we did in the General Strike. We weren’t able to take the power which we suddenly found we’d got, so we lost it. You see, today it’s gone. And then the power gets all broken up, and that’s devastating then. You haven’t got the join-up which could lead you in the direction you want to go. So many people think that they’re good leaders. Perhaps they are. But often they’re breakaways. “I don’t know about your idea, but do that and you’re wrong.” So you get a broken up movement instead of a united one. Ultimately Russia seems to have exchanged one dictator for another.

I have a lot of faith in our own movement. I still believe that what I believed in when I was younger, Socialism, is the only thing for the future. But I don’t like our leadership. I don’t like this trying to pull the wool over your eyes. I don’t like gimmicks. I like the plain truth, even if it hurts. That’s far better than being told a lot of rubbish just to keep you quiet. I don’t believe in that at all.

6. Work in the Midlands

Then came the terrible crisis of 1929, – the Slump and two million unemployed.

At that time they were thinking of having the new Brighton Belle, but they put it out to contract with a private firm in Birmingham and they put everyone out of work down here. I wrote to Birmingham for a job and they replied, “Come up here and start straight away,” and I went up to Saltley to work on the Southern Belle, the one that has just been taken off. I worked there for three months till the contract was finished. We did fifteen Pullman cars, three sets of five, and they all had ladies’ names. But they were beautifully done, beautiful workmanship.

In Brighton, I was never a footballer, going to matches, but when I was in Birmingham you had to go to football there or else you were an outcast. It was alternate weeks, one match Aston Villa, one match Birmingham. You didn’t have to mention Aston Villa at the Birmingham match and you didn’t have to mention Birmingham at the Aston Villa match, but you didn’t have to mention anything other than Aston Villa at work. There used to be 60,000 at the ground and I used to enjoy it. That was the first time in my life I had my freedom.

I never got involved with the unions in Birmingham at all. I didn’t know a thing that was going on, because you worked out your trade union spirit in the shop itself. So there was no need to ask any questions because it was in operation, – you were just working together. If your mate said “Will you do so and so for me?” you did it for him and he did for you what you wanted him to do. I never ran into the kind of bother that the last few years have seen happening there. I’ve seen all the men from one shop in Birmingham, all walking along the street with clean overalls on, go straight into another job in a car factory on slightly better terms. That’s the kind of thing I saw happening there.

It was a new experience for me, because directly I got in the workshop in Saltley, the union bloke came to me and he said, “Have you got any lodgings?” So I said “Well, we’ve been told where to go” and he said “Let me know if you get any lodgings.” Then he asked, “Have you got any money?” and when we said we had, he said, “If you want any money, we can let you have some.” This was a new thing to me in a contract shop.

Anyrate, we went and got these lodgings and the woman said, “Oh yes, pleased to have you.” So I went with a mate and we shared a room. This was a house with five rooms, and we didn’t know but you didn’t use the front door, you used the back door. It’s like the miners. You came in and had a wash in your back yard and then went in that way. On the Monday we started work and when we came home we looked at the laundry – it was right down the garden – and it was as black as your hat. It had been washed and clean, but the colour of it made us say, “We aren’t going to stay here.” When we had breakfast, there were only half a dozen of us round the table. The next day there were eight, and then we started to wonder what was happening. By the end of the week there were twenty-six people living in that house.

What we didn’t know was this. There was a large motor car industry there, of course, and at that time they used to take the cars to the purchaser direct. These people would come up with their number plates, and ask to be put up for the night because they were going to collect a car in the morning. It didn’t matter how many people came to this house, they took them in. So I said to my mate, “We aren’t going to like this.” We didn’t know where they were sleeping but when the landlord and landlady were out we had a look round. We found five or six beds on the floor, like bunks, all round the room. Of course they didn’t mind, because they got it at a reasonable price. So my mate said, “We’ll get some fresh lodgings.”

This was the first week of starting in a contract shop and the manager of the workshop came round. He said, “Are you happy in your lodgings?” We said, “No.” “Well now, look,” he said, “there is a widow, lives in such and such a street. Go round and see her. She might put you up.” So we went round to this house and knocked on the door, and an elderly woman came to the door with a clean white apron on. It was always the thing to do, to put a clean apron on when you came to the door. We said “Oh, good evening, we’ve come to enquire if you could put us up with lodgings for a while.” “Come in, come in.” So in we go. Kitchen upside down, black lead in the grate – all the old-fashioned way – a bit of a fire, everything looking nice and bright and clean. We told her what we wanted and she burst out crying. “You’ve just saved my life,” she said, “because I was just writing to my daughter to tell her I can’t keep my home together any longer.”

I stayed with her for the rest of my time in Birmingham. She was like a mother to me and when I look back, it seems so sad. She was as happy as a sand boy – we gave her a new lease of life.

Strangely enough, when I came back, I invited her to come down and have a holiday with me, and she came two or three years running. Then during one of these holidays, she and my wife decided to go to London. When they got there they saw a nice coach trip somewhere, and they went on it and couldn’t get back. I never forgave her for it, and I’ve never written or spoken to her from that day to this. I was so annoyed because they went off without letting me know. All they had innocently done was gone on a coach trip and couldn’t get back. They had had to get lodgings for the night and come back the next day, but I had all that anxiety. I said “No, that’s not my way of going on. Never do that.” But she was really good. I thought a lot of her.

I came back to Selhurst to work in 1931. I was looking for lodgings and I went to the station master and I asked him if he knew somewhere. He said, “Go round to so and so,” – just one of the chap’s places. I’d got a mate coming up there and I thought he was going to lodge with me. Unbeknown to me he’d already come up an hour before me and got some lodgings. He went into a place and he didn’t know but they kept seven big dogs in there. It was dreadful. So he came out of there and he thought to himself, “I’ve left my bag behind, I’ve made a mistake there.”

Anyrate, I went to my lodgings and got a decent place. I came back to the station and ran into him. “Here” I said, “I’ve got some lodgings for you”. “Oh thank God for that,” he said, “How am I to get my bag back from this house where I’ve just fixed up for my lodgings?” “Well”, I said, “You just go and tell them. Tell them you’ll report them to the sanitary people if they don’t give you your bag.” So he went and got his bag, and we went to my lodgings and started unpacking. We went to the chest of drawers, pulled out the first drawers and put our things in it. They went straight through to the floor. There were no drawers there.

7. Courtship and Marriage

I had all my love letters returned from my first love. I really was madly in love, or I thought I was. Thank God it never came to anything. She was a girl that I went to evening classes with. She was really nice and I used to blush when I met her. I was eighteen then. I used to buy a button-hole for tuppence every time I went out. That was hard going to spend tuppence on a carnation done up in fern. When we decided that we’d part, she said, “Well, you can have your letters back,” and when I read them I thought I ought to be shut in a mental hospital for ever writing such stuff. There was nothing wrong in it, because we always behaved ourselves.

I met my wife when I started dancing. I used to go to a place where they taught dancing, and my wife – as soon as I came in the door she nailed me and I became attracted to her. It was very strict, this dancing place. We had to turn out at 10 o’clock at night and there was only coffee and tea to drink.

I courted her for ten years and she didn’t think I was even human or natural. I behaved myself all the way through. I used to say to her, “I shall never marry you, girl, so it’s no use your hanging on to me.” The reason for that was my terrible family history. If I don’t die in hospital I shall be the only one. And then my aunt who brought me out of misery to look after me and bring me up was the one that I wanted to look after. She was a wonderful woman and to me she was everything. So I promised her I would look after her and I kept my word.

But my girl persevered and when my aunt got to pension age, I decided then I couldn’t keep her waiting. I got pressure from all her friends. “When are you going to marry the girl?” they said. So I decided that I would marry her and I’ve never regretted it. We went into partnership – we plighted our troths on the top of Malvern Hills, near Worcester. Up at the top of Malvern Heights, there is a “Topperscope” and when you are up there you can see sixty miles in any direction – a marvellous place.

We were married in 1940. Of course it was a Church wedding. I was always Church. There were sirens going all the time. We had six raids during the wedding. They were coming over Brighton, flying low and machine gunning. Our wedding was a little bit different because we went to a cafe – Clarks down on York Place, and I booked tickets at the theatre for the guests afterwards. We had a rough time at first, we really did, but we got over it. The funny part about it was we could have bought all the houses if only we had known, because all the houses were empty. The house our flat was in, a four-storey one in Ditchling Road, went for £1,200. I don’t know what it would fetch now, £15,000 or £18,000.

I nearly blew myself up the morning I got married. I thought, “I’ll have a bath.” I put the geyser on and the blooming thing exploded. I was jolly lucky over that. We were married on the 6th July. I always say it is Independence Day but she won’t have it. We’ve always been independent of one another. I never worry about what she does and she never worries about me. And we always decided that if we were at loggerheads today, we wouldn’t be at loggerheads tomorrow. Today we’d be finished.

My wife is a London woman. She was born in May Day Road Hospital on Christmas Day, 1904. She’s full of fun, always the life and soul of any party and she’s always been a jolly good companion. We were both orphans. It’s meant an intertwining which is quite unusual. I depend on her without letting her know it and she depends on me without letting me know it. When I first met her she wasn’t interested in anything at all, excepting me, and she used to carry on terribly because I used to spend all my time out of doors. Well, I started her in a Guild and then in the Co-operative movement and in the end she was going out as much as I was. I used to help her with my different experiences and she used to invite me to her different things. She became as much involved in her activities as I was in mine.

She has always worked. One of the things that she was in demand for most was night nursing. She first came to Brighton to go into service because everybody went into service in those days. Service was a terrible thing. They were your masters and there was a lot of hard work in those old houses: Hearth stoning the steps, scrubbing the tables, and only half a day off with Church on Sunday morning. What that Mrs. Powell writes in her book, Below Stairs, is the most marvellous illustration of what took place. When the people of the house went shopping, the shop manager used to come out and show all the nice things to them to make them come into the shop and buy their goods. And the way they treated them! I’ve lived her life. It’s a marvellous book.

My aunt who brought me up was in service. When we talked afterwards she used to look back and say she was so proud when they gave her Christmas presents. One year it was the material to make her uniform with, so that she didn’t have to buy it. I used to take hold of my head and tear the hair out of it and say, “To think, Auntie, that you thought it was a good thing at that time that someone should buy you the material to make the uniform for you to wear in service. How dreadful! How wicked!” And those people who were their employers were getting all their money and wealth from Ireland, where people were working for about a few shillings a week, in poverty. Her employers had children and I used to be glad of her cast-off shoes and clothing, – glad because we couldn’t afford to buy them. To think that such things happened in those days in service! They were tyrants! Absolute tyrants!

8. Labour Party and Public Service

I joined the Labour Party when I was 13. I don’t think anyone asked me to join. I just went automatically. I started by going to their socials, because they used to run all kinds of things to get pennies for the Party. We used to meet in Queen’s Place, down towards St. Peter’s Church – a little back alley there, up the staircase and over the top. It wasn’t like today. I remember the Labour Club in London Rd. when it was the Employment Exchange. We used to meet in all kinds of places in those days but most meetings were on the Level, in the open. No one was afraid to get up on a soap box in those days.

I started electioneering when I was 14, filling envelopes and delivering. I did a terrific amount of work. In my day as a boy we had three labour councillors in our ward and when we had an election, we could go in every house in the ward and speak to the people on equal terms and they would welcome me. And on Election Day you would get one person in each street going round with a bell and ringing that bell up the street, telling the people that they had got to come out and vote – and they went out and voted. All our chaps then used to be talking in the street. They had meetings in the street on soap boxes and people used to come out and listen. Of course, there used to be a lot of arguments – there is no doubt about that part of it, – but they were good solid socialists, because we were down and we were trying to get up.

The further we progressed the fewer people came to the meetings that were organised. I don’t say that at the moment you would not get a good meeting because people are sick and tired of everybody and the way they are going on. But the apathy has got to a terrific stage today when people tell you they cannot be bothered to listen. Quite probably television has had its impact on it.

I was put up for election to the Council in 1945. There was all the enthusiasm in the world from all the soldiers coming back. They wiped out the Churchill lot, and I got in quite nicely for St. Peter’s ward. I served a period of two years instead of three because two councillors had to be elected that time and Dorothy Stringer who was elected with me got 40 votes more than I did. But the election came round again and I was put up again. They never used to announce an election result until the following day, so you had a terrible strenuous day electioneering and you didn’t know the result of it until the next day, when you had to go down to the Town Hall for the count. Today of course it is counted the same night. I’ve been down there till one and two o’clock in the morning since then, not for my election but to see how our colleagues have got on.

At night time this second time I was put up, my colleagues said to me, “I’m afraid we’ve lost this one. You had better prepare a speech for defeat to-morrow!” So I said, “Well, that’s all right.” I went down to the Town Hall the following day, and we had the count, and there was only one vote in it. When you are scrutineer, you are called in front and you have to make up your mind about votes that you are not going to use, – what are called spoilt papers, – and once you have made up your mind on them, that had got to be it. We went through the spoilt papers without knowing what the result was going to be, and then he said, “It’s one vote.” So of course they wanted a recount. They had a recount and they still made it one, and I’d got in by one vote. So I made a totally different speech off the cuff. It did not last long but it was very much to the point. Then when I got away from there, people were stopping me in the street saying, “It was my vote that put you in.” I know I went to a block of flats and brought somebody out on the stroke of nine and they voted and that was a vote for me. I know that because that was the last big effort to get a vote, and I’d already voted for myself. People told me their sons had come home on leave and they’d said, “Don’t forget to go round and vote for Langley!” and so on and so forth. They realised they were important. Everybody’s vote did count, it was a marvellous thing.

I did not stand for election again after that. It took up such a lot of my time, in going to the committee meetings and everything, in particular the Education Committee which can be a full time job. There were thirty-seven sub-committees to that and it got beyond anything. As far as I was concerned it was interfering with my work, although that is the only thing that I can say about working for British Railways, they gave you every facility to carry out public duty, every facility without loss of pay.

One of the worst things that can happen to you when you are a councillor is that people come to you with a lot of complaints. You saw to them and you got them some satisfaction and if you really got things done for them they said, “Thank you” but afterwards they never had any more interest in you. It never got you support. The people that you worked for the hardest were the people that were liable to let you down. They do learn their lesson eventually but the damage is done. – for example the way they didn’t come out and vote for us at the 1970 election. It was a wonderful campaign the other side did to stop our people from working towards something that they were told was going to be an overwhelming victory. It was an ace card to play, to say that you are going to get in by a large majority, because then they stopped working. But there was a need to work, there was a need to work much harder.

When I was on the Council I had some very harassing times but I had some very nice times too. We had Queen Elizabeth (Princess Elizabeth she was then) when she came to Brighton and, although I had just retired from the Council, my invitation still stood. That is one of the things that is so wonderful when you are a commoner, – you realise you are a commoner and you remain in that standard. I have always remained as I was and I have done it for this particular reason. The people that I have lived with have made me what I am, and therefore I do not want to leave them. I want to remain with them. I could have gone for promotion to my executive committee, but I didn’t want to. They were the people who made me their leader or one of their leaders, and therefore I wanted to stay with them, and I have always done it.

When I first served on the executive of the Labour Party in Brighton, we only had one constituency, not two. It was fatal when we broke up. When we had the one borough party, we all got together and the secretary was an enthusiast who worked for nothing. Tullett his name was. I think that was the great thing, to think that a man could give his life and soul and time, and real energy to it. He put everything into it and he made us too. We felt that we owed him something because he was doing it and so we worked hard as well. He got the support because he worked hard. That is a natural thing – where you have good leadership, you follow. And we all knew one another. But as soon as it divided there were two different secretaries, the thing was growing and we had to have paid workers and everything, – and away went the combined spirit. When I was on the Executive, I did an enormous amount of work. I started doing the social side and used to run the annual bazaar in the Dome. Al Cohen was the backbone of our Party at that time and we used to go to lunches held up at his house and meet Gaitskill and all the big people. Bellman, who was in London Road, was our other mainstay. He stood as councillor once. Whenever I wanted anything I used to go and see him, but it was a very funny thing, it was not only our Party that had everything provided – everybody else had everything provided as well!

I was put on to the National Assistance Board (now Social Security) in 1945, and that to me was a very tragic board to sit on, because the very people that ought to be helped were the middle class people who had saved up from their shops and similar employment a fixed amount of money which would bring them in a certain income. Then when they retired they suddenly found the working class people had come up to their standard. A working class person could go to the National Assistance Board and get the extra money which would pay for the necessities of life, but the people who had made it their business to save up for their retirement found themselves right on that level – what you may call the poverty level – which was the standard that the government had set for everybody. Therefore they could not get any more and so everything that they had done had been for nothing.

We did not know how to help that type of person. They had their own houses. Working class people did not own their houses, but they did not want to, because the rent could now be paid under the new circumstances. But these people, they could not even pay the rates on their houses, so they had to deny themselves in their ordinary life. Whereas if it had not happened, they would have had a good retirement when they finished their working career. The value of money was changed so much and the uplifting of the working class – which was right, quite right – was such that in a way it levelled people down.

As far as trade unionists are concerned and the N.U.R. people in particular, we are in every walk of life giving voluntary service. We give hundreds of thousands of hours of voluntary service as mayors of big boroughs or chairmen of local councils, sitting on all the health committees, sitting on everything there is under the sun, giving public service.

Well, as I say, I went from one thing to another through going to my branch meetings. As soon as you get on one committee, people that you meet from other walks of life say, “We want you on something else” and so you go on getting more and more experience. It is like Hitler’s career if you read Mein Kampf. He could see how he could progress through the branch meetings and when he became a trade unionist at the painters’ meeting, he found that because he could talk he could get elected to all kinds of things. This is how he started. It was wonderful because it is just exactly what does take place. I know it off by heart. The good talkers get all the jobs to do. They get all the delegations and then they talk again and so on and so on, and as they go along so they lose their colour and turn a different colour. That is how I see it today in the Labour Party.

I think there has been a terrific change in the Labour Party. I think probably we had to work so hard for so many years for such a little, that we have worn ourselves out. I have seen even the very wise ones gradually go into a sort of decay. It is because of the overwhelming effort we had to put into it. We had a dreadful life, my life was dreadful as a child. No one knows. Life was terrible. Everyone was against you – you never got anything. And we have progressed. We’ve got everything now. I only wish all those people could come back and see what we’ve got. We are in paradise today, we really are, and we don’t know where to go from here. The thing is, we can smash it to pieces if we are not careful. That is what I am afraid of.

You have still got to work for everything. You must produce something. You have got to produce it for the sake of the person that cannot produce it. It is no use when you get to the stage where you want to go golfing in the day-time and playing tennis. I’ve got no time for those people. I think it is a dreadful thing for people to be at Wimbledon and Ascot and all this, showing off. I think everybody should do their stint, so that they understand other people who are doing their stint too.

Conclusion

I trust that I have not bored you with my story. It would not have been told but for the intense interest of the group who so patiently listened for so many hours and then transcribed into something readable. I am indebted to them all.

One of the important lessons to be learnt in life is to listen to people when they talk to you. You then discover they have a philosophy which you never dreamed they possessed and you find you have so much in common.

I have had a life chock full of interest. I have worked hard and as a consequence enjoyed the treats which came my way. I have enjoyed the greatest blessing of all – good health.

Every time I have been up against it, something has turned up to renew my faith and hope. I see the best side of things rather than the worst.

When I see an old lady or old man walking along the road on a cold winter’s day, I think to myself, once you were a sweet little baby, loved and cuddled by your mother – and now?

I have reached my three score years and ten and my dearest wish is to finish with a blissful sleep, something I have never enjoyed. I have never known the joy of waking up after a good night’s sleep, due to my active brain, and I have wished so often to pull the blinds down in my head.

I would like to finish this story with a quote from a newspaper so many years ago:

“Life is a leaf of paper white, whereon each one of us may write.
Then may I leave some slight impress of beauty and of happiness.
A little mirth, a singing phrase, sincere and simple song of praise.
Confession of deep gratitude because I found that life was good.
And on this page may I portray the glory of a new born day.
Of ugliness no single trace, only life’s gentleness and grace.
And truth’s impression boldly wrought and if I may a guiding thought.
A thought perhaps that might inspire, may fan to flame a high desire
Might cheer and help a weary heart to make a fresh courageous start.
If I might leave one simple song to help another soul along.
If on my leaf I may this write, I would not grieve to say Good Night.”